Speculating on childhood and time,with Michael Ende’s Momo (1973)

Thinking time, future and childhood

No, no, you are not thinking, you are just being logical. (Bohr, n.d.)

Bohr’s quote sets up a powerful tension for an exploration of the assumptions and perceptions that structure thinking in time. Thinking logically and analytically often means, by definition, to follow reason in an arrow-like forward movement from cause (always in the past) to effect (present and future). Many educational problems are considered in this linear fashion, which, due to its logical nature, appeals particularly to policymakers (Lee and Blair, 2016). The following illustration will sound familiar to educational researchers and educators: if only we can identify why little Jonah first started to push others during story time, then we have a starting point for understanding and ultimately changing his disruptive behaviour when he sits down with others to listen. The belief in progress and a better future – in this case, the belief that Jonah will learn (progress) to listen peacefully (better future) in the company of others – is a powerful Enlightenment legacy which relies on time as linear and as a knowable, governable force. Chronological time, tamed into units that are uniform, measurable and predictable in their constant forward movement, provides a deep throbbing rhythm to modernity’s vision of a better future shaped by logic and reason (Adam, 2004; Rosa, 2005). Bohr invites a framing for thinking that exceeds linear logic and reason by insisting that thinking is more, or perhaps even something different altogether, than ‘just being logical’ and following time’s linear arrow from cause to effect.

This article aims to think around and alongside futures, childhood and time to follow Bohr’s vehement encouragement to exceed or go beyond or circle around ‘just being logical’. It does this work in Donna Haraway’s (2013) speculative-fiction mode of analysis by proposing ‘what ifs’ and by bringing ideas and figurations in conversation with each other to find out what might be possible to think in these coming-togetherings. The coming-togetherings in this article involve a highly acclaimed fairy-tale novel by Michael Ende, research literature about time and childhood, and a vignette of a child (data from a previous study, Dalli et al., 2011). Ende’s (1973) time-child, Momo, will contribute time imaginings that are unusual and yet familiar to the way in which time is practised in early childhood education (Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2013). In order to add to this conversation, a child’s being in time in a childcare centre is imagined as a ‘What if the child lives in Momo-time’? Speculative fiction (Haraway), Ende’s novel (Momo) and the child in his daily life in childcare (the vignette) are further introduced later in the article. Bohr is also part of the conversation. However, he only weaves his way into the introduction to question the very idea of thinking in order to open a space, and time, for exploration.

Modern childhood in time

Bohr does not set up a binary about scientific thinking. He does not stipulate that ‘true’ thinking is either logical or non-logical. Instead, he points out that thinking can be more than logical. He pushes against the boundaries of what is considered scientific thought and analysis. Bohr’s frustration with just one way of doing scientific analytical work opens up other possibilities for what thought can do, which may destabilise concepts of temporal linearity and causality. This is a fascinating challenge because (cause and effect again!) linearity and causality are cornerstones of many current perceptions, understandings and experiences of time. Childhood as a concept is steeped in assumptions about time.

Childhood as a ‘modern invention’ (Jenks, 2003) defines children as beings at the beginning of individual time. Conceptually, politically and culturally, modern childhood has been considered as a time of renewal, hope and malleability (Braun, 2007; Castaneda, 2002). In current postmodern/post-industrial contexts, this tried and cherished idea of childhood as a hopeful domain for building better futures is coming under scrutiny in a global climate of uncertainties about ‘the future’ (Facer et al., 2012). Nevertheless, imagining children as malleable and unformed ‘becoming’ beings continues to provide rationales for all kinds of biopolitics and policies aimed at creating ‘better futures’, often through early education and early intervention (Millei and Joronena, 2016; Peters et al., 2010). In some ways, modernity’s desires for childhood as a time of innocent beginnings and unfolding potential are possibly even more pronounced when the world looks increasingly unstable.

