The biopolitical construction of infancy and adulthood: The child as paradigm and Utopia

Introduction

It is convenient to start by noting that the focus on biopolitics does not contradict classical studies on the emergence of a new sentiment and a special treatment toward children around the 18th century in Western culture. Indeed, I would like to emphasize that biopolitics’ newer perspective on childhood not only historically coincides with the emergence of modern biopolitics but is also consistent with biopolitical mechanism as well. Although Ariès (1962) does not focus on biopolitics, he begins his classic book demonstrating that age was irrelevant in Western society during the 16th and 17th centuries, it cannot be denied that he shows that power has not only made the biological fact of birth a starting point to classify, regulate, and standardize the individual and the population group but that power also influences the care about life and intervenes in the way we live.

This essay proposes three lines of analysis. The first one, as mentioned above, considers necessary the distinction of childhood from infancy: childhood is inseparable from age and refers to the individual life cycle, but also to a population group, that according to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), ranges from 0 to 18 years of age.

It is well known that there has been, and there still are, different cultural interpretations on the duration of childhood, its characteristics, or the ways of parenting, that is, different childhoods, but it is also true that the modern state attempts to homogenize and universalize its management on life and the way of living it.

The second line of analysis suggests that since ancient times and up to the present, the child has been placed within the sphere of zoē (with the natural life). Although the child was not considered a “miniature adult” any more (Ariès, 1962), this new understanding really did not change its closeness and familiarity with the simple zoē. This goes beyond a social construction, but also a renewed biopolitical production which holds association to animals and/or the primitive man—as a “not yet” from an adult-centric perspective.

I would stress that even the constructionist perspective labeled as a new paradigm (James and Prout, 1997) continues to take an emphasis on the biological data of age and does not question the political implications of the duality nature/culture, which for Agamben (1998), on the contrary, implies not only the production of a “bare life” but also the originary activity of sovereignty. We shall see that the child is the paradigm of a form-of-life that even at the earliest age does not allow a gap between the biological and the cultural spheres (see Mantilla, 2016, in press).

The third line of analysis states that the concept of childhood lays on an implicit notion that involves not just a “no-longer” childhood but also a “no-longer” infancy. More specifically, the attributes of infancy remain reserved to the age of childhood; thus, adulthood becomes extremely instrumental to biopolitics because it contains the possibility of the homo sacer.

This process is consistent with the contemporary era in which, just as it has happened inside concentration camps, zoē utterly occupies politics.

Biopolitics on child and childhood

We should remember that it is an attribute of sovereign power to have “the right over life and death,” and also that Foucault (2003) tracks down biopolitics in the modern era: “The right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die” (p. 241). Precisely, around the 18th century, natural life begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculation for the management in the modern state; therefore, politics becomes biopolitics.

Agamben (1998) further considers that since ancient Greece, the word “life” is already, in itself, a biopolitical production. Homo Sacer I begins with a reflection on zoē and bios, indicating that both expressions were used in ancient Greece to refer to “life.” Zoē addresses to the simple fact of living or simple basic natural life that is common to all creatures considered to be alive (plants, animals, humans, and gods). Zoē also includes the sphere of economy and reproduction of life. In the classical world, zoē was confined to the home: the place for women, children, and slaves. Bios is a politically qualified life (by free men) which indicated the form of living proper to an individual or a group.

I should note that childhood became separated from the adult by the simple fact of age, from a psychological developmental and bio-genetic perspective, which is consistent with biopolitics. This clearly does not deal with the old right: “To take life or to let live,” as the ancient regime is illustrated upon the usual infanticide, abuse, and abandonment of children, in the work of Lloyd de Mause (1974).

