Fugitive Rehearsals: The Ferality of Kaspar Hauser, Playground Performances, and the Transversality of Children

Abstract

The figure of the child, as paradigmatic trope of “child” or incarnation of “childhood,” poses an anxious contribution to theoretical discourses of subjectivity. The child embodies aspects of alterity, thereby delimiting possibilities with regard to sanctioned subjectivation. It also traces the potential for subjective growth, allowing on explicit or subterranean levels the capacity for transformative processes of subjectivation to occur. Michel de Certeau describes this paradoxical situation of childhood as “to be other and to move toward the other” (110). In this formula, the central contradiction of the child’s classification within official culture’s dominant systems becomes a result of negative formulations: youth must embodythe non-subject while performing against the non-subject; itmust be other while learning to create the other in its inception as human. As transversal theorists, we break away from the vagueness and negativity implicit in the term “other” and instead recover the mechanics of Certeau’s statement as enabling through its activation of unlimited opportunity and definitional fluidity as both agential and positive processual qualities. In our considerations, the child embodies the conditions of fugitivity, which is to say, elusive activity of resistance, change, and adaptation, capable of happily defying authoritative structures and altering established meanings and determinations.

Very brief analysis of childhood behavior shows that such combinations as histrionic play, bluff, playful threat, teasing play in response to threat, histrionic threat, and so on form together a single total complex of phenomena. And such adult phenomena as gambling and playing with risk have their roots in the combination of threat and play.

Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (181)