[CRIT 12.3 (2011) 323-346] doi:10.1558/crit.v12i3.

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Critical Horizons (print) ISSN 1440-9917 Critical Horizons (online) ISSN 1568-5160

Innocents and Oracles: The Child as a Figure of Knowledge and Critique in the Middle-Class Philosophical Imagination
Joanne Faulkner
School of History and Philosophy, University New South Wales, Australia j.faulkner@unsw.edu.au

Abstract: This paper argues that the figure of the child performs a critical

function for the middle-class social imaginary, representing both an essential innocence of the liberal individual, and an excluded, unconscious remainder of its project of control through the management of knowledge. While childhood is invested with affect and value, childrens agency and opportunities for social participation are restricted insofar as they are seen both to represent an elementary humanity and to fall short of full rationality, citizenship and identity. The diverse permutations of this figure, as it develops in the middle-class imagination, are traced from the writings of John Locke to the films of Michael Haneke (via Charles Dickens and Henry James), to interrogate what this ambivalence regarding childhood reflects about middle-class, adult identity.

Keywords: Childhood; modernity; Locke; James; Haneke; unconscious.

The age of pre-pubescence has come to be the most treasured, and imperilled, stage of life, and yet this particular significance of childhood gained currency only since around the seventeenth century.1 The idea of childhood
1. The study of childhood, understood as a cultural construction beginning to emerge around 1500, was pioneered by Philippe Aris, Centuries of Childhood A Social History of Family Life, R. Baldick (trans.) (New York: Random House, 1962). Ariss thesis is relatively controversial in some respects, particularly in its evidentiary focus on the French aristocracy and on representation of children in art images. For summaries of these contestations, see A. Wilson, The Infancy of the History of Childhood: An Appraisal of Philippe Aris, History and Theory 18(2) (1980): 13253. Linda Pollock takes Aris squarely as a target in Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983),
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has had interesting socio-cultural effects. What began as an intuition that childhood might be different in kind from adult experience has led to its being placed in an ambiguous position of moral authority over adulthood: the childs perspective is regularly held to be instructive of adult experience, to offer insights that it is felt would otherwise be unavailable to us. In this vein the figure of the child is akin to a secular angel, materializing from an elevated realm to deliver divine messages. Childhood is invested with the affect and reverence once reserved for religion, and the uncanny truths children utter (out of the mouths of babes) at least simulate a religious tonality in the Western imagination.2 Under closer inspection, however, the figure of the child as developed in the pivotal texts of philosophy and literature is more equivocal than this ethereal image of the angelic child would suggest. For the child can also be understood to represent a subterranean perspective: as a messenger from the unconscious, delivering a forgotten or hidden knowledge that is rendered visible only by virtue of the refracting effects of the childs innocent (but interrogative) regard. The gaze of Dickenss cadre of children upon nineteenth century industrial Britain, for instance, or Harper Lees depiction of the deeply racist South, told through the six-year-old Scout Finchs innocent eyes. More menacingly, the filmmaker Michael Haneke frames his narratives through the ambiguously situated viewpoints of children and adolescents, thus turning up truths from the past that continue to haunt Austria, the country of his own childhood, and his adopted country of France. Elaborations of this figure of the child have shifted from innocence in Victorian literature, to ingenuity in modernism, to a deconstructive undercurrent in some contemporary representations. And the significance of unconscious knowledge that the child represents is played out through these differences. I will argue here that the figure of the child as it is now recognized emerged through the first formation of modern notions of self and society,
arguing that little has changed in adults regard for children since the Middle Ages. Notwithstanding scholarly disagreement over the scope of Ariss argument, however, it is clear that he blazoned a path for the study of childhood as complexly culturally and socially determined rather than simply as a universal and natural phenomenon. 2. Even as long ago as the New Testament childhood has had a special significance respecting spiritual purity: Jesus is often imagined and represented as an innocent child, and Jesus tells his disciples that be converted, and become as little children (Mt. 18:1-5), thereby undercutting the equation of worthiness with power or greatness. Children here are seen in their innocence to be closer to spiritual sanctity and, indeed, to logos than adults (in the temple only the children speak out to acknowledge the truth of Jesus as the Christ, the son of David [Mt. 21:14-6]). I thank Robbie Duschinsky for making this observation to me.
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and continues to bear a heavy burden within Western cultural narratives of self-representation. Since Lockes first forays into empirical psychology, the child has been a touchstone for conceptions of human meaning and value. Representing an epistemic purity and independence from the entrenched social norms that, during Lockes time, were in the process of being overturned, childhood embodies traits attributed to natural humanity within Enlightenment thought. The social and economic ascendency of the middle class, connected with the rise of capitalism, was accompanied by a cultural ascendency of middle-class norms principally epitomized by the family (today even the British Royal family must be seen to embody middle-class values).3 Notwithstanding the importance of childhood to the middle-class social imagination, its function is often contested. The child is claimed both by agendas to conserve tradition and by movements of social criticism, which mobilize traditional notions of innocent childhood in order to critique entrenched political and economic interests. Middle-class social ideals that have shaped modern notions of childhood are, in turn, articulated through the child: as an aesthetic form that furnishes a vessel for the containment and regulation of the excesses of contemporary social life. The discursive construction of childhood serves as a touchstone or master signifier4 for a form of political subjectivity that is both comfort-seeking and self-critical: a mode of subjectivity, that is, which can seek refuge in commodity fetishism at the same time as proclaiming give me liberty or give me death! In order to sketch out the meaning and function of childhood for the contemporary social imaginary, I will first trace its role in the early empiri3. The cultivation of the middle-class position, as the way between the hardship of farm and factory workers and the immorality of the aristocracy, was integral to the viability of capitalism as a social and economic system. Through the writings of Smith, Defoe, and Rousseau (among other key thinkers of the Enlightenment), this emerging class of readers was able educate themselves in the moral mandates that accompanied their new dominancy, and to interpellate their role as social witnesses of injustice and arbiters of value. For a book length study on the rise of the governance of morality by the middle classes, see A. Hunt, Governing Morals: A Social History of Moral Regulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also D. Marshall, The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); and M. E. Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1962). For a discussion of the shift of the meaning of childhood within the growth of the middle class, see V. A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Thank you to one of Critical Horizons anonymous reviewers for prompting me to clarify the sociological object of this article. 4. Master signifier is a Lacanian concept referring to a term that is affectively loaded yet empty of content, and which serves evaluatively to organize or stabilize a discursive field. Other examples of master signifiers include capitalism, socialist, or un-Australian.
