The Bourgeoisification of Childhood, or the Infantility of the Bourgeoisie

All children start life as baby bourgeois, in a relation of magical power over others and, through them, over the world, but they grow out of it sooner or later.

-Pierre Bourdieu[1]

I want to explore a simple yet powerful analogy between the temporary state of childhood and the permanent (but not ever-lasting) state of the bourgeoisie[2], drawing throughout on bits of scientific expertise in the form of child developmental theory.  I think this analogy can, at the very least, be made in two domains of life: a social cosmology (the way one imagines or constructs the surrounding social world) and behavior. [3]  I aim to reveal both the middle-class values and assumptions that inform child developmental theory, and, more importantly, to draw some conclusions on the bourgeoisie as a permanently child-like class.  

As Bourdieu notes, baby and bourgeois social cosmologies are very similar.  At 9 months, a baby begins to develop ‘favorite toys’; at 1 year, has ‘favorite things’; and at 4 years, ‘often can’t tell what’s real from what’s make-believe’, and ‘talks about what she likes and what she is interested in’. [4]  In psychologist-philosopher Jean Piaget’s theory of child development, children from age 2-7 remain in the preoperational stage, in which ‘magical thinking’ and egocentrism are the norm.  Not only do children think less logically and more fantastically, but they are unable to understand situations from any viewpoints but their own.  In Marxist terms, the bourgeoisie share similar ways of thinking about the social world around them.  They too have favorite toys and things (which, in child development theory, become naturalized as appropriate ways for children to relate to the world around them), and – in the form of commodity fetishism – often think about these things magically.  Things – the Droid Bionic phone with its supposedly futuristic, fighter robotic origins[5] comes to mind – appear as just that: things or toys with no sense of the social labor of production of the various components, etc.  What’s ‘real’ – where the Droid is made, by whom, under what conditions of labor, for what wages, for whom, who can afford it, who uses it, what connects who uses it to who makes it, and so forth – is ignored (indeed, almost impossible to know unless one is an inside expert) in favor of what’s ‘make-believe’ – that these phones really are magical: they download data from outer-space in microseconds, they tell you exactly where you are and where you need to go (one only needs to think of the relatively new ‘Siri’ – a piece of software acting as a human personal assistant – released by Apple: ‘Ask Siri to help you get things done.’).  The phones of course do all these things, but we tend to marvel at these technological effects rather than its production (in all its forms).  This commodity fetishism is only part of a generalized ideology whereby the bourgeoisie – focused primarily on themselves and things – cannot imagine how others live, who/what brings them their morning omelette, or why one might object to wage labor, the stock market, and all the other games of capital.  All this is to say that, on the whole, their imaginations of the social world are indeed child-like. 

Behavior is the other domain where babies and bourgeoisie find much in common.  When children do something ‘wrong’, we often fall on the recourse that they ‘don’t know any better’.  At 4 months, they might cry when you stop playing with them; from 9 months, they may begin to be ‘afraid’ of strangers; at 18 months, they ‘may have temper tantrums’; at 3 years, they ‘may get upset with major changes in routine’; and at 5 years, they are ‘sometimes demanding and sometimes very cooperative’.  That these developmental milestones or expectations are socially constructed in the image of bourgeois life should be immediately evident – severely malnourished children lack the energy to have tantrums; nomadic children are unlikely to expect the tedious routine of a ‘nine-to-five’, ‘weekday-weekend’ conception of time; etc.  More importantly, however, is that these behaviors characterize bourgeois attitudes and beliefs.  The question of ‘not knowing any better’ is the question of ideology.  Temper tantrums and crying are egocentric considerations of self-need without the ability to rationalize the absurdity of these needs or to consider those of others.  Being upset with ‘major changes in routine’ is an excellent naturalization of counter-revolutionary sentiment, an assurance that what is normal is natural and should not be resisted or changed.  And being ‘sometimes demanding and sometimes very cooperative’ is characteristic not only of babies but of shift managers or any type of boss.[6]

                 

