The becomingness of the child, or young human, is always in question and the horizon of being is always partially obscured. The child’s body, its language, its affects, its energies are in savage contestation with time and the child, more than any other body, is so visibly under time’s contorting, stretching spell. The child strains forward into growth we code as maturity and just as quick diverts, appearing far to the side, prodigal, wayward, delinquent. Youth folds into Elizabeth Grosz’s description of time and emerges light-footed and daring: “It has an evanescence, a fleeting or shimmering, highly precarious ‘identity’ that resists concretization, indication, or direct representation” (1999, 1). All of us share, in some way, in this “fleeting or shimmering” moment and indeed, change is constantly upon us while our sense of time passing fluctuates around us and pulses through us. Time and the child cannot be conflated, nor are children a mutable, inscribable substance of time, worked over and then read symptomatically as a “sign of the time(s).” But they are co-conspirators. In league together, plunging and rearing, signaling chaos, unpredictable with joy. The child is the surreal, the endless play, the absurd, the scourge of the placid, the entombed, and the slave of reason.

I want us to refuse the relentless, linear, and totalizing hegemony of the child transfixed by The Future (as dual sign of biological and capital succession) or kidnapped by discourses insisting there is “no future” (trapping lived becoming into an airless space more conducive to fossilization than fecundity). Neither satisfies. Our possibilities of conceptualization are not so impoverished as to cling to the (heteronormative assumption of an) inevitable headlong plummet into a biological event culminating in death (only temporarily bought off with sacrificial bio-reproduction). Nor should we simply flinch in reaction to this coercive biological “truth,” braking/breaking this essentialized cruise into the future with a queer (s)kid, cracked up by negation. The linear former is entranced by an ideology of capital as the process of (endlessly cyclically, endlessly in crisis) accumulation; the latter by a reified projection cast up by theory. Basically, kids get pinioned between these poles as naturally reproducing subjects obligated to contribute their biopolitical efforts to the family and nation in an impossible project of fascist futurity, or as discursive, theoretical objects drawn from politics or narrative texts like novels or films and made to perform a fragmented refusal, a “no future” pageantry.

Make no mistake: I am sympathetic to time marked in maturation and decay. I feel it in my bones too. And trust this: refusal is my first impulse and my plan b from outer space—punks snarling about the ever-nearing terminus of present political regimes fits squarely within my own prognostications on power and their black site dreamings. But rather than remaining on this linear plane as “a time of generalized equivalence, a flattened, ‘capitalistic’ time” punctuated only by “no!,” I yearn towards cut-up time, spiraling time, time slipping away and stealing back again, fragmented and incompatible in duration with tidy schedules of being-in-a-state and clean compartments where things/subjectivies/desires are switched on or off (Guattari 1995, 16). Within this capitalistic, linear time children are too often made to stand in as a symbolic order to preserve a structured continuity. Children are such ideal sacrificial lambs insofar as they re-present to us our recollections of the past, while winking at us about adult power they frolic beneath. The dangerous, common violence is to entrap children in our own memory-schema of the way things were such that power collects the experiences and memories of children as a “virile majoritarian agency treating them as ‘childhood memories,’ as…colonial memories” (Delueze 1987, 293). The child fails us in this regard and it never surrenders as our colonial reserve of the future. The uncanny of the child is in its becoming not in its prefiguration of the adult we anticipate joining us on the island of existential grown-up crisis. The uncanny child instead inhabits “the paradox of presents which succeed one another” as lived overlays of childhoods, growth, becomings, maturation, social death and altered subjectivities. But then, strangely, the child—that one out there, riding the train to school in Tokyo—and our own experience, seems to “coexist symbolically in relation to the pure past or the virtual object” (Deleuze 1994, 124). They are from our time but also are imagined to embody all sorts of pre-social histories as if they each are a germ of a humanity before culture, before Time descended like a fascist night and blacked out everything but the assumption of future heir—to the nation, to the law, to gender, race, and species dogmas. (And oh, to inherit all this, can you imagine! Such an honor, such a blessing, to be a child! Do we wonder then when they go missing, zone out, flat out ignore what is best, and instead leap out into impossible atmospheres where their “childhood” is sucked into oblivion?)

