Panic Sites and Deviants: Children and Social Disasters and Convulsions
The anthropology of children is finely tuned to the constant low thrum of anxiety—a discordant sonic halo—of children misplaced, displaced, disordered, disrupted in their specific cultural journey into forms of maturation and bio-social reproduction. As such, children dart around and through a vortex of ever-evolving crisis. With such attentive scholarly apparatus, it is no wonder that artifacts of risk form fuzzy constellations across the literatures interested in children or their socially-constructed avatars. In almost textbook applications of capitalist logic, young people are situated amid crisis zones, dis-membered from domestic formations as families are colonized, dispossessed of cultural expectations by powerful agents of politics and economics, like offspring from the nightmare of displacement and enclosure outlined by Rosa Luxemburg in her classic study. “The more ruthlessly capital sets about the destruction of non-capitalist strata at home and in the outside world...the greater also is the change in the day-to-day history of capital. It becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions, and under these conditions, punctuated by periodical economic catastrophes or crises, accumulation can go on no longer” (Luxemburg 2003, 447). The perpetual crisis of capital is the monotonous siren heralding war all the time—from the very heart of the home to the very farthest battlefields where “universal childhood” has yet to come into being as another component in the global assemblage of children. What is required of us, especially in anthropology, is to discern through the haze of perpetual crisis the lived realities of children in their heterogeneous circumstances and to listen below the klaxon wailing for the everyday vernacular of change and becoming articulating cultural transformations and the every-decaying, ever-multiplying ways young people’s lived experiences infiltrate possibility and openness out of crisis zones while bearing the marks of conflict into new territories.
In the political and social upheavals of Sierra Leone and Liberia, children, specifically young boys and men, are dispossessed and then repossessed as a reserve army of labor on the frontlines of bush wars and diamond mines in Danny Hoffman’s anthropological account of “the war machine”—the struggle of social spaces exterior to the State to persist as “non-territories,” unmapped to the governing coordinates of politico-capital power. In short, and in my own imprudent foreshortening of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the nomadic war machine, Hoffman’s ethnography describes the relations generated along the very line where capital compels the un-Stated society into classes, appropriating land and resources as territory and people as subject(ed) workers. Hoffman’s work focuses on young people because they are always already outside/not yet incorporated into society and populate the very fraught zones of raw conflict and labor. They are the feral Deleuzean exteriority to the safe but permeable ring of culture endlessly mapping the interiors of its pleasures, its disciplines, its discontents, its reproductive techniques. The young are initially outside the practices intended to capture and incorporate them into a society of adults and bring them into the grace of human community, bequeathed with the coat of history and the lamp of futurity. Culture clearly is not impervious to the effects of young people nor is acculturation a unilateral process. The classic model for maturation imagines young people entering (cultural) adulthood where they may come to make sense of themselves as becoming other and taking on proper social roles. In contemplating “putting away childish things” they “come of age” into cultural zones profoundly perforated and destabilized by the global tremors of expanding capital colliding with fluctuating state power. Hoffman finds Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the nomadic war machine historically resonate: after the turmoil 1968, D&G’s “goal was a work of usable political philosophy for an era of state collapse and the radical expansion of capitalism’s logic into all manner of social relations” (Hoffman 2011, 5). While Hoffman deploys the conceptual tools offered by D&G on the contemporary moment in Sierra Leone and Liberia, we can also recognize in Hoffman’s summary of crisis the very processes detailed so carefully by Luxemburg as she surveyed the violence unleashed by Western capitalism across the non-capitalist/colonized worlds. Hoffman draws on D&G precisely for their understanding of crisis as a permanent and evolving feature of global capitalism, albeit a process not based on Hegelian dialectics but on a complex (and always incomplete) conception of forces and energies cutting through, intersecting, modifying, and stimulating forms of sociality, power, and desire.
I too will be improvising with and around D&G, and particularly Guattari with his notion of the assemblage, but here it is significant to acknowledge how the multi-valenced/striated analytical model proposed by D&G shares a fluid, pulsing method and cascading vocabulary with their friend, Foucault. The concatenation of forces that materialize around the child’s figure as well as make material out of the child itself are central to Foucault’s project. He writes about how the 18th century was the time that adults began to exert a new power of surveillance over newly-constituted subjects—children on the verge of sexuality. Grand new typologies of the child were constituted under new regimes of power especially interested in their secretive non-compliance and the new techniques that might force their admission and therapeutic re-appropriation by adult society. Swaddled and webbed, “All around the child, indefinite lines of penetration were disposed” (Foucault 1990, 42). Even as bourgeois adult conceptions of the child were engorged with new expert knowledge manufactured helter-skelter by hygienic and moral institutions, children, the “target expanded, subdivided, and branched out, penetrating further into reality at the same pace” (Ibid.). This summarizes the panic or concern surrounding the Japanese child in the 1970s and 80s, a crisis concomitant with a rhizomatic bourgeois notion sprouting new nodes of practice throughout the Japanese population, the recent laboring/suffering engine and beneficiaries of Japan Inc. ideology (Ivy 1995). Children, as the object par excellence of the family unit, forecast the precipitating cultural, political, and economic changes in the environments they inhabit and as such they are symptom and cause, both victim and threat. Through the alterations made to the subjectivities of children whole political economies shudder into new shapes, replete with biopolitical units of living labor reproduced through family restructuring/re-suturing. In Japan, an exquisitely durable event persists: the chronic economic crisis of the early 90s has become an epic, super-flattened, future-scape of joblessness and childlessness. This future-scape—the economic and demographic projections into a zone of future crisis already foretold—hovers monotonously in blame and anxiety over the site of youth—a massive structure given lift and durability in critical reflection by academics themselves.