So perhaps children and bourgeoisie think and act more similarly than we think.[7]  To extend this argument, we should think about the contradictions posed to bourgeois development stages and their corresponding materio-moral sentiments by certain categories of people and actions – child soldiers and child criminals tried as adults, for example.   Certainly, there are plenty of cases in which children are ‘brainwashed’ or forced into serving as combatants.  Yet those children who fully understand what they are fighting for (usually a peasant or proletarian cause) – as politically informed and selfless soldiers – go unacknowledged, in part because they appear as abnormal or unnatural, defying the codes of bourgeois child development.  Their distance is usually sanctified, and their ‘innocence’ constructed, through Orientalist humanitarian eyes, mainly because images of African child soldiers circulated in US media.  On the other hand, at home in the criminal justice system, members of the public (white or Black) may be more likely to favor trying Black children than white children as adults[8], suggesting that these codes of child development are not ‘appropriately scaled’ to poor Black kids who are so deeply Othered, hated, and feared. 

                 

What are the implications of this whole thought-exercise?  First, of course, child developmental stages, along with so many other biomedical ‘norms’, are social constructions of a consumerist society calibrated towards or with bourgeois values and codes of conduct.  But also, these codes re-create the values and expectations of bourgeois life.  Second and more philosophically, one might come to conceive of the bourgeoisie as not fully human – that is, they exist in a child-like form of social life, incompletely developed (even according to their own standards).  This is, in a roundabout manner, precisely a historical Marxist treatment of the bourgeoisie; Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness posits the proletariat as the subject-object of history, where (in teleological Marxism), capitalism is said to be a temporary phase of history to be replaced by communism (and with it, the disappearance of the ‘primitive’ bourgeoisie, as with the disappearance of feudal lords before them).  Third, if the bourgeoisie are to be considered in this way – let’s put in their own developmental terms –as suffering from a ‘developmental disorder’, we might do better than Dr. Frederic Jameson[9] in diagnosing the condition of the bourgeoisie.  They are not, in today’s ‘postmodern’ consumer society, condemned to schizophrenia (a condition which, clinically speaking, onsets in late adolescence or early adulthood).  Rather, they are developmentally disabled from birth, condemned, as Bourdieu suggests, to live perpetually with childish thoughts and behaviors out of which, unlike children, they are unable to grow. 

               

I close with one final conclusion on children and the bourgeoisie in relation to Immanuel Kant’s notion of ‘perpetual peace’.  In a recent essay[10], anthropologist Liisa Malkki suggests that the proliferation of cultural artefacts linking children with peace depoliticizes and infantilizes the very notion of peace in favor of ‘the adult world of real politics, real history’.  I think we can fruitfully extend her analysis by recognizing the very notion of ‘world peace’, at least in its Kantian origin and in today’s culturally dominant form, as bourgeois.  Kant, in his remarkable late 18^th century essay suggesting some conditions and forms of government for the assurance of international peace among states, suggests that commerce and money could play important roles:

The spirit of commerce, which is incompatible with war, sooner or later gains the upper hand in every state. As the power of money is perhaps the most dependable of all the powers (means) included under the state power, states see themselves forced, without any moral urge, to promote honorable peace and by mediation to prevent war wherever it threatens to break out. They do so exactly as if they stood in perpetual alliances, for great offensive alliances are in the nature of the case rare and even less often successful. (From First Supplement, ‘Of the Guarantee of Perpetual Peace’; emphasis added) 

As today’s US imperial wars have best taught us, commerce and war often go hand-in-hand: Halliburton and Iraqi oil, Lockheed Martin missiles in Pakistan, and so on.  Kant’s argument – to the effect (elaborated by economist Joseph Schumpeter, among others) that capitalism guarantees peace – should thus strike us as not only bourgeois, but also childish.    

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[1] Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction. Richard Nice, trans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.  Pg. 54.

[2] I intentionally use ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’ here because these although these class categories sound outdated, they are today more relevant than one might suspect reading recent social theory (even Marxist work).  The Occupy’s 99% vs. 1% discourse could be read as a euphemism of this set of terms. 

[3] Language and language development is another important area, but I leave this for linguists to elaborate. 

[4] These developmental milestones come from the CDC: http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/actearly/milestones/index.html

[5] See the advertisement here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-K71MpwCko&feature=related.  The slogan “Made from machines to rule all machines” is fetishistic in the extreme.

