2001 MMLA
Globalization and the Image
Jeannie Martin
University of Alberta, Edmonton
Imaging the Child in Neo-Imperial Missions of Globalization
Do not cite without permission of the author.
When the house is guarded, the street is policed, the shares are purchased, then we feel safe, defended against the indeterminate actions of others.
People think they can do whatever they feel like doing
to us.
I hate rich people. I would like to take revenge against them.
If you have money, you have friends. If you have no money, you have no
friends.i
In "Technologies of 'the Child,'" Jo-Ann Wallace argues importantly
that the figure of the child, unequal correlative of Enlightenment man,
is the "repository and projection of all that is repressed"
by various arrangements of theoretical knowledge (297); the child, in
other words, is the aporia of theory, the thing that gets effaced in order
to set theory to work (Spivak 429). This observation helps explain why
in Children and the Politics of Culture Sharon Stephens notes an absence
of the child in the burgeoning literature on globalization. If the link
between children and globalization has not been visible in adult-centred
theory (a point I will return to at the end of this paper), the child
is nevertheless a prominent symbolic figure in the theatre of globalization,
most specifically in the discourse of child rights. Since theories of
the child rose along with theories of man, however, with the critique
of one, social panic sets in around the other (Wallace "Technologies"
297). Consequently, as the global enterprise of neo-liberal man gets challenged
by such instruments as the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child
(the CRC), we need to ask how the child serves as a site of containment
for displaced anxieties of globalization.ii
Within the human rights discourse, the child as repository of repressed
knowledge poses a problem: while the child carries polymorphous symbolic
freight, it serves to homogenize material differences. Although the concept
of the child as a normalizing figure is not often challenged, anthropologist
Jo Boyden cautions that the child created by the CRC excludes its counterpart
of street children whose disappearance from urban centres from São
Paolo to Seattle gets effaced in debates over child rights. As definitions
of permissible behavior set out in various legal instruments become more
precise, she states, "so judgment[s] about abnormal childhoods"
become more unsympathetic (Boyden 187).iii In noting that the growing
unease over the suffering of innocent child-victims is accompanied by
an increasingly unforgiving perception of anti-social children, Boyden
specifies a relationship between image and index: the child is constructed
on the trace of and makes invisible its material Other. Exceeding the
image burdened by the Enlightenment values of naturalness and innocence,
street children elude the frame of visibility, leaving only a resistant
trace in the ambiguous figure of the street child. In Homi Bhabha's formulation,
"[w]e are no longer confronted with an ontological problem of being
but with the discursive strategy of the moment of interrogation"
(49).
Putting the universal figure into question, when children are imaged as
children, the romance of protected childhood begins to confront its material
limit. Children-as-children demand recognition beyond those values encoded
by the singular figure and consequently carry potential to intervene in
the imperialist ideology that forges the child-beneficiary of economic
man as a subject to be (re)formed for the circuit of capital production.
With the return of repressed anxieties that surface when the mask of innocence
is removed, historical children are in danger of becoming ostensibly invisible
or of reconfiguring in the realm of unprotected visibility; in the street,
for example, the singular child becomes feral and multiplies into "gang."
In other words, the child degenerates to 19th-century typologies, slipping
via the street from innocence to intransigence to become the juvenile
delinquent, visible marker of "unimaginable communit[ies]" (Suleri
3).
This illiberal child has a dangerous cultural opponent in the child located
occasionally in the current surfeit of financial magazines of which the
1998 special edition of Forbes is paradigmatic. This publication is rife
with the tropes of imperialism, for the Forbes man of the "concrete
jungle" and his freely-traded offspring appropriate earlier figurations
of territorial imperialism (Brother 297, Slemon 7). Within Forbes, like
Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, the (ad)venture(r)-capitalist engages
in "First Encounters" that enable colonization of no less than
the entire universe (Davidoff 303). There are few child-figures in Forbes.iv
When present, however, they provide the raison d'être for the hero's
"relentless pursuit" of capital gains. While young girls are
metonymically imaged as "packages" to be provided for through
the borderless enterprise of financial speculation (Liberty Mutual 281),
young boys are always-already miniature replicas of their successful male
parent. Selling not only life insurance and mutual bonds but gender and
racial stereotypes, these figures reinforce the logic of economic imperialism.
In this accounting, the child inserted into the global cash nexus is a
functional principle of both accumulation and consumption and as such
is both psychological asset and material liability.