Furthermore, Agamben’s critical thought on ancient times indicates an attitude that is still prevailing nowadays: the “paterfamilias” (the head of the household) extended their power over their children into the public space of the polis; in fact, it is precisely in the formula “vitae necisque potestas”’ (power over life and death) that for the first time in the history of law, the expression vita appears. For Agamben (1998), this formula refers to the subjective character of the genesis of sovereign power, and its importance lays in the fact that it shows the magistrate’s imperium is nothing else but the father’s “vitae necisque potestas” extended to all citizens and represented as a kind of genealogical myth of sovereign power (p. 55).

In my opinion, the modern discourse on childhood that separates the child from the adult is totally consistent with one of the greatest transformations of the political rights in the 19th century. In other words, it may clearly be seen that the old right was replaced precisely by the opposite right: the power to “make” live and “let” die. But to make live does not change the fact that the child is still persistently positioned in the zoē sphere.

Regimen of truth and biopower

Foucault (2003) emphasizes in his study of biopolitics the link to technologies of power as “real and effective practice” (p. 28); he is not concerned about comprehending its origins or its legitimacy, but points out that children, as much as adults, are the object of disciplinary power over the individual body and are subjected to places and times and to strictly regulated activities under surveillance in enclosed spaces. The arrival of the modern school demonstrates the effectiveness of the panoptic architecture linked to the micro-physics of power (Foucault, 2002).

As it is well known, Foucault (2003) also refers to disciplines in the sense of knowledge/power. He considers that multiple relations of power traverse, characterize, and constitute the social body, and in any case,

Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power. This is true of all societies, but I think that in our society, this relationship among power, right, and truth is organized in a very particular way. (p. 24).

Thus, knowledge/power underlies the process of normalizing and regulating the population in all age spectra and especially in relation with child and childhood. Foucault (2003: 67) shows the importance not only of the single basic school but also of a whole society school apparatus.

We should notice that constructionism is an approach which in Childhood Studies frequently resumes Foucault—with or without bringing to account biopolitics’ focus—to critically consider upon “regimes of truth,” revealed even today on the dominance of developmental psychological model, as announced early in the 20th century. As it is well known, hegemonic developmental perspective has postulated the explanation of the child’s nature as universal—a nature where the local and cultural context hardly impacts.

As we can learn from the play theories of the 20th century, Piaget is not the only one considering that the child plays due to its proximity with the animal and the primitive. In fact, it is through developing in age that the child reaches the logical games that are suitable to the social and civilized being (Mantilla, 2016). Piaget, as it is well known, in spite of lacking systematic investigation (Singer and Singer, 2013), is still widely influential in institutional ambiences like daycare centers and schools.

I would, however, like to underline that also the new paradigm of childhood, which is also important nowadays to a great extent, is taken for granted in the biological age: “The immaturity of children is a biological fact of life but the ways in which this immaturity is understood and made meaningful is a fact of culture” (James and Prout, 1997: 7).

The new paradigm of childhood certainly remarks the importance of the social contexts and confirms the existence of different childhood(s). But, even in this perspective, the separation biology/culture is taken for granted—or just not considered critically.

For instance, James and Proud point out that the social construction of childhood could fall down into a “cultural determinism,” that is, an exemption of human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom by denying any effects of our biological and physical being. They also suggest that research in sociology and social anthropology must see childhood within certain biological constraints (James and Proud, 1997: 203).

Following Agamben (1998), the importance of bios in relation to language is described politically: “in Western Politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being the exclusion establishing the city of men” (p. 12). Hence, there are politics because man is the living being whom in language separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, keeps a relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion (an exception). It is then necessary to insist that bare life is the original basis for political production because bare life, which is excluded from the polis, becomes a significant object of the politics conducted there.

Thus, roughly speaking, even in this constructionist perspective, the natural facts of biology are object of cultural interpretation, but the basis of this binarism between the biological and the sociocultural is not submitted as it is in Agamben’s (2005) view:

That which we call bare life is a specific production of power and not a natural fact. Even if we move in space and look back in time, we will never find—even in the most primitive conditions—a man without language and culture. Not even the child is bare life. (p. 8)

Therefore, in Western childhood, a big difference persists between zoē and bios, and this difference is not politicized, opposite to Agamben’s thoughts.

