Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy: Children Ex Machina [1st ed.] 978-981-13-6209-5;978-981-13-6210-1

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xv
Why Childhood Ex Machina? (David W. Kupferman, Andrew Gibbons)....Pages 1-15
Front Matter ....Pages 17-17
Franken-Education, or When Science Runs Amok (Andrew Gibbons)....Pages 19-39
The Monstrous Voice: M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (Lauren Ellis Christie)....Pages 41-56
Toy Gory, or the Ontology of Chucky: Childhood and Killer Dolls (David W. Kupferman)....Pages 57-75
Front Matter ....Pages 77-77
Through the Black Mirror: Innocence, Abuse, and Justice in “Shut Up and Dance” (Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo)....Pages 79-92
Your Android Ain’t Funky (or Robots Can’t Find the Good Foot): Race, Power, and Children in Otherworldly Imaginations (Walter S. Gershon, Reagan P. Mitchell)....Pages 93-110
Tension, Sensation, and Pedagogy: Depictions of Childhood’s Struggle in Saga and Paper Girls (Amy N. Sojot)....Pages 111-132
Front Matter ....Pages 133-133
A Utopian Mirror: Reflections from the Future of Childhood and Education in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Island (Joseph Todd)....Pages 135-153
Filling the Mind: Cortical Knowledge Uploads, Didactic Downloads and the Problem of Learning in the Future (Phillip W. Simpson, Andrew Gibbons)....Pages 155-169
Heretic Gnosis: Education, Children, and the Problem of Knowing Otherwise (Adam Foster)....Pages 171-187
“Life is a Game, So Fight for Survival”: The Neoliberal Logics of Educational Colonialism within the Battle Royale Franchise (Travis L. Wagner, S. Gavin Weiser)....Pages 189-207
Front Matter ....Pages 209-209
Children and Pedagogy Between Science and Fiction (Paul Levinson, Petar Jandrić)....Pages 211-226
Correction to: Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy (David W. Kupferman, Andrew Gibbons)....Pages C1-C1
Back Matter ....Pages 227-229

Citation preview

Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories Series Editors: Karen Malone · Marek Tesar · Sonja Arndt

David W. Kupferman Andrew Gibbons Editors

Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy Children Ex Machina

Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories Series editors Karen Malone, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia Marek Tesar, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand Sonja Arndt, The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

This book series presents original and cutting edge knowledge for a growing field of scholarship about children. Its focus is on the interface of children being in the everyday spaces and places of contemporary childhoods, and how different theoretical approaches influence ways of knowing the future lives of children. The authors explore and analyse children’s lived embodied everyday experiences and encounters with tangible objects and materials such as artefacts, toys, homes, landscapes, animals, food, and the broader intangible materiality of representational objects, such as popular culture, air, weather, bodies, relations, identities and sexualities. Monographs and edited collections in this series are attentive to the mundane everyday relationships, in-between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’, with matters and materials. The series is unique because it challenges traditional western-centric views of children and childhood by drawing on a range of perspectives including Indigenous, Pacifica, Asian and those from the Global South. The book series is also unique as it provides a shift from developmental, social constructivists, structuralist approaches to understanding and theorising about childhood. These dominant paradigms will be challenged through a variety of post-positivist/postqualitative/posthumanist theories of being children and childhood.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15731

David W. Kupferman Andrew Gibbons •

Editors

Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy Children Ex Machina

123

Editors David W. Kupferman Minnesota State University Moorhead Moorhead, MN, USA

Andrew Gibbons Auckland University of Technology Auckland, New Zealand

ISSN 2523-3408 ISSN 2523-3416 (electronic) Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories ISBN 978-981-13-6209-5 ISBN 978-981-13-6210-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018968384 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Science fiction let me do both. It let me look into science and stick my nose in everywhere. Octavia Butler Machines have less problems. I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you? Andy Warhol

Acknowledgements

There is a truism about books that they are never the product of one person, and nowhere is that truer than in an edited volume. We are indebted to the 12 contributors to this book, and are thankful for the quality of their chapters as well as the varying directions that they are willing to take us in thinking about childhood, science fiction, and pedagogy. We are also grateful to the publication team at Springer, notably Nick Melchior and Lay Peng Ang, who helped shepherd this book from concept to reality, as well as the three reviewers who offered constructive and encouraging comments. Additionally, we thank Karen Malone, Marek Tesar, and Sonja Arndt, the editors of the series Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, for including this volume. David is eternally thankful to Jen for giving him the time, space, and support to work on this project; and to Soren, Esme, and Geneva for inspiring him to consider (and remember) what it means to be a little monster.

vii

Contents

Why Childhood Ex Machina? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David W. Kupferman and Andrew Gibbons Part I

1

Relationship

Franken-Education, or When Science Runs Amok . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andrew Gibbons

19

The Monstrous Voice: M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts . . . . . . . Lauren Ellis Christie

41

Toy Gory, or the Ontology of Chucky: Childhood and Killer Dolls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David W. Kupferman Part II

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Affect

Through the Black Mirror: Innocence, Abuse, and Justice in “Shut Up and Dance” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo

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Your Android Ain’t Funky (or Robots Can’t Find the Good Foot): Race, Power, and Children in Otherworldly Imaginations . . . . . . . . . . . Walter S. Gershon and Reagan P. Mitchell

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Tension, Sensation, and Pedagogy: Depictions of Childhood’s Struggle in Saga and Paper Girls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Amy N. Sojot Part III