According to an article in US News & World Report, one of many such
articles, this child costs parent-citizens one and a half million US dollars
to raise to the age of majority (Longman 51). With such pressures and
expectations, there is no ethical room in a Forbesist economy for the
"estimated 250,000 children who die each week around the world"
because of poor nutrition, sanitation, and health care. (Elshtain 431)
Rather, evading responsibility for the redress of structural inequities,
corporatist logic records a company's investment in the public interest
by promoting bourgeois familial imagery, thereby, displacing the financial
burden onto an idealized family for which homo economicus provides private
security. This security is not only economic but physical, for the Forbes-man
installs solid locks to secure his home "from fear of . . . invasion"
from, as history records, a highly visible threat to middle-class security:
the street child indexing the socio-economic fringes inhabited by street
children (Ingersoll-Rand 119).
As ethnographer Tobias Hecht observes in his study of Brazilian street
children, while street children have been used to "exemplify the
vulnerabilities of childhood," they have also been refashioned "as
harbingers of the danger posed to society" (173). Children of the
poor often use the street as a place to work and socialize, yet the mass
media fuels moral panic about the urban young by rendering stereotypes
of groups of children as delinquents. Child-actor Vinicius de Oliveira,
whom director Walter Salles discovered working as a shoeshine boy in Rio's
airport, concurs: neither he nor his character in Central Station is a
street child, he states, and life in a slum quarter does not translate
to delinquency. Absent in Forbes, the street child can be located in Brazilian
films such as Hector Babenco's Pixote (1981) and Salles's Central Station
(1998) which disrupt neo-liberal fictions about street children.
I limit my reading in this paper to Central Station, which allegorizes
the production of new affective social relations. The relationship between
the two central characters is initially antagonistic. Dora is a retired
school teacher who works as a professional letter writer in Rio's central
train station. At the end of each day, she reads through these letters
and tears most up, saving a few for possible future mailing. Her adversary
is a feisty nine-year-old, Josué, whose mother approaches Dora
to write a letter to the father Josué has never met. When his mother
is killed in the street, the now homeless boy begins to pester Dora, who
entices him to her home and then sells him to a black market adoption
ring. Eventually, Dora has second thoughts and intervenes to rescue the
boy and help him find his father when a friend suggests he will be sold
on the international market for human organs.
One of the problems limiting the effect of such films as Central Station
lies with their reception. Salles tempers harsh socio-political issues
with a rich iconographic spectacle, drawing several reviewers to neglect
its historical indexing to read a tale of individual redemption, superficiality,
or predictable cuteness.v While Salles minimizes his critique of brutality
and corruption to foreground positive aspects of human relationship, he
posits a rationale for responsibility beyond nuclear family in condensed
images referencing the transgression of taboo prohibitions, in "the
impossible" of consuming the sacrificial child's organs and killing
the juvenile delinquent. Reading a narrative of individual redemption
makes "the impossible" of child-murder invisible; the (re)viewer's
eye slides aporetically over the image to disavow the uncivilizing act.
vi
Significantly, at the end of his journey, Josué does not find his
father but two elder brothers. Foregrounding fraternity to provide an
antidote to the disease of social alienation, Salles images the political
event in its extremity in a brief scene that remains invisible to those
reading from the lens of imperial-liberalism. An incident in which a youth
steals a transistor radio, is caught by a vigilante thug and shot on the
spot is shocking in its disruption of the "sentimental" narrative
of individual child-rescue, but even more shocking is this scene's invisibility
to (re)viewers when one considers that Salles based the shooting on an
actual event. Indexing the material conditions of the narrative's possibility,
the disruptive presence of the murdered youth haunts the myth of "universal"
brotherhood.
Salles thus does not present universal brotherhood but rather a reconfigured
affiliation that entails the intervention of the invited guest, of a summoned
Dora, who acquires the moral conscience prerequisite to developing affective
relationships beyond "the family." In Salles's formula, this
work of child-rescue is performed at the level of the individuated child
which unless read adjacent to the structural problems marked by the socio-political
margins haunting the text sanctions a prefigurative logic of child-saving
predicated on its Other of child-killing; in Central Station, the gang
of street children shown in Pixote, for instance, is the aporetic bind
of universal brotherhood. Read on the allegorical level as the carnivalization
of the civilizing enterprise, the journey undertaken by Dora and Josué
spectacularly renders the remedy for spiritual alienation under military
regime as individual salvation; on the literal level the film critiques
economic exploitation by referencing its radical limits: the over-consumption
of commodities as the harvesting of the child's organs and distributive
injustice as the killing of the juvenile thief.
In an economy of knowledge grounded on the rationality of sight, Central
Station demonstrates, brutality towards children is correlative with their
elided visibility.vii To combat the myth of childhood as a space of protection,
the CRC addresses children's invisibility by making them partial agents
rather than mere objects of intervention, the occasional object of the
unencumbered individual who may or may not intercede on their behalf.
