童年論述經典研讀會#4
時間：2009/1/19
閱讀範圍：James R. Kincaid’s Child-Loving, pp. 112-161
主讀人：劉鳳芯 (9:00-10:30)
地點：台大舊總圖
About Kincaid and Child-Loving
Kincaid: Aerol Arnold Professor of English at the
A widely recognized authority on Victorian lit. and culture.
has also been a consultant to the Guggenheim Foundation
Child-Loving:
Objectives of the writing: how we come by the knowledge of the love of children, how it is constituted, why it is so important to us, what it costs us to maintain
Hypothesis: ※The exploration is funded entirely by skepticism
●What passes for knowledge among us on this subject [the love of
children] is more likely a prescribed cultural agreement cemented by fear, desire, and denial. This knowledge is really “knowingness”, a pact that authorizes us to treat our ignorance as wisdom and to make that ignorance the basis for action.
● the way we talk about child-loving: the talk is monster-talk, first of all, talk that is busy rejecting the pedophile that it is, at the same time, creating. (monster: the other, the child, the pedophile)
(Defining the child as an object of desire, we create the pedophile as the one who desires, as a complex image of projection and denial)
Methodologies: ●a home-version form of deconstruction
-Jolt this discourse [on pedophilia] enough so as to make more vulnerable some of the assumptions it is busy engaging and disguising.
-What if we looked at the discourse of pedophilia and its history ironically, as if we were somehow outside of it? What would happen? That we are not and cannot be outside does not entirely disable our expedition; it simply means that we will have to distrust our own maps, try to unsettle our most confident sense of where we are, include ourselves in our own satiric accounts. We have no certain destination, no permanent truth to find; we have only various planes on which to travel.
- Kincaid believes that we can find some measure of liberation by examining the directions we receive for reading the past and disobeying them as brazenly as we can, flaunting them, turning them back on themselves. Kincaid is most interested in ways in which it can appear that the Victorians (or some of them) did not read as we do, did not see the same things or respond in the same way, did not go to the same schools.
◎Foucault
-historical lenses: The discussions of the Victorians of the subjects provide a field on which we train our historical lenses. The past does not exist as a solid ground from which to assess the present; the past is there for us in reference to present needs.
p. 138
-power
●psychoanalysis (the way to view the relationship between we and the pedophile / the child)
-Kincaid believe the first step could be to center the Other, to welcome home the monster we are so busy exiling: we make the definition of our health in this regard so entirely dependent on being non-pedophilic that we find ourselves willy-nilly entangled with that we are shooing
away. We need the pedophile to fill our emptiness, provide the matter we otherwise miss, create our own form of existence. That which
we deny returns by the back door and sits comfortably in the living room.
Materials: ●Victorian discussions of the child, the body, sexuality, pedophilia
-The Victorians are employed here to assist in exposing our discourse and its compulsions; they display their own prose primarily to help them
in reading us [human beings / contemporary us]. Kincaid is less interested in reconstructing the past than in examining what our methods of
reconstruction might tell us about our own policies.
=The Victorians: All the Victorians in this book are Other Victorians – strange, inhospitable, nearly undecipherable. The point is not to read them but to look for ways in which they resist reading, to estrange them or find those who already seem to have their teeth bared.
Arguments: ●What we think of as “the child” has been assembled in reference to desire, built up in erotic manufactories, and that we have been laboring
ever since, for at least two centuries, both to deny that horrible and lovely product and to maintain it.
● Pedophilia is located at the cultural center, since it describes the response to the child we have made necessary. If the child is desirable, then to desire it can hardly be freakish. To maintain otherwise is to put into operation pretty hefty engines of denial and self-deception. And that is what we have done.
● By insisting so loudly on the innocence, purity, and sexuality of the child, we have created a subversive echo: experience, corruption, eroticism. By attributing to the child the central features of desirability in our culture – purity, innocence, emptiness, Otherness – we have made absolutely essential figures who would enact this desire. Such figures are certainly not us, we insist, insist so violently because we must, so violently that we come to think that what we are is what these figures are not. They come to define us: they are the substance we feed on. The pedophile is thus our most important citizen, so long as he stays behind the tree or over in the next yard: without him we would have no agreeable explanation for the attractions of the empty child. We must have the deformed monster [MMichael Jackson] in order to assure us that our own profiles are proportionate.
● To Kincaid, the terms “pedophile” and “child” point not to things but to roles, functions necessary to our physic and cultural life. We find people to play these parts, certainly, bodies we can thrust into the performance; but their presence testifies only to our need.
The “child” is not defined or controlled by age limits; anyone between the age of one day and 25 years or even beyond might, in different contexts, play that role. In other words, what a “child” is, changes to fit different situations and different needs. A child is not, in itself, anything. Any image, body, or being we can hollow out, purify, exalt, abuse, and locate sneakily in a field of desire will do for us as a “child”
The “pedophile” is a role and position, brought into being by and coordinate with the erotizing of the child. Defining the child as an object of desire, we create the pedophile as the one who desires, as a complex image of projection and denial: the pedophile acts out the range of attitudes and behaviors made compulsory by the role we have given the child. Demonizing this figure at the same time we call loudly for his presence, asserting his marginality as we proclaim his importance, dissociating as we make alliance, we anoint as we execute the pedophile.