Pedagogy

A Utopian Mirror: Reflections from the Future of Childhood and Education in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Island . . . . . . 135 Joseph Todd

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Contents

Filling the Mind: Cortical Knowledge Uploads, Didactic Downloads and the Problem of Learning in the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Phillip W. Simpson and Andrew Gibbons Heretic Gnosis: Education, Children, and the Problem of Knowing Otherwise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Adam Foster “Life is a Game, So Fight for Survival”: The Neoliberal Logics of Educational Colonialism within the Battle Royale Franchise . . . . . . . 189 Travis L. Wagner and S. Gavin Weiser Part IV

Conclusion

Children and Pedagogy Between Science and Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Paul Levinson and Petar Jandrić Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

Why Childhood Ex Machina? David W. Kupferman and Andrew Gibbons

As a science fiction writer I personally prefer to stand still for long periods, like the Quechua, and look at what is, in fact, in front of me: the earth; my fellow beings on it; and the stars. Le Guin (2000, p. 142).

Abstract Given the plethora of examples from literature, film, and television, science fiction has long offered entry points for analyses of childhood ex machina. The study of childhood from the machine is a critical exercise in understanding not just how the machine constructs childhood but also how childhood from the machine constructs worlds, societies, lives, and relationships. Childhood from the machine churns out truths for worlds—childhoods are world-making truths. This chapter looks at various interpretations of science fiction as a genre, method, and lens through which to consider childhood, asks key questions that frame these analyses, and lays out the structure of the rest of this book.

Introduction Childhood comes from the machine. The machine is the thing that constructs childhood. Childhood is a thing constructed by the machine. The study of childhood from the machine is a critical exercise in understanding not just how the machine constructs childhood but also how childhood from the machine D. W. Kupferman (B) Minnesota State University Moorhead, Moorhead, MN 56563, USA e-mail: [email protected] A. Gibbons Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 D. W. Kupferman and A. Gibbons (eds.), Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_1

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constructs worlds, societies, lives, and relationships. Childhood from the machine churns out truths for worlds—childhoods are world-making truths. As writers on childhood, we would like to stand still and look at, in front of us, and in us, childhood ex machina. Whether through the pedagogical considerations of the short stories of Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, the ontological and metaphysical complications of childhood in AI Artificial Intelligence, the image of the parasitic pregnancy of a xenomorph in Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise, or any myriad other examples, science fiction has long offered entry points for analyses of childhood ex machina. The concern of this edited book is to explore constructions of children, childhood, and pedagogy through the multiple lenses of science fiction as a method of inquiry. Additionally, it seeks new ways of theorizing the intersections of childhood and science fiction, as well as their effects on the social imaginary. The general frame of the book treats science fiction from the Kantian perspective of aesthetics as a first philosophy, in which aesthetics is both disinterested and singular, or rooted not in fact but in a particular form of judgment (Shaviro, 2012). To that end, this book aims not to define science fiction as method, but to broadly approach conceptions and applications of science fiction, acknowledging the fluid boundaries of genre between science fiction, horror, and “the weird and the eerie” (Fisher, 2016). The work in this book does, however, contribute to the discussion of what counts as science fiction, and why science fiction counts. The chapters entertain a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches to remembering children, childhood, and pedagogy, including but not limited to the deployment of new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology, among other philosophical interpretations. This book invites both rethinking and reconceptualizing definitions of childhood and pedagogy through an imagining of possibilities—past, present, and future—enabled by the aesthetic turn to science fiction (in all its potential meanings). Questions of interest in this volume include: • How does science fiction allow us to engage with questions concerning childhood? • How does science fiction highlight the use of children as a plot device that may actually open up spaces for new analyses of sociocultural productions of the child? • How do roles and positionalities of children shift in science fiction from a comparative perspective? • How does a new materialist or speculative realist theorizing affect popular understandings of the artifacts of childhood as depicted in science fiction and horror tales (e.g., dolls, toys, games, etc.)? • What effect does the social imaginary, as rendered through science fiction in various media, have on our perceptions of children as either innocents or monsters? • How does science fiction reconfigure relations of power between and among children and adults? • What do dystopic and utopian imaginings of childhood and pedagogy reveal about contemporary society? • What is a posthumanist ethics in science fiction representations of children?

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• How does science fiction employ technology to complicate our knowledge of childhood and produce new subjectivities? • How does science fiction invite us to understand childhood as machinic? This first chapter engages with the last of these questions, and the associated title of this volume: exploring what it means to talk about childhood ex machina within the broadly delineated fields of childhood studies and science fiction. These questions asked above are questions that invite a complicating of science fiction. While Roberts suggests that it “is probably true to say most critics of SF, even those working currently, are more influenced by structuralist assumptions than poststructuralist ones” (Roberts, 2006, p. 21) inasmuch as they see the genre as requiring the certainty of boundaries and rules, here we are interested in the rule breakers and boundary crossers. Following Roberts (2006), we are keen to resist “purification” of the genre in its application to the study of childhood from the machine. Science fiction resists being simplified and taxonomized and will continue to evolve as a genre on account of the interest in its nature as genre. Although there are no easy or tight or agreed definitions of science fiction, it is worth attempting a definition all the same (Roberts, 2006).

