Patsy Rodenburg: Why I do theater | Rousseau on the Arts.

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Progress and children's rights

Itard's "...The Young Savage", and Rousseau's "Politics and the Arts."

Fascinating class. First there was Itard. We began by watching some clips from Truffault's film "The Wild Child" which I, as I always have, found very moving. Truffault found such empathy for the young boy, and he was played so brilliantly by Jean-Pierre Cargol, not, as I said in class, Jean-Pierre Leaud, although the film is dedicated to him.

What was interesting about showing the movie is not that we saw the film and could comment on the story, but rather that we saw another interpretation of the story of the Wild Child, one which understood him as being alone and scared in the world, and facing " institutionalization, a big theme for Truffault. In comparison to Itard's book, which attempts to be a more philosophical/scientific view of the boy, it underlines the one problem of the subject: the boy could not express himself in our context and so was left to be "used" towards the ends of the interpreters.

Itard's project, to examine "man in his natural, primitive state", was quickly shot down in class as having no scientific footing to stand on. The boy is now thought to have been abused and autistic, and his sample size of one hardly allows extrapolation to a general concept.

In spite of Michael's attempts to get us to focus on Itard's project, we couldn't. But perhaps it is not Itard's project that matters. What matters is our fascination with the figure of the social outcast, the child thrown out of our midst to fend for himself. Whether it is Truffault, Itard, or us reading the book, we couldn't help but feel a fundamental empathy for him, lining up our sympathies so clearly in defense of his nature and situation. We felt pity for his "alone-ness", his disadvantage. We took responsibility for it: he was abused and cast out, he was autistic, learning impaired. It wasn't his fault. Somehow, we innately feel that being in civilization is the only possible way to survive and be happy and feel anxiety about those who are left out.

So Itard may very well be right: "that moral superiority which has been said to be natural to man, is merely the result of civilization, which raises him above other animals by a great and powerful stimulus" (Itard, p.144) Our pity for him was raised by our sense of empathy for his isolation. It's how we would feel if we were cast out of society, man's natural state.

Rousseau was fun. Such a flawed and powerful document. The big questions it raised were: "how do we create good citizens," and "if family is no longer the core of society, then what is (can be)?"

The problem, to me, is how do you "create" a citizen without a totalitarian government? The failed communist states whose demise bred the faction-ism Rousseau apparently feared, is example enough of the problem of trying to accomplish this task.

The only remaining example is the USA, which poses another set of problems. I think that advertising is the very thing that Rousseau was arguing against in this text. Without foreseeing it, he imagines that any medium so connected to pleasing the audience and citizenry could never instruct. Society would be too consumed with vanity and desire for the "spectacle-makers" to risk offense. The US, and indeed the rest of the western world, although Europe's long histories help galvanize people in their identities to an extent not found in North America, is driven by the consumer culture, which is fueled by the control of desire and stimulation of growth by advertising. But what growth? I think that we've seen in recent events that this growth was false, a balloon of wants built on borrowed money. A pyramid scheme that ran out of time. And so what kind of citizens are we? Are our core values based on our relations to each other and our society? Or are they related to our possessions and ambitions?

I rather detest much of Rousseau's "Solution", but can't help to recognize the problem he outlined as being alive and well and living 250 years later, undoubtedly on a scale not even he would have anticipated. Although I'm sure I sell his imagination short.

But what to do? The Conservative government would like to legislate taste, but the idea is abhorrent to me, mainly because their taste is a throwback to a time that can't survive out of the enclaves that this particular government comes from. They want our culture to reflect the world of the straight, married family. A world I don't see thriving around me anymore. And one which excludes very good people from having, what?, franchise or agency in the world simply because they differ from the "norm".

Moreover, there's a challenge brewing in court over polygamy. The government tried unsuccessfully to prosecute on the grounds of Canada's anti-polygamy laws. The case was struck down as being un-prosecutable. The lawyer representing the government in the case told me the problem, as he saw it, is that there are more people living in what could be seen as poly-amorous relationships in Vancouver than there are in Bountiful, B.C. Cluny's story is case in point. If her boyfriend were to move in, or even stay there three nights a week with her, her ex-husband and children, the government would then have grounds to investigate, going firmly against Trudeau's famous dictate that "The government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation." But this is the power that the government seeks! The case has since been refered to the BC Supreme court for a ruling on the constitutionality of the anti-poligamy laws. If they are struck down, the only legal recourse would be to prosecute on behalf of the young girls co-opted into marriages and sex before the age of 16 (this is the preferred course of my lawyer-acquaintance).

The family as the core of our legal and moral structure is on its last legs.

So how do we structure our society if not on the family? I think the beginning of the answer lies as much in the last case as it does in the Wild Boy of Aveyron: children's rights. We're now seeing a global movement to enshrine the rights of children. Not only are they entitled to human rights as all are, but they entitled now to special rights: the right to a level of care that supersedes the parents individual authority. These rights are interesting because they do two things: they grant rights without a demand of responsibility from the rights-holder, and they legislate duty. Perhaps it's in these two poles that the beginning of a new understanding of citizenship can begin.

Government

I think our guest lecturer hit it on the head when, after talking about Confucius, said, ".. and we're only barely reaching out to scratch the surface".

In brief, my feelings about Locke are this: it's not a very deep look into the true nature of human society and nature. It felt, to me, like a political tract, as though it were using the frame of a narrative about the nature of man and civilization to justify an argument for private property and its' legal and violent defense.

