Peek-a-Boo!

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena has come to love the game of peek-a-boo in its various forms: I cover my eyes with my hands, and then open them up to "peek-a-boo"; Rita hides behind a wall and then appears; I slide below the crib, makes sounds, and then lift my head up with a loud "beep!"  These games guarantee a laugh from Helena, and also gave an excuse for a brief talk on philosophy.

Most psychologists interpret babies' love for the game of peek-a-boo with their understanding of object permanence: when a child comes to understand that an object is there whether I look at it or not, the appearance and disappearance of objects becomes an intellectually challenging game.  "Where is the thing?  I can't see it, but it makes sounds, so it must be there... There it is!"  The confirmation of this knowledge brings the laugh.

As I told Helena, though, I think there is a basic epistemological error in this way of reading peek-a-boo.  It makes sense for when the baby's eyes are hidden, but babies love it even more when the adult hides his or her own eyes.  It is the adult who can't see, not the child, so object permanence isn't really at issue... unless, of course, we think that children are as stupid as the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, described in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as "A beast so mind-bogglingly stupid it thinks that if you can't see it, it can't see you."  Since I don't think babies are that mind-bogglingly stupid, we have to come up with another reason for why they love peek-a-boo.

My sense is that babies love to see their parents cover their eyes, pretend not to know where the baby is, and then open them to a "There you are!" because they are learning to recognize the perspective and subjectivity of the other.  The game plays with the slow realization that other people are not merely there to serve or impede the baby's desires, but have their own perspective on the world.  Babies come to see that others are also subjects with desires and perspectives... and limitations.  Dad is not a God-like figure, because he can't see when his eyes are covered; like the baby, he only know the world by the holes in his face that let sensations in.

Sara Hrdy gives the example of the “False-Belief Test”: sitting with a mother and a small child, Hrdy would ask the mother to cover her eyes. Then, she would hide a cookie that had been in plain sight before the mother had closed her eyes, and ask the child, “Where does you mother think the cookie is?” In general, middle-class American children younger than four years old said that their mothers believed that the cookie was hidden under the table. Older children, on the other hand, generally recognized that the mother would continue to think the cookie was on the table – a false belief – because she had not seen the cookie move.  Attributing a false belief of the other, the recognition that his or her point of view is incomplete, shows that I accept that the other has a mind with different beliefs and perceptions than my own... and in that way, exactly like my own perspective, which is also limited and often wrong.

Hrdy is talking about older kids, but playing peek-a-boo with Helena Iara suggests that this process happens much earlier.  In fact, I'd like to suggest that it's a central part of what it means to become human: for the Tupi-Guaraní Indians, for instance, this ability to recognize that the other has a perspective (and the desire to learn from that perspective) are the center of what it means to be a person.  And no less thinker than Emmanuel Kant insists that the essence of ethics is recognizing that the other is an "end-in-himself", a subject with a separate perspective on the world.

Peek-a-boo as an ethical exercise: who would have imagined that a baby's game would be so essential?

Happy Thanksgiving

"Hey, you!"

Thanks to her paternal grandparents, Helena has several new toys that talk to her.  One is a little ball with buttons and lights and a little internal motor that allows it to roll by itself, while the other is a "baby's learning laptop."  Both of them talk and flask more than I might like, but they aren't all that irritating... except for one fact.  If you don't play with them for a while, they yell at you.  The laptop asks, "Are you home?"which isn't actually that bad, but the ball sings "So much fun to learn and see, why don't you come and play with me?"  Though only an inanimate object, it demands that you pay attention to it.

As we had dinner with Joey and Sarah, Helena's American godparents, last Friday, Joey heard this story and declared, "Only six months old, and she's already being interpellated!"

Helena is probably one of the few babies around whom one can have a sensible conversation about French structuralist Marxism (though who knows; it may be that lots of babies love the subject.  I don't want to do the research to find out), but it still does require a little bit of explanation.  In his classic example of this process, the French philosopher Louis Althusser mentions a police officer who yells “Hey, you!” on the street.  When I turn to look at the officer, I recognize myself in his words and recognize his authority over me.  In the simple action of turning and looking, power molds my subjectivity and legitimates the authority of the police officer.  But if I just continue walking, pretending I didn’t hear, I look like a surly adolescent, which also, perversely, affirms the power of the police officer.  Interpellation, then, both constitutes the subject and establishes the context of power in which both the “oppressed” and “oppressor” operate.

According to Althusser, this "Hey, you!" is the way we come to see ourselves as an I, as a subject (for him, like for Foucault and many other French theorists, the subject/agent is always confused with the subjected subject, the "king's subject".)  One is subjected to a person or process as much as one is the subject of an action.  However, in almost all of the theory around the issue, it is a police officer, a person in authority, who calls your name.  In Helena's case, as Joey pointed out, it was actually an object (not an inanimate object, unfortunately, because it is capable of moving itself) that engages in the process of interpellation, which can call out to the baby "Hey, you!"

