Everything transforms

A couple of weeks ago, Rita, Helena, and I went to visit one of Rita's childhood friends, a family that Helena loves to visit, because the son always brings out his toys.  This visit, she became obsessed with little games that would have been called "Transformers" when I was a kid: these were not exactly the brand name Transformers (cars or other machines that turned into robots when you moved the parts around), but something a little more organic, like rocks that turned into dinosaurs and leaves that became crocodiles.

Helena also loves other stories of transformation: books and songs about caterpillars that become butterflies, stories of peasant girls who become princesses (though, since I'm not always happy about the politics of such stories, I also tell stories of princesses that become peasants).  She also loves doll clothes and the changes that they imply.  All in all, we can say that Helena, like many kids, loves change.

There is something human in this process: children may think that adults are so different from them that in order to "grow up", they will need to pass through a metamorphosis similar to that of a caterpillar.  I wonder, though, if something even deeper isn't going on here: last week Rita was preparing a paper for an anthropology conference in São Paulo in which she compared the role-playing of little kids to the idea of clothing in Amazonian tribes.  In the West, we have the idea that play-acting is like being on the stage: an actor pretends to be something for a time, but then returns to his same being when he doffs the costume and the persona.  Yet in the Amazon, a change in clothes means a change in essence: when I put on the mask of a jaguar, I begin to see the world like a jaguar sees it.  Others treat me as a jaguar.  The clothes of a jaguar make me a jaguar.

Kids seem to see the world in the same way.  They aren't invested in their own personality or identity, in the way that an adult (or especially an adolescent) will say "I'm not the kind of person who..." They are much more willing to transform, to try on other "clothes".  Through many philosophers who write about play (Benjamin, Freud, and Agamben come to mind) talk about the repetition that play involves, I think that this kind of personal experimentation is even more important.  And, quite frankly, much more fun.

I'll take care of you

One of Helena's favorite Christmas presents was a book by Richard Scarry, whom I also remember loving when I was a kid.  Toward the end of the book, the Cat Family is reading nursery rhymes, of which one is the encomium on sexual assault,

"Georgie Porgie, puddin' and pie,

Kissed the girls and made them cry.

When the boys came out to play,

Georgie Porgie ran away."

The portrait shows two girl cats by the side of a big boy cat, both of the girls crying as the boy tries to kiss them.

Yesterday, Helena began to talk to the girl cats: "Não chora,  Bebê cuida." (Don't cry, the baby (i.e., I) will care for you).  I was very excited to see empathy spring forth at such a young age.  Then, today, she began to point her finger at the boy cat: "No, no, no!"  Empathy had moved on very quickly to a sense of justice, or at least of prevention.

At the end of the 18th century, moral philosophy saw an important debate between Emmanuel Kant and the Scottish Enlightenment.  For the Scots (people like Thomas Reed, but also the young Adam Smith), moral feelings needed be be culled and trained: empathy and a sense of justice might be natural in many people, but they were like small, weak plants in the jungle, and people needed to learn how to give them food and light so they could grow.  That way, our "natural" dispositions (in fact, trained dispositions) would direct us to act for the good.  Kant, in contrast, declared that any act based on a natural disposition, or in fact on any motivation other than duty, could not be called moral.

Now, when I was a Freshman in college, I loved Kant's moral theory.  It was hard, challenging, and logically rigorous, something that would set the moral people apart from the chaff.  As I've grown up, I have to say I'm much more convinced by Thomas Reed and his friends: though they may lack the logical and moral rigor of Kant's German thought, their ideas seem to bring more good into the world.

Why does any of this matter?  Because Helena is beginning to develop those moral seeds: the care for others who suffer (even if they are crying cats in a book), a sense of empathy for children who have lost their mothers, a rejection of the abuse of power in Georgie Porgie.  Kant would insist that there is no virtue in these young sprouts of ethics: if she is to be a good person, Helena must learn to defend the girls against Georgie because it is against the moral law exposed by our reason... not because she feels sorry for them.  Honestly, I think Rita, who sits with Helena and the book and talks her through the images, is a much wiser philosopher than Kant here.  As she talks about the girls and their tears, she trains Helena's sentiments to be just.  And that training, soon to become instinct, is better than any moral law out there.

Isn't she just a doll?

On our recent trip to Salvador and Recife, Helena Iara heard one comment time and time again: "Isn't she just a little doll?" ("É como uma bonequinha!")  Helena is a cute baby, but what really attracted interest was how blond she is: in the very African cities of Brazil's northeast (and where the harsh sun burns everyone black pretty soon), such a white baby is shocking.  I'm not exaggerating when I say she stopped traffic on downtown streets.


I began to tell Helena a little more about the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, which seemed quite apropos... Baudrillard's basic idea is that in post-modernity, the sense of reference is lost.  Instead of a picture signifying some real thing "behind" it, representation develops a new relationship to reality.  What, he asks, does the China exhibition at Epcot Center have to do with China?  He defines the simulacrum as a "Copy for which there is no original."