Unlike Freud or Darwin, I don't think he was trying to answer a big question so much as he was trying to build a case for an idea, or belief.

I'm much more prone toward Rousseau's assessment of private property from his Discourse on Inequality:

"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine', and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society."

In other words, private property is not a product of labour and an extension of Man in Nature, but a cynical product of civilization, built on the shoulders of bullying and imbalance of power.

I am fighting with my neighbor over a fence line, determined not to allow him one inch of what I think is mine. He, likewise, is determined to expand his reach to the last possible inch. Fucker. He's wrapping his property in chicken wire, built a locked gate, and has parked an ugly RV in his backyard. I don't want to see it. I hate the chicken wire. He brought in a backhoe and tore out the natural hill in front of his house (which is actually municipal property, not his), and replaced it with a horrific stone wall that bears no aesthetic connection to our surrounding landscape. He wants to cut the tops off the hundred or so trees in front of his place that denies him a view of the ocean (guiltily, I admit that most of the trees blocking my view were taken down many years ago.) Doesn't matter, he has no taste. That is, he doesn't share mine. In my opinion, he's ruining what is lovely about our rugged pieces of land on our little island.

But it's his property. He can do with it what he will.

I hate private property. But, even if we held all land in common, we would still have to deal with people who would lay claim to things and try to form an advantage over others, or just basically ruin the party for everybody. This, I think, is man's true 'State of Nature'.

There's a development on the other side of the island where all the lots have been created to make the least impact on the natural lay of the land. All owners must adhere to a strict building and use code. All amenities are shared and paid for by the strata. And no fences are allowed to be built. I want to live there. Of course, it's extremely expensive. So I'm stuck here with my RV-and-Chicken-wire loving neighbor, and absolutely no recourse but to try and get along with him.

I'm going to build a fence. As tall and long as I can, and blot him out of my life. This is the true nature of the social contract: not that we must agree to get along, but that we can't kill each other, so we're best to build walls and stay separate.

This is the legacy of Locke.

I wish we had more of Confucius in us. I wish virtue was defined by our conduct toward each other and not by our possessions. I wish the social contract governed our feelings about living together on a crowded planet, rather than our right to build fences to protect that which is ours from the use of others. I wish we had a society built on humility rather than aggressive acquisition.

Of course, I'm only scratching the surface. I know.

Violence

The readings this week were wonderful and challenging for me. I had read All Quiet before but had never read Arendt. In fact, I've never read any political theory before this year and have found it a fascinating challenge. Along with philosphy, I didn't anticipate an interest as deep as I have for them.

Unfortunately, I missed the class on this topic, but I got some of the notes. It seems like the class, an interesting phenomenon this semester, veered into the personal on this topic as well. Like dislocation, many people in the class have had experiences with war and violence in their lives that I have escaped in mine.

But I can see where "All Quiet..." would provoke that response, however. I found it such a deeply personal, deeply felt, account of soldiering that it was impossible not to respond personally. What was of great interest, of course, where the dynamics of rage that accompanied the violence. Firstly, as Arendt makes very clear, the implements of war had already begun to outstrip and outsize the human scale, reducing the soldiers to the size and vulnerability of bugs on the battlefield. While they still went into hand-to-hand combat, they seemed to view their enemy with a certain bureaucratic distance. The only thing that really provoked anger was when an enemy was "unfair", and used "cruel" weaponry like a jagged bayonnet. Otherwise, they charged and killed each other out of a certain dumb, autonomic response, winning and losing small patches of meaningless ground, and only after being rendered senseless by artillery. Violence is possible only with implements, and emerges from rage, which can only be triggered by a sense of injustice. But since there is no injustice in an imperialistic impulse, one must be created by the commanders and channeled toward an un-characterized enemy.

And so the personal rage was directed at their superiors and the army, the "Tyranny of none", as Arendt calls it. Most likely this happens because they are the only identifiable, personal target for rage available to the soldiers. But it fits perfectly with Arendt definitions of power and violence. And they also had only one outlet for feelings of love and bonding in the face of death, which were with each other. Their past life had been relegated to sentiment, which Arendt refers to as "the perversion of feeling" (p. 64).

And this is the interesting thing, for me. This junction between death and the political is a fork in the road. Arendt describes it clearly as a differentiation between the Greek quality and the modern one: To the Greeks, "it was the certainty of death that made men seek immortal fame in deed and word and that prompted them to establish a body politic which was potentially immortal" (p.68). But to us in the Western world, it seems that "Death, whether faced in actual dying or in the inner awareness of one's own mortality, is perhaps the most antipolitical experience there is." (p. 67)

We're watching this play out right now in "The War on Terror". We have an enemy that has created a pantheon of heroes who find immortality in death and have created an immortal order to rule on earth, versus us, who or not so political, but who fear death to the point that we will band together to fight them, focussing more on our own common bond and desire to survive. "Support the Troops", even if you hate the war.

This last point was also of interest to me in terms of Freud. Freud's theory that man has a natural destructive instinct, which even he had trouble supporting wholeheartedly, is given life by Arendt with her definition of violence begetting from rage which begets from a sense of correctable injustice. Rather than a primal urge, it is one now engaged in a specific circumstance. Rage becomes a tool for change, rather than just an impulse.