Vulnerability of “Virtual” Subjects: Childhood, Memory, and Crisis in the Cultural Value of Innocence

Abstract

There is perhaps no member of contemporary Western communities more valued than the child. Children are valued as future citizens, producers and consumers, and invested with adults’ hopes and fears for the future: regarding the environment, the economy, knowledge, and morality. Children are also valued, however, because of their precariousness, or vulnerability. Yet children’s vulnerability has become a privileged site of cultural anxiety, as well as a proxy for a host of other, often conflicting, traits attributed to ‘childhood.’ Depending largely on class or material situation, for instance, children can be regarded as innocent, promising and precious, or else as volatile, corruptible and prone to moral danger. Does the crisis of childhood innocence indicate the extent to which children’s vulnerability makes adults feel vulnerable? Or, is ‘the child’ a place of fantasy into which adults’ feelings of vulnerability are projected? This paper argues that the fantasy of childhood innocence, notionally grounded in vulnerability, avails ‘the child’ to serve an affective function within the fantasy life (or ‘social imaginary’) of the community: as a ‘pluripotent’ trope that can be co-opted to a variety of cultural or political projects; as an easily manipulated vehicle for the feelings of compassion that attract to human vulnerability; and as a repository for adults’ thwarted hopes and disappointments. This function relies, however, on the emptying out of children’s agency, and a notion of them as virtual (rather than actual and complete) subjects. This thesis is explored with reference to Henri Bergson's philosophy of memory.

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