Hip-Hop baby

For the last three weeks, we've been hosting three young filmmakers from Recife at our house: we've worked with them on numerous projects for the last six or seven years, and now they are starting their own news channel, where they report news from the favela from the perspective of the favela.  (The site launches tomorrow, at www.favelanews.org, if you're interested).  All three of the young artists love rap, and one of them is one of the best breakdancers in Brazil, so Helena found herself in the middle of a crash course in the philosophy, ethics, and æsthetics of hip-hop.

American hip-hop is most famous for its misogyny and violence, but Brazilian hip-hop has stayed more true to the movement's roots: in Brooklyn and the Bronx in the 1960s and 1970s, rap and breakdance served as a way to transform gang conflict into artistic conflict.  Instead of fighting with knives and guns, hip-hop artists fight with dance moved and rhyme.  Over the next dozen years, before rap got co-opted by the music industry, rappers, dancers, and graffiti artists developed a comprehensive philosophy of black self-help, valuing the beauty of the slum, and calling for social justice.

How does this make sense to a little girl?  Not through words like "social justice" or "combatting discrimination."  She liked the dancing and and music, things that fit into her world of fun and beauty.  Quite a few times, Okado, Dita, and Adriano took advantage of a break in their classes to teach her the basic moves of breakdancing, turning our kitchen into an improvised dance floor.  And by the end of the three weeks, Helena had memorized the chorus and several of the verses of Okado's most famous rap, "Morar na Favela não é fácil" ("It ain't easy to live in the 'hood"), which has become a kind of anthem for kids in the favelas of Recife (we filmed this music video of it last year).

There is a lesson to philosophers -- and others who want kids to think and learn -- here.  We put a lot of effort into words: words in books, words in lectures, words memorized and repeated.  But the attraction of hip-hop -- and its secret to inspiring frequently illiterate kids from the urban periphery to learn, to write, to make art -- is that it is fun.  It uses the body in dance.  The ear in music.  Like most great philosophical movements in antiquity (the ones that actually made a broad impact on the world, unlike today's phenomenology or analytic philosophy of language), hip-hop is an integrated way of thinking that includes the body, culture, sound, and being-together.  The Stoics included spiritual practices with their thinking; the Epicurians food and physical exercise.  Buddhism and Christianity, now understood as religions, also started as philosophical-cultural movements.  In all of those cases, philosophy was a way of life, not a way of thought.

And thanks to Okado, Adriano, and Dita, Helena was initiated into one of the more interesting of those movements over the last couple of weeks.

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.

Pictures from the patio on a rainy day

 

 

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.