The Uncanny, Gothic Imaginations, and Horror There are important distinctions in definitions of science fiction, horror, the weird, and the eerie, yet we want to explore them and allow them to bleed into each other so that we can more fully question what it is we mean by childhood and how we theorize it. Fisher (2016) notes that Freud’s notion of the uncanny (unheimlich) provides a way of looking outside from within, a primarily psychological gaze. This perspective is opposed to the weird and the eerie, which allows us to look inside from the outside, from an observer’s point of view. The weird is the sense that something is wrong, that something should not be there that is there: the killer doll that suddenly appears among a menagerie of stuffed teddy bears and other animals; the eerie is the sense that something is missing: an abandoned landscape—think Rapa Nui with its Moai looming over an island without its people—or the killer doll that is suddenly gone from the white wicker rocking chair where it was sitting just a moment ago. In that moment, we are confronted with the eerie, which turns into horror when the doll reappears to kill you. So there is an important turn that we make when we move from the unheimlich (internal) to the weird/eerie (external); and within that external space, there is a question of agency. The implications here are manifest for our discussion of childhood: in the first place, childhood studies historically have suggested that constructions of such a subject are indeed psychological, and at worst grounded in developmentalism (see, for example, G. Stanley Hall and the curriculum wars of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries in the USA). This is the construction of the child according to Locke (the tabula rasa) intersecting with Rousseau (the state of nature, the uncor-

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rupted, the naïve, the innocent, etc.). If we are to ascribe to science fiction the characteristic of the unheimlich, then we are penned in by discourses of psychology, the internal, and very narrow prescriptions of agency. That is, there are primarily, if not exclusively, psychological explanations for children’s behavior and growth. There is little if any room for agency, for subject identity formation, in a Foucaultian sense, on the part of the child. Psychology, in a word, has “solved” the problem of the child. Second, we can see that the weird and the eerie are strangeness, but not horror, though they may lead there. And it is in this space of the strange that childhood operates on the social imaginary most effectively, if unnoticed. In the weird, according to Fisher (2016), “we are in the presence of the new” (p. 13), and more specifically in the presence of wrongness. There is something in the weird that requires us to incorporate some element that was not compatible before into a new framework, in order for us to make sense of it. In the film AI Artificial Intelligence (Curtis, Kennedy, & Spielberg et al., 2001), for example, there is the notion of the robot, David, as child, but this is a strange child, a child who does not belong, who does not fit our Romantic notions of the child as naïve or innocent—quite the opposite, the child quickly becomes a threat (notably to another, human, child), and there is an important inversion of subjectivity that takes place once the child is seen no longer as a child, but rather as a robot. It is the unhuman form that takes precedence in his (David’s) identity formation, despite his programming and imprinting on other humans, as if he were a child. Third, we encounter issues of agency when we confront the eerie, as it is unclear who or what is acting when there is a failure of presence. What do we make of the child, for instance, in the movie Children of Men (Abraham et al., 2006), wherein the world is bereft of reproductive potency, pregnancy, and newborn children? In the case of a failure of presence (of children), we are left to wonder what actor/agent is actually at work here? How does the appearance of a newborn—and its importance to government agencies—transform our understanding of agency when it is the failure of presence of children that spells extinction for the whole of humanity? Here, there is no child in the machine—and it is the absence of childhood that dictates agency for the rest of society. Indeed, it is curious and telling that the child in this case exercises its most compelling form of agency by not appearing at all, by its very absence. The child as horrible can be traced back to Hobbes (1651/1985): childhood is a state of war, since all are born in original sin and must be “corrected” in order to engage with the social contract. In this way, children are seen as natural horrors, bereft of sovereignty and, in Leviathan, subject to the whims of their parents, who may sell or trade them, or, ideally, teach them how to “behave.” We argue that this has always been the preferred construction of childhood, and the treacly Romantic notion of children as blank, innocent, or naively perfected in a state of nature is the irruption in a long history of social control and denial of agency. Indeed, one of the more compelling effects of Romantic notions of childhood has been to erase the child altogether. At least from a Hobbesian view, children have agency, even if it is negative agency that must be coercively corrected and controlled (Tesar, Rodriguez, & Kupferman, 2016).

Why Childhood Ex Machina?