My hypothesis is that Western childhood emerges in the context of a modern biopolitics, hence, submitted to a process that has not involved a breach of the biology/culture dichotomy; therefore, it has not been submitted to a critical reflection on infancy, as we shall see in the next section.

The biopolitical construction of Zoē/Bios and the denial of infancy

For those familiar with the view on childhood as complex process of social construction and reconstruction, Agamben’s conception on the human being as a production of an anthropological machine should not be very difficult to understand.

In The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben (2004) lays out that not only theology and philosophy but also politics, ethics, and jurisprudence are drawn and suspended in the difference between the man and the animal; in my opinion, these differences are relevant in regard to childhood and infancy, as both are directly involved in the production and definition of human nature.

In terms of contemporary biopolitics, the production of the human being entails an unstable concept both of the child, as I previously examined, and of the man for we cannot refer ourselves to a psycho-physical nature that is separate from a historical product and a linguistic community. In fact, the difference between man and animal has not always been the same, even in the world of science. To give an amusing example mentioned by Agamben (2004), “Linnaeus classifies sirens (which Caspar Bartholin called Homo-marinus) together with man and apes” (p. 37).

Agamben highlights that persistently, differences between animal and man have played a role in defining man himself. More specifically both the animal–man and the man–animal are two sides of a single fracture, Agamben (2004) distinguishes two anthropological machines: the ancient machine that proceeds through animal humanization and the modern anthropological machine as “… it functions by excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human” (p. 37).

The distinction between zoē and bios and its connection is directly related to children as son or daughter, students, and so on are important, but I would underline that the binarism of zoē and bios also implies the denial of infancy: infancy is, above all, an experience that encloses the human being as a form-of-life that does not accept the separation of the twosome zoē/bios from each other.

The conception of a rational-speaking being a bios that is taken away from its biological nature is a metaphysical and political assumption that denies infancy. Agamben quotes exactly the same fragment of Aristotle’s text in Homo Sacer I (Agamben, 1998) and in Infancy and History (Agamben, 1993), which has the title Experimentum Linguae. For Aristotle, the voice (phone) is something possessed by all living creatures that express pleasure and pain and reside at home; on the other hand, the city is where language (logos) lives, and it is used to demonstrate whether something is convenient or inconvenient, just or unjust. So this question arises for Agamben (1998): “In what way does the living being have language?” corresponds exactly to the question “In what way does bare life dwell in the polis?” (p. 12).

In this line, bios (unlike zoē), as a being capable of language contradicts, in principle, that the human being is a form-of-life that needs learning language in a linguistic community because, unlike animals, human infants receive their language from outside. What thus characterizes the infant is not a simple impossibility of saying, but an impossibility of speaking from the basis of a language:

Animals do not enter language, they are already inside it. Man, instead, by having an infancy, by preceding speech, splits this single language and, in order to speak, has to constitute himself as the subject of language—he has to say “I.” (Agamben, 1993: 52)

Hence, the truly human being is not the man or the animal, but this empty intermediate area wherein the anthropological machine takes the decision of what to include or not include in the concept of human being; thus forms the link between human and animal and man and non-man (Agamben, 2004).

Agamben places infancy in this mute place and indicates that it provides the basis for a necessary delay that precedes the entering into language (i.e. entering into the semantic and properly cultural dimension) using a topographic metaphor Agamben (1993) refers to infancy as “a place between nature and culture.” It is language precisely what allows the relation and resonance between these two systems to take place and make space for this third different system.

