Stickers

Last Christmas, my mom gave Helena some stickers.  Not very exciting ones -- I think they came as a bonus with an Audobon Society mailing or something -- but they had pretty pictures of birds on them.  And ever since, Helena has been obsessed with stickers, and will leave behind all of the rest of her beloved painting and drawing supplies (click here for some reflections on her art) just to post some kind of a silly cat on top of a painting she's been working on for hours.  Last week, when Rita found some stickers for her in a stationary store, I think I began to understand this compulsion a little better.

As Helena has stuck her stickers on any surface she can find, I've also been reading Donald Winnicott, the British children's psychoanalist from the 1950s.  Winnicott is most famous for his theory of the transitional object, a way to think about blankets and pacifiers and other stuff that kids come to abopt between 1 and 4 years old.  According to the theory, these things are not really things -- they have no full existence separated from the child), but they aren't just the kid, either.  They are a transition from the child's earliest ideas about the world (that it is all a part of the baby, and she is omnipotent over it (an idea that Helena still seems to have from time to time, as I wrote last week)) to a more adult division between subject and object, an "I" and a "world."

The transitional object is almost part of the baby, but it also has a bit of autonomy; it isn't entirely under her control.  We may be able to see this better in toys, which seem to be under our control, but then suddenly they aren't: the kite or the ball dashes and bobs where we didn't want it to; the dolls engage in conversation and suddenly one "says" something that the child playing with them had never planned.  Toys are also part-me, part-other.

I think the sticker may play the same role.  On the one hand, Helena controls it: she gets to take it off the pad and then put it somewhere, and she gets credit for the art she makes with a sticker (I remember my mom's reaction to Helena's first "sticker-art," full of oohs and ahhs).  At the same time, she didn't make the sticker, and certainly couldn't draw the birds and frogs and mermaids that she sticks on paper. Stickers are also under imperfect control: accidentally put a corner of the sticker down on paper, and it only comes off by tearing, and won't ever be useful again.  The fold and twist in ways we don't expect. And once stuck onto the paper, you'll never get it off (though, as Helena has learned, if you stick it onto  plastic, sometimes you can recover it).  In the world of art, the sticker plays the role of the transitional object.

I just wish we could find a way to help her work through these ideas of omnipotence in other areas: I think it would save us a lot of crying fits when we say "no."

Can mothers have it all?

This week, Facebook and blogs and even (gasp!) real life conversations have been lit up by an article by Anne Marie Slaughter, who had worked in policy planning at the Obama State Department, about the (im)possibility of mixing motherhood and career.  The piece, an honest portrayal of the difficulties of second and third generation feminist women to "have it all" has clearly touched a vein among my friends who work as lawyers, policy professionals, doctors... truth is, pretty much everyone with whom I went to Harvard or Williams, and who then went on to be a mother and a high powered professional.

Rita and I have not had to face anything like the world Slaughter describes: no 20 hour work days, no leaving the house before the kids wake and coming home after they are asleep, no impossible choices between a sick baby and a professional deadline.  Next month, Rita will go to an anthropology conference in São Paulo, and it will be the first time that Helena Iara will have to spend a night without her mommy in the same house.  None the less, we have seen enough of the challenges of parenting and working to know how much harder it must be for someone working at the United Nations, in government, in a bill-by-the-hour law firm.  Slaughter is right: after fifty years of feminist successes in policy and ideology, children still make it much harder for women to climb the professional ladder.

I don't recall which of my professors declared that philosophy does not have the role of answering questions, but of asking why we ask those questions in the first place, but it's a good place to enter this debate (and is the starting point for William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein, two of my favorite thinkers).  So here's my poor contribution to the debate:

I've been readying Dostoyevsky recently, and finding some humor amidst the gloom by laughing at the silly hierarchies of state bureaucrats, classed just like military officers in 19th Century Russia, with a "Collegiate Registrar" equivalent to a warrant office,  a "Titular Counsellor" like an Army Captain, all the way up to an "Actual Privy Counsellor" who held the same rank as a Field Marshall.  Russians of that age may have taken the quest for honor so far that it becomes ridiculous, but they aren't that much different than we are, with different levels of professorships, pay-grades for government service, and whether or not one becomes a partner.  Men have always dedicated themselves to honor, in one way or another.