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With that, it is important to both suss out distinctions between science fiction and horror, as well as to note where it is they overlap and complement each other. These connections can be seen most readily in the space of Gothic imagination (Roberts 2006). Notably, Shelley’s (1818/1994) Frankenstein is recognized by some as the genesis of science fiction in which “the detailed manifestation of the beautiful strangeness of the monster” (Roberts, 2006, p. 43) operates within the realm of the Gothic, and at the same time “the alienated monster articulates the way “science” cuts itself off from the more organic processes of nature, and in turn functions as a symbol for a modern sense of alienated existence” (Roberts, 2006, p. 44). Here, science and progress generate the horrors that keep horror and science fiction connected. Another line of thought might also contend that Romantic notions of the child in fact are necessary conditions for horror to work, since horror operates most effectively in comfortable, familiar spaces. Here, science fiction and horror operate differently, since science fiction does not need to be rooted in the familiar; instead, we impose the familiar onto science fiction, whereas in horror, we pull the familiar out from under us: “Science fiction returns the audience to the status of a child, forcing them to make sense of a newly discovered world…By projecting the audience’s fears onto a monstrous “other,” horror films externalize internal conflicts, and they force their audiences to try to make sense of them. In this sense, they force their audiences to take a childlike approach…” (Grunzke, 2015, p. 92). Thus, we can theorize the conjunction of horror/science fiction and weird-eerie/unheimlich as fundamentally an outside/inside skirmish. Horror also has very clear notions of agency: it is the agency of the monster, the other, that is primary. In the case of children, then, they are most often reified as innocents, and at worst agentless—they are defined by an empty internal psychology, while the monsters, those outside, are most imbued with agency. They run the show, dictate the plot, and must be destroyed. It is here that horror offers a unique window into childhood, as horror works more effectively when there is a great struggle that results in the slaying of the monster (and by extension, the slaying of agency). It is only when the child, let us say Robbie Freeling in Poltergeist (Kennedy, Marshall, & Spielberg, 1982), is able to disembowel the killer clown doll, and who therefore in that moment becomes the agentic monster, that he is then allowed a return to “normal” childhood, which is innocent and agentless. The child in this example must destroy agency in order to return to a state of nature and state of agentlessness. Robbie becomes the very thing—a killer—that he must destroy, in order to regain his childhood-ness; he must exercise agency in order to rid himself of agency. This phenomenon appears to be the ultimate expression of a Hobbesian definition of the child. We also would do well to say a word or two about intentionality here, since this notion bridges in some ways the gap conventionally theorized between science fiction and other genres. Bukatman (1998) offers a nice summary of the ways in which intention and perception, which are key to horror as well as to the weird/eerie, frame noetic engagements with science fiction. These notions can also be linked to our discussion about agency and childhood, and the child as both ex machina and

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machinic. Theorists of science fiction (to wit, Baudrillard), according to Bukatman (1998), have constructed a master-narrative, one grounded in the centrality of human intention and perception, which has the cumulative effect of inaugurating a new subject capable of inhabiting the bewildering and disembodied space of the electronic environment—the virtual subject…[one the one hand] the function of the genre, then, is to compensate for the loss of the human in the labyrinth of telematic culture by simply transforming it into an arena susceptible to human control…[on the other hand] SF frequently posits a reconception of the human and the ability to interface with the new terminal experience…[and this] space becomes a fundamental part of human (or posthuman) redefinition. (p. 118)

The problems of defining science fiction occur in part because attempting a definition brings to the fore not what we think science fiction does engage with, but rather what we think it ought to engage with—and that philosophical distinction is important for us in this work because we have, as noted above, invited both author and reader to engage with science fiction and childhood in particular ways. For instance, we are not looking for science fiction to offer solutions to the problems of educating children in the twenty-first century. That is a matter of interest to us more as a point of departure for asking critical questions concerning the relationship of childhood to narratives of progress. On the contrary, in this book, each chapter brings that sense of not knowing to the study of childhood. Childhood, like science fiction, does not lend itself to easy definitions. Here, we want to be careful to note that science fiction and childhood are shown to share a number of tensions, importantly a concern for both human work and the concomitant posthuman work: a science fiction writer may be interested in what it means to be a human child, however not for the purpose of privilege. The child’s humanity is at the same time the child’s alien-ness or otherness. In science fiction, androids and aliens demand our rethinking of the meaning of being a human and a child, a theme notably played out in the movie AI Artificial Intelligence (Curtis et al., 2001), an adaptation of a Brian Aldiss short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long (2001). Both the movie and the short story play with the story of Pinocchio: an early child android who sets out on a journey to find a way to become a real boy. It is these kinds of stories that are of significant interest to us in the study of childhood, because they challenge us to consider what counts as a real childhood (Ghiradelli, 2000) and what the reality of childhood means for children, adults, societies, worlds, and galaxies. The attention to technology–human relations in these stories challenges any distinct boundaries between the natural and the artificial, and reveals the analogical relationship between human and machine arguably constructed, and definitely developed, in cybernetic thinking (Kucukalic, 2010). Cybernetic thinking constructs the child as a thinking machine, and the thinking machine is understood largely as operating as a child (Gibbons, 2007). This idea is explored in the movie CHAPPiE (Blomkamp & Kinberg, 2015) in which the “artificially” “intelligent” “robot” appears like a child as it learns about the world. That this child is learning about the world at an apparently advanced rate is of course not a new story, and hence encour-

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ages careful reflection on the ways in which observations regarding the technological drivers of child development fuel anxieties regarding the passing of time. In addition to cybernetics, the science fiction of interest in the present book—that which wrestles with and beyond the tensions between the human and the posthuman—engages in a critique of the psychological sciences. For instance, in the work of Philip K. Dick, the psychological demands of the technological society are recognizable. Dick shares narratives of familiar characters in a world “radically changed by technology, but with vulnerable human subjectivity at its center; the existential loneliness and epistemological uncertainties sometimes allayed only through humans’ interactions with machines” (Kucukalic, 2010, p. 16). With reference to the work of Philip K. Dick, Kucukalic (2010) argues: Science fiction’s keen focus on societal and cultural behaviors and examination of collective and individual ethics enabled Dick to portray the lives of his characters from the perspective of the need for change fought not in the extreme conditions of an isolated heroic individual, but in the everyday life, under realistically described systems of economy and politics. (p. 19)

For the study of childhood in science fiction, the psychological sciences are of interest inasmuch as they typically fail in their attempts to condition the child for a better world. The child’s psychological treatment, or “solution,” reveals the lengths that a society may go to in order to ensure predictable and exploitable educational outcomes. Childhood in this sense is a psychological machine in a technological society.