It is necessary to emphasize that the mute and empty place where language takes place does not cease to exist through man’s development; actually, it forms the place for ethics:

The experience, the infancy at issue here, cannot merely be something that chronologically precedes language and which, at a certain point, ceases to exist in order to spill out into speech. It is not a paradise which, at a certain moment, we leave for ever in order to speak; rather, it coexists in its origins with language indeed, is itself constituted through its appropriation by language in each instance to produce the individual as subject. (Agamben, 1993: 48)

As Lewis (2011) mentions on Agamben, “infancy is the moment before the speaking subject speaks (‘not yet’) but after the acquisition of language (‘no longer’). Infancy is therefore both a potentiality (to speak) and an impotentiality (not to speak).”

Therefore, it is important to add that it is possible to speak of various childhoods, of a periodicity of childhood (Steinberg, 2011) or, in a postmodern context, of the liquidation (Hengst, 2001) or disappearance (Postman, 1994) of childhood. Infancy, however, at an ontological level, is not a variable for social or historical analysis and is not related to different conceptions and styles of childhood nurturing, but takes into account the fact that human beings are a form-of-life of which the child is the paradigm ¹ (Agamben, 2012).

The duality zoē/bios has been inherent to the concept of life and has remained stable since antiquity, delivering a tight correspondence between modern power and the most immemorial of the arcana imperii (Agamben, 1998: 11). The distinction between zoē and bios certainly refers not only to something in the past but also to something still in the present that may be methodologically comprehended as an arché. Agamben (2009) explains—a posteriori—employing the method of philosophical archaeology.

The production of the adult as homo sacer

For Agamben (1998), “the politicization of bare life as such constitutes the decisive event of modernity” (p. 10). What is even more, politics in our time are utterly biopolitical. Contemporary biopolitics acquire importance on the juridical and political levels and also in the process of political subjectification, which is, in my perspective closely linked to the dichotomy adult/child. These two last notions founded in biology obscure the notion of infancy.

As we saw, the human being can be distinguished for having infancy, that is to say, a form-of-life and the bare life is a product of biopower; then it would seem logical to think that biopolitics act on the child until it produces him into a homo sacer (a human life which is included in the juridical order solely in the form of his exclusion, this is fundamentality a bare life).

In my opinion, the notion of the adult is appropriate for subjectively activating the production of the homo sacer. Adult is the notion equivalent to child and childhood, defined by age, wherein both deny infancy. In other words, in the idea of adulthood prevails the idea of no longer childhood, but, specially, no longer infancy.

Theories on the meaning of adulthood conceive it as a stage of life that is the goal to be reached by children, adolescents, and young grownups. Among these theories, an implicit one is clearly demonstrated in a study conducted by Zacarés and Serra (1996) that maturity associated with adult life follows cultural beliefs of directed behavior. They identified a passive-external theory in which maturity and adulthood become synonyms as they allude that the simple passing of the years implies in a broad spectrum socioeconomical success and fulfillment of standard procedures like paternity, thereby people obtain a meaningful place in the instrumental work.

A different approach is seen in the adult developmental theory; in this recent field of analysis for Clark and Caffarella (2000) paradoxically, age has transformed from a condition to a process: “One of the striking things about adult development as a field is its age. It is entirely a twentieth-century phenomenon, in no small part because the concept of adulthood has crystallized only in this century” (p. 3).

It draws my attention that even though the latter approach is focused in development, its perspective goes beyond constructionism in the case of Childhood Studies, where a critic to the separation between mind and body invites adult’s reflexivity on the way of living life: “age ideology is a socially constructed system of beliefs about biological development, midlife, and aging—beliefs that are deeply embedded in our culture” (Mott, 2000: 13).

In a certain way, this view, which considers “Aging is a state of mind as well as of body,” could have a rather problematic outcome if it implies a desire to live outside of time.

Badiou (2010) criticizes the actual perspective in which the supremacy of youth and the search for pleasure is a social imperative. This context is incapable of organizing a discipline of time.

Arnett and Galambos (2003) more recently examined the conception that young people had in regard to the meaning of becoming an adult (p. 93). The authors found that, in spite of differences between ethnic groups in the United States and also between other countries, young people today are more concerned with processes of becoming an adult in that “… the most widely supported criteria for adulthood were those that reflected values of independence and individualism, just as in previous studies of American middle-class whites.”