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cist philosophy that informs the middle-class social position. The paper will then turn to aesthetic representations of childhood in the works of Dickens, James and Haneke. What these pivotal representations reveal is a tension ripe within middle-class ideology. Childhood as a deceptively dense and complicated figure of thought both shores up and places in question the legitimacy of middle-class modes of life. On the one hand, an ambivalence towards the child conceived both as a source of critical knowledge and significance, and as oblivious to (and so uncontaminated by) such knowledge guarantees a very modern sense of mastery over the environment and world of others. Yet, on the other, ambivalence towards childhood also undermines such mastery, as the child comes to represent the abject aspect of control: figuring unconscious residues, and standing as an unconscious knower, of adult truths and secrets. While at a conscious level, then, Western culture valorizes childhood over every other form of human experience, at an unconscious (or unacknowledged) level children are highly regulated, excluded from meaningful social participation, and conceived as not-yet rational, capable or moral.5 The manner in which children are discursively situated as knowers signals the force of a social or political critique, as well as the political possibilities open to children. The Child as Unknowing Knower: Observation and Experience (Locke) A central contention of this paper is that middle-class subjects negotiate a relationship to self through a complex dialogue with the figure of innocent childhood. Being middle class involves a formation of identity and sensibility that brings childhood into play at each of its nodes of articulation: economic, psychological and cultural. Through an imaginary relation to children, adults channel anxieties about enjoyment and guilt, work and leisure, excessive consumer and sexual desire, and responsibility.6 In order to perform this function so obligingly, the child has been withdrawn from the sphere of economic production, and emptied of content, desire and agency.7 But this does not mean that children do not work, and are not
5. These contrary evaluations of childhood are demonstrated discursively, for instance, in journalistic commentary, public policy governing children, and guidelines for the state regulation of media content and advertising in Australia. 6. See G. Cross, Valves of Desire: A Historians Perspective on Parents, Children, and Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research 29 (2002): 44147. See also my The Importance of Being Innocent: Why We Worry About Children (Cambridge and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 7. See Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child.
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worked upon, in what has become of the domestic sphere since the rise of capitalism over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Childrens work is now invested in the creation of human capital, through schooling, and of cultural capital, through a long social apprenticeship to their parents.8 Where children were once sent to other households to work from the age of reason (around seven or eight), they are now secured to the family for an intense investment of the fruits and pathologies of contemporary life. The childs chief social value is, thus, as a potentiality: their existence represents the promise of a better (more productive, more equal, happier) future; but they also contain for us the elements of middle-class society that are kept back from actuality, or are not supposed to be exposed to the light of day. Children are accordingly examined for portents of Western societys success, but also the problems thought to be inherent to society: obesity, over-consumption of commodities, addiction to computers and television, violence and promiscuity. Children are charged with the progeny of our sin as well as our virtue, and examined like tea leaves for signs of what the future might hold.9 The outlines of this empty child were foreshadowed by the early empirical texts of philosophy that also paved the way for the conception of middleclass subjectivity. Such texts utilized the childs point of view not for social commentary as much as to designate a purer relation to knowledge per se. This process is evident as early as Locke, who privileged the child as a site of epistemic purity: a tabula rasa, whose hypothetical process of building reason from experience is subjected to philosophical scrutiny. Locke, and the proponents of empirical psychology thereafter, repudiated the biblical judgement of humanity as soiled by original sin by situating the child as an innocent subject of experience. A re-evaluation of what it is to be human was taking place. Customary certainties were rendered suspect and abandoned in order that new relations to the world, to God, and to each other might be explored. Humanity now considered itself on the ascendency rather than inherently blighted, the unworthy progeny of a fall. For the first time the idea that children are innocent could take its definitive hold of the
8. See J. Qvortrup, From Useful to Useful: The Historical Continuity of Childrens Constructive Participation, The Sociological Studies of Children 7 (1995): 4976. See also A. Leibowitz, Home Investments in Children, The Journal of Political Economy 82(2), Part 2: Marriage, Family Human Capital, and Fertility (1974), S111-S131; and G. S. Becker and H. Gregg Lewis, On the Interaction between the Quantity and Quality of Children, The Journal of Political Economy 81(2), Part 2: New Economic Approaches to Fertility (1973), S279-S288. 9. Foucault has written of the emergence of the child as a focus of attention in Abnormal: Lectures at the Collge de France 19741975 (New York: Picador, 2003). See also N. Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1990).