[6] One might point out that these particular observations could equally be ascribed (by the bourgeoisie) to the proletariat: as being prone to tantrums (strikes, revolutions, etc.); as ‘not knowing any better’ (‘uneducated’); as being sometimes demanding and sometimes cooperative (management’s characterization of workers); and so on.  These characterizations have historically been and continue to be instruments of class control, infantilizing workers for the purposes of union-busting, stifling class consciousness, etc.  The recent banning of Paulo Freire’s ‘The Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ in a Tucson school district – affecting working-class children – is an important example that suggests that child development theory functions to naturalize class oppression more directly than it might appear. 

[7] This, of course, gives us another, perhaps unexpected explanation for why bourgeois children find it easy to become bourgeois adults.  In addition to the material continuity of ease, there is a continuity of thought and behavior! 

[8] For example, see Feiler, S. and J. Sheley. 1999. Legal and racial elements of public willingness to transfer juvenile offenders to adult court. J Crim Justice, 27: 55–64.

[9] Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New York: Verso. 

[10] Malkki, L. 2010. Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace. In In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care. Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, eds. Durham: Duke University Press.

The Morality of Play for the Capitalist Subject

Recently, I’ve been perplexed with what I might call the ‘morality of play’.  By this I mean to ask: how can a politically committed subject living in a capitalist society experience pleasure or play that is not already co-opted or incorporated into relations of power?  Or, more simply, is it possible to imagine a Marxist form of ‘play’ or recreation in a capitalist society?  

Let me start with a simple, personal example: football (soccer) is one of the few enduring passions in my life.  I play weekly, but more importantly I am a supporter of Arsenal Football Club, whose matches I follow keenly and attend whenever I am in London.  As a cultural critic, I am intellectually aware of the problems of supporting/paying what is now more a company than a club; of being transformed from a supporter into a consumer; of, as a result of the creation of the Premier League and its lucrative global satellite TV deals, becoming a distant supporter of a remote club thousands of miles away; and of yielding to the ‘cult of personality’ of the club’s superstars, who I’ve never even met, yet feel like family to me.  I have read, with a painful, knowing grimace, Terry Eagleton’s cutting critique of football as the opium of the people (although I think he underestimates the potential for revolutionary organization by local, fan-owned clubs like FC United of Manchester or AFC Wimbledon, among others).  And yet, like a physician who - knowing all the health risks - continues to smoke, I cannot help but remain glued to the Arsenal, looking forward with such joy and pleasure to matches, around which I carefully plan other events in my life.  Is such pleasure immoral?

The short answer is, of course, yes.  Orthodox Marxist perspectives explain how cultural elements like sports, music, and so forth – especially in their mass produced forms – constitute a superstructure determined by the economic base of the capitalist mode of production.  In their Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which they write about the deceptive techniques of the ‘culture industry’, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue that in pleasure, human beings divest themselves of thought.  Although inherently free of domination and discipline, pleasure in the hands of rulers is a rational measure of manipulation, administered to subjects in controlled doses.  In this sense, football is not the only form of pleasure already ‘poisoned’ by power.  One could think of any number of forms of play that are, in the ‘soft’ sense of ideology or the ‘hard’ sense of hegemony, already constitutive of, or at least linked to, techniques of manipulative domination – like going to the movies (cf. Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle) or enjoying a post-dinner dessert (cf. Sidney Mintz’s Sweetness and Power). 

Of course, these forms of play are all practices that continually re-constitute us as capitalist consumers, conditioned to find pleasure (and our own postmodern identities) in a way that reproduces the existing mode of production.  Even where we might have options to resist – e.g. via a boycott of a particular product – such resistance is merely a choice already constrained.  If you refuse to buy non-organic milk because of the way in which the drive for profit-maximization has led to the ill-treatment of cows, you have the option of buying organic milk, a purchase that – however moral it may seem – is still a purchase from a profit-making company within a system that exploits labor power (cf. Slavoj Žižek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce).  

