Kindergarten theory: Childhood, affect, critical thought

Abstract

Current notions of affect are often underpinned by unacknowledged assumptions about spontaneity, materiality and immediacy. Childhood, which has traditionally been associated with these concepts (and for this reason has not been much debated within critical theory), helps us reconsider the political impact of affect theory. This is both because feminist theory has recently reconceptualized childhood and because positing affect as moments of intensity immanent to matter raises a number of problems from a feminist point of view. A passage from Mrs. Dalloway (illustrating how childhood works as a mimetic break within the project of literary modernism) will introduce an analysis of excerpts from Lisa Cartwright and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, two feminist case studies in which affect and childhood are linked. Referring to past psychoanalytical and political debates (especially by Jacqueline Rose, Juliet Mitchell and Walter Benjamin) that have anticipated some of the problems we are currently facing within feminist theory, the article investigates through childhood the politically problematic role of affect as 'the new' in critical theory.But Lucrezia Warren Smith was saying to herself, It's wicked; why should I suffer? she was asking, as she walked down the broad path. No; I can't stand it any longer, she was saying, having left Septimus, who wasn't Septimus any longer, to say hard, cruel, wicked things, to talk to himself, to talk to a dead man, on the seat over there; when

Child as method and/as childism: Conceptual–political intersections and tensions

“…This was one of the problems attending earlier versions of childism that, in the name of countering prejudice or discrimination against children, actually reinforced a particular model of childhood at its core (e.g. Hunt, 1984b, for a wider critical account, see also Caselli, 2010). So it is important to highlight that the radical geomaterialist constructionism of Asia as method allows for no such presumed prior or stable understanding – and now of child.…”

Motherhood, evolutionary psychology and mirror neurons or: ‘Grammar is politics by other means’

“…For further critiques of evolutionary psychology from a specifically humanist perspective see: Tallis (2011); Weisberg et al (2008); Corrigall and Wilkinson (2003); Bullowa (1979); Posner (2004); and Wolf (2007). However, it is the question of affect which underpins the divergence of the arguments in this article from these humanist positions, as discussed through Daniela Caselli's (2010) arguments quoted here; see also LesnikOberstein (1998). 6.…”

Fanon and the child: Pedagogies of subjectification and transformation

“…4 This mobilises Chen's (2010) Nandy, 1984, andCannella &Viruru, 2004), rather than rejecting, replacing or displacing dominant discourses of childhood, complicit as they are with the hegemonic neoliberal racist heterosexist order, the strategy here is to explore tensions and frictions indicative of instability, multiplicity and transformative potential. Burman & Stacey, 2010;Burman, 2008b;Lesnik-Oberstein, 2010;Caselli, 2010) taking as analytic material Fanon's entire corpus of writing. This may be a 'minor' reading (c.f.…”