Biopolitics refers to the Foucauldian observation that the formative stage of the modern nation state saw the emergence of a new way of governance which was characterised by a focus on life itself (Foucault, 1977). Humans as living bodies became the subject of governance, which included governing people’s life from birth to death (Braun, 2007; Rose, 1999). In the 20th century, childhood emerged as central to biopolitics as children were ‘largely, but not exclusively, understood as human fragments of the future available in the present for shaping and design towards the end of national wealth creation’ (Lee, 2013: 11). Examples of current biopolitics as the concern of governing life itself (Rose, 2007) through a sharp focus on childhood include reproductive technologies (Lesnik-Oberstein, 2008), neurosciences (Millei and Joronena, 2016; Sullivan et al., 2015), early childhood education (Farquhar et al., 2015; Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2012; Sumsion and Grieshaber, 2012) and refugee children (Maher and Smith, 2014). In each example, childhood provides the core concept for intervention of some sort with the aim of shaping (better) futures.

Modern western childhood as a temporal concept has emerged as a powerful globalised construct built around aspirations, hopes, ideals and fears for children as future citizens and economic contributors (Duhn, 2014; Millei and Sumsion, 2011; Papatheodorou, 2010). This westernised childhood ideal has given rise to the worldwide expansion of education systems for very young children (UNESCO, 2010), at the expense of diverse concepts of childhood and education (Burman, 2008; Stephens, 1995). Evidence of this is the dearth of imaginations about ‘other ways’ of being a child. A childhood without some form of formal education is almost unimaginable. Worldwide, young children are now considered as disadvantaged if they do not have access to early education and care (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2006, 2010). Children are born into childhoods that are temporally structured and governed by rationalities that emphasise ‘optimisation’. The time for maximising potential and identifying risk is rapidly shifting closer to the moment of conception (Knudsen et al., 2006; O’Keeffe and Kenny, 2014; Sullivan et al., 2015).

Childhood as a governable domain and malleable construct has been extensively analysed (Burman, 2005; Castaneda, 2002; Lee, 2001; Lesnik-Oberstein, 1994; O’Loughlin, 2009; Pence and Hix-Small, 2009; Prout, 2005). This body of work has established that childhood is a mainly temporally defined domain that governs almost every aspect of children’s lives. Furthermore, the concept of childhood also governs how the future is imagined. Children are a direct link to the future, at times at the cost of paying close attention to children’s state of being in the present. This article thinks around childhood and time to explore what may be possible if time exceeds its confinement as a universal, forever forward-moving arrow. How might childhood change? What happens to the childhood-as-future imagination if time is no longer a universal, measurable, objective force only? How can time be imagined otherwise and what is just possible to think and imagine in pedagogical practice?

Imagining modern time

Time as a chronological, relentlessly forward-moving, universal and predictable force appears as completely natural and objective and unescapable. Barbara Adam (2004), the founding editor of the journal Time and Society, claims that humans’ ability to perceive time in this manner enables the creation of futures. Producing futures is a means of escaping biology, of managing the inevitable, which, for each of us, is the end of individual time. Industrial societies, she claims, have colonised the future and transformed the uncertainty of the future into risk factors ‘that could be calculated and managed on the basis of a known past’ (Adam, 2004: 301). She argues that the idea that futures can be risk-managed and controlled by analysing the past (as cause) and the future (as effect) has generated an inability to imagine futures as open-ended, unpredictable and diverse. It becomes difficult to imagine futures that are not dominated by economic logic and rational scientific visions of future life.

These emphases on logical futures are strongly coloured by the experiences of recent global events, such as the 2007 credit crunch (Lane, 2013), climate change, old and new wars, refugee crises amidst exponential population growth, environmental degradation, species loss and rising inequalities (Hirst et al., 2015). How limiting a one-sided focus on economics and science is to human aspirations for diverse futures is obvious when considering the catastrophe, end-of-the-world, post-apocalyptic themes that currently dominate the imagination in movies, art (Ginn, 2015; Giuliani, 2015; Strauss, 2015) and literature (Canavan, 2012; Heise, 2008). This emphasis on dystopia in culture includes a focus on the future of childhood (Bone, 2015; Lee, 2013) and is evident in current trends in dystopian children’s and adolescent literature (Hintz et al., 2013).

