Learning to buy

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena has become... well, "obsessed" is too strong a word, but certainly very concerned, about economics.  Specifically, she wants to understand what allows us to go into a store and take certain things home, while we don't or can't take others.  She seems to have resolved this conundrum with a single word, "pagou." (Paid).

Helena's concern with payment serves as a way to de-normalize something that we do every day.  It seems so normal to buy stuff, but in fact it's a relatively new and strange way to exchange good and services.  For most of human history, barter and other informal forms of exchange were much more common, as were sharing, potlatch, and completely non-commencial forms of distributing goods.  It takes a lot of work for a baby to understand how capitalism works.

It's not just babies, of course: people from traditionally non-capitalist cultures famously have a hard time adapting to the money economy.  I remember very clearly, for instance, the way that the cooking oil market worked in Cazucá, a shantytown above Bogotá where I worked for many years.  Most of the people who lived there were refugees from the war, peasants, indigenous people, and traditional blacks who were used to subsistence agriculture as the basic way to sustain themselves.  They had always grown their own crops, shared a successful hunt or catch of fish with everyone (knowing that others would do the same later), and bartered their produce for things they didn't grow themselves.  Then suddenly, in Bogotá, none of those resources were available.

Cooking oil, then: these refugees bought oil each day, just enough to fry what they wanted to cook that day.  Unfortunately, however, buying in small amounts made bad economic sense: in 10 days, they might spend five dollars on oil, while if they had bought the same amount all at once, they would have spent less than a dollar.  If we think about why these people spent so much of their salary on food, and had so little to save or invest, knowledge of how capitalism works was part of it.  (Another serious problem was that the paramilitary gangs controlled the oil market, and they had a vested interest in people not learning.)

Helena Iara is just learning this stuff as we shop.  Not an easy lesson, but an important one.

The universal tedium of Richard Scarry

Helena Iara loves Richard Scarry books.  I remember loving the stories of Huckle Cat and Lowly Worm when I was a kid, too... but I have to confess that while Dr. Seuss has aged well -- which is to say, I continue to enjoy his books as I read them to Helena -- Richard Scarry now seems a complete bore.  Nothing actually happens, there is little narrative, no rhyme or play with words.  In fact, the book she likes so much only relates the events of a normal day, no different from the cooking and playing and driving around that we experience in our lives.

There the tedium.  More interesting, I think, is what happens when kids read these sorts of stories, see their lives writ large on the pages of a book.  Over the last couple of months, I have been thinking very intently about how people -- especially children -- on the margins of society conceive of knowledge.  Last year, we did a major research project in Recife, looking at the causes of, and possible solutions to, violence in the favelas of that city.  After four months of interviews, mapping, movie-making, and writing, the book was finally done: a toolkit for foundations and government agencies that want to reduce violence.  Adriano had been the first of the four young researchers to arrive at the closing party for the project, and as he read the first pages, a look of amazement filled his eyes.  "It's true," he said, almost stunned.  Several more lines down the page, with even more wonder, "That's just how it is."  As he continued to read, the expressions of surprise only grew.

Words about the favela too often sound like a police report: so many dead, so many arrested.  Those news stories might be strictly accurate, but they aren't really true; they leave far too much out.  We never see the motivations of kids who join a gang or the ethical struggles of kids who don't; the joy of a party on Saturday night or the pride of a old woman watching her grandkids play in the alley.  Our research took the deep experience of living in the favela seriously, seeing it as a possible source of solutions.

Adriano had been a part of every stage of the research, and many of the theories in those pages were originally his, so the surprise didn't come from new ideas or perspectives.  No, I think the real shock was that the written word could express the truth, that a description of his community could be honest to what goes on there.

"Knowledge," with the weight and importance that word implies, always seems to come from outside the favela, from teachers and books and the TV.  But as Adriano read the book, he suddenly came to see that words could reflect the world, that his experiences were important, enough to justify or even demand action.  For the first time, I think, he came to see what knowledge meant, and the power it could have.