As I explained to Helena, it seemed even more perverse the doll -- originally a signifier of a baby, but now a kind of simulacrum -- would now become the reference by which real babies are judged.  If a baby is "like a doll", then she is pretty and good. Certain other comments we heard on the street also made it clear that the comparison had to do with wealth: several women declared "She looks like a soap opera baby!" while one street boy innocently spoke the truth that lies behind all of these comments: "She looks almost like a baby of the rich people!"  The rich, like a doll, are unreal and perfect, powerful but untouchable.

Fortunately, Rita was listening to my diatribe and stopped me before it got out of hand.  She explained to Helena that the real problem wasn't ontological, but practical.  When people describe a baby as a doll, they may also treat the girl as a thing.  The cheek-pinching, hair-mussing, and invasive stares she got from people she had never seen before and would never see again served as very good evidence of this fact.

In the end, I still contend that issues of the constitution of being in postmodernity are important... but Rita is basically right.  The real issue with seeing the other was a doll is that she becomes a thing.  Prized and treasured, perhaps, but basically an object.  Instead of another subject with whom I interact, people on the street wanted an object with which they could play.

Salvador and Recife

Helena Iara has had a hard time with the heat, here near the Equator.  Sleeping is hard, she rejects putting on clothes with even more vehemence than she does at home, and she even came down with a cold that seems to be associated with going in and out of air conditioning (100 degrees on the street, less than seventy in a bank... it isn't easy even for an adult).

The great thing about Brazil's northeast, however, is its culture, with more dance forms and musical genres and styles of painting and decoration than anyone could imagine.  And since Rita and I are making a movie with kids who rap, break-dance, and dance capoeira, she's gotten a lot of exposure to a new world.

Most people who have seen either capoeira or break-dance see them as spectacles, as amazing feats of acrobatics, but for the kids who do them here in Recife, the activity is much more profound.  Both serve as ways to transform conflict and to ritualize violence.  As one kid told us, breakdancing appeared when gangs were fighting on the streets, and some young artists proposed to turn the battles into an artistic competition, instead of a conflict ending in death.  The language of the break-battle remains the same as for war, but you can't touch the other, and victory is decided by competence, not blood.  Rita's doctoral dissertation followed this process of transforming violence into art.

The same is true of capoeira, maracatu, and many other artistic forms here in the northeast.  And for Helena, a little girl who loves drama and movement and acrobatics, it's been fun.

Toys, Gravity, Kant

This morning after breakfast, Helena Iara sat in her high chair, throwing one toy after another to the ground, excited to hear the sound of the plastic hitting the tile floor, powerful knowing that either Rita or I would reach down and pick the toys up.  "One down, two down, three down," I joked as I picked up yet another plastic block.

"Good thing," Rita replied.  "Think of what would happen if Helena were in outer space, with no gravity at all."  An image of Helena outside a spaceship, throwing her toys left and right and "up" and "down" (categories that don't make much sense without gravity), with nothing ever to stop them, flying off into infinity where Helena could never see them or play with them again.

Emmanuel Kant said something very similar, about how what we think of as a problem to do something, may be exactly what makes doing that thing possible: "The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space."  The dove longs for an easier passage through the air, resenting the friction of each passing atom of oxygen... without recognizing that it's exactly that air that makes his flight possible.  In the same way, I get tired of the force of gravity which forces me to bend down and pick up yet another toy, without recognizing how much worse it would be otherwise.

Slavoj Zizek defines this process as the goal of psychoanalysis: seeing that what seem to be the "conditions of impossibility" of an action are really "its conditions of possibility," what seems like a barrier to what I want is in fact essential to doing it.

 It seems like a key lesson to fatherhood, a way to look at the sleepless nights and stomach aches and vomit after eating an apple.  Without these things, without the needs a child has of her parents, we would never construct love, family, all of the things that we want from parenting.  It's all air to a dove.

Pizza

Helena, Rita, and I went out for pizza last night, an experience rather different than what most Americans would expect.  While American pizza is generally cheap, considered a form of fast food, over the last ten years, Brazilian pizza has become gourmet, the sort of thing that people dress up to eat, expect unusual flavors like black fungus and arrugula, and drink wine.

From the moment we got to the pizzeria, Helena Iara set out to seduce everyone in the restaurant: she started with the waitresses, looking at them, throwing kisses (a new skill she learned this week), then opening her arms as if to say "come and get me!" before flirtatiously turning to hug Rita.  Next, she wanted to walk around the room, and stopped at each table to look up at each person.  When they smiled at her, she would move on to the next diner, as if to say, "Have you played with me yet?" By the end of the evening, she had "talked" with everyone and inspired people at one table to talk to people at another: an event had happened, and it brought everyone closer together.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog about Sara Blaffer Hrdy's hypothesis that babies are the foundation of human culture, because they are so hard to care for, that one person can't do it alone.  The baby needs grandparents and friends and aunts and uncles as well as her mother and father, because unlike most other animals, humans are born too early, too small and fragile to do anything for themselves.  I think that Helena's adventure last night, however, suggests that Hrdy begins with too much of a negative (or maybe physicalist?) frame: "babies are hard to care for, so people have to come together to guarantee the continuity of the species."  In this case, though, Helena brought people together through shared joy, not shared suffering.