Time, rhythm, matter, thought

Thinking and imagining otherwise requires the ability to begin to identify what is, as Haraway (2013) suggests, just possible to think outside or alongside economic and scientific imaginations. Haraway evokes a non-linear engagement with time, story, people, things and animals in encounters that produce imaginations of difference as a speculative imaginative practice:

Taking fabulation seriously entails proposing possible worlds, inhabiting them with different sorts of work practices, or disciplinary skills, or whatever. Such proposals are not made up. It is a speculative proposal, a ‘what-if’. It is a practice of imagination, as a deliberate and cultivated practice. (Haraway et al., 2015: 20)

Methodological considerations in this endeavour are that encounters help to build a structure or space for exploration, while time as fleeting moments of heightened awareness enables ideas to take on form. Something string-like – Haraway (2013) proposes a ‘cat’s cradle’ or a string bag – might help with the architecture of a flexible structure that changes as it is worked – a structure that is not a vessel but instead intra-acts in encounters:

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (Haraway, 2013: para 4)

In speculative mode, I have attempted to capture fleeting moments of time imaginings that I wrote down when I began thinking about this article. Here are my short speculative time musings that matter, to me, while I search for the knots to tie the story together:

‘I’ am nothing but time, and space. ‘I’ am timespacebeing. Matter is space and time. Space between molecules and atoms, space between moments of clarity, with time as the force that creates variations across, between, above, below moments, encounters and repetitions. Consciousness arises as events, as little intakes of breath. Time as the dynamic process that enables matter to come together, to assemble and to disintegrate and reassemble in new forms. Time as the heartbeat that encounters mind and creates awareness and perception in space.

This is what intra-acts with other ideas, concepts, perceptions and memories while thought materialises as words, sentences and paragraphs. Each word, sentence and paragraph flows back and across, and generates differences in its movements. Time flows like a rhythm, like a heartbeat, which moves thought further into form and differentiation. The rhythm returns but is never quite the same, similar to thought – time-rhythm ‘as a force that resists systematized or exhaustive capture’ (Henriques et al., 2014: 16), perhaps similar to Elizabeth Grosz’s (2004: 136) emphasis on ‘the process itself which produces, through chance, life with its inevitable push towards the future, an irreducible direction forward, eternal becoming’. Time is mysterious and unknowable, as are imaginings of the future. Time-rhythm indicates that eternal becoming involves recurrences and repetitions, which then create differentiations. Futures are open in the sense that life desires life and will take chances in its eternal desire to become more complex, to add differentiations. There is no causality and linearity but there are multiplicities and non-stasis.

New-materialist-inspired time thinkers propose to consider time as ‘rhythm [linked] to imperceptible movement and the non-conscious dimensions of experience, the intensive and emergent aspects of reality, and the irreducibility of variation or differing difference’ (Henriques et al., 2014: 16). Rhythm here is conceived as vibration that ‘comprises vibratory micro-movements or activity that is inherent to matter’ (Henriques et al., 2014: 19). This is Bennett’s (2010) ‘vibrant matter’, where eternal micro-becomings create ‘reality’ as sensory/perceptible experiences. Rhythm as vibratory micro-movements also creates the connective pulsing flow where awareness dips in and out to make sense of the self and the world, as renowned Varela scholar Evan Thompson (2015), bridging neuroscience, philosophy of consciousness and Buddhist studies, suggests. What takes shape is determined by these moments when awareness lingers long enough to form a thought that catches on to another thought to make a story.

Momo, the time-child

Exploring the intra-action of time, space and matter in relation to the concept of childhood made me think about a story that my children and I loved to read together. We were drawn into the story by its intensity and its heroine – a girl named Momo. The story, written in Europe during the Cold War, is a philosophical and sociological fabulation of childhood, of the past and future, and of fears and dreams about ways of life in advanced, urbanised, capitalist, highly industrialised societies. It has a short title and a long, descriptive subtitle: Momo, or The Curious Story about the Time-Thieves and the Child Who Returned the People’s Stolen Time. Written by Michael Ende as a fairy-tale novel about time and childhood, the book has been translated into more than 30 languages and was made into a movie in 1986. Readership includes most likely as many adults as children (Cánovas and Teuscher, 2012). Ende wrote the book in Italy, and while Momo, the orphaned girl, lives in a time and place that are non-specific, the mood of the place evokes a romantic version of a bygone southern European way of life. This way of life is under intense threat from the time-thieves. Momo finds a way of experiencing time as intense materiality, which ultimately creates a reality in which the time-thieves panic and lose their hoard of stolen time.

The story begins when, one day, Momo appears in a city that has existed for a long time, somewhere in the northern hemisphere’s south. Outside the city lie the ruins of an ancient amphitheatre, which is described as a space with a mighty history that spans millennia. The ruins are almost forgotten and have little value as a tourist attraction, as this particular amphitheatre had always been a humble space where poor people gathered to listen and to watch. Only the local people know about the ruins. They do not much care about the place and let their goats roam there. Children use the oval to play ball games, but otherwise the amphitheatre is deserted and left to itself. The absence of human presence and human noise, described as ‘silence’ (Stille), is only punctuated by the song of cicadas. Ende paints an image of time as perpetual cicada song where one verse of the cicada tune cannot be distinguished from the next. Cicadas provide time as rhythm, an intensive aspect of reality where cicada song creates almost imperceptible variations in micro-movement (Henriques et al., 2014). It may sound the same but it is, in fact, the coming-together of millions of tiny sounds that flow into each other.

Ende’s ruins create a sense of time as something that feels soft and ancient, overwhelmingly intense like the cicada song, and detached. There are traces of the past – for instance, the semi-collapsed stone chambers underneath the amphitheatre stage, which are only accessible through a hole in the external wall of the ruins, bear traces of long-gone human habitation. This is where Momo finds her home. She does not disturb the ruins. Her human presence adds difference and variation without domination. Momo is not a coloniser. She seems to move in time as rhythm rather than attempting to bend time to her will by counting hours, minutes and seconds.

Momo is described as a girl who wears a jacket that is far too big for her, has no shoes and owns nothing. Her age is difficult to determine, but she is probably somewhere between 8 and 12 years old. She is a child without a family and without a discernible past. Momo does not belong to anyone and has no obligations to others, and yet she draws people to her because she brings the gift of listening: ‘Momo konnte so zuhören, daß dummen Leuten plötzlich sehr gescheite Gedanken kamen [Momo was able to listen in such a way that stupid people all of a sudden came up with very insightful thoughts]’ (Ende, 1973: 15; my translation). This becomes possible because Momo’s listening is the practice of enabling intra-active encounters. She brings her full attention and care to each coming-together, including people, animals and also things, and, in being curious and open in the encounter, she draws the other into time as rhythm, where new possibilities emerge. For people, this means that thoughts and ideas which would have gone unnoticed otherwise, emotions which would have simmered away under the surface, and insights which would have remained only flashes of something intangible can take form in Momo’s presence. Momo’s non-ownership, including the absence of a past that would provide her with a possible cause or reason for her present being, frees her of anxiety for the future as a continuation of her present and her past. Momo’s future is open to becoming as ongoing intensification and differentiation based on chance and the desire for life. She politely resists the townspeople’s attempts to make her live a ‘normal life’, which would involve predictabilities such as living in a home with regular meals, adult supervision, school, routines and timetables.

Momo prefers to live by herself in the stone chamber under the amphitheatre stage and, perhaps in recognition of her unique ability for intra-action, the adults respect her singularity and her difference to other ‘normal’ children. What Momo has in abundance is time. She is a figuration of a ‘timespacebeing’, someone who embodies the idea of human life without fear of the future as something that has to be predictable, and without attachment to the past as a source for present and future successes and failures. Momo’s gift is that she is able to take others with her into a time and space where difference can materialise. Momo practises what Haraway (2015) calls ‘a curious practice’, which involves a

sort of politeness … [it] does the energetic work of holding open the possibility that surprises are in store, that something interesting is about to happen, but only if one cultivates the virtue of letting those one visits intra-actively shape what occurs. They are not who/what we expected to visit, and we are not who/what were anticipated either. (Haraway, 2015: 6)

Tension arises when Momo’s ‘curious practice’ comes under threat from the grey men who steal time. The grey men are products of the human imagination of time as a commodity, and they live and thrive on stolen human time. They steal it by intensifying a climate of fear which makes humans worry about not being effective enough and not maximising their potential at all times. Humans’ greatest fear is wasting time, not having enough time, and letting opportunities for self-optimisation pass. The grey men freeze-dry saved time so that it becomes brittle and loses its vibrancy and life force, then roll it up and smoke it. They are time-vampires who suck life out of time. Their ultimate goal is to make every human save more and more time, at all times, by doing things faster, doing more of everything, being more efficient and never experiencing stillness. Resting, daydreaming, lingering, playing, singing, dancing, being silly and even sleeping are moments when time passes unmeasured and flows freely. This is anathema to the time-thieves, who rely on time not as a flow but as a tamed and manageable force. Time in forever smaller, measurable and collectable units is what they are after.

