THERE IS A CLOCK THAT NEVER STRIKES
Reasons to eviscerate your Inner Child
The little trucks travel nowhere and the tiny barrels on them are empty; yet they remain true to their destiny by not performing, not participating in the process of abstraction that levels down that destiny, but instead abide as allegories of what they are specifically for...The unreality of games gives notice that life is not yet real. (1.)
There's no more melancholic, jealous adult fantasy than Peter Pan. The legend of children happy never to grow up is bitter propaganda. Children want immediate safe passage out of childhood, only not at the price you paid for it. The pale 'majority' you've slowly come to terms with is something no-one would imagine before it had already engulfed them.
As they learn the meaning of age difference, children see adults moving confidently through the world, apparently willing things to happen, and become impatient with an awkward, miniature existence. An idea of what adults are able to do follows logically from the thought of life without its worst indignities, which are all attributed to the mere fact of not being older. Oblivious to the kinds of servitude internalised by parents as 'responsibility', the child presumes that the power she enjoys within the narrow confines of 'playland' would extend indefinitely if that boundary were erased.
'A child seeing the tightrope walkers singing, the pipers playing, the girls fetching water, the coachmen driving, thinks all this happens for the joy of doing so...we, however, know what is at stake', lamented Johann Peter Hebel. 'Namely', explained T.W. 'Teddie' Adorno (2.) in another century, 'earning a living'. (3.) Activity 'irradiated by the light of its own self-determination as "joy in doing"' (4.), dictatorship of the imagination over objects' destiny: these privileges are sampled only once in a lifetime inside capital. 'The quality of things' is not directly subject to the law of exchange only in the enclosure where future labour-power is lovingly tended, in the trivial representation of a world sealed off as the scene of play.
Arthur Rimbaud, professional prodigy and catastrophic role model (5.), understood the laws of this Ante-purgatory, suspended animation in which unreality bends to the utterly ineffectual will. His juvenilia, never recuperated by a 'mature' body of work, reproduces at every level of its logic this paralysis of time, where any extravagance, whatever 'disordering' of sense and senses, is equally permissible but none is able to affectstates of affairs.
How tedious, the hour of the "beloved body" and "dear heart" , he spits in the didactic prose-poem Enfance. The two sections following this slogan are made up of self-contained and static oeneiric images, hanging in indefinite space with no hint of transition, no discernible relation to time. Five such frozen details are introduced in succession with a bland There is..., as if their presence were simultaneous and eternal. The possible worlds projected here are either uninhabited or filled with ghosts: The little dead girl behind the rose bushes...The little brother (he is in India!) there, against the sunset...The old men who are buried upright. Further on, the notion of childhood as a kind of temporary death reappears in the line Let them rent me this tomb at last. Giorgio Agamben found the anthropological basis for this association: in the essay 'In Playland' inInfancy and History he points to the traditional function of children and ghosts as bearers of a necessary ambivalence, transitional vehicles between the diachrony of eventful, historical life, and the absolute synchrony to which the dead ['the ancestors'] are consigned (6.).
Yet if childhood is estrangement from the experience of time, a state in which all hours are equivalent because every action is equally unreal, it is precisely Chronos, the authority of the calendar, that is used to determine who is held in this condition and who allowed to leave it. This is the extraordinary double meaning of the line There is a clock that never strikes (7.). (As is well known, Rimbaud himself seized a series of chances to escape minority with ruthless contempt for any idylls left behind. As soon as the dreamlike helplessness of childhood was fully illuminated, he abandoned vague intoxicating images for the exact calculations of colonial trade.)
Almost thirteen decades after Rimbaud last saw any point in writing poetry, childhood is still set up as an alienated representation of adult life, concealing the latter's defects and cut off from its compensations. Yet the constant development of certain commodities' allure has increased 'childish' expectations of adulthood beyond measure. A child draws erratic lines on paper; without provocation the simplest materials slide out of her control. Adults' gestures may once have appeared only slightly more decisive, less in thrall to nature; now they seem to control a world of breathtaking complexity, perfect machine-made surfaces, smooth motion at incredible speeds. The 'promise of happiness' concealed in this impression is further reinforced by the magical powers conferred within the ghetto of play by generations of electric and electronic toys. If child's play is adult life in microcosm, the competent user of a video console has no reason not to look forward to a despotic reign over time, space and technology, endless 'Illuminations' of painless, devastating violence.
The 'death of childhood' bewailed by reactionaries (embittered sentimentalists intent on making sure none escape the ordeal they once went through) is no more than the growing tendency for 'children' to refuse separation of childhood from the rest of life, attempting to appropriate immediately the freedom they attribute to their elders. The fact that the plenitude laid claim to doesn't yet exist for anyone amounts less to a naive element in their insurrection than to a rigorous critique of adult life as it's endured. Adorno saw that 'in his purposeless activity the child, by a subterfuge, sides with use-value against exchange value', that 'the unreality of games gives notice that life is not yet real' (8.). In spite of what he may have believed, this doesn't simply mean that in a miniature utopia children take refuge from the wretchedness of the commodity form. Rather, most are acutely aware that the agency enjoyed in play is purely 'virtual', a teasing simulation. Wrongly but quite rationally, they presume that reality will become real when the stigma of minority is removed. So they search for ways to make this happen without waiting to 'come of age'.