In short, children—youth—are completely infested with uncontainable heterogeneity. Even the power of recent English-language animated films designated “for children” depends on this heterogeneity. “The beauty of these films is that they do not fear failure, they do not favor success, and they picture children not as pre-adults figuring the future but as anarchic beings who partake in strange and inconsistent temporal logics” (Halberstam 2011,120). The case Halberstam makes is perhaps overstated and overly sanitized, but I am excited by this description of “anarchic beings” outside of strict time codes and schedules for achievement, transition, maturation, assumption, and civility. The liminal figure is too bounded, already constrained by beginnings and meaningful ends. Social rituals of liminality periodically undo old patterns and make an opening for renewal and difference. Liminal figures, as Victor Turner describes, “elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space” (Turner 1969, 95). “Neither here nor there” he continues, but embarked upon a dedicated journey where they are “to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life” (Ibid.). Out of uncertainty and unnatural and/or dangerous states, the liminal are offered a return as the righteously transformed, vitalizing systems anew. Offspring are a biological expression of the larger cycle of regeneration, taking up new energies where old ones have been exhausted. As much as they affirm and invigorate biological systems, they also transfuse new blood into social systems—across the kingdom Animalia. But for humans, this is the question of continuance and equivalence: how does the child’s difference not overwhelm the system as an intruder into the bloodline and a stranger in the house, even with the careful over-coding as (temporally, politically, kin-wise) liminal? We would not say the child is simply derived. It is not a fleshy, biological derivative. Not a copy. In this sense, the child-as-infant is not “the equivalent” of a human until it has been culturally worked over and had its unruly differences tamed and brought to order within biopolitical indexing. The child is brought into social communion through ritual: “rites of separation form the asexual world or from the world preceding human society, and rites of incorporation into the society of the sexes and into the nuclear or extended family, clan or tribe” (Van Gennep 1960, 52). Some traits are valorized and permit inclusion. Others are abolished (“the child was of the earth” or “the child was one with the mother and must be individuated”) and the differences sublimated. The child seems to succeed the parent. One follows the other and the differences are merely sequential and so difference is coded as a natural fact of relay, preceded by resemblance and identity. But maybe it is not so simple. Genes, the work of culture, environment, the firm hand of ideology—they fail to plot out the smooth trajectory of the child and yet somehow the divergence is in communication with the differences around it. This is an argument against negation, where “no” and its blank, dead stare reckon difference as the broken spine of time. Instead I am trying to outline a flexible, improvised understanding of shifts—within ourselves and between ourselves and outside of ourselves in species, environment, and material that does not depend on simply “not being” the Other. And we must have a way of marking these divergent events and becomings without the violent, reactionary orthodoxy of crisis attended by its own Benjaminian “angel of history,” precariousness.

Within the ethnographic scope of this project, the Tokyo-based skate crew Lesque give us an example of becoming both individually and as a group. They had organized themselves around many differences; their heterogeneity drew in multiple terrains, languages, affects, histories, ethnicities, ages, aesthetics, goals and horizons, styles. One of the prime organizers was Asada Koji, a skater and videographer-editor. He was born in Costa Rica to Japanese parents who had self-consciously migrated or exiled themselves, depending on the telling. With Koji’s Spanish influence and their collective questioning of the present and possibility the crew settled on “Lesque” for their name. It is a portmanteau of the suffix “-less” derived from “endless” and the Spanish interrogative “que”. Assembled from parts and fragments, Lesque means “endless question.” It is not a facile and vain gesture as mantra to deflect an interminable and indecipherable present.  Paraphrasing from their own poetic interpretation of the name, “the goal becomes finding answers in the direction of challenge. That is where possibility is produced.” The “direction of challenge” is the point of heterogeneous contact out there.

I’m up for a bit of mischief. Are you? Let’s slide this bit of Deleuze and Guattari out of place; they were explaining how systems emerge out of the chaos of the eternal return and how the constitutive parts, what they call series, coexist in a unity of differentiation.

But I want to think about their ideas of divergence: A project on children and about youth and youthfulness requires taking each series of experience, subjectivity, and lived reality as “divergent; not relatively, in the sense that one could retrace one’s path and find a point of convergence, but absolutely divergent in the sense that the point or horizon of convergence lies in a chaos or is constantly displaced within that chaos” (Deleuze 1987, 123). The child (as a state of becoming) and youth (the category of social, political, technological, ethical, economic, and media becoming) flow into and around one another. Childishness abounds and children are out of bounds (Chin 2003). Youth as a global phenomena has metastasized, secreting its affective, desirous, energetic differences across all manner of spaces and times.

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