Science, Identity, and Childhood Studies Citing Damien Broderick, Roberts (2006) presents that science fiction is “that species of storytelling native to a culture undergoing the epistemic changes implicated in the rise and supercession of technical-industrial modes of production, distribution, consumption and disposal” (p. 11). In other words, science fiction is a child of the technological society (science fiction ex machina) that asks both what will we have to pay for our technological progress and who will we be as servants of that progress (Ellul, 1964). Science fiction thereby “reconfigures symbolism for our materialist age” (Roberts, 2006, p. 15). Here, estrangement presents to us something unusual, unfamiliar, different, while the cognitive element suggests that there is something about this strange place that we are compelled to understand, and this is, Roberts argues, where science and technology have a central role. As Shaviro (2016) contends, “Science fiction does not ever actually prove anything; but its scenarios may well suggest new lines of inquiry that analytic reasoning and inductive generalization would never stumble upon by themselves” (p. 9, original emphasis). This reconfiguration becomes evident in the many searching questions that science fiction characters are obliged to ask about their identity as human or as nonhuman other. The radical difference of the other confronts lived reality so as to question that reality. Included here are social realities that present the world in simple terms of good and evil, self and other, center and margins, and so on. Difference, then, is a critical

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concern for writers of science fiction who use the genre to critique experiences of difference, “a means, in a popular and accessible fictional form, for exploring alterity” (Roberts, 2006, p. 17). This element of science fiction lends well to the study of childhood where the interest is the construction of the child as other, and an attention to the voice of the child. It is here, at this moment of other, of alterity, of “us”/“them,” that the contributions of science fiction highlighted above cohere with the field of childhood studies. Childhood studies, like certain subgenres within science fiction, engage with the anxieties of society; in this case, anxieties with regard to childhood. These anxieties are often hidden deeply within the construct of childhood, within the source code of childhood. In childhood studies, the development and impact of this code are of interest in its moral, political, economic, cultural, and social manifestations. The study of childhood reveals how constructions of childhood are formed and how these constructions then inform the structures and relationships of social groups (Ariès, 1962; Jenks, 1996; Tesar, 2016); and in doing so, shares with science fiction an interest in technology and the technological society. The technological society constructs childhoods and keeps churning out new childhoods (Wolff, 2016). Yet childhood is not just constructed in relationship to new technologies—rather, childhood is technology (Ellul, 1964; Gibbons, 2007). Constructions of childhood are in a sense science fiction and certainly provide strong subject matter for science fiction writers. For instance, images and stories of the child as savage or as innocent (Jenks, 1996; James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998) that require physical, emotional, and intellectual intervention, have operated in times and places where chaos is perceived and order is desired (Donzelot, 1979). This is a theme acknowledged in many classic and contemporary science fiction plots (see, for instance, Gibbons, 2014). In addition, science fiction offers childhood studies a further mechanism for revealing the construction of childhood and the normalizing tendencies that can occur around this construction when a disinclination exists to question social constructions of childhood (James et al., 1998; Osgood, Sakr, & de Rijke, 2017; Tesar, 2016). The techniques of normalizing a child’s mind, body, and feelings (including the very Cartesian device of constructing, separating, and operating on these distinct dimensions of the human child) are techniques about which science fiction is compelled to speak. These techniques include a tendency to measure, calculate, and rationalize, since the very idea of childhood is in part a calculation that has been forgotten in its essence, and that leads to a host of taken-for-granted practices through which the child is her chronological age, rather than her observed behaviors and/or relationships. These relationships are also central to childhood studies and to science fiction; notably, family, community, and society as understood in relation to the construction of childhood (Ariès, 1962; Donzelot, 1979). Both the child as normalized and her right to resist normalizations enjoin childhood studies and science fiction in a critique of the modern institutions that engage in the construction of the child, and through which certain narratives of progress and developmentalism abide (James et al., 1998). For both childhood studies and science fiction, these constructions are critical to an understanding of

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modernity and the rise of the industrial and postindustrial society. Science fiction and childhood studies have shared a concern in both the industrial and the digital child. Osgood et al. (2017) assert an amplification of this work, pointing out that there is a predominance of narrow and limiting narratives of childhood. With a focus on “digital environments,” Osgood et al. (2017) argue for “examining ‘the dark’ physical-digital networks of children’s everyday play to challenge established ideas about how children do and should play, and expose a need for educators and parents (and the myriad others involved in the creation of digital resources) to continue to grapple with our conceptions of the child and contemporary childhoods” (p. 109). Science fiction also provides children with an examination of childhood and society. A significant amount of literature engages with childhood, youth, and young adult science fiction reflecting the popularity, successes, and/or demands for this genre, in addition to challenging this genre and the many tropes that impact on children’s engagement with gender, culture, age, identity, and so on. Of the latter of these, we are interested in the very existence of a genre of youth science fiction as different from adult science fiction for how the genre constructs childhood. If childhood studies is an interdisciplinary, philosophical and open field (Tesar, 2016), then science fiction is certainly a legitimate and productive contribution to the study of childhood that draws together concerns regarding the construction of particular and often dominating ideas and relationships. For childhood studies and for science fiction, these ideas and relationships seem to gather around an idea of progress. The study of childhood offers science fiction evidence of the ways in which a society constructs an “ideal mode of existence” (Baader, 2012, p. 487) through the very nature of childhood. That nature then constructs the social and political systems through which both adulthood and childhood come to be known by adults and children. Hence, an analysis of the different thrusts and trajectories in science fiction reveals distinctions that can be generalized and explored in educational terms. While not wanting to delve too deeply here into what counts as educational about reading fiction writ large, science fiction texts—in particular, those that have an interest in a critique of the present, of progress, of society, and of humanity—appear to be teaching some kind of lesson through the imagination of the writer and their implicit (and often explicit) aim to advise and warn the reader of generally grim totalitarian futures. Importantly, Sambell (2004) argues that this purpose for science fiction has become increasingly common in fiction for children and young adults, through which the main themes developed in the work of canonical science fiction writers such as Huxley and Orwell are pitched to a new, younger, audience. For example, Suzanne Collins’ (2008) The Hunger Games series offers up an Orwellian police state full of newspeak and political paradox, connected by a contemporized version of Orwell’s (1986) seeing television in the room. And also like 1984, the future of childhood is used to teach of the violence to come: while Orwell writes of children who dutifully and zealously report on their father who is then taken away for “treatment,” Collins writes of child sacrifice. As children are often labelled our “hope,” so we must recognize that this phantom—the child who never existed, the child we wish we might have been, the child who was lost—is