Those who survive this period learn from experience (or perhaps from its persistent refusal to begin) that within existing social relations childhood never ends. The privations of minority go on forever, albeit in a slightly altered form. After a certain age parents' and teachers' authority no longer comes between the individual and her use of the world; instead, indifferent exchangeability of hours, estrangement from 'the quality of things', stunted subjectivity -- the same scandals that characterise childhood -- are encountered everywhere as 'natural' facts of economic being. The only thing that's cancelled is the certainty of one day being released from these bonds.
Obviously, children's attempts at immediate seizure of 'adulthood' are founded on ignorance of the sameness actually lying in store. Electronically enhanced play promises a life with miraculous qualities; the desire to test these outside 'playland', in unmediated contact with a full-scale world, draws strength from a false belief in its imminent satisfaction. A question of bad information, however, in no way diminishes the status of this childish impatience as a revolutionary virtue disastrously lacking in present day 'grown- up' politics.
Of all the possible responses to betrayal of infantile faith by Actually- Existing Adulthood, surely the most cynical is cultivation of an 'Inner Child'(9.). The phantom that goes by this name is treated as the sole repository of early memories and authentic desire; its nature is derived wholesale from an adult stereotype of 'innocence'. An Inner Child, unlike living children, is never childish but 'childlike'. Rather than railing against subjection to dazzling, unintelligible powers, it conforms to certain adults' sentimental image of childhood as perpetual enchantment.
However earnestly they identify with the past, bearers of an Inner Child retrospectively disown their childish struggle against minority. The memory of this intemperance (10.) and its necessity, they wager, will be warded off by the scarecrow set in its place. Veneration of the sacred Child serves as an alibi for having come to terms with working adulthood, for acceptance of minority renewed in the guise of 'responsibility' (11.). The childish fury best forgotten cried out for an altogether different future.
The potential for unmediated life, then, is taken for granted throughout childhood, before being ridiculed by the reality of 'coming of age'. After this encounter with experience, what could seem more reckless than refusing to renounce such a childish demand? Holding on to it would entail more than a constant effort to extricate oneself from the transactions of 'maturity': 'a Man Without Qualities', Musil's eponymous hero learns, 'does not say "no" to life but "not yet"'. The task of anyone professing 'loyalty' to childish desire is at once immediate and historical: certainly not to re-animate innocence, but to undermine and deform the present adult world so that, without resembling childhood, it comes to fulfil a promise with which it had intended to deceive.
1. Adorno, Minima Moralia , section146, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott, Verso, London 1996
2. cf. correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin re Passagen-Werk, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, 'The Prince and the Frog'Infancy and History, trans. Liz Heron, Verso, London, 1993.
3. Minima Moralia 146.
4. Ibid.
5. eg. Allen Ginsberg, Jim Morrison, Kathy Acker, Leonardo di Caprio: an 'Art of Sinking in Poetry' starting from the lowest possible point.
6. Long banishment to a shrunken, sterile world, exclusion from history in the name of chronological order: this condition is also described almost casually in the lines I walk on (je suis le pi eton de) the high road beside the stunted woods; the noise of the sluices covers my steps.
7. Agamben, 'In Playland', inInfancy and History.
8. Minima Moralia 146.
9. Another strategy, seemingly more sincere, is denounced from time to time by media moralists as young adults' 'refusal to grow up' (cf. any issue of LM magazine). Distaste for the squalid reality on offer is expressed by never giving up the iconography of childhood -- toys, food, television -- and shamelessly indulging 'immature' impulses. While the latter is a practice worth defending, barricading oneself inside a playpen ultimately provides little protection against the blackmail of citizenship. Gestures of this kind are almost always purely symbolic: invoking childhood atmospheres is rarely able to return social interaction to the brutally experimental school playground stage, and still less often does it reveal ways to avoid exchanging time for money. Limiting resistance to such colourful but insubstantial displays implies either deep desperation or secret reserves of contentment. Obviously, trying to live inside a simulacrum of infancy renounces the utopian childish vision of adulthood as irreversibly as does accepting adult life in the imposed form.
10. In the essay 'Virtuosity and Revolution' (anthologized in English in Radical Thought in Italy, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, Minnesota U.P., Minneapolis, 1996), Paolo Virno opposes incontinence, 'a giving way to immediate appetite', to intemperance, a 'constructive defection' which 'opposes an intellectual understanding' to given ethical standards.
11. Admittedly, the word 'responsibility' is often used to designate the stakes of freedom. (In a recent interview, Antonio Negri attaches it to a 'materialist eternity' -- each action's eternal return in its effects' invisible constitution of history). But at present the ideological usage overwhelmingly prevails: 'responsibility' in this case refers to a command internalised as duty or more precisely as debt.