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collective imagination principally because humanity now understood itself as essentially innocent. Together with the epistemological skepticism directed towards customary sources of authority, political and social relationships at this time were also re-imagined according to a radical critique of patriarchy, or the rule of fathers. As the power of the church and monarchy came to be interrogated, so too did paternal power more generally. According to Lynn Hunts work on revolutionary France, as Kings were dethroned and beheaded, the family also came under scrutiny, political upheavals worked over through a surfeit of popular novels relating tales of paternal abandonment or incest between siblings.10 The cultural fascination during the Enlightenment with children reared by animals (enfants sauvages) and with pedagogical texts such as Rousseaus mile, accompanied an interest in children more generally.11 Through these forms, the emergence of childhood as a particular structure of experience became tangible. But moreover, a cultural identification with children was also apparent: significantly this critique of patriarchy managed in effect to sideline feminist responses, instead celebrating the value of fraternity. An equality of brothers supplanted the authority of divine, stately and even familial fathers in the social imagination. The figure of the child, then, was the fantastic prototype for a nascent individualism, which, in turn, was consolidated through tales of release from paternal authority, such as Defoes Robinson Crusoe. Arguably what made Crusoe so popular was its resonance with emerging movements in society.12 The economic individual conceived as rebellious child masters his own immediate environment, through a painstaking process of critically rebuilding the forms of life previously available to him (and in defiance, thereby, of paternal authority). By tearing himself away from family and society and managing himself autonomously, Crusoe, like the enfant sauvage, captured the imagination and desire of an epoch. In texts of philosophy, the child lent to modern humanity these new contours of freshness and potentiality by furnishing the original position and constant reference point for the genesis of knowledge. For Locke the child is a chief exhibit for his argument that there are no innate speculative
10. L. Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). 11. J. V. Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Due to improvements to nutrition and health during the period, it is also true that there simply were more children, thus increasing their visibility and significance at this time. 12. See I. Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957). See also M. E. Novak, Economics and the Fiction of Daniel Defoe (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1962).
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ideas, as, he states, it is evident that all children and idiots have not the least apprehension or thought of them.13 The child is cited here as an instance of natural humanity: in possession of reason, but a formal or procedural reason, distinct from the mixture of superstition and prejudice that characterizes the knowledge, so-called, of men in society. Locke performed various thought experiments with reference to a childhood that was rendered available to the experimenters either through direct observation or memory.14 And by tinkering with inputs, he tested hypotheses regarding how knowledge is formed. For instance, he writes, I think, it will be granted easily, that if a child were kept in a place where he never saw any other but black and white till he were a man, he would have no more ideas of scarlet or green, than he that from his childhood never tasted an oyster, or a pine-apple, has of those particular relishes.15 Childhood thereby became a stage of life in every sense of the word stage: a focus of attention and observation driven by a commitment to the idea that therein was played out the most purified truth of what it is to be human. The figure of the child, in this respect, represents the distilled essence of human capacity for knowledge. And by observing the various impressions made upon the child by its environment, the philosopher could locate in childhood the germ of the free and rational individual. In order to play the part of yardstick for the question of human knowledge, however, it was necessary that the childs own experience should remain unrealized and obscure. The child is conceived here as an instrument rather than a subject of experience, and so must remain as neutral as possible in order to avail itself as an objective medium for knowledge. For Locke, the child grasps its environment naively, forming impressions and building upon them a body of truths uncontaminated by received opinion, via a gradual process of experimentation. What constitutes personal identity in this process of knowledge-accrual is memory or a traceable history of associations of ideas. Notably, however, memory is for Locke precisely what children per se do not yet possess and this is why they can serve as such vivid examples for his epistemological theory:
13. J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Adelaide, Australia: University of Adelaide, 2004), I, II, 5. 14. See L. Wolff, When I Imagine a Child: The Idea of Childhood and the Philosophy of Memory in the Enlightenment, Eighteenth-Century Studies 31(4) (1998): 377401. 15. Locke, Human Understanding, II. I. 6.
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He that attentively considers the state of a child, at his first coming into the world, will have little reason to think him stored with plenty of ideas, that are to be the matter of his future knowledge. It is by degrees he comes to be furnished with them. And though the ideas of obvious and familiar qualities imprint themselves before the memory begins to keep a register of time or order, yet it is often so late before some unusual qualities come in the way, that there are few men that cannot recollect the beginning of their acquaintance with them.16 Follow a child from its birth, and observe the alterations that time makes, and you shall find, as the mind by the senses comes more and more to be furnished with ideas, it comes to be more and more awake; thinks more, the more it has matter to think on.17 Notably, the subject of experience appealed to in this passage is the adult reader, who remembers his childhood self, and is frustrated only by gaps in memory produced by infancy. The child itself is ambiguously conceived as a knower being imprinted with ideas before the memory begins to keep a register of time and order and as the object of ambivalent identification through adults observation, which both appropriates and distinguishes itself from the childs experience. Importantly, it is a speculative conception of the child and the work this does for adults self-conception that is at issue here, rather than what we might infer from Lockes theory about the mnemic capacities of actual children. As a notional blank slate, the child is like even exemplary of adulthood, to the extent that it is a truth of the human that there are no innate ideas. The child is emblematic of human capacity for understanding, enacting a purified relation to things in the world. Yet the child is unlike even antithetical to adulthood, in that it represents a state of having no memories (and therefore no identity), possessing only disordered impressions that come to be organized after the fact, as they are apprehended by adult memory. Before sufficient time and experience has elapsed, and a greater degree of wakefulness achieved, the child knows only the impressions that affect him as they do so, for the duration of the present moment. Before an adequate edifice of memory has been built to keep a register of time and order, the child does not consciously retain these impressions, but rather only prepares the ground for the unusual qualities (or experiences of note) that will come their way so late as to
