Abstract
This chapter explores questions of the subjectivities elaborated within accounts of postmodernity by juxtaposing readings of two theorists of contemporary politics and philosophy, Lyotard and Benjamin, who explicitly invoke and address childhood in their analyses. While Benjamin analyses the cultural and political strategies of modernity in his (1929–33) radio broadcasts for children, Lyotard1 claims to explain the postmodern condition to children. I will explore areas of convergence as well as difference that give rise to correspondingly different politics, and politics of childhood. While both accounts threaten to indulge in a romanticization which reinstitutes a model of the subject as abstracted from cultural-political contexts, this abstraction is also used to invoke the possibility of a subversive political imaginary. These familiar rhetorical devices therefore maintain a theme of the child as quintessential or idealized subject within postmodern as much as modern accounts — albeit for contrasting analytical purposes.
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Notes
J-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence 1982–5 (London: Turnaround, 1992).
P. Antze and M. Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (New York/London: Routledge, 1996).
In W. Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955/70).
J-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984).
Scandalously, the thesis was finally rejected by Horkheimer, as revealed in Adorno’s edited collection of Benjamin’s correspondence (reviewed by F. Jameson in London Review of Books, 3 August 1995, pp. 8–9).
Benjamin’s chequered relationship with the Institute for Social Research — as both critic and protector — is documented in detail in M. Brodersen’s Walter Benjamin: A Biography (London: Verso, 1996).
J. Mehlman, Walter Benjamin: An Essay on his Radio Years (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993).
See K. Doderer, ‘A “hermaphroditic position”: Benjamin, Postmodernism and the Frenzy of Gender’ (pp. 76–82); H.T. Lehmann, ‘An Interrupted Performance: on Walter Benjamin’s ideas of Children’s Theatre’ (pp. 179–200) and G. Fischer, ‘Benjamin’s Untopia of Education as Theatrum Mundi et Vitae on the Programme of a Proletarian Children’s Theatre’ (pp. 201–18) in G. Fischer (ed.), ‘With the Sharpened Axe of Reason’: Approaches to Walter Benjamin (Oxford: Berg, 1996).
M. Lowy, ‘Revolution Against “Progress”: Walter Benjamin’s Romantic Anarchism’, New Left Review, 152 (1985), pp. 42–59.
See E. Muchawsky-Schnapper, ‘Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem’, Israel Museum Journal, 8 (1989), pp. 47–52 and Brodersen, ibid.
Roberts, in T. Bottomore (ed.), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 49.
A. Rabinbach, ‘Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism’, New German Critique, 34 (1985), pp. 78–124.
T. Eagleton, ‘Capitalism, Modernism and Post-Modernism’, New Left Review, 152 (1985), pp. 60–72.
S. Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989).
J-F. Lyotard, Economie Libidinale (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974).
See Lyotard’s ‘Presentations’, pp. 116–35 in A. Montifiore (ed.), Philosophy in France Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983);
P. Dews, Logics Of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987) and
V. Descombes, Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Cf. E. Burman, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (London: Routledge, 1994);
E. Burman, ‘What is it? Masculinity and Femininity in the Cultural Representation of Childhood’, pp. 47–67 in S. Wilkinson and C. Kitzinger (eds), Feminism and Discourse (London: Sage, 1995).
D. Frisby, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Prehistory of Modernity as Anticipation of Postmodernity? Some Methodological Reflections’, pp. 15–32 in G. Fischer (ed.), ‘With the Sharpened Axe of Reason’: Approaches to Walter Benjamin (Oxford: Berg, 1996).
See E. Burman, ‘Developmental Psychology and the Postmodern Child’, pp. 95–110 in J. Doherty, E. Graham and M. Malek (eds), Postmodernism and the Social Sciences (London: Macmillan, 1992).
E.g. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Viking Press, 1977),
and F. Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, 146 (1984), pp. 53–93.
See e.g. Burman (1994), op. cit., or ‘Developmental Psychology’, pp. 134–49 in D. Fox and I. Pririlltensky (eds), Critical Psychology: An Introduction (London: Sage, 1997),
and J. Morss, Growing Critical: Alternatives to Developmental Psychology (London: Routledge, 1995).
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Burman, E. (1998). The Pedagogics of Post/Modernity: the Address to the Child as Political Subject and Object. In: Lesnik-Oberstein, K. (eds) Children in Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230376205_3
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