Momo, with the help of a non-human animal, the turtle Cassiopeia, who has been sent to find her by Meister Hora, the mythical time guardian, finds her way to a secret, hidden house-like structure. Deep within this house is a space like no other, where time flowers into incredibly beautiful blossoms. Momo sees her own time-flowers, one at a time, one following the other, with each one seemingly more beautiful than the next. Momo’s realisation that time lives within her, that every flower is the most stunning one at the point of its materialisation, and that each flower fades and disappears when a fresh blossom appears is an imagination of time as forever changing/becoming, of beauty, vibrancy and variation. Momo’s experience of time as becoming fits with her ‘curious practice’ (Haraway, 2015): even though she knows the pattern of one blossom at a time, she is completely surprised by each new flower’s specific beauty and begins to realise that, despite repetition, there is no sameness. Time in units relies on uniformity, which leaves no space for surprise, beauty, micro-movement and variation (Henriques et al., 2014).

Ende has created a heroine who takes on neo-liberal globalisation (the time-stealing grey men) before its time. Momo is also described as a very human child with anxieties, wishes and hopes for joy, playfulness and liveliness with others. Momo’s greatest fear is that no one has time left. This is not only a matter of death, but, more importantly, also a matter of how life is lived.

A fleeting conclusion: curious time practice in early childhood?

I remember watching a video clip of a child who had only just discovered his ability to stand up and to carefully balance his way from here to there. In the short snapshot, he put his feet on a wooden plank lying on the floor. He stood on the plank for what seemed like a long time, seemingly motionless. Legs bent a little, he almost half crouched. The educator who made the video was gathering data (Dalli et al., 2011). Instead of moving the camera on after 30 seconds, she decided to keep focusing on the child. The task was to document learning moments. It was surprising to see her persevering with this moment where nothing much was happening. When asked later, she said that she was wondering what would happen. She was intrigued by the child’s non-movement and his rootedness to the plank, and was expecting to see him discover/learn something new about himself or his environment. This learning moment would then have enabled her to recreate a similar situation for him, perhaps the next day, and so extend his discovery/learning based on his current interests. This is a familiar pedagogical strategy and seen as an indication of ‘quality programming’ (Duhn and Grieshaber, 2016).

This is discernible quality, according to current understandings, because the educator gives the child time. She does not rush him and she is not visibly driven by the ‘tyranny of the clock’ that often dominates daily practices in early childhood pedagogy (Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2012: 159). While it is challenging to escape the post-industrial intensification of time as commodity, it is of vital importance to speculatively imagine and to explore wholeheartedly what else is possible (Ulmer, 2016), and what other stories can be storied to support liveliness and vibrancy on a damaged planet (Haraway et al., 2015). Living on a damaged planet means rethinking ethics, response-ability, belonging, relationships across species and in relation to matter, and, perhaps most challenging of all, thought itself (Åsberg et al., 2015).

There is an opportunity here for ‘curious time practice’ and for creating space for time that is not uniform, but enables opportunities for the singularity of this encounter to emerge (Probyn, 1996). It would require speculation: What if this child is experiencing time as intense micro-movements right now? While the watchful adult hears the minutes tick by, the child may feel his muscles contract in each toe while the plank shivers imperceptibly under his feet. What if his experience of time is multiple and complex? His eyes appear fixed on the plank, but he may feel tiny flickering movements in his eyelids and his eyeballs while his heartbeat thrums in his ears. What if his left big toe senses a fine crack in the wood while his left knee bends a fraction more to support the invisible toe/skin encounter? What if the child feels his breath building up, asking to be released from his lungs? What if he hears his heartbeat and notices that there are several sounds, not just one beat? What if he hears an echo of the sounds he heard no so long ago in the womb? What if the adult imagines what the child experiences and speculates with him, silently?

What if the adult loses herself in time and has fleeting experiences of the singular beauty of Momo’s time-flowers while being a visitor, wholeheartedly, in the child’s moment?