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D. W. Kupferman and A. Gibbons often indicative of fears for the future. Child sacrifice is a common trope in our society. And beneath it lurks questions of desire, identity, and humanity. (Tan, 2013, p. 55)

These questions concerning childhood have immediate application for children learning about their role in society through and for their education. Science fiction reveals to the child the nature of the system in which s/he is being educated. In this sense, exploring possible spaces and times in the above novels, children are introduced to different forms of educational futures. On the one hand, the State continues to think about the future as something to insure against through education. For instance, education systems seek to create new forms of learning outcomes, in which the learner’s knowledge identity has shifted into the twenty-first century and the postmodern information age. In this version of the present, a child’s education focuses on “unpacking and questioning current practice” and recognizing “that there is a need to do things differently” (Bolstad et al., 2012, p. 62) because policy makers are beginning to prophesize about the inability of the system to sustain the economy. This kind of educational futures thinking reveals the immediacy of a dystopian future, of the problem of the future in the present. Writing on educational futures is typically based in the present, however with quite different views regarding the privilege of the present. Slaughter (1987) explains: … I am more interested in futures in education than I am in futures of education because the former concerns itself with the needs and potentials of real persons in the present while the latter often reflects a more managerial or technical view. The slide from “in” to “of” parallels the immensely greater investment in controlling the future as compared with the more convivial task of facilitating human development in order to create it. (p. 342)

While these messages of a totalitarian techno-deterministic society can be brutal, and at times overly simplistic, science fiction offers something else for learning through its aesthetic. Science fiction as an imaginative and reflective genre offers a lesson in the use of wonder to make sense of the world: “in our learning we must gradually come to be able to take the measure of things, extending that measuring in new and unforeseen ways” (Standish, 2002, p. 157). The aesthetic of science fiction produces new thinking about being; it is poetic and as such offers education more than just a series of warnings (Gibbons & Kupferman, 2019). We have argued elsewhere (see Gibbons, 2014; Gibbons & Kupferman, 2019) that science fiction is underrepresented in the study of education, teaching, and learning. Here, we would like to add that science fiction is and traditionally has been underrepresented in the study of childhood. Works on it are few; and this state of affairs is unfortunate because science fiction offers not just new and different, but also richer, forms of thinking about the present, especially for educational futures engaged with discourses of childhood and pedagogy.

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The Chapters This book includes 10 chapters organized into three sections—on relationship, on affect, and on pedagogy—and concludes with a dialogue on the role of science fiction in childhood studies and pedagogy writ large. The first section focuses on the notion of relationship, between creation/creator, student/teacher, and child/plaything in a variety of genres and stories. In “Franken-education, or When Science Runs Amok,” Andrew Gibbons reads the classic gothic/science fiction tale by Mary Shelley to explore the ways in which conventional progress narratives have been used to proscribe the conditions through which children and childhood are not only defined but also allowed to operate. It is through these tropes of educational and developmental “progress,” clearly bounded by relationships between a student and a teacher, or subject and scientist, that childhood is delineated as monstrous, when in fact it is the creator (in Shelley’s telling, Victor Frankenstein) who is the monster. Gibbons traces how this great literary provocation has been adopted, and at times appropriated, through such examples as Akira (Otomo, 2009), Ender’s Game (Card, 1991), and CHAPPiE (Blomkamp & Kinberg, 2015). The next two chapters deal with the issues of relationship in terms of authority and agency, and their implications for the child’s place in society. In “The Monstrous Voice: M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts,” Lauren Ellis Christie examines how evil is portrayed through the visage of the child in Carey’s (2014) novel, and how childhood innocence is inverted through the educational process and the horrors of humanity sanctioned by government institutions. Drawing from theories of speculative realism and the ontology of things, David W. Kupferman, in “Toy Gory, or the Ontology of Chucky: Childhood and Killer Dolls,” examines how the use of killer dolls in film and television both stand in for and erase the agency of the child. Looking at the examples of the clown doll from Poltergeist (Kennedy, Marshall, & Spielberg, 1982), an episode featuring a ventriloquist’s dummy in HBO’s Tales from the Crypt (Darabont, 1990), and the homicidal Chucky from the film Child’s Play (Kirschner, 1988), killer dolls are seen as both a stand-in for childhood (infantile, impotent) as well as its inverse (misogynistic, murderous) and agentic in a way that children are not. Here, killer dolls and children’s playthings are both a reflection and negation of constructions of childhood, compelling us to consider childhood as complex and ultimately unknowable. The second section probes affect in the convergence of childhood and science fiction, including issues of horror, race, and sensation. The opening chapter in this section delves into aspects of horror and childhood that bring to the fore social fears and taboos regarding children, sexuality, and agency. In “Through the Black Mirror: Innocence, Abuse, and Justice in ‘Shut Up and Dance,’” Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo utilizes queer theory and studies of child abuse to analyze the theme of child as victim. Through a reading of the episode “Shut Up and Dance” from the television science fiction series Black Mirror (Brooker & Bridges, 2016), in which the protagonist is forced to complete more and more horrific tasks—including fighting a man to the death—lest a video of him masturbating to child pornography be made public,