Richard Scarry is the complete opposite of the experience of knowledge in the favela.  Instead of seeing their lives as exceptions or spectacles, Scary shows the lives of ordinary, middle class children in the US as universal.  This is how everyone, event cats and worms, lives.  The implicit message to children: "Your life is universal, your particular experience counts as universal knowledge."  Children from the favelas feel frightened to generalize the events of their lives into a word as big as "knowledge," but thanks to Richard Scarry, American TV programs, and other manifestations of US middle class culture as universal reference, kids here don't run into that challenge.

Now, we can easily find a solution in an attempt to universalize other experiences: Sesame Street, where a street in a mythical Harlem stands in for the universal, is an excellent example.  Maybe we should write a Richard Scarry for the favela... to a certain degree, the work that Rita and I do professionally with films made by marginalized kids strives for that.

However, I think there is a real virtue in the way kids from the favela see the relation of their particular to the universal.  Because they aren't convinced that everyone -- even cats and worms -- had their experience, they aren't convinced that they know.  For that reason, they are less invested in their epistemological errors, more willing to change, grow, and learn.  Socrates insisted that the first step in philosophy was to know that one knows nothing: people from the favela have that one down pat.  At that point, perhaps we can all learn together.

And maybe I won't have to suffer through more days reading about the Cat Family going to the grocery store.

Pocoyó!

Most video for little kids bores me to tears.  I can't imagine watching Dora or Teletubbies day after day with Helena.  But the Spanish show Pocoyó -- she loves it, and it even makes me think.  Like a Pixar movie for the under-2 set.  Just one example:

The short film is, I think, the best example I have ever seen of the distinction that Jacques Lacan makes between the speaking and spoken subject... and quite frankly, it's much more fun to watch Pocoyó and Pato explain it than reading any number of academic commentators on the subject.

Now, a lot of left wing theory in the 1950s and 1960s was very pessimistic about the possibilities of human agency.  People like Louis Althusser and the young Foucault saw the subject (the actor, the person who does something) in its etymological sense, as one who has been subjected (literally, "thrown under"); one is, after all, the "subject of the king" or of a country.  A good bit of the philosophy of that era focusses on all of the different external forces that structure our subjectivity: the way that language makes us see the world as we do, or how gender and power and monetary differences limit how we dream or what we think we are capable of.  Though useful as a critique of ideology, it's a deeply pessimistic philosophy, and I think may lie at the root of the current fiasco of the European and American Left.

If we think about these ideas in terms of Pocoyó, it's the first couple of minutes of "Wackily ever after", when the narrator tries to control the story (and the actors) by means of his voice: "Ely will do this," "Pato is the crazy villain..."  The voice is making explicit a kind of "should"that all of us feel: we all should strive for success, which means being a lawyer or an i-banker (even if most of them aren't very happy).  Clothes have this power, too: Pocoyó gets the crown, and so will be the prince, while the top hat and cape make Pato the heavy.  Lacan, however, focusses on the aspect of speech: that's why he talked about the spoken subject, the subject created by the voice of the narrator, the other, or power.

But Lacan opens another door: the speaking subject.  Pocoyó and his friends are not about to let the narrator tell a classic (read: boring!) story about princes and princesses and evil monsters.  Ely wants to be a princess, but the kind of princess who lifts weights and rides a scooter (vide Fiona, in Shrek).  Pato doesn't really want to be the villain: he wants to play and to water the flowers.  Pocoyó isn't going to duel his friend Sleepy Bird, so he invites him to dinner.  The play of children, their resistance to the voice of the narrator, takes the story in new directions, makes the kids speaking subjects as well as spoken ones.

No one really controls everything about his or her own agency: our parents and culture and genes and who know what else are strong influences on what we think and do.  But I think that subjectivity -- for Pocoyó, for Helena, for me -- comes at the intersection of the voice of the narrator and the rebellious play of a child.  Surfing back and forth between those two is what makes us... well, us.