16. Locke, Human Understanding, II. I. 6. 17. Locke, Human Understanding, I. II. 22.
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remain continuous with the series of ideas that belong to adult consciousness (and identity). In this manner, the child performs for Locke the part of a tabula rasa in the truest sense, as a tablet that receives but does not record the markings made upon it. Put differently, the child figured in this way is a pure potentiality: what Giorgio Agamben might call thought thinking itself, but which does not know of its own existence.18 Crucially, this child represents for Locke a potentiality that is not actualized in its own terms, but which remains always in reserve so that he may render it available to be put to a specific use. The child is useful for Lockes theory to the extent that we can apply to childhood to learn of adult processes of knowing. But what the child knows it keeps secret from itself. The child is unconscious of its knowledge and this is why a curtain of oblivion descends upon adults recollections of early childhood. Locke does not hold back from expressing a degree of annoyance that these experiences of early childhood are withdrawn and hidden from him. Children, he contends, are unreliable purveyors of childhood, too heedless of their epistemological responsibility to take care to remember,19 or else insufficiently experienced to ground memory within a bank of previous impressions. It is adults charge to remediate the childs partial relation to itself, and to recuperate the truths childhood keeps carelessly, negligently, like an untidy room. The imperative for Lockes empiricism is a domestication of experience rather than the direct contact with it represented by the child. As Agamben suggests in Infancy and History, modernity is marked by a distrust of experience and a need to control it, the expropriation of experience its measurement and domestication being the founding project of modern science.20 By means of observation and memory adults take control of mercurial childhood and its precious cargo of lost truths; and through this domestication of childhood they are thereby able also to organize the individual and experience. In affirming this process of retrieval that his empirical philosophy enacts, Locke thus also consolidates an image of adulthood as one of mastery of its environment, projecting onto childhood those aspects of experience and of memory (or the loss thereof ) that are beyond human control. Children are defined as unconscious so that adulthood can lay claim to a conscious and well-managed body of knowledge.
18. G. Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, D. Heller-Roazen (trans. and ed.) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 24445. 19. Locke, Human Understanding, II. X. 4 and 5. 20. G. Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, L. Heron (trans.) (London: Verso, 2007), 1920.
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This asymmetry between adulthood and childhood in epistemology is also a political asymmetry. Lockes child to be observed, contained and accessed for knowledge exists for adults in memory, as their own remembered or imagined childhood. But it has no memory, and no identity, of its own. This permits the adult observer to stand, so to speak, behind a two-way mirror; to observe the child unobserved, and to impose upon them an adult gaze. Children, in turn, see this gaze back in their own reflection, on the other side of the two-way mirror. Through the rubric of spectatorship that rhetorically constitutes Lockes account of empirical knowledge, children are inculcated with the condition of being-observed that comprises modern childhood, and train themselves to the innocence their adult observers expect to see. The practices of observation, by means of which Locke establishes the axioms of empirical epistemology, thus demand a containment of childhood. And this cultivation of childhood as passive and empty of content in effect leaves children without conceptual and rhetorical resources to apply for political consideration. Because the child provides the means for a visibility of an essentially adult humanity, the child as a subject of experience and of politics is rendered invisible. The idea that the child is unconscious of its own knowledge like a tablet upon which impressions are written but not recorded continues to abide within contemporary understandings of childhood. This perception serves a number of purposes: to assuage guilt regarding childrens exposure to information adults deem to be beyond their comprehension; and to assure adults of their own completeness and control of their perceptions and experiences. It interacts, too, with other prejudices about knowledge and about childhood: that worldly knowledge is inherently dangerous; and that innocence per se depends upon ignorance of such knowledge. Analogies with the biblical fable of the fall and the knowledge of mortality through which humanity is engendered are apt, and I have pursued this connection elsewhere.21 My interest here is the extent to which children are figuratively invested with unconscious knowledge: family secrets, social anxieties, the hopes and fears of a community, and the unruly debris of a subjectivity characterized by a desire to control itself and its surroundings.
21. See J. Faulkner, The Importance of Being Innocent; Innocence, Evil and Human Frailty: Potentiality and the Child in the Writings of Giorgio Agamben, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 15(2) (2010): 20319; The Innocence of Victim-hood vs. the Innocence of Becoming: Nietzsche, 9/11, and the Falling Man , Journal of Nietzsche Studies 35/36 (2008): 6785; and Terror, Trauma, and the Ethics of Innocence, in Trauma, History, Philosophy, M. Sharpe, M. Noonan and J. Freddi (eds) (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 12241 (130).
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From Lockes interrogations of childhood onward, a key question for middle-class culture has been what do the children know? and moreover, what do they know that they know? This difference between conscious and unconscious knowledge is critical to the social delineation of childrens agency; whether they are regarded as capable citizens or merely proto-citizens, a conceptual resource from which adults derive self-knowledge. Critically, this relegation of the child to the unconscious serves a particular conception of adulthood. It helps to moderate an economy of knowledge and ignorance that provokes anxiety about control and maturity. Particularly regarding sexuality, possibilities of miscommunication and of unintended, even abject mishaps chronically threaten to expose adults ignorance. As Simon Goldhill suggests, sex is an especially dense site of struggle between knowledge and ignorance consciousness and unconsciousness and this struggle is revealed in the various euphemisms, double entendres and paroxysms of language that apply to it.22 Carnal knowledge, to cite only the most ironic of these euphemisms, assumes a kind of ignorance of the other and ignorance of oneself that makes way for pleasure: it is a desire that exceeds conscious control and exposes one to a discomfiting, visceral vulnerability. Children, then, play the part of a field of pure unconsciousness in which adults ignorance and loss of command are projected and disowned. Sexuality, subjectivity, and knowledge itself is always cut through with gaps, inconsistencies, points of unconsciousness and ignorance, which the child stabilizes into one figure the better to manage a relation to this difficult other realm. The management and mastery of the self through which the modern individual was formed extended into memories of childhood wherein the key to the self was secreted. By working over these memories, and by observing living children, childhood was appropriated to an epistemological and social project manifest in philosophical and literary narrative, as well as material living arrangements that showcase the preservation (and domestication) of childhood. In the nineteenth century what children know in this familial context increasingly became a point of anxiety for the middle class. And by the fin de sicle this anxiety was firmly focused on what children knew about sex. Perhaps at the turn of this century it still is. The Child as Innocent Seer and Unwitting Social Critic (Dickens) Just as the idea of the modern individual arose via observation of, and identification with, children, the idea of childhood developed through a con22. S. Goldhill, On Knowingness, Critical Inquiry 32 (2006): 71011, 716.