What does all of this mean for Helena as she grows up?  Not much, I hope... she also has many other flesh and blood people (authorities and not) around her.  But what about for kids who grow up immersed in technology that demands their attention?  With video games and robots and who knows what more?  Will they develop the strange dynamics of resistance, fear, and obedience that we have with police officers, except with machines?  A frightening prospect.

Realized Eschatology

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena Iara has come to love the anticipation of things as much as the things themselves: sometimes even more.  For instance, she (like many babies) loves zrrrbts, the release of air against her stomach or another big space of skin, but now she smiles and laughs even more as I breathe in, breathe out, come close, pull away... play the game of "zrrrbt coming!"  In the same way, she has long loved to hear a fake sneeze, finds it hilarious, but now she giggles even more in the "ah, ah, ah, ah..." that comes before the "choo" of the expelled sneeze.

So today, she and I talked about the idea of realized eschatology in early Christian thought, something we find in both Paul and John (no, not the Beatles, the Apostles...), expressed perhaps most clearly in the phrase "The Kingdom of God is among you."  (Luke 17:21)  The idea is that the Kingdom of God (generally understood in that time as a kind of worldly utopia of justice and peace, not, as in post-Constantine Christianity, as heaven after death), is a promise of a just future, but also something present in the community that is struggling for that justice.  If you have ever been inspired by a civil rights march or a rousing folk song by Pete Seeger, you probably understand what I mean: people come together to struggle for justice in the future, but as they come together, they have the sense of solidarity and joy that they hope such a future will bring everyone.

Paul talks about politics and religion, but for Helena Iara, the same is true of a funny sneeze: the future begins to colonize the present, and we get the joy of the anticipated result long before the thing itself.  As I told Helena, it reminds me of the way my father always thought about vacations: he would sit over books and guides and photos for months before we left home, not so much because he wanted to make the trip error-free, but because he loved the anticipation of the trip as much as the trip itself.

I think Helena's joy may explain why Buddhism never really tempted me with its condemnation of desire.  Buddha said, quite correctly, that suffering comes from desire, because we almost never get what we want, and when we do, it turns out to be something different that we thought it would be.  As such, to be happy, we must overcome desire.  I think, though, he missed the joy of realized eschatology, the giggle we see on Helena's face as she waits for the fake sneeze to come.  Desire and struggle isn't just something for the future: it's the way the joy we want from the future can touch the present.

Wind

As Helena and I walked to buy vegetables a couple of days ago (well, I suppose as I walked and carried her, and she entertained herself by watching the world go by and kicking her legs), a strong wind came down from the northeast.  Helena hasn't faced much wind in her life, and she didn't like it.  Or perhaps more accurately, she complained and was fascinated at the same time, wanting to understand what it was that was beating against her face and making her cold.

It seemed like a good time to give an etymology of wind, an idea that plays a much bigger role in the history of religion and philosophy than most people realize.  In Hebrew, the word for wind is ru'ah; in Greek, pneuma, and in Latin, spiritus; in all three languages, the word also means two other things.  First, rather like the English phrase "he got his wind back," or "she ran faster after she got her second wind," all of those words also mean "breath."  But more significantly, all of them have also been translated as "spirit", that essential word in the history of western religion.

I explained to Helena Iara that spirit, like wind, is something you can't see, at least not directly.  You can only see its effects and consequences.  Helena loves to watch the trees blow in the wind, for instance, or to watch a stormcloud roll over the house.  In the same way, many ancient peoples believed that you can't see spirit, but that doesn't make it any less present; its effects are obvious.  And spirits/winds can be both good and bad, blowing the clouds away to show the sun, bringing clouds and rain to water the crops, but also the cold wind of winter that bites our faces, and the drafts that almost every traditional people believes is the origin of colds and the flu.  Good and evil winds, good and evil spirits.

Spirituality, on the other hand, seems impoverished and new age in contrast to the raw power of wind.  Maybe it's because we're too German, where spirit is Geist, a cognate of ghost: it seems like what is left over when the body is gone, a soul that floats up to heaven.  But like most religious concepts, spirit starts out as something very material, like the sun (Apollo, Ra) that burns and makes the plants grow.  You feel it in your face, use it, curse it, struggle against it...

And as we walked back from the market, the wind at our backs, Helena seemed much more content.

The semiotics and social agency of eating

People without babies (OK, me, before we had Helena) often mistake the real challenges of caring for an infant.  I had always imagined that "sleeping like a baby" had some basis in truth, for instance but teaching Helena Iara to sleep has been one of the most difficult challenges we have faced.  And food... we all need food, right?  People like to eat.  The problem with most Americans is that we eat too much, after all.  In fact, however, teaching Helena Iara to eat has also been a challenge.