Mainstream American feminism has done an extraordinary job of showing why and how women have been oppressed and excluded, but at a price: it has accepted masculine terms for the debate.  When we look at definitions of success for women (or for feminism in general), we ask about how many women sit in corporate boardrooms, what salary women earn, how many women work in policy roles in government.  I wonder, though, if these concerns don't simply accepted traditional masculine (and not universally human) milestones for success.  Even the question "Why can't women have it all?" uses the verb most associated with honor in postmodern capitalism.  As Marx (among many others) noticed, capitalism moves us from a concern with being to one of having.

That move from being to having was critical: no one would ever ask if you can "be it all."  Of course not: you can't be mother and father, God and man, master and servant... the  verb "be" recognizes that certain things exclude each other.  But "have"... It seems like, hypothetically at least, we could possess everything.

Slaughter addresses this question in a way: she says that she and many women like her (and many men, as well), work as hard as they do because it is the way they can change the world; she herself was working in Planning for the State Department, and cites many women in government, academia, and the international human rights system.  Here, for better or worse, I might be able to add something useful: I know lots of people who have both worked at the grass roots and in "the system", and almost all of them say that they are not only happier on the "outside", but that they do more good (a quick caveat to expose my bias here: after working in Washington think tanks and going to Harvard, I made a conscious decision that I didn't want that life; I'm not an objective observer).  People at UNICEF, the Foreign Service, government education departments... To quote one high UNICEF bureaucrat I met last year, "Let's be honest, I could do a lot more elsewhere.  But when I look at myself, I know that I wouldn't earn as much or get as much prestige elsewhere.  So I stay."

The point isn't that mothers shouldn't try to "climb the latter".  Power matters, and who holds it is no small thing.  But I think we need to ask deeper questions about the nature of success, happiness, and even "having;" it allows us to ask the question in a much better way, and maybe even one that will make us happier and more able to change the world.

How old is...

"How old are you, Helena Iara?" I asked her as we came back from running errands a couple of days ago.

"Two years old."

 "Your Aunt Sandra is going to have a birthday in a couple of weeks.   Do you know how old she'll be?"

"Two years old."

"Truth is, she'll be 31."

"Yeah?" (said, by the way, exactly like that)

"And your Mommy, how old is she?"

"Two years old."

This conversation continued through quite a few people that Helena knows, and I soon discovered that I, her grandma and grandpa, her cousins, and everyone else she knows is also "Two years old."  Now, it's quite possible that "Two years old" to Helena just means "has an age" or "has parties for a birthday," or even that the answer is simply rote.  Just for a moment, though, I want to take her seriously: does she think that everyone is only two years old? And if so, why?

Here, then, a first hypothesis: for Helena, there is no real evidence that anything is older than she: in her eyes, everything came into existence simultaneously when she popped out of the womb.  Everything is two years old because she has only been able to see it for that time.  And though this idea might seem silly, it tracks one of the most important epistemological theories in western philosophy, the solipsism of Bishop Berkeley.  We naively think that our perception of the world is an interaction between our senses and the things around us, but Berkeley showed that one can coherently argue that it all goes on only in our own minds.  Though Berkeley largely wrote as a kind of thought experiment, and didn't live out his ideas (he never walked into the street in front of a carriage, thinking that the horses that would trample him were only ideas in his mind), the mere attempt to respond to his crazy idea made future thinkers (especially Kant) develop much more coherent theories of perception and knowledge.

Add the element of time to Berkeley's idea, and you get Helena's "Two years old."  The world exists because I see it; I wasn't here more than two years ago; ergo, the world and all of the things in it are two years old, just like me.

Maybe, though, I can give a second hypothesis: Mommy is two years old because, as a Mommy, she really is only two years old.  Yes, Rita was born more than two years ago, but before Helena was born, she was not a Mommy.  The baby is not the only new birth at delivery: a child creates so many new relations, roles that had not existed before.  If the child is the first in the family, a new Mommy also emerges from that operating room.  A new Daddy, too (it might be argued that my repeated existential crises over the past two years have to do with my inability to accept that at 39, I was born into a new name and new "identity.").  My parents suddenly gained new names of Gramma and Grampa.  As that, they are really only two years old.

This idea isn't solipsism, but closer to the new anthropological theory of perspectivism, which Viveiros de Castro postulates as the epistemology of Amazonian Indians.  The relationship of a capybara to a jaguar is the same as that of a monkey to a harpy eagle: they fear the predator.  So according to many amazonian tribes, when monkeys talk of eagles, they call them jaguars.  When little fish talk of jaguars, they refer to the bigger fish that eat them.  And (in an odd twist), the "jaguars" that humans have are Gods, who demand us as sacrifices.

