Visions of Autonomy: Figures of the Child as Model of the Human

In Infancy and History, Giorgio Agamben elaborates what he calls the 'destruction of experience' from early modernity onward. This condition comprehends a historical shift in subjectivity: from having experience to undergoing it. The destruction of experience, then, articulates a fundamental change in the relation between subject and world and between the 'I' and the quality of its relationship to the world, or how it recognizes and internalizes that relationship. After Descartes, according to Agamben, experience is understood predominantly as a source of knowledge — a field through which reality is tested. From this point onward, the 'I' is separated from experience. As experience is instrumentalized as a process for determining truth, it is domesticated and controlled. For to achieve this purpose, our evaluation of 'experience' must be regular and procedural to ensure that understandings drawn from it are shared and hold beyond its existence as singular.

Paradoxically, through this process of domestication, experience thereby also comes to be problematized, distrusted, regarded as duplicitous, unruly, and ephemeral. The epistemological turn of philosophy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows an anxiety concerning vulnerability of the senses to optical illusions, hallucinations, dreams, and imagination, and even an evil demon that purposefully deceives appears in philosophical argument. While appeal to experience comes to dominate philosophy during this period, the scope of what experience comprises is reduced considerably according to the scientific techniques brought into the service of knowledge.

Experience, trained to its function as intermediary between self and a 'natural' world, is stripped of 'superfluous' significances that would render it the rich and satisfying involvement it had traditionally been. This separation from experience (alongside a series of other associated schisms: between reality and imagination, work and play, adulthood and childhood, religious and secular life, and so on) characterizes contemporary life for Agamben. The feeling of having been deprived of life's meaning or that life is elsewhere, so thoroughly characteristic of modernity and 'postmodernity,' is thus an inheritance of modern philosophical inquiry.

This chapter examines how the impasses that mark modern conceptions of experience and self not only engender the alienated colonizing subject but also how these contradictions are brought to crisis in the figure of the child. Although hitherto very little attention has been afforded to the part of the child in modern philosophy, this chapter argues that the isolation of experience as an instrument to gather knowledge was achieved in tandem with a conception of childhood as an experimental field through which human capacity itself was interrogated. The child during this period developed both as a figure for total enjoyment of 'experience' (or jouissance) and as a mode of humanity completely evacuated of experience and thereby rendered ready for controlled experimentation.

Along the lines of this latter representation, a significance of childhood as innocent of prejudice came to be privileged, so that the child was conceived as a mode of humanity purified of prior experience and opinion. The child functioned thereby as a reduction through which an idealized process of understanding the world could be observed, monitored, and appropriated. Modern philosophers were preoccupied with how to conceive of 'man' before social institutions and conventions and how man could conceive of anything in its 'state of nature.' Through the child figure, philosophy attempted to grasp the processes of cognition and sensation 'unadulterated' by existing theories and language. Yet the work performed by these 'children' in philosophical discourse remains unacknowledged. 'The child,' represented as pure of the trappings of adulthood, is so ubiquitous in works of philosophy that its presence there is imperceptible as such.

Most remarkable about this use of the child beyond its ubiquity, however, is the manner in which this figure operates as a site of investment of hopes for human capacity and of projection of human vulnerability. For just as the child is valorized as a site of experience, it also attracts anxieties about cognitive failure: Where experience is already distrusted by modern philosophers, the child is represented as even more easily deceived than adults, more forgetful and cognitively undisciplined, ruled by emotion — even savage. The child is thus an equivocal figure that accrues conflicted meanings extending beyond the epistemological realm to the moral and political arenas of action. Especially regarding questions of human perfectibility that feature at this time, childhood operates as a scene for meditations on the potentiality and provenance of the human: as heir to the past and seed of what is yet to come.

The former association of the child with an overabundance of experience or pleasure (jouissance) also fuels this ambivalence, rendering the child an object of envy and resentment. 'The child' is conceived in modernity as possessing an enjoyment foregone as a condition of becoming adult: an enjoyment of having experience without needing to account for it. To imagine oneself as a child is an exercise in reclaiming a lost association with nature and with one's own object (or corporeal) being; yet this is also figured as the ultimate derogation of responsibility, as undesirable because of the complexity that childhood misses. The child comes to symbolize a fullness of experience, the loss of which is irrevocable. The child is resented as one who selfishly consumes and is consumed with itself, as a figure of unchecked creativity and destruction.

The child figure's prominence in discourses of colonialism is not, then, surprising. I would contend, further, that ambivalence about colonization and the modern humanist project has come to overdetermine representations of 'the child' today, as this figure negotiates the diverse significances that accrue to colonialism: exploration, creativity, and initiative alongside greed, recklessness, and cruelty. To understand how white Australia has come to identify so strongly with 'the child,' we need to consider the beginnings of the modern concept of childhood in its...