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centrated and prolonged effort of self-observation. This modern tradition ensured adults experiences of children have been, and continue to be, mediated by nostalgia for a more innocent childhood past; and motivated by the fantasy that this innocent childhood a childhood, that is, which does not retain the traces of experience might redeem a present blighted by social injustice or personal disappointment. This idea of childhood was rendered with more depth in the nineteenth century beginning with Wordsworths pastoral, wherein the child represents imagined pre-industrial modes of living, feeling and perceiving. Such an imagined childhood is undifferentiated from nature, and blissfully unconscious: assimilated to a fantasized past that erases the complex desires and frustrations of childhood, because it is itself already a product of post-industrial reverie about an enchanted past. Wordsworths innocent shepherd boy, once transposed back to the city, became Oliver Twist, David Copperfield or Little Nell. The Dickensian childs assumed natural simplicity recalibrates the readers moral compass: As victim of social injustice, the childs point of view offered a defamiliarizing vista through which the texts adult readers could re-evaluate their social milieu. Olivers innocence, however, does not exist independently of social class and the effects of alienation: Dickens positions Oliver at a careful remove from the other children criminals and waifs in his midst. Oliver is deserving: born of unknown parentage that it eventually transpires had been middle class, he is subjected to lower class ordeals, as Dickens himself was in childhood.23 Olivers request for more gruel, and its harsh reproach, has become emblematic of the plight of children in poverty. Yet, as Mark Spilka observes, By couching that request in middle-class accents, by placing it on the lips of a genteel orphan boy deprived at birth of his rightful status, Dickens seduced his original class-conscious readers into putting their own children, if not themselves, in Olivers place.24 Dickensian protagonists such as Oliver were innocent not only because they were children, but also because they were middle class: and thus differentiated from the vices of both the upper and lower classes. Such a child could serve as a witness to social injustice for the middle class precisely because,
23. M. Spilka, On the Enrichment of Poor Monkeys by Myth and Dream; or, How Dickens Rousseauisticized and Pre-Freudianized Victorian Views of Childhood, in Sexuality and Victorian Literature, D. R. Cox (ed.) (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 16179 (169). 24. Spilka, On the Enrichment of Poor Monkeys by Myth and Dream.
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like them, he appears to be unspoiled by the complexities of society and the exigencies of need. Olivers function as witness of social injustice presents a sanitized image of childhood that eventually redeems both Oliver and the middle classes the novel addresses. It is Olivers imperviousness to corruption and inability to learn the practical knowledge of the street urchins in Fagins den that ultimately allows him to return to the fold of material comfort. In other words, Olivers redemption is assured by his successful performance, against all odds, of an unconsciousness sustainable only by virtue of wealth. Olivers story, while drawing attention to the inequity of the poor laws and use of child labour, also effectively depoliticizes the conditions under which innocent childhood is viable. The innocent eye that is deployed in order to critique social inequality is, ironically, the most refined product of such inequality: innocent childhood is cultivated by means of a leisure afforded only by great wealth.25 Olivers innocence defies belief, but it effectively allows the books middle-class readers to retain an innocence regarding their own social privilege, and an unconsciousness of their own part in its maintenance. Middle-class childhood is thus domesticated so that children may be kept in a condition of potentiality, ready-to-hand to adult imagination. This use requires not only that children avail themselves as seers or witnesses, but also that they do not record that is, are not affected by the knowledge that they furnish adults. Like Oliver, the childs part is as a messenger of truths of which she remains innocent and unconscious. By the same token, children are supposed also to remain unconscious of their own desires, at least until their pubescent awakening. The idea that children are ignorant of their own interests and desires brings them under adult control, and renders them as enchanted purveyors of a more general cultural unconscious. Anxiety then persists that, should children become aware presumably by means of an external agency of the unconscious with which they are charged, then they would lose their innocence and thereby their childhood. This anxiety frequently expresses itself in terms of the sexualization of children, and especially of girls, whose innocence is considered most fraught and precious. The borders of childrens knowledge about sex, work and death are sites of acute cultural attention. Henry James took up the perforation of these borders of knowledge, and the death of childhood that follows it, more

25. See T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford: Oxford Worlds Classics, 2007), 28 48.
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constructively than some contemporary commentators over a century ago.26 And it is to his text that we now turn. The Child as Manager of Knowledge and Social Relationships (James) Henry Jamess novel What Maisie Knew (1897) has been read as an epitaph to childhood, or at least to the Victorian conception of innocent and uncomplicated childhood we find in Dickens.27 As its title suggests, the novel is oriented by the question of what a young child might understand of adult concerns, especially where her material wellbeing depends upon how they will resolve. This anxiety about the contamination of childhood by adult concerns, so familiar now, was already ripe for literary exploitation in Jamess time, and, accordingly, Maisie attracted a great deal of disapprobation from his contemporaries.28 The appeal of childhood innocence is as a field of ignorance that assures adults of their own knowledge and potency. Childhood has come to represent the elements of vulnerability and inexperience adults must disavow in order to function as such in society. To play this part, however, children are called upon to manage adults unwanted material, and continuously monitored for signs of awareness of it. Children are charged with the task of storing adult truths, regarding epistemology (Lockes tabula rasa), as well as sexuality, work, self-esteem and death. Adults anxiety about the loss of childhood is, then, coterminous with anxiety about how to negotiate a peace with their own failure adequately to embody control and knowledge. As long as children remain unconscious, they do not confront us with this vulnerability: they remain apparently undamaged, but more to the point, they allow adult mastery also to remain intact. The fear
26. There is lately a great deal of discourse addressing the sexualization of children, and threats levelled at childhood by popular culture and capitalism. For a particularly lurid example, which galvanized debate in Australia, see E. Rush and A. La Nauze, Corporate Paedophilia: Sexualisation of Children in Australia, Discussion Paper No. 90 (Canberra: The Australia Institute, 2006). 27. The phrase epitaph to childhood is prompted by Jamess description of a remark of one of Maisies relatives: Poor little monkey! she at last exclaimed; and the words were an epitaph for the tomb of Maisies childhood (H. James, What Maisie Knew [London: Penguin Books, 2010], 45). 28. One reviewer remarks, for instance, that Maisie ranks, except for a terrible underlying dullness, with the worst schools of French fiction (Unsigned review, Literary World, Boston, 11 December 1897, reprinted in James, Maisie, 27273). Another writes, with reference to Jamess humorous execution of the novel: For the life of us we fail to see where the fun comes in, though no doubt this strenuous facetiousness has its admirers (Unsigned review, The Spectator, 30 October 1897, reprinted in James, Maisie, 27172).