But what about non-consumptive forms of play?  What are, in this particular historical moment, or conjuncture, the moral stakes of going to a dinner party?  Of having sex?  Of playing pick-up football?  Here, the problem of play arises in a different form, and requires us to think more deeply about the opposite of play or pleasure today: work.  Raymond Williams, in his excellent Keywords, traces the etymology of work before it acquired new connotations under industrial capitalism.  Today, of course, ‘work’ signifies ‘paid employment’, but it used to merely signify ‘activity’.  As a graduate student, when I say, “I need to get to work,” I’m often mistaken to mean that I am employed as an alienated wage laborer, when I simply mean I would like to read or write as part of an activity-process very much my own (one in which I feel I become more rather than less human, and thus ‘need to’ in the Foucaultian ethical sense of self-betterment rather than the sense of labor discipline).  My sense of work, I would like to think, is one that connotes its earlier meaning – merely a form of activity, rather than work in the sense of ‘labor’ that has become a commodity and a class.  And yet my sense of work is by no means dominant.  For the capitalist subject  (which I certainly am, in spite of the less alienating form of my labor), all forms of play – even the non-consumptive – are inextricably bound to the dominant sense of work, as a counter-alienating practice prepared precisely to balance the alienation of capitalist work.  Who doesn’t at times long to come home from work to enjoy a TV show, to make love to a partner, to have a family dinner?  For most of us, these are what we see as our ‘real’ lives, what we do outside of work.

This work-play complex is connoted best in that heinous expression (unfortunately, too commonly heard in medical school), “Work hard, play hard.” This mode of life creates the perfect circle to maximize productivity – one must do one’s best while at work, and then do one’s best while at play, only in order to be able to perform better at work.  If ‘play’, in the form of religion, sports, music, and so forth, is not taken as a way to rejuvenate our bodies and minds from the labor we perform for others, it at the very least orients us towards searching for life in our limited time off from work, preventing us from organizing work (in the sense of activity) such as the occupy movement (which is itself sustained by economic crisis, unemployment, and lack of opportunity for educated young people).  In Wage Labour and Capital, Marx writes of industrial labor:

[The worker] works in order to live.  He does not even reckon labour as part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life…What he produces for himself is not the silk that he weaves, not the gold that he draws from the mine, not the palace that he builds.  What he produces for himself is wages, and silk, gold, palace resolve themselves for him into a definite quantity of the means of subsistence…And the worker, who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc. – does he consider this twelve hours’ weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shoveling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life, as life?  On the contrary, life begins for him where this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed.

[I should mention that today, capitalism operates largely through flexible accumulation, and actively promotes worker autonomy and creativity in some lines of work as a counter-measure against alienation. (cf. Luc Boltanksi and Eve Chiapello's The New Spirit of Capitalism)]

In this notion of ‘play’, even non-consumptive forms of pleasure exist ideologically, as though coming up to gasp for breath in a pool from which there is no escape or exit.  Dinner parties, sexual activity, and all other forms of non-consumptive play remain – to the extent that they do not offer an alternative Marxist hegemony – ways in which the capitalist division of work and life becomes self-affirmed.  They are means of adapting ourselves to a common sense that is not only non-sensical, but immoral within Marxist ethics. (I should say that this type of Marxist asceticism, however similar, should not be confused with the Protestant ethic of capitalism that Max Weber once wrote about.  Indeed, as E.P. Thompson describes in The Making of the English Working Class, trade unionism arose with similar asceticism and self-discipline, which I take to be necessary in any radical political struggle.)           

                                                                                       

What would moral ‘play’ then look like for both an anti- or post-capitalist subject?  For an anti-capitalist subject, how can we begin to think of ‘revolutionary’ play in everyday life?  Can we think of ‘revolutionary’ dinner parties, ‘revolutionary’ sex, or ‘revolutionary’ football?  For a post-capitalist subject, for whom that negative connotation of ‘work’ associated with capitalism falls away in place of joy, what happens to ‘play’ altogether?  When labor becomes pleasure, what constitutes play, and what purpose does it serve? 

Capitalism, Violence, and the Problem of the Spectacle

I had the opportunity to observe some events at ‘Occupy Oakland’ on the day of the general strike (Nov. 2).  I have not been involved in the occupy movement and, as an anthropologist interested in social justice, wanted to examine the movement’s rhetoric and actions firsthand.  I reserve judgment or critique on the movement itself, which is still in its early stages.  But, as I explore below, some things I saw and heard reignited my recent conceptual struggle with the idea of violence.  I’m referring mainly to growing discontent with a faction of the occupy movement that has vandalized property and not agreed to use ‘peaceful’ means of protest.  During the night after the occupation of the Port of Oakland, a group of protestors broke windows, threw stones, and started fires.  As far as I know has been reported, the protestors did not hurt anyone or cause damage other than to property.  They have been roundly condemned by police and fellow occupiers alike.