Put this idea onto the plane of family relations, and Helena may we be right.  Because we entered into new relations when she was born, Rita and I (and my parents, and everyone else important in Helena's life) came into existence (or a new existence) when she was born.  We are, in that way, just two years old.

Does this make me feel any younger?

Sound Effects

Helena absolutely loves playgrounds, but she has never been a great fan of teeter-totters.  She prefers swings and slides and anything she can climb... and I have to admit that I empathize with her on her choices.  Even so, when we went to the playground on the shores of the Lagoa de Peri a couple of days ago, Helena wanted to get on the "up-up!" (as she calls the teeter-totter), and I decided to add a little to the game.  As she went up and down, I made strange noises: hardly the sound effects of a sci-fi movie, but something that tried to imitate airplanes and spaceships and who knows what else.  And for the first time, Helena's laughs on the teeter-totter were something similar to her expressions on joy on swings and slides.  She didn't want to get off, even after hundreds of ups and downs.

 This week, I have also been working on the title sequence for the new internet-based news channel that Rita and I are developing with teenagers from the favelas of Recife.  Though I had figured out some interesting images and visual effects, I simply was not convinced by the way the titles were coming out: they seemed to lack emotion and gusto.  Thinking of Helena and her teeter-totter, I began to work on the sound: not just the music, but the sounds that go on in the background that often pass straight to our subconsciousness.  And suddenly, the images began to make sense -- it's not that they were cooler or more interesting, but they became comprehensible in a new way.  With sound, the viewer sees new things.

Now, I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say, along with the French cinema theorist Michel Chion, that film truly functions as a new space teaching us how to hear.  None the less, sound does teach us to see: imagine the explosions of a blockbuster movie without the booming sound effects of a theater, or a person walking though a deserted building without the echoing of footsteps.  I have made enough films to know that when you record sound as you film, you don't get it right.  The steps are too loud or too soft, the wind distracting...  In the end, the sound that we record in reality just doesn't sound right on film, so we have to re-create it.  It's not a deception, but a way of learning to see in a new place (in front of a movie screen, a TV, the computer...).

Immanuel Kant based his epistemology, the basic rules for how we know the world, on two premises: first, that we somehow understand space and time before we ever experience it, that it is a part of our mental make up.  And second, he insisted on the "systematic coherence of apperception", a really confusing way of saying that all of our senses have to agree on something for us to feel that it's part of the world.  If we hear a coffee grinder but don't catch the smell of beans and don't see the whirl of the machine, we know that something is wrong.  When the whole shebang of lots of different sensations comes together, we feel more confident about reality.

Film -- or any kind of play, like a teeter-totter -- is often lacking a couple of senses.  It isn't quite real: that's what gives art and play the chance for creativity, humor, and critical distance.  At the same time, it can make everything feel kind of empty.  So boys invent the sounds of laser guns and sword clatter as they play their war games.  We fake the sounds of falling as we climb in a tree or drop rocks off a bridge into a stream.  And we create sound effects on the computer for the movies we invent.

Looking in the eyes

Rita, Helena, and I just got back from two weeks of work in Recife, a city that can be wonderful in many ways... but ethics on the bus cannot be included in that list.  There, commuting is a war, where the drivers of jam-packed busses wrestle their broken-down machines past each other, jerking and accelerating so much that the dozens of strap-hangers can only keep their feet by falling into each other.  Shin-kicking, stepping on feet, elbows... it's all part of the morning in one of the world's most violent cities (the connection between murder rate and bus behavior is not, I think, a random one).

One of the few rules that people obey on the bus is the social obligation to give up a seat for a mother with a baby (sadly, people don't give them up for old or handicapped people).  Over the last several years, however, we have observed a growing exception to this rule: if you don't see the baby, you're not obliged to give up your seat.  As such, on crowded busses, people make a conscious effort to avoid eye contact with any standing mother.

As Rita rode one particularly crowded bus last week, swaying dangerously with Helena in one arm, I counted seven young men who began to "sleep" only after we made it onto the bus, and a couple more people suddenly fascinated by whatever was happening out the window.  Finally, one man let his eyes wander, and Rita's eyes met his.  With a sign and a feigned shrug of "Oh, sorry, I didn't see you," he stood and gave up his seat.

I could write pages on the brutality of public space in Recife (a great part of Rita's PhD dissertation addresses exactly those issues), but here I want to talk about eyes.  What is it about eye contact that inspires responsibility?  Why can we ignore our responsibility to others as long as we can pretend that we don't see them?  And how can we "pretend" this when we, the person to whom we are responsible, and in fact everyone else around, knows that it is a lie?