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that haunts such figurations of childhood is that children might gaze back: that they could become aware of their significance and of their power over adults in their sphere to enact an agency of their own. Jamess novel interrogates this worry in his readers through a story that, like Oliver Twist, places a small child at the mercy of some fairly callous adults from birth. Set in the last decade of nineteenth century Britain, the novel commences with the divorce of Maisies parents, and the unusual arrangement, for the time, by which custody of her is divided evenly between them. Maisies function throughout the book, then, is as a share or partage to be both divided (partag) and bartered, desired and rejected according to the whims of her parents and their lovers.29 James thus brings to the fore childrens vulnerability to adults, and their susceptibility to be used for the satisfaction of adults desires. We might observe that only two years after James wrote What Maisie Knew, Freud who opened the Pandoras box of childhood knowledge (or theories) of sexuality analysed Dora, an adolescent hysteric who rejected Freuds interpretation and terminated treatment only months after it had begun.30 Dora, like Maisie, was also a share bartered by her parents so that they could conduct extramarital affairs. Dora was not a willing participant in this exchange, even manifesting (unconscious) hysterical symptoms in protest, and Freud was employed to broker the exchange to bring her unconscious under control. Maisie, too, was a valuable commodity in the sexual economy of her parents and guardians, and an instrument to assuring an appearance of propriety in their relationships. Yet of equal significance is her part in the knowledge economy that organizes Jamess text. Especially of interest is the manner in which James frames the narrative, which does not attempt to appropriate the childs voice and nor does it take a synoptic thirdperson view. Rather, the readers perspective is restricted to the observation of Maisies responses to the action surrounding her. We gain no insight into Maisies inner life or the motivations of those around her, apart from the very narrow scene of Maisies interactions with the various players. The reader, then, must interpret along with Maisie the state of play, albeit with Jamess more sophisticated affective palate and vocabulary, by means
29. See M. H. Phillips, The Partag Child and the Emergence of the Modernist Novel in What Maisie Knew, The Henry James Review 31 (2010): 95110. 30. S. Freud. On the Sexual Theories of Children (1908), in On Sexuality, The Penguin Freud Library Vol. 7, A. Richards (ed.), J. Strachey (trans.) (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 184 204; and Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora) (1905 [1901]), in Case Histories I, The Penguin Freud Library Vol. 8, A. Richards (ed.), J. Strachey (trans.) (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 31164.
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of the characters various parapraxes slippages, blushes and excessive reactions as they are registered by Maisie. In this manner, the central question posed by What Maisie Knew is epistemological, and, moreover, revisits issues first turned up by Locke. First, in rendering Maisie, James was concerned to characterize her experience as a register of impressions upon consciousness, thereby framing the narrative according to a kind of sensual empiricism or phenomenology. In the 1908 preface, James sets out his objectives, describing the narrative as the elaboration of the childs developing consciousness: This precious particle [around which the novel develops] was the full ironic truth the most interesting item to be read into the childs situation. For satisfaction of the mind, in other words, the small expanding consciousness would have to be saved, have to become presentable as a register of impressions; and saved by the experience of certain advantages, by some enjoyed profit and some achieved confidence, rather than coarsened, blurred, sterilized, by ignorance and pain.31 James deliberately casts his protagonist as a girl because rude little boys havent enough sensibility and, he writes, my plan would call for no end of sensibility.32 Yet despite the impressionability (and innocence) attributed in this way to girls, James is committed to an account of Maisies experience and her knowledge of it as not in itself damaging, even if it does ultimately extinguish her childhood (or a certain understanding of it). Maisies practical education is neither tragic nor sinful because, rather, James permits her an agency within it. Maisies agency resides in her ability to bring people together: she provides first the occasion, and later the alibi, for her step-parents to develop an illicit relationship, for instance. And in this liaison she senses an opportunity for protection, as it transpires that each of her parents have lost interest in caring for her. James continues, with reference to Maisies successful management of the relationships through which her experience is articulated: This better state, in the young life, would reside in the exercise of a function other than that of disconcerting the selfishness of its parents which was all that had on the face of the matter seemed reserved to it in the way of criticism applied to their rupture. The early relation would be exchanged for a later; instead of simply submitting to the
31. James, What Maisie Knew, 291. 32. James, What Maisie Knew, 292.
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inherited tie and the imposed complication, of suffering from them, our little wonder-working agent would create, without design, quite fresh elements of this order contribute, that is, to the formation of a fresh tie, from which it would then (and for all the world as if through a small demonic foresight) proceed to derive great profit.33 Maisie is able to find resources within the meagre sphere in which she is allowed to operate: her beauty and charm, undoubtedly, but more importantly, her ability to derive profit from her function as a broker of knowledge and of relationships between the adults who care for her. This brings us to the second respect in which James returns to Lockean concerns, by recalling the split between experience and memory, unconscious knowledge and its conscious recollection. As an effect of Maisies fate, to be divided between households, her consciousness is also divided as her allegiances must be complexly negotiated and shifted according to whom she must please at any given moment.34 Although an ever-present question for both reader and other characters within the book regards the nature of Maisies knowledge about the liaisons connecting her adults, it is clear that she is acutely savvy regarding her part in them. In order to thrive in her duplicitous environment, Maisie must divide her knowledge, keeping secrets and sometimes showing only a portion of what she knows to the adults, at others appearing as if she knows more than she does in order to improve her value to them. Unlike Lockes child, then, she is able to reside in the present moment whilst also keeping track of her other experiences, personas and alliances: Maisie is, in other words, an impeccable manager of memory and identity. Because Maisie is able to utilize this knowledge for her own interests that is, because she does not merely store others secrets for their benefit, but derives a profit of her own Maisie is not reduced to a potentiality, or simple resource that allows the adults to legitimize their affairs. This is how they attempt to manage her, and Maisie is able to exceed their control, and their expectations. Maisies wonder-working agency, as James puts it, creates a future for Maisie, and is not only reserved for her adults to appropriate as with Lockes appropriation of childhood experience and memory for his epistemological theory. Indeed, it is through the fresh ties between these adults that Maisie creates that this future is initiated. Maisie, too, is a player, and beats the adults at their own game.