What is violence?  And why does it conjure up such emotional angst among us?  Anthropologists and philosophers have long struggled with this question.  For most of us, violence is that physical or bodily damage - rape, crime, killing, and other acts that violate the dignity of the physical body and property.  Violence brings to mind images of shootings and stabbings, of torture and mutilation, of vandalism and looting.  But of course, violence is much more than that.  Paul Farmer, among others, has popularized the idea of ‘structural violence’, or the violence done by structural processes and social conditions that condemns some to poverty and disease.  It is an idea that could be used to describe the ways in which fluid capitalism creates growing inequality between the richest and poorest, felt particularly during economic crises such as the one that led to the occupy movement. 

How can we compare physical and structural violence?  For most of us, they are both immoral.  But philosophers are not so sure.  Marxists Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre believed that violence was critical to ensure political and human liberation for the colonized, who (in the late 1950s and early 1960s) were plagued by an inferiority complex.  Even the liberal Hannah Arendt felt that to take away violence from man would be to dehumanize him.  She opposed violence not to peace or non-violence, but to power.  Those regimes losing power would increasingly resort to violence in order to maintain it.  But violence will always destroy power, never giving rise to it.  Let us then be skeptical about not only the glorification of violence for the grand end of seizing power, but also the revulsion against violence as an inherent evil. 

 First, it is too easy to condemn physical violence.  There is something about the way in which the flowing of blood, the smashing of a window, or the explosion of a gunshot shatters our world.  We become transfixed by the spectacle that it so often produces – pools of blood, destroyed buildings, a dead body – in part because they disrupt our sense of normalcy.  But everyday normalcy is not equivalent to historical normalcy; in the Marxist sense, of course, all history has been a history of class struggle, with violence and revolution inherent to that history.  From a historical perspective, nothing could be more normal than for a movement directed against the wealthiest class to turn to violence against property. 

Does this mean that an event attentive to historical normalcy should be seen as moral?  This is a more difficult question, with several perspectives.  From the point-of-view of the land-owning class, such an event is considered inherently wrong within a bourgeois moral framework in which the protection of property is guaranteed by law and ideology.  Their moral stance is shared by many occupiers from the middle classes who were ‘hurled’ into unemployment after diligently following the rules of achieving the American dream.  From the point-of-view of other more radical occupiers, violence risks alienating potential liberal allies, and becomes a utilitarian question about the efficacy of tactics by which the movement can grow and accomplish specific goals (which seem to still be in the process of formulation).  From a Marxist perspective, one might see the destruction of corporate property as a physical violence fighting against a structural violence.  Yes, a downtown Oakland bank branch seems quite normal and harmless.  It employs local workers and provides a useful service to local residents.  But it is in fact not only symbolic of but also constitutive of a structural violence by which labor power is exploited and finance capital grows – the essential violence done by the capitalist mode of production on workers.  That we aren’t shocked when we walk by a bank branch is because what goes on inside is not earth-shattering shootings or visible torture of people.  Instead, it is a slow violence, an everyday violence, in which the blood and sweat of labor is exploited, hour by hour, dollar by dollar.  

  

Ultimately, the ethical dilemma in which we are left is this: how does one best respond to the structural violence of capitalism?  The occupy movement has successfully gathered a critical mass of people ready to act, but with very different ideas of what type of action should take place.  I am neither convinced by the violence of some occupiers nor by the non-violence of others.  To close, I draw from Karl Marx’s The Civil War in France (1871).  He was analyzing the reasons for the fall of the Paris Commune – the 1871 takeover of the city of Paris by workers in what was seen as the first ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.  The socialist occupation was cut short when troops from Versailles re-took the city, crushing the nascent government and executing many of its members.

"...In the economic sphere much was left undone which, according to our view today, the [Paris] Commune ought to have done. The hardest thing to understand is certainly the holy awe with which they remained standing respectfully outside the gates of the Bank of France. This was also a serious political mistake. The bank in the hands of the Commune - this would have been worth more than ten thousand hostages." - Karl Marx, from 'The Civil War in France' (1871)

Perhaps the battle against structural violence consists neither of destroying banks nor of occupying public spaces; historical lessons suggest that occupying banks is an alternative worth considering.