In the political and social upheavals of Sierra Leone and Liberia, children, specifically young boys and men, are dispossessed and then repossessed as a reserve army of labor on the frontlines of bush wars and diamond mines in Danny Hoffman’s anthropological account of “the war machine”—the struggle of social spaces exterior to the State to persist as “non-territories,” unmapped to the governing coordinates of politico-capital power. In short, and in my own imprudent foreshortening of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the nomadic war machine, Hoffman’s ethnography describes the relations generated along the very line where capital compels the un-Stated society into classes, appropriating land and resources as territory and people as subject(ed) workers. Hoffman’s work focuses on young people because they are always already outside/not yet incorporated into society and populate the very fraught zones of raw conflict and labor. They are the feral Deleuzean exteriority to the safe but permeable ring of culture endlessly mapping the interiors of its pleasures, its disciplines, its discontents, its reproductive techniques. The young are initially outside the practices intended to capture and incorporate them into a society of adults and bring them into the grace of human community, bequeathed with the coat of history and the lamp of futurity. Culture clearly is not impervious to the effects of young people nor is acculturation a unilateral process. The classic model for maturation imagines young people entering (cultural) adulthood where they may come to make sense of themselves as becoming other and taking on proper social roles. In contemplating “putting away childish things” they “come of age” into cultural zones profoundly perforated and destabilized by the global tremors of expanding capital colliding with fluctuating state power. Hoffman finds Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the nomadic war machine historically resonate: after the turmoil 1968, D&G’s “goal was a work of usable political philosophy for an era of state collapse and the radical expansion of capitalism’s logic into all manner of social relations” (Hoffman 2011, 5). While Hoffman deploys the conceptual tools offered by D&G on the contemporary moment in Sierra Leone and Liberia, we can also recognize in Hoffman’s summary of crisis the very processes detailed so carefully by Luxemburg as she surveyed the violence unleashed by Western capitalism across the non-capitalist/colonized worlds. Hoffman draws on D&G precisely for their understanding of crisis as a permanent and evolving feature of global capitalism, albeit a process not based on Hegelian dialectics but on a complex (and always incomplete) conception of forces and energies cutting through, intersecting, modifying, and stimulating forms of sociality, power, and desire.
I too will be improvising with and around D&G, and particularly Guattari with his notion of the assemblage, but here it is significant to acknowledge how the multi-valenced/striated analytical model proposed by D&G shares a fluid, pulsing method and cascading vocabulary with their friend, Foucault. The concatenation of forces that materialize around the child’s figure as well as make material out of the child itself are central to Foucault’s project. He writes about how the 18th century was the time that adults began to exert a new power of surveillance over newly-constituted subjects—children on the verge of sexuality. Grand new typologies of the child were constituted under new regimes of power especially interested in their secretive non-compliance and the new techniques that might force their admission and therapeutic re-appropriation by adult society. Swaddled and webbed, “All around the child, indefinite lines of penetration were disposed” (Foucault 1990, 42). Even as bourgeois adult conceptions of the child were engorged with new expert knowledge manufactured helter-skelter by hygienic and moral institutions, children, the “target expanded, subdivided, and branched out, penetrating further into reality at the same pace” (Ibid.). This summarizes the panic or concern surrounding the Japanese child in the 1970s and 80s, a crisis concomitant with a rhizomatic bourgeois notion sprouting new nodes of practice throughout the Japanese population, the recent laboring/suffering engine and beneficiaries of Japan Inc. ideology (Ivy 1995). Children, as the object par excellence of the family unit, forecast the precipitating cultural, political, and economic changes in the environments they inhabit and as such they are symptom and cause, both victim and threat. Through the alterations made to the subjectivities of children whole political economies shudder into new shapes, replete with biopolitical units of living labor reproduced through family restructuring/re-suturing. In Japan, an exquisitely durable event persists: the chronic economic crisis of the early 90s has become an epic, super-flattened, future-scape of joblessness and childlessness. This future-scape—the economic and demographic projections into a zone of future crisis already foretold—hovers monotonously in blame and anxiety over the site of youth—a massive structure given lift and durability in critical reflection by academics themselves.
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