The problem with food, as I explained to Helena a couple of days ago, seems to be more about semiotics than about taste.  Semiotics? you ask (and certainly Helena would have asked, could she speak).  The science of symbols?  What does that have to do with food?  Well, I explained to her, she had seen a spoon before, because we use it to give her medicine.  She doesn't like medicine, whether because it tastes bad or because it's associated with when her belly hurts, so the spoon has become a symbol associated with something she doesn't like.  It doesn't matter what the spoon has in it: it carries more than just food, it carries meaning.  Give Helena orange juice in a spoon, and she'll spit it out.  Give it to her in an adult's cup, and she'll plead for more.

And that's the point of semiotics: symbols and signs matter.  They don't just refer to things, but they bleed into those things, imbuing the signified with the taste of the signifier, the thing with the sound and associations of the word.  The Danes named the beautiful island they found in the north Atlantic "Iceland", and the terrible, glaciated place "Greenland", largely so that other countries would think that the sign described the place, and leave them alone on their wonderful geyser and hot spring paradise.  Much of marketing is based on the same premise: associate the right words and signs with a thing, and people will come to like even something as nasty as Coca Cola or Cognac.



But there's another issue behind the spoon, too.  Adults hold the spoon, and we give it to babies.  They aren't the actors of the action, not the protagonists of the story.  Since helping children to see themselves as protagonists, as actors on the world stage, is what most of Rita and my work and mature writing has been about, I suppose it makes sense that I would talk with Helena about that problem, too.  She wants to feel like she is the agent, that she is the one doing the eating (and the choosing, the chewing, everything).  Almost all adults have come to wonder at and fear that one simple, infantile phrase, "I can do it myself," and Helena has already reached it at six months, long before she is able to speak.

Smashed banana and applesauce are the foods that start most babies on the road to eating, but Helena hates them, they literally make her vomit.  The foods come on a spoon that also carries meanings she doesn't like, and she doesn't control the process.  But hand her a piece of a ripe pear, and she'll gum away at it contentedly.  The same with a peeled half of an orange.  And yesterday, Rita pierced the grains on a corn on the cob, and Helena eagerly sucked out the marrow.  It was a messy process, but a wonderful one, and she smiled and laughed and ate with real gusto.


In fact, Helena loves to eat.  It's just that she want so eat the right symbols along with her food, and she wants to do it herself.

Cause and Effect

Helena loves the bathroom sink.  I've mentioned that in other blog posts, but she loves it so much it bears repeating.  And in the last several days, to her surprise and joy, she has learned to turn the water on: she stands before the mirror, by the sink, and throws herself toward the mirror, as if to embrace her own image.  As her belly hits the handle on the faucet, the water flows on.  She looks toward the spigot, straightens up, and smiles as broadly as a girl can smile.

Though several times Helena has also been able to turn the water on with her hand, it seems that she thinks that the cause of the water flow is her lunge to touch her own image, a fact that inspired a conversation about magical thinking and the philosophy of David Hume.  As much as we might like to dismiss magic in current rationalist discourse, we can actually see it as an important precursor for modern science, because magic is basically an attempt to understand cause and effect.  I got sick, and I don't know why.  On the other hand, when I get a bruise, I know why: it's because I got in a fight and my enemy hit me.  Under the same logic, then, if I am hurt by illness, it must be because my enemy did it.  Magic serves as the connection to explain how my enemy was able to affect me at a distance.

Helena isn't thinking magically, but she is trying to connect cause and effect: Whenever I lunge at the mirror, the water turns on, so she thinks the lunge is the cause of the water.  To a certain degree, it is, but only when mediated by her belly striking the handle, the essential element she may not yet have grasped.  The point is that she is researching her world, and trying to find ways to test her hypotheses.  When she tries the same thing with another bathroom mirror, and the water doesn't turn on because the handle for the sink is somewhere else, she'll have to develop new hypotheses.

By seeing people's failure to connect causes and effects (or their recognition that they had the wrong cause for the observed effect), the Scottish philosopher David Hume developed a skepticism about the intrinsic connection between cause and effect.  We may assume that the lunge at the mirror causes the water to flow (or that the rotation of a key causes the car to start), but we never know if we are actually right.  It may be that we just haven't found the case where it doesn't work, or the intermediary step that is truly essential (turning the handle).  This skepticism did great things for philosophy and science, forcing Kant to develop his categories of apperception and bringing the scientific method of trial and error closer to its modern form.

At least that's why I explained to Helena Iara.  She wasn't that interested.  She just wanted to turn the water on again.