●the outcast pedophile is somehow on the throne. (but
he clarifies right away that he is not defending for pedophilia)
Body-Centers (continued)
E. Brain-Centered
focus on sexuality
Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell
Krafft-Ebing
Freud
F. Sperm-Centered
The loss of semen, by way of masturbating, nocturnal emissions, and seepage, was sometimes thought to be more disastrous than massive bleeding
Henry Verley’s analogy to taking sap from maple tree.
Tennyson’ poetry
G. Sex-Centered
Deslandes
The Body that Runs Itself
The solo or autocratic model
the harmonious body
meddle the balance (p. 116)
Minding the Body
Mind-body union
The problem of excessive development (p. 118)
Sex Talk (i.e., sexual education) and the Expert (control or reject the power)
-the volume of Victorian books on sexuality is considerable; the child is still
figured as one of the pillars of the discourse, but Kincaid contends that “the number of books published on the subject may run in direct, inverse, or no
particular relation to public interest and public chatter”. (142)
-the growth of sex-pedant is related to the growth of the middle class
-sex talk and power (if we wished to have control over children, we had better
listen to him[Freud, expert], given him power)
-control the power:
●Freud: the necessity for talk of sex to children, quotes on pp. 143-44
Cf. (“playful” and “rebellious” arguments; not so relentlessly in pursuit of control)
-enthusiastic with the study of sexual perversions, quoted from Havelock Ellis
(p.144)
-study the abnormality of sexuality
-one historian concluded that Krafft-Ebing “viewed human sexual behavior as
a collection of loathsome diseases.” (p. 145)
-refuses to succumb to a model of power (discourse)
E.g. (1) pedophilia: not the activity of the psychically normal, yet the
practitioners should be looked after: “the proper place for such persons is a sanitarium established for that purpose, not prison”. (quoted in Kincaid p. 146)
(2) sexuality is not the exclusive property of adults: “manifestations of sexual instinct may occur in very young children.” (quoted in Kincaid p. 146)
(3) homosexuality: from degeneracy to illness to unusual development: “…the individual, according to the predominanceof favourable or
unfavourable influences, experiences now heterosexual, now homosexual feeling”.
-claims to study normal sexuality, but Kincaid contends that “Ellis’s genealogical
skills, his ability to show how deeply ‘related’ were the normal and abnormal, is exactly the point on which he seemed ‘pathological’ to many of his contemporaries and seems so to many of us.” (p. 147 top)
-Kincaid seems to be impatient with Ellis’s indirect argument, not-so-different conclusion, cumulative examples, un-sorting materials, but
asserts his sharply defined focus in enquires.
-refuses to succumb to a model of power (discourse)
E.g. (1) homosexuality is the usual thing (p. 149)
(2) ready to consider any possibility, whether or not it is plausible or coherent
Kincaid’s conclusion: We may say if we like that the Victorians transformed sex into discourse and then turned that discourse over to experts. But we need not
figure those experts
as stern pedagogues or moralists; they as often seem playful, maybe clownish.(p.151)
Sex and Silence
-Kincaid calls our attention to the discrepancy between what was prescribed by experts and what was done but for a range of activity and opinion that was nowhere discussed because nowhere challenged or even noticed (p. 151 middle) (Deconstructive approach)
-an example of silence: the neglect of young prostitutes
exception: William Acton’s argument on prostitution (1875): he sought the middle path
between licensing and ignoring: recognition
-interpretation of silence:
●silence might signal acceptance; but it is possible that many Victorians did not discuss sex
because they felt no anxiety about it. (p. 152 )
●the projection of indifference [on prostitution] gives voice to an opposition, provides a form to silence, suggests strongly that we cannot read these silences
easily, if at
all. (152 bottom)
●We might abandon the once-popular caricaturing of the Victorians, reading silence as ignorance and hypocrisy. (p.153 top)
●The silences we certainly do notice see to be more productively recorded as difference,
sometimes great and threatening difference. “This momentary bewilderment on our part [at the difference in Victorians sexual thinking] can be dispelled if we remember that the Victorians tended to argue along lines that accepted racism, sexism, and class inequality as part of the natural order.”
●Victorian silences, like Victorian speeches, do not seem to tremble. The wonder is that
we ever wanted
to feel them that way.
The Wisdoms of Our Ancestors (William Acton)
-William Acton is resurrected as lead signer in Steven Marcus’s The Other Victorians (1966)
-
held by the “official culture”, but that Victorian discourse on sexuality is far more challenging and difficult to access than we have often been lad to believe.
(p. 155 top)
-