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Nolte-Odhiambo asks how we are to conceive of childhood in terms of victimization, and how both children and their abusers are stripped of their humanity through the dominant discourse. The chapter “Your Android Ain’t Funky (or Robots Can’t Find the Good Foot): Race, Power, and Children in Otherworldly Imaginations” by Walter S. Gershon and Reagan P. Mitchell asks why there are so few children—referring here to early childhood—in works of science fiction, and, perhaps more importantly, why there are almost no children of color (with a corollary query about the lack of science fiction writers of color). Reading science fiction comics such as Monstress (Liu & Takeda, 2016–2017), Saga (Vaughan & Staples, 2012–2017), and Descender (Lemire & Nguyen, 2015–2017) in combination with sonic pedagogies, the authors provide positive counterexamples to both the erasure of children of color in science fiction, as well as to predictable tropes regarding stories of characters of color. Also reading the Saga (Vaughan & Staples, 2012–2017) series, in conjunction with Paper Girls (Vaughan & Chiang, 2016–2017), Amy N. Sojot’s chapter, “Tension, Sensation, and Pedagogy: Depictions of Childhood’s Struggle in Saga and Paper Girls,” explores the interlocking processes of new materialism and affect theory in order to both unravel how we can engage with tensions around pedagogy as productive in incongruous spaces, as well as how our sensual-affective responses to reading physical comic books about (and ostensibly for) children inform ways we speak about how and what it is we know. The third section focuses on questions of pedagogy and the ways that science fiction can reflect our present condition of schooling theory, practice, and policy as well as offer alternative educative possibilities. Joseph Todd, in his chapter “A Utopian Mirror: Reflections from the Future of Childhood and Education in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Island,” looks at two extremes of pedagogical actualization. In the first instance, Brave New World (1958) describes a precisely micromanaged educational experience, where children are economized as little more than assets of the State (though not of their parents); in the second case, Island (1962) offers a childhood experience based on radical forms of community, trust, responsibility, autonomy, and freedom, though just out of reach. In a complementary way, Phillip W. Simpson and Andrew Gibbons write in “Filling the Mind: Cortical Knowledge Uploads, Didactic Downloads, and the Problem of Learning in the Future” of a pedagogy rooted in databanks of knowledge and “learning” that consists of little more than data uploads and downloads. Drawing on Peter F. Hamilton’s The Night’s Dawn Trilogy (2009) and Commonwealth Saga (2005), the authors contend that such dystopian imagery, in which the teacher effectively disappears in favor of pure data, fits neatly within a framework of cautionary educational theories that includes Frierean critiques of the banking model of education, which in this case has run wild (or, perhaps, has fulfilled its speculative destiny). Similarly, Adam Foster writes in “Heretic Gnosis: Education, Children, and the Problem of Knowing Other-wise” of the ways that the all-knowing teacher and knownothing student produced through modernity have erased what he calls the “enchanted epistemology” of childhood. Reading the child’s worldview in the television show Stranger Things (Duffer & Duffer, 2016) and Stephen King’s (1986) novel It, Foster

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argues that such heretical epistemologies challenge the assumptions underlying the social experiment that is school and require us to seek out alternate pedagogical models. In Travis L. Wagner and S. Gavin Weiser’s chapter, “‘Life is a Game, So Fight for Survival’: The Neoliberal Logics of Educational Colonialism within the Battle Royale Franchise,” the notion of dystopian pedagogies offers an examination both of neoliberal educational policies as well as the colonially imposed, and suspiciously American, modern-day school system in Japan. Here, the authors consider Koushun Takami’s (2003) Battle Royale series, which serves as the model for such adolescent dystopias as those presented in The Hunger Games series, and how its focus on individualism and fight-to-the-death competition impacts how we think of school and the purposes of neoliberal education. The concluding chapter, “Children and Pedagogy Between Science and Fiction,” is a conversation between science fiction author Paul Levinson and Petar Jandri´c. In it, they explore connections between children and childhood studies, pedagogy and posthumanism, and science fiction as the frame of reference through which to develop theoretical links between inquiry and narrative grounded in theories of media studies. We are careful to provide a caveat that the idea that it is the science fiction reader who determines what counts as science fiction could be seen as in danger of constructing an exclusive and insular community. Problematically, that community is volatile, fractured, and driven at times by acutely competing agendas. For instance, readers of violent and sexual science fiction comic strips might not agree on feminist politics with readers of Ursula Le Guin, yet they may agree that they both read science fiction. At the same time, both might also find their positions undermined by the wholesale critique of science fiction as populist, common, and juvenile. Common and juvenile, for our purposes here and to be clear, are significant, productive qualities of interest. Whether science fiction is or is not these things is less of interest than the assumption that these things might in some way inform the work that we are attempting to perform here as they relate to childhood studies. In this collection, we are looking for something quite particular in the use of science fiction; as such, we are not concerned so much with what the broad, popular, genre looks like, but rather we are interested in the science fiction that challenges our common sense, taken-for-granted perceptions of a real world. In this way, we argue that we are interested in poststructural, postmodern, postfoundational, and new materialist exercises. The authors herein are critical readers of science fiction for whom their selected (specific) works and (general) themes invite worlds to be challenged.