We can say that, in principle, generalization of the meaning of becoming an adult from a typically American model is problematic if we consider the thinking of Kojève, quoted by Agamben (2004: 10), because the American way of life is supposed to represent the end of history.

It is important to take into consideration that a post-historical period involves a time in which the human being is conceived as a completed creature with a goal that has been already accomplished and whose objective is only to survive. This notion of accomplishment is opposite to the potentiality that characterizes the child where “The child is the only integrally historical being, if history is, precisely, that which is absolutely immanent” (Agamben, 2012: 32).

The completed being incorporates itself simultaneously to an animalization process, which implies that the anthropological machine (the one previously mentioned) currently works by excluding the human from human. Thus, the traditional historical potentialities (poetry, religion, philosophy) where the reflection between the animality and the humanity of man has been transformed into cultural spectacles and private experiences and has likewise lost all symbolic efficiency. On the contrary, the genome, the global economy, and humanitarian ideology are all united by a gross interest in physiology or the “total management” of biological life, that is, of the very animality of man (Agamben, 2004: 77).

Foucault refers to disciplines in the sense of knowledge/power underlying the process of normalizing and regulating the population, whatever the age range. One should add that this knowledge, closely related to medical science and when linked to reflections by Stolkiner (2012), makes it possible to understand the importance of the pharmaceutical market today.

The work of Lee and Motzkau (2011) allows us to see the way in which discourse can disappear, as it is possible in the conflict between one generation and another to use an artifact that will obtain discipline, without the need to speak.

The absence of this debate about the difference between animal and man has implied that the

… two terms collapse upon each other—as seems to be happening today—the difference between being and the nothing, licit and illicit, divine and demonic also fades away, and in its place something appears for which we seem to lack even a name. (Agamben, 2004: 22)

I want to add that the words “adult” and “person” function as synonyms and that the process of biopolitical subjectivity is present for Esposito (2009) in the concept “person” (mask) where, above all, it functions as a device that has practical effects. The person keeps up the dichotomy between zoē and bios inside himself/herself. As a person, the human being is who controls or should control his animal side: “The person (it might be said) is that which in the body is more than the body” (Esposito, 2009: 23). In this conception, the child is a semi-person.

Additionally, in current society, the prominence of the economic dimension is not indifferent to subjectivity and, I would add, to the construction of the adult. In fact, the book Homo Sacer I mentions the gradual transformation that Hannah Arendt points out about the process of becoming “homo laborans” (and with it, biological life as such) gradually to occupy the very center of the political scene of modernity (Agamben, 1998: 10).

Still more problematic in terms of modern adults, as a rational thinker, is the Cartesian ego cogito (I think, therefore I am) that not only assumes an “I” which has not come into existence as the subject of a linguistic community (as distinct from the case explained above) but also has been used by modern day science to combine the subject of experience and the subject of knowledge by eventually making the subject disappear from experience. Hence, experience today has lost all authority, giving its place to scientific experiment, “it is the character of the present time that all authority is founded on what cannot be experienced” (Agamben, 1993: 14). In this framework of rationality, magic is seen as “unreal,” the link between magic and desire becomes eroded (Agamben, 2007).

For a philosophy of infancy

I believe that the modern idea of child not only evolved in developmental psychology, we could say that a similar hegemonic view persists in the social and philosophical thoughts. Reyes (2014) going through the Western dominant thought—Locke, Rousseau, Durkheim, and so on—finds the child has had an unstable meaning as a demon, as an angel, as a rasum tabulae, as a “other” wild primitive, always tagged as missing something to finally become a human being, a person, an adult.

In my opinion, it may be considered surprising that the contribution of the philosophical thought, especially that of Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin, who gave the child an emancipatory role (Amar, 2011), should hardly been noticed in childhood studies. Agamben, however, continues this line of thought.