33. James, What Maisie Knew, 291. 34. See Phillips, The Partag Child , 96.
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Notwithstanding his receptivity to the idea of juvenile agency and even wisdom, however, James attributes to himself and to the adult reader a synthetic power over Maisies experience that seems out of place and is, indeed, contiguous with Lockes judgement of children as partial, and as incapable of unifying their own experience. I recall that my first view of this neat possibility was as the attaching problem of the picture restricted (while yet achieving completeness and coherency) to what the child might be conceived to have understood to have been able to interpret and appreciate. Further reflexion and experiment showed me my subject strangled in that extreme of rigour. The infant mind would at the best leave great gaps and voids; so that with a systematic surface possibly beyond reproach we should nevertheless fail of clearness of sense. I should have to stretch the matter to what my wondering witness materially and inevitably saw; a great deal of which quantity she either wouldnt understand at all or would quite misunderstand and on those lines, only on those, my task would be prettily cut out. To that then I settled to the question of giving it all, the whole situation surrounding her, but of giving it only through the occasions and connexions of her proximity and her attention; only as it might pass before her and appeal to her, as it might touch her and affect her, for better or worse, for perceptive gain or perceptive loss: so that we fellow witnesses, we not more invited but only more expert critics, should feel in strong possession of it.35 James like Locke, attempts a remedial function with regard to Maisies experience, which, in telling her story, he recuperates to adult interpretations of childhood. This gesture can be read alongside his inclusion of the preface, through which James pretends after the fact of having written Maisie to have intended all the effects it would achieve. James attempts retrospectively to master his text through the preface, just as he purports to master Maisie through his interpretation of her experience. The effect James does not address in his preface, however, is the anxiety Maisies knowledge and uncertainty about the nature of such knowledge inspires in the reader. Maisie is a place of hiding for the various secrets and excessive demands of the adults surrounding her. Maisie registers their complaints and indiscretions, as so many impressions made upon her surface. Maisie extols throughout the story that she knows before secrets can
35. James, What Maisie Knew, 29394.
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be fully disclosed: thus giving a sense of her precocity that both relieves her adults of the necessity for disclosure and unnerves them. Whatever Maisie does not know, she grasps that it is in her interest to claim a conscious knowledge of what surrounds her, to be a purveyor of knowledge for herself and not only the adults. Maisie, like any middle-class child, bears witness to the uncontrolled excesses of middle-class culture, because she is kept safely at its core in the family home. Children like her are invested with past and present indiscretions they are assumed not to be able to understand or access. They look after the loose ends that are supposed to stay within the private sphere, and so constantly pose a threat of exposure. Whereas children publicly represent, then, all that is valuable, good and innocent, privately they represent a potentially menacing unconscious middle-class culture represses. The Child as Unseen Seer: The Tain of the Two-Way Mirror (Haneke) If Maisies quiet and discrete manipulation of knowledge is unnerving, the children of Hanekes films are threats to the order of middle-class society, prefiguring its undoing by radically critiquing their own middle-class parents. Hanekes children are most usually adolescents, and as such already pose a threat to childhood innocence not only because of their growing consciousness (and physical signs) of sexuality, but also because of a dawning consciousness of memory more generally: the store of knowledge of adult behaviours and hypocrisies accumulated in past childhood. This significance of childhood forms a consistent thread through Hanekes oeuvre, as Bennys Video (1992), Hidden (2005), and most recently The White Ribbon (2009) each in its own way reveals the abject face of middle-class adulthood through childrens eyes and actions. Hanekes children play out the repressed violence and disowned desire that is their parents legacy, and confront them with it by incarnating the monstrousness of these unconscious remnants of middle-class pleasure. The proto-Nazi children of the village of Eichwald (The White Ribbon) undo the innocence with which their strict protestant parents bind them (the ribbon of the title is tied upon them as a reminder of their duty to be pure), whereas Bennys violence (Bennys Video) earnestly if not innocently responds to an ennui engendered by his middle-class parents disengagement. In each case the parents fall short of recognizing the detritus of their own desire in their childrens actions, and respond instead by busily ignoring the evil progeny of dissatisfaction, secrecy and nihilism, invested in these children.