References Abraham, M., Newman, E., Shor, H., Smith, I., Smith, T. (Producers), & Cuarón, A. (Director). (2006). Children of men [Motion Picture]. USA: Universal Pictures.

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Aldiss, B. (2001). Supertoys last all summer long and other stories of future time. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin. Ariès, A. (1962). Centuries of childhood (R. Baldick, Trans.). London, UK: Jonathan Cape. Baader, M. S. (2012). Childhood and happiness in German romanticism, progressive education and in the West German anti-authoritarian Kinderläden movement in the context of 1968. Paedagogica Historica, 48(3), 485–499. Blomkamp, N., & Kinberg, S. (Producers), & Blomkamp, N. (Director). (2015). CHAPPiE [Motion Picture]. USA: Columbia Pictures Corporation. Bolstad, R., & Gilbert, J., with McDowall, S., Bull, A., Boyd, S., & Hipkins, R. (2012). Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching: A New Zealand perspective. Report prepared for the Ministry of Education. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education. Brooker, C. (Writer), Bridges, W. (Writer), & Watkins, J. (Director). (2016). Shut up and dance [Television series episode]. In C. Brooker (Producer), Black mirror. London, UK: Netflix. Bukatman, S. (1998). Terminal identity: The virtual subject in postmodern science fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Card, O. S. (1991). Ender’s game. New York, NY: TOR. Carey, M. R. (2014). The girl with all the gifts. London, UK: Orbit. Collins, S. (2008). The hunger games. New York, NY: Scholastic. Curtis, B., Kennedy, K., & Spielberg, S, (Producers), & Spielberg, S. (Director). (2001). AI Artificial Intelligence [Motion Picture]. USA: Warner Bros. Pictures. Darabont, F. (Writer), & Donner, R. (Director). (1990). The ventriloquist’s dummy [Television series episode]. In W. Teitler (Producer), Tales from the crypt. Los Angeles, CA: Home Box Office. Donzelot, J. (1979). The policing of families. New York, NY: Pantheon. Duffer, M., & Duffer, R., (Writers & Directors). (2016). Stranger things [Television series]. Atlanta, GA: 21 Laps Entertainment. Ellul, J. (1964). The technological society (J. Wilkinson, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books. Fisher, M. (2016). The weird and the eerie. London, UK: Repeater Books. Ghiradelli, P. (2000). The fundamentals of Gepeto’s philosophy of education: Neopragmatism and infancy in the postmodern world. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 32(2), 201–207. Gibbons, A. (2007). The matrix ate my baby. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Gibbons, A. (2014). “Ah the serenity…” Absurd ideas about educational futures. Set: Research Information for Teachers, (1), 16–23. Gibbons, A., & Kupferman, D. W. (2019). Flow my tears, the teacher said: Science fiction as method. In S. Farquhar & E. Fitzpatrick (Eds.), Innovations in narrative and metaphor: Methodologies and practices (pp. 167–181). Singapore: Springer. Grunzke, A. L. (2015). Educational institutions in horror film: A history of mad professors, student bodies, and final exams. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Hamilton, P. F. (2005). Commonwealth saga. London, UK: Macmillan. Hamilton, P. F. (2009). The night’s dawn trilogy. New York, NY: Orbit. Hobbes, T. (1985). Leviathan. New York: Penguin Books (original work published 1651). Huxley, A. (1958). Brave new world. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Huxley, A. (1962). Island. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers. James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing childhood. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Jenks, C. (1996). Childhood. London, UK: Routledge. Kennedy, K., Marshall, F., & Spielberg, S. (Producers), & Hooper, T. (Director). (1982). Poltergeist [Motion Picture]. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. King, S. (1986). It. New York: Viking. Kirschner, D. (Producer), & Holland, T. (Director). (1988). Child’s play [Motion Picture]. USA: United Artists. Kucukalic, L. (2010). Philip K. Dick: Canonical writer of the digital age. New York, NY: Routledge. Le Guin, U. K. (2000). The left hand of darkness. New York, NY: Penguin. Lemire, J., & Nguyen, D. (2015–2017). Descender. Portland, OR: Image Comics.

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Liu, M., & Takeda, S. (2016–2017). Monstress. Portland, OR: Image Comics. Orwell, G. (1986). Nineteen eighty-four. London, UK: Martin Secker & Warburg. Osgood, J., Sakr, M., & de Rijke, V. (2017). Dark play in digital playscapes. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 18(2), 109–113. Otomo, K. (2009). Akira (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Kodansha Comics. Roberts, A. (2006). Science fiction: The new critical idiom. Oxon, UK: Routledge. Sambell, K. