Innocents and Oracles: The Child as a Figure of Knowledge and Critique in the Middle-Class Philosophical Imagination

Abstract

This paper argues that the figure of the child performs a critical function for the middle-class social imaginary, representing both an essential "innocence" of the liberal individual, and an excluded, unconscious remainder of its project of control through the management of knowledge. While childhood is invested with affect and value, children's agency and opportunities for social participation are restricted insofar as they are seen both to represent an elementary humanity and to fall short of full rationality, citizenship and identity. The diverse permutations of this figure, as it develops in the middle-class imagination, are traced from the writings of John Locke to the films of Michael Haneke (via Charles Dickens and Henry James), to interrogate what this ambivalence regarding childhood reflects about middle-class, adult identity.

A world without innocence

“…This is achieved by making their bodies seem unreal or as distinct as possible from adults: dimpled and round, with unblemished skin (Higonnet ). In this sense, Locke and other Enlightenment thinkers used the child to imagine a secular humanity; as its exemplar, the figure of the child enabled humanity to reimagine itself as also essentially innocent, that is, as having the potential to act and shape its own future (Faulkner ). On the one hand, Enlightenment thinkers turned Judeo‐Christian notions of innocence on their heads, not simply placing innocence in the past but identifying it as the key to the future; on the other hand, despite its shifting temporal location, innocence remains central to how we imagine nature and the limits of humanity.…”

“…For Joanna Faulkner (, 333), carnal knowledge assumes a kind of ignorance that in turn makes way for pleasure.…”

Child poverty in rich contexts: The example of Sweden

“…The lived experience of child poverty in a rich context is always a moral transgression challenging adult past and present and the middle-class fantasy of childhood. The norms and ideals of the middle class are lived out in the organisation of the family and expressed in consumption (Faulkner, 2011). The ban on child labour organises life into separate sequences by which children’s economic productivity is postponed (Wintersberger, 2005).…”

“…The position of children in relation to work has changed dramatically during the era of capitalism. With the emergence of the middle class (Faulkner, 2011), children went from – at the beginning of the 20th century – being important economic contributors to the family and society, to being banned from the paid labour market and solely appraised for the emotional value they bring their parents, thereby becoming the priceless child (Zelizer, 1994). The maturing capitalist society demanded a generational division of labour and more efficient use of more highly skilled adult workers, which meant a diachronic division of labour and a sequencing of life into education, paid work, pension (Wintersberger, 2005).…”

The posthumanist tabula rasa

“…On Locke's formulation epistemic innocence, for which he posited the child as a privileged vessel, offered direct access to objects in the real world, and thus evaded what was most problematic about accrued knowledge and language. 1 In her incisive assessment of Locke's argument Joanne Faulkner points out that in posing human knowledge as essentially innocent, Locke offered a powerful rejoinder to the doctrine of original sin (Faulkner, 2011a). The notion of the mind as a blank slate served an early modern desire for independence from the entrenched norms and values of feudal society.…”