Do your shoes control you?

Sometimes it's tempting to turn this blog into a series of commentaries on Pocoyo (don't worry, I won't really do it, but the Spanish cartoon does open so many amazing ideas in little kids' heads...).  Here's one I found particularly interesting:

Like many other things we buy, Pato's shoes seem at first to be magical: they allow him to do things he never could before, they give him and intense kind of joy... and they make him better than his friends.  It's what we want from our athletic shoes, isn't it?

Pato soon finds, though, that the magic in his shoes isn't completely under his control.  In fact, they soon control him much more than he controls them.  Though the metaphor is childish and drawn in primary colors, it is also quite honest: Rita and I were just in Los Angeles, for instance, and found the bus and metro to be much better than anyone thought, and we were amazed at the friendly atmosphere in public transit.  In contrast, most people drove their cars alone, with a grimace on their faces, and then had to pay $10-25 a day to park.  Might these cars be like Pato's shoes?  After all of the financial and emotional investment we put into them, we simply can't take the bus.  The car, to some degree, comes to control us.

Marx says this about the products we consume, words that seem even more interesting today than in the 1950s when he wrote:

A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.

Pocoyo shows some of these theological niceties, more exactly how the shoes come to function as a magical power outside of ourself, not too different from a charm in animist religion.  But in general, Pocoyo is quite a bit more fun than Karl Marx... and it has better colors.

The "real" Pocoyo

Yesterday, before Rita, Helena, and I got together with some friends who live here in Los Angeles, I was trying to remind her who they were.  "We saw them lots there in Brazil, Helena, and then stayed in their house last year... and remember Tiago, the little boy?  He was born in Spain, where the real Pocoyo is from..."

As soon as the words escaped my mouth, I heard how silly they were.  Yes, the Pocoyo cartoons that Helena loves so much are, in fact, made in Spain.  She often watches to them on Youtube in Castillian Spanish.  But "the real Pocoyo?"  I wanted to indicate something "more" than the plastic Pocoyo toy she plays with every day, but could I possibly say that the video of Pocoyo, something that exists only as the 1s and 0s of a computer program, is any more "real" than the plastic and rubber Pocoyo she was playing with?

In the late 1980s, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard made quite a splash on the academic scene with his idea of the simulacrum, defined as "the copy for which there is no original."  He saw this phenomenon everywhere in postmodern culture, from the fake culture of Disney's Epcot to Hollywood movies, but it seems that a plastic doll representing an electronic cartoon, where there was never even a "real" drawing of Pocoyo, stands at the peak of the pyramid of simulacra.  When we think of the intentionally decontextualized world in which Pocoyo lives, where the background is pure white most of the time, it becomes even harder to imagine an original of anything having to do with the character.

For all of the nihilism of Baudrillard and his followers, a heavy tone of moralism always accompanied their talk of simulation and simulacra: it was as if they said, "This is how the world is now, but it wasn't always this bad."   After all, the basis for most Western philosophy is Plato's theory of the forms, some original "real," of which all of the things we see in our world are nothing but copies.  Plato condemned art because it was a copy of the things of the world, and as such, really only a copy of a copy, derivative to the second level.

Pocoyo, however, seems to steal the fire from the moralizing postmodernists.  Pocoyo isn't a copy of a real boy, and his world is not a copy of ours.  Certainly there are some references to things that we know, but we don't judge Pocoyo by whether it is true to reality or not.  It's not about representation at all.  It's about fun.  About play.  And though we may play-act, though children may pretend to be something when they play, we don't principally judge a soccer game or play with dolls by whether it "truly represents the world."  We can call it good or bad, beautiful or ugly, but never true or false.  Play escapes the logic of the real and of truth.  It's something else entirely.

And the "real Pocoyo?"  Who cares.  What matters is how Helena makes her doll run around, take baths, cook, slide down the couch.  It's about play, not about truth.

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.