It is imperative in this essay to point out that although bare life is a product of biopower, infancy cannot be self-destructed: “That which has its place of origin in infancy must keep on traveling toward and through infancy” (Agamben, 1993: 53).

Agamben affirms that the human beings, unlike other animals, who in their maturity simply obey specific instructions engraved in their genes, are cast into the world but still keep that obstinate infantilism, this is, as the child that holds on to the possibility of attending to somatic potentialities, to the arbitrary, the non-coded, or the capacity per se. But I want to emphasize that he does not get lost with the passing of the years (Agamben, 2012).

This potentiality truly defines the child and prevents him to be a bare life, Agamben, further considers the child to be exactly the contrary: the paradigm of an absolute form-of-life, which notable in the radical importance of this statement “It means that the child is never bare life, that it is never possible to isolate in a child something like bare life or biological life” (Agamben, 2012: 31)

Potentiality and possibility are essentially different to effective reality and are always inherent in the form of “whatever” (Agamben, 2006: 35). This potentiality of the child is for Agamben a political utopia. To be a “whatever” implies simultaneously deactivating the power of the State and performing a oneself representation in prevailing terms. The “Whatever” does not mean “it doesn’t matter which,” it actually means “being such that it always matters.” Hence, the figure of the child acquires a milestone importance because within childhood studies, Agamben does not picture the idea of the child as a potential problem; on the contrary, the problem would be the idea of adulthood as an accomplished grownup.

Analysis of the potentiality of being and not being, permeates the work of Agamben, and it would result out of the question to revise it here, but the practical implications for education of the child, linked to instrumental ends, are a very serious matter as shown in Lewis’ (2011) brilliant reflection.

With regard to economic life focusing in consumption, Agamben (2007) returns to the old concept of profanation that used to imply a ritual process through which things, places, animals, or persons who belonged to the sacred realm were restored to the common use. In the capitalism of today where items of merchandise have become fetishes, the distinction between the use value and exchange value has become extremely difficult to maintain, leading to consumption, in opposition to regular use. In this context, profanation becomes impossible.

The playing of a child, although not sacred, has a similar effect as things are taken out of their conventional use and put to another use that does not coincide with utilitarian consumption. It is well known that children play seriously.

I should add that the “as if” that children apply to their play and game since their third year of age shows the distinction between reality and play, just as adults distinguish reality from fiction in a movie (Mantilla, 2016).

Deactivating things from their conventional use, to give them another application, to play with them, is what Agamben (2007) proposes, as Benjamin did also to deactivate in play the potentialities of the economy, of the law, and of politics.

Conclusion

The words “childhood” and “infancy” are often used as synonyms in ordinary language, and in most academic studies, the only exception being when they are used by those who are interested in psychomotor and cognitive development, for whom infancy covers a period from birth to 2 years old. In this essay, infancy does not relate to age, it refers to a human form-of-life, ontologically located between zoē and bios, nature, and culture.

Childhood and adulthood are both concepts founded in biology, and in them also the biological processes of life acquire a notable importance and are appropriate to the classification, normalization, and regulation that biopolitics imply.

Childhood and adulthood have a doubly negative relationship in modern times: childhood has come to be defined in terms of what children—as an individual and as a social group—“are not” or by the fact that it is impossible for them to behave as an adult, but it should be noted, as a modern adult, and it would be quite difficult at this point of history for them to acquire: formal knowledge, formal work, economic independence through wages, and citizen rights, to name the most important.

The modern adult has become above all a rational being, regarded legally as a person, that is, fit for a social order ruled by law, contracts, and remunerated employment.

He is also qualitatively defined by the absence of infancy, what has been reserved for the child, albeit only temporarily, or by having only limited or mediated access to it: the most important aspects including potentiality, possibility, magical thought, and ludic experience. In this sense, adult also is defined by what he no longer “is,” by the infancy that has been left behind, making infancy more effective in the biopolitical realm when it is non-infancy or has been rooted out or concealed.