Here's where I think Rita's thinking is really innovative: her research in the favelas of Recife and Rio de Janeiro showed that children play exactly this role as the glue of civil society, as the element that brings together families and neighbors into groups and informal organizations.  Children are community organizers, even in a pizza parlor.

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.

Ordinary Language

Over the last several weeks, Rita and Helena Iara have been talking quite a lot.  I'm not joking: Helena is responding thoughtfully, engaged in a real conversation with her mother.

Helena isn't even eight weeks old: clearly her proud father is exaggerating.  Everyone knows that children may speak their first word at about twelve months, and certainly won't converse for a good time after that.  And etymologically, "infancy" comes from the Latin of "do not speak".  So what in the world am I talking about?  These reflections became the theme for a long conversation with Helena Iara a couple of nights ago, after she and Rita had spent a good half an hour talking back and forth.

Now, if language is essentially the communication of meaning through verbal symbols, as most people have defined it through history, then I'm just writing nonsense.  However, over the last sixty or seventy years, beginning with Wittgenstein and JL Austin, philosophers and anthropologists have looked at other ways to define language, not merely as meaning, but also as a social practice.  Austin called his famous series of lectures How to do things with words, trying to show that meaning was only one of many activities that one can do with language.  When a priest or a judge says "I hearby declare you man and wife," for instance, he doesn't mean anything.  His words change the world, create or formalize a relationship that did not exist before.

Austin focussed on these kind of uses of words, but we can also see lots of other ones.  When two teenagers flirt with each other, for instance, the meaning of their words is less important than the romantic game they are playing.  Many modernist poets insisted that they wanted to create beautiful sounds more than convey meaning: after all, poein in Greek, the origin of poem, means "to make".  And words always work as a way to bring people together or force them apart, to create relationships, to develop intimacy.  They are a tool for sociality.

Since this theory that I'm proposing is a major part of Rita's research, it shouldn't surprise me that she would play these sorts of games with Helena Iara.  She speaks or giggles or grunts, and then waits for Helena to respond with a different sounds.  To which Rita will then respond, and the game goes on.  "Game," I say, but it is really the social practice of language: not the language game (Sprachspiel, in Wittgenstein's terms) of meaning, but a language game even so.  Helena has learned to speak long before she has learned how to mean.

On the origins of culture

4AM.  Helena Iara woke up hungry, and ate more than she should have, perhaps thinking that Rita's breast was a kind of all-you-can eat rodízio, and the extra milk gave her a stomach ache.  So once again, we made our way to the hammock, where Helena looked out the windows onto the bright stars that shone down on the jungle and the Morro do Lampião.

Why did I start talking about contemporary paleo-anthropology?  Maybe because she didn't like talking about Schleiermacher the night before, maybe because I was thinking how much harder it was for most parents of newborns.  In any case, Sara Blaffer Hrdy came up as I tried to talk about anything that would distract her from the colic in her stomach.  And it seemed to work.

Now, any number of anthropologists have hypothesized about the origins of culture, society, and human language, so the fact that Hrdy would try for a kind of grand unified theory of man is hardly new.  What is new, however, is where she situates this origin: in babies.  Specifically, in the premature birth of human babies.

The argument goes something like this: humans, unlike dogs or horses or almost any other mammal, can't do anything for themselves when they are born.  Horses can run, cats can worm their way close to their mothers' breasts.  And unlike marsupials (which are also born helpless, but whose mothers can get raise the baby on their own), one human being cannot take care of a baby.  The task is just too big: the food and the crying and excreting and cold and health...  As any mother knows, she needs the support of her own mother, of sisters, of a husband, of social services and professionals.  Four of us live here with Helena Iara, who is a great little baby who makes few demands in comparison with other babies, but even so, Rita, me, her sister, and her brother in law are all exhausted from the work.  Society, culture, and language, Hrdy suggests, all emerge from this human weakness, the need to have others help us in the essential task of reproducing the species.

I don't know if Helena was really interested in all of this, or just calmed by the rocking of the hammock, but she certainly perked up when she heard me mention her mom, whose anthropological research in the favelas of Recife led her to exactly the same conclusion: collaborative child care is the root of civil society in poor neighborhoods.  Women care for each others' kids, allowing one to work Monday, another Tuesday, another Wednesday.  When kids get to know each other, they introduce their parents, who might have been divided by warring favelas or high walls.  And because even gang leaders want the best for their kids, everyone can come together in a common purpose to create a day-care center or a soccer league.

We often think of kids as students, as the objects of adult education, discipline, and action.  In fact, though, of Hrdy and Rita are right, little babies may be the most important social agents around.  Without even trying, they are the ones who make human culture.