The Seriousness of Social and Political Effects

Abstract

When I asserted that in talking about ‘children’ as readers of the Harry Potter books (actually any book) we — primarily adults — are presenting ‘children’ as ‘a category or collection of subjectivities with social and political effect’, I am aware that I have stepped into the, in this context frowned-upon, register of the serious. I have done this already by stating earlier (with what was, I hope, a tantalizing lack of explanation) that the main interest of this essay is the ‘political and social effects that constitute the Harry Potter phenomenon’. Such statements could all too easily become fodder for negative perceptions of academic jargonizing, the pretentiously intellectual, the nit-pickingly pedantic... — all terms replete with a sense of the mismatch between object and analysis. This perception could take two forms. It could be observed that the Harry Potter books are aesthetically too slight, too much the sphere of light reading, too attuned to an uncritical child world, too removed from the here and the now in their content to deserve such hefty critical apparatus as political and social analysis. Or it could be asserted that there is something perverse about trying to expose the delight of (especially children, but also children-within-adults) reading Harry Potter books to these worldly and responsible matters: there is something pristine and innocent about these books and the enthusiasm they generate which should be admired and valued, not exposed to weighty scrutiny. A mismatch is gestured towards in such arguments: the mismatch of meeting the light-hearted with killjoy seriousness, the unthinking with analytical rigour, the obviously trivial with the expectation of depth, the massmarket product with elite literary taste.