Fear

Helena is afraid.  Or more accurately, she tells us she is afraid.  She certainly doesn't fear the things she should, like climbing down the stairs alone or falling into deep water at the lake, but from time to time the movement of shadows under a tree or the sight of a leaf that looks like a spider will inspire her to say, "fear," and shy away.

There is a wonderful passage in the Philosophical Investigations, where Wittgenstein addresses the analytic philosophers of his day (heirs of Hume and other radical empiricists), who insisted that because we cannot feel the pain of other people, we can't know that what they call pain is the same as what I can pain.  "Just try for a moment," Wittgetstein ironizes, "to think that someone is not in pain when they wince in front of you."  Pain is not, in fact, a personal thing contained only in my body; it is social.  We know that other people are in pain and, as Bill Clinton famously said, we actually feel that pain.

I think I understand how a baby comes to understand what "pain" means, seeing how others react when a hammer falls on their feet, and then feeling the same thing.  Fear, though, strikes me as something different, perhaps because it is much less quotidian: Rita and I don't feel fear on a daily basis.  Jaguars and FBI agents don't surround the house to inspire such feelings so that Helena would know the social element of fear.

She started to talk about fear after we read Little Yellow Riding Hood, a fantastic book by the Brazilian poet and musician Chico Buarque, to her.  The story is about a little girl who is afraid all the time, and of everything... but especially of the big bad wolf, though she has never seen the beast, and it probably only exists in the mountains of Germany.  But because she fears the wolf so much, one day she conjures it up, and it really appears... and the reality is, of course, no where near as bad as her fears.

There's an easy Foucauldian lesson here: just as all prohibition actually inspires the desire to break the law, a book that tries to calm fears may actually inspire them.  But I don't think that's what is really going on.  I think the book taught Helena that fear is an important category of human (or childhood) existence, so she has to figure it out.  And since she doesn't have frightened adults around her on a regular basis, she has to do experiments.

Human feelings are confused and diverse.  "Fear" isn't so much a description of any singular sensation, as it is an umbrella under which we put lots of different feelings.  So Helena tries something out: she's confused by the play of shadows, and that messes with something in her belly; she calls it fear.  Rita and I say, "No, there's nothing to be afraid of," so she sets that category aside as a failed experiment.  "Fear," she says when she sees something that looks like a snake, and I say, "Don't worry, that's not a snake."  She reads that as, "you don't need to be afraid right now," but also as "Snakes are something that should cause fear."  And gradually, she learns how people use words to describe complicated emotions.

I just hope it's a while before she needs to understand "anxiety" and those other heavy words!

Almost...

This morning, as Helena and I rocked in the hammock, looking out on the jungle, she glanced at the shirt I was wearing, one with the iconographic image of Che Guevara on it, and gave one of her sounds of exited discovery: "O!"  Then, as she now seems to do with anything she likes (her mother, her stuffed animals, her baby doll), she leaned down to kiss the photo on the shirt.

The dreams of a left-wing philosopher father: one week she recognizes Foucault on a magazine cover, the next an icon of Che... I had a full blog post imagined in only seconds.  When... "Bow, wow!" she said.  And then again.

She didn't see Che on my shirt.  She saw a cute dog.

 The thing about when a baby begins to talk, is that I learn that the thoughts that I had long projected on her... well, she has much more individual things going on in that rapid and active brain.  Among them, puppy dogs more than Latin American revolutionaries.

Finding Foucault

Today, more a story than a philosophical reflection: a couple of days ago at the local community library, Helena and I spent close to an hour looking for books for her.  As always, she loves to sort through every book on the shelf, transferring them to the table, paging through each one, and then choosing a couple that she likes.  At the end of the time, we moved to the back of the library to play hide and seek among the shelves (not many of them, because the library is only a couple of years old, and the only books are ones donated by people from the neighborhood).  After a couple of minutes of "where's the baby?"  "Oh, there's the baby!", Helena moved toward a shelf at the back.