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Of interest, however, is the extent to which Hanekes direction places the child in possession of the knowledge apparatus, as shots are fixed from peculiar and extremely limited perspectives, suggestive of the viewpoint of an unseen child looking through doorways and from around corners. Like Jamess Maisie, Hanekes children are depicted precisely as the surface of inscription of the impressions made by the enigmatic actions of their adults. But whereas Jamess discursive depiction of this surface is revisited and supplemented by mature remediation (in the form of the preface), in each of these films Haneke leaves his viewers uncomfortably with the childs gaze, represented visually in its partiality, and without a corrective of the adult interpretation to resolve its gaps in understanding. Haneke thereby gives the tabula rasa itself an agency albeit perhaps an acepalous agency to act upon the adult viewer, undoing their certainty and sense of control.36 In doing so, he also reverses the two-way mirror that organized Lockes use of childhood, so representing the observed child cultivated through devotions of anxiety, hope, guilt and fear as they fix their gaze back onto adulthood, and find it wanting. Haneke thus releases a potentiality children have come to embody for modernity (the unconscious underside of adult knowledge and control) to their own use. The inner tension that structures middle-class subjectivity is brought to crisis point in childrens apprehension of their role as custodians of the unconscious. Particularly Hidden develops, at a number of levels, the horror of the idea that our children might deploy the knowledge invested in them against us. The secrets that are disclosed to the viewer concern various repressed truths: a grievous wrong done to another in childhood; a possible extramarital affair; and Frances colonial past, charged also through the intimidating presence of the children of migrants from post-colonial Africa.37 Haneke represents in the childs gaze an agency that prosecutes the parents for these crimes, witnessed by children. In this way, his interrogation of what children know reveals the underlying unconscious fear, resentment, and desire for control that subtends adults relationships with children. Hidden begins with a long steady shot of a suburban home that monotonously records passers-by, someone leaving the house nothing especially threatening, until it is revealed that we are watching a video anonymously
36. For Jacques Lacan, the agency of the unconscious is an acephalous (or headless) knowledge, in that it is non-subjectivized or alien, pursuing jouissance without consulting the (conscious) subject. See S. iek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 36. 37. See G. Mecchias excellent treatment of Hidden, where each of these levels is explored more fully, in The Children Are Still Watching Us, Cach/Hidden in the folds of time, Studies in French Cinema 7(2) (2007): 13141.
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filmed and then deposited on the doorstep. No explanation of the video is provided but its existence warns the inhabitants that they are being watched. The victimized family is thoroughly middle class. The adults, Georges and Anne, are professionals and purveyors of culture: he hosts a literary television programme, while she works in publishing. Their home testifies to a middle-class taste for books and elegant objects. Pierrot, their son, is well turned-out, studious and successful at his extra-curricula activities (exemplified by the regimen of swimming laps), but lives alongside his parents rather than with them. Like many teenagers he is private and enigmatic, having learned well from his parents the liberal mandate to keep ones own counsel. The videos continue to arrive, and are complemented by raw and disturbing childrens drawings sent to each family member. These missives chip away at the familys complacent veneer. Yet they also trigger for Georges repressed memories of what transpires to have been his childhood cruelty to an Algerian boy, Majid. Majid had lived with Georgess family after his parents were killed in the Paris massacre, and Georges motivated by a kind of sibling rivalry had lied to his parents to set them against Majid. When this failed the young Georges tricked Majid into killing the familys rooster. His parents, finally convinced of Majids unsuitability as a companion for Georges, sent him into state care. Like the imperfect and partial memories of Lockes reader, who seeks the truth of human knowledge in childhood, Georgess memories frustrate and thwart him. They are fragments that intrude from elsewhere, from the unconscious; fragments that remind him of past attempts to take control, and which violence now returns to jeopardize his well-laid existence. The videos eventually lead Georges to Majids apartment in a poor sector of Paris, where Majid denies having made the films and threatening drawings. When Pierrot goes missing for a night, police detain Majid and his son on suspicion of kidnapping. Finally, on Georgess third visit to the flat, Majid slits his own throat before him a film of which is sent to Georgess employer in, we presume, an attempt to destroy his career. The apparently supernatural, acephalous agency of the recorder of these impressions is left unresolved by Haneke, except for the final scene hidden beneath the rolling credits in which the two sons meet amicably on Pierrots school steps and then depart together. The persecuting gaze of the video camera would appear thereafter to have emerged through the collusion of Pierrot and Majids unnamed son. Their impressions are literally recorded in memory of the injustice that Georges and indeed France would forget, or relegate to the oblivion of childhood memory. Hanekes refusal to resolve
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once and for all the whodunit implicates the viewer within the injustices perpetrated by Georges and the French authorities. We, too, are persecuted by the adolescents gaze; and we, too, are afraid of what they might know. Conclusion The dark aspect of childhood that presently perforates the ideal of innocence signals the limits of middle-class identity and memory. Middle-class subjectivity and childhood share an origin, but also a destiny, in childrens knowledge and adults ability to appropriate and control it. The currency of the childs viewpoint in narratives of social critique trades on an innocence we assume is connected to childrens incapacity truly to understand what they see. This assumption of childrens unconsciousness permits adults to access them as reserves of hidden knowledge: a cultural cache, or unconscious memory, retrieved by Locke in order to develop a model of human knowledge, and social commentators such as Dickens, in order to enact a social critique that nevertheless recuperates a middle-class standpoint. Perhaps the most repressed truth of childhood which narratives such as Maisie and Hidden reveal is the extent to which children are able to access this knowledge for their own purposes. James and Haneke each bear out the potentialities of a childhood constructed by middle-class ambitions: invested with its unconscious material, the figure of the child keeps in check the middle-class drive to control. While the child has been cultivated as the epitome of values that middle-class subjects hold most dearly, references to childhood also signal a critical attention to the susceptibility of those values to complacency or excess, and more precisely their dependence upon the exclusion of other values: an admission of ignorance and vulnerability, for instance. The notion of childhood innocence of children who do not record what they see and are not affected by experience authorizes systems of power that effectively then deny them a meaningful part in society. The anxiety works such as Maisie and Hidden provoke testifies to this imaginary relation of dependence on children, and to fantasies of their retaliation and insurgence. Children will continue to haunt capitalism and liberal individualism as the worst of their products, unless conceptions of control and agency are redistributed to include them.
Joanne Faulkner is an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of History and Philosophy, University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the author of The Importance of Being Innocent (Cambridge, 2011) and Dead Letters to Nietzsche (Ohio University Press, 2010), co-author (with Matthew Sharpe) of Understanding Psychoanalysis (Acumen, 2008),
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and has published articles in Angelaki, Theory and Event, Hypatia, and Textual Practice, among other journals. She is currently researching the social and cultural significance of childhood innocence in Western political communities.

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