The notion of protection is generally based on unacknowledged dependencies
and power relations. In the logic of free-trade economy, protection is
proprietary, limited to the million-dollar Forbes-child. Not distributive
justice, Forbes ads certify, but individual responsibility, or protectionism,
to which ideology the bourgeois child is to be inculcated, is a fundamental
value of the free-willed economist, and while bourgeois children might
expect to profit from this logic, invisible poor children cannot (Cigna
in Forbes 80).viii
Take the example of a recently sanctioned visible child-a politicized
Elián González emptied of material particularity and reconfigured
as the prototypal neo-liberal heir apparent. The media narrative of Elián
hardly needs recounting. Essentially, by the detainment of a young boy
for seven months in the United States and his separation from both nuclear
and immediate-extended family, US authorities sacrificed a boy's right
to affective security-his right to family, home, and cultural community.
In this political battle, the child functioning as a site of symbolic
production legitimated for many an ideological inversion, from defending
"traditional" western family values to vehemently opposing the
reunification of the nuclear family.
This inversion is possible because the child functions doubly. As himself,
Elián was made a typological object of Christian sacrifice and
salvation, a sacred child bearing the Disneyfied seeds of capitalism garnered
for a greater celestial or fiscal Father (Jenkins 16). In addition, Elián
was made an "organizing principle of the nation-state in its relations
with . . . its own citizens and those of the . . . developing world"
(Wallace "Technologies" 286). The political question became:
which nation makes the better parent? The answer: which kind of family
is not as important as which kind of state. Elián-as-consumer-of-commodities
functions to displace attention from worldwide protest over US imperialism
formulated as the Helms-Burton law. Rescuing the child figured as the
messiah of democracy reinforces the myth of redemption, thereby, assuaging
guilt for imposing inhumane embargoes on food, educational, and medical
supplies that affect the "gang" of Cuban children made invisible.
Wiping "the moral slate clean," salvation of the solitary child
leads to a diminished sense of responsibility for the hardships these
economic sanctions impose (Scheper-Hughes 186).
While the work of bourgeois childhood supports corporatist claims that
capital investment is not only an act of individual but, by implication,
social responsibility, this responsibility rests on voluntary acts of
charity that do nothing to address structural inequities and, ultimately,
eschew social responsibility. This truth is bluntly expressed in USAmerican
economist Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom:ix Social responsibility
is "a fundamentally subversive doctrine," he states. "Few
trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free
society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility
other than to make as much for their stockholders as possible" (133).
To counter the ideology of voluntarism, intervention concerned to ameliorate
the conditions of existence for children must take children's right to
social welfare and partial self-determination into the theoretical
account.
As feminist debate teaches, the work of grass roots organizations, the
"real front against globalization," is inseparable from theoretical
intervention (Spivak 416). My final point, then, illustrates how, despite
radical commitment to ameliorating unequal conditions imposed by economic
globalization, in adult-centred theory, children are invisible. To be
taken seriously, children need to secure not only moral and emotive rhetorical
value, but the theoretical import generally reserved for adults.
I close with an image in The Economist which anthropologist Arturo Escobar
analyzes in Encountering Development. Noting that this article appeared
"the week prior to" the Earth summit meeting . . . on Environment
and Development held in Rio in 1992, Escobar describes in the accompanying
photograph "an undifferentiated mass of dark people, the 'teeming
masses' of the Third World," and in so doing marks an aporia of the
child (210).x Sharon Stephens, child researcher as well as anthropologist,
reads the same Economist photograph and sees not a horde of "people"
but "a mass of black children" (13, emphasis added).xi Notably,
while the child functions as an organizing principle in the discourse
of development, the child remains invisible in Escobar's interventionary
critique, symptomatically presented in a chapter entitled "Power
and Visibility" (emphasis added).xii This excision of the child from
an analysis of development is curious, since historically both marginalized
peoples and children have been managed through representations of the
child that enable various civilizing missions, including the mission of
development (Wallace "Waterbabies" 176).xiii To effectively
intervene in economic globalization, I suggest, is to further problematize
development theory by incorporating children into adultist accounts.
In sum, a theoretical account that brings children into the discursive
equation must decode the legitimating narrative of salvation and (re)formation
authorized by the child. To set to work the problem of implementing children's
rights, these rights must be brought into the discourse of development,
for to redress problems of distributive injustice necessitates conjoining
individual protectionist impulses with children's rights established by
the CRC to partial self-determination and social welfare. Ultimately,
our recognitions and identifications-whether or not we choose to question
images of childhood and render children visible in theory-structure our
relation to knowledge and condition our abilities to forge new affective
relations.
Notes
i Respectively, Bill McSweeney in Security, Identity and Interests and
three unnamed Bangladeshi street children in the traveling art exhibition
Children of the Wind, Les Enfants du Vents organized by Canadian curator
Linda Dale.
ii Following the formulation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
unencumbered civil man became impotent in Cold War efforts to forge a
binding treaty addressing economic and social rights. The rights movement,
therefore, requiring a new symbolic labourer carrying additional ethical
and emotional value, deployed the child as an object of global politics.
By encoding an additional set of rights including social welfare and self-determination
for children, this figural shift from universal man to child enabled a
partial displacement in a rights regime that had previously been primarily
civil and political. In other words, the inclusion of the affective and
moral currency that the child contributes makes universal social welfare
conceptually possible. However, just as the child coexists in unequal
relationship with economic man, so those rights enabled by the child are
subordinate to civil and political rights prioritized by free-trade logic,
those rights enjoyed without an entailing responsibility to a larger society.
iii Michael Freeman in The Moral Status of Children discusses the James
Bulger case, the murder of a toddler by two 10-year-old boys in February,
1993. Freeman observes, "we are prepared to impose criminal responsibility
on [children at the age of ten] . . ., but we are less willing to accept
the correlativity of responsibility and rights" (28). In the Bulger
case, he argues, the trial processes and sentence were "in no way
adapted to the needs of 11-year-olds" (109). Freeman contrasts a
similar case over one hundred years earlier when in 1861 two 8-year-olds
were convicted of the manslaughter of a 2-year-old child. The Bulger case
could have been treated differently; James Bulger's killers "were
not given the opportunity of a manslaughter verdict" and unlike the
earlier judge, the judge in this case "seemed oblivious to the welfare
of the children Thompson and Venables (251-2).
iv There are slightly more women in Forbes. Here, the figural woman literally
stands behind her man. She provides for her children with the help of
security companies, she sports expensive jewelry if she is young and superficially
beautiful, or she receives breakfast in bed if she is the office helpmeet,
in which case, the question becomes "who is she sleeping with?"
(Westin in Forbes 395).
v See, for example, Peter Brunette, Arthur Lazer, and Janet Maslin.
vi Child actor Fernando Ramos da Silva who plays Pixote in Hector Babenco's
film (1981) experienced a brief moment of sanctioned visibility through
his acting success. Unable to get more work because he was almost illiterate,
da Silva dropped back into the realm of unprotected visibility, where
at the age of seventeen street-child da Silva was mistaken for a criminal
and shot to death by military police.
vii Discussing Richard Rorty on mirroring, Bhabha notes that the West's
"primary relation to objects and ourselves is analogous to visual
perception" (49). The panic over child abuse in the last decades
of the 20th century belies notions of the privatized/invisible space of
the family as a space of protection.
viii The Canadian government, for instance, acknowledged in its apology
to First Nations communities for the harm done by the residential school
policy, that protection is in fact the worst form of oppression.
ix Samir Amin, "one of the most influential economists today,"
director of Forum Tires Monde in Dakar, Senegal, and author of books such
as Imperialism and Unequal Development, Eurocentrism, and Empire of Chaos,
says scathingly of Friedman, "Milton Friedman is the wizard-in-chief
of our contemporary Oz. He understood what they [the pure economic pundits]
wanted to hear: that wages are always too high (even in Bangladesh), that
profits are still not high enough to offer the affluent sufficient investment
incentives, and so on. Hence his success, despite his muddleheadedness
(he might say anything, and then its opposite, depending on who is listening
and when) and his proven intellectual dishonesty. Those are the very qualities
sought in a wizard-in-chief, worthy of a Nobel Prize" (142).
x The 'lesson' [he critiques] is population: the expanding masses of the
'third world' have to be curbed if sustainable development is to be achieved"
(210).
xi Escobar's inattention to age may or may not have to do with the shortcomings
of recall, for his vaguely dated and incorrectly titled article is missing
from his bibliography.xi
xii For an elaboration of the parent-child developmental paradigm and
a brief overview of development and dependency theories see Kate Manzo's
"Modernist Discourse and the Crisis of Development Theory" in
Studies in Comparative International Development 26.2 (Summer 1991): 3-36.
The analogy is often implicit in development literature but explicit in
such earlier colonial literature as Katherine Mayo's Mother India contested
by such post-colonial writers as Anita Desai, Bessie Head, Jamaica Kincaid,
and Edna O'Brien.
xiii What is it that makes it necessary in a critique of population control
that Escobar not see children as children? To do so, would require the
impossible recognition of the limit-text for reproductive rights theory,
since unprotected children are that which is exorbitant to wholesale reproduction.
(This is not, in this debate, to sanction other than choice.)
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