"O!" she called out, in the voice she uses for her most exciting discoveries: the monkeys coming by the house in the afternoon, her favorite carved jaguar found under a table, a new hat made by her mom.  The "O!" again.  I walked over to see her pointing to a magazine on the bottom shelf.

Her index finger touched the forehead of a photo of Michel Foucault.

Yes, a proud, proud moment.

Children's books

This weekend, Rita and I went into a bookstore to buy a book for Helena Iara.  As Rita and Helena paged through the kids' section (Rita paged, while Helena removed each book, looked at it, and then placed it on the floor), I ran into a new translation of Paul Ricoeur's famous book on narrative, where he hypothesizes that time is actually constructed from story, not only that we understand history through tales, but that time itself is the result of narrative.

Helena likes some books that have a beginning, climax, and end -- Little Gorilla, for instance, and Fortunata the Giraffe, which Rita ended up buying for her --  but narrative is hardly necessary.  One of her favorite books right now is My Circus, which pairs simple drawings with single words on each page: "Clown; Elephant; Tent; Acrobat."  If I turn the pages one by one as I read the words, she quickly gets bored, but if she turns the pages, sometimes back to forward, other times forward to back, sometimes skipping pages or flipping back to the beginning, she can sit with the book for fifteen minutes happily.

Clearly, she loves to see the way turning pages impacts her world: as she flips quickly between "Acrobats" and "Jugglers," I have to say the words just as quickly as she turns the pages... and then she flips back to "Children" just to see if I notice.  Kids like to exercise some kind of control over their parents, and turning the pages back and forth does that for Helena.

But I think there's something else going on here, too.  Helena likes to see new juxtapositions.  The list "Drum, Tent, Clown, Magician, Caravan" means one thing, but "Clown, Drum, Children, Acrobat, Elephant," that's a different story all together.  Or maybe not a story... and I guess that's my point.  There is something exciting about putting things or images or ideas together in an unexpected or even prohibited way.  That can mean anything from André Breton's surrealism, where poems are made of the seemingly random transpositions of words, to Dalí's paintings, to the chance placement of a book by Foucault next to the New Testament, making one think of new ways to interpret the epistle to the Romans.

Ricouer is probably right: narrative does create time, or at least the way we understand it (thermodynamics probably has something to do with the physical reality, after all).  And I think babies do understand both time and narrative, but that's not the only lens through which they look at the world.  There is also a jumping, random juxtaposition, and then the struggle to make sense of those new orders.  Narrative can be fun, but so can turning the pages any which way.  Things get placed side by side, the brain has to work to make the connection, and that's fun.

Prohibition and desire

Helena Iara isn't even a year old, but she already understands a the logic of desire: when things are prohibited, we want them more.  For instance, imagine that she is sitting in her baby seat, set on top of the table as Rita and I have lunch.  We will offer her toy after toy, which she will play with for a moment, and then throw aside.  A toy left barely within reach deserves a little more attention, if only because it is a challenge.  But... a piece of paper?  A hot teakettle?  The Tabasco sauce?  Anything that we do not want her to touch (and we don't even have to say it explicitly), that's what she wants.

A lot of intellectuals these days connect this idea with Michel Foucault, and he certainly did formalize the ideas in his political philosophy, but Foucault himself attributed the seed of the idea to Deleuze.  And as I explained to Helena Iara a couple of days ago, the idea goes back at least as far as Paul of Tarsus, with his famous, "Were it not for the law, I would not have known sin," and the rest of the epistle to the Romans.  Paul certainly didn't invent the idea, either: any mother paying close attention to the behavior of a baby will see the same thing.

But as a philosophy professor of mine once said, "The dirty little secret of philosophy is that most of the great idea have already been thought.  We try to complicate them up so that we look smart and original, but carpenters and grandmas had them long before we did.  Even so, it's worth while to repeat them, though."

And in the end, as I repeated the connection between prohibition and desire to Helena Iara, I knew I was not being original.  But it helped me not to get irritated as she reached, yet again, for the sharp spines on the crown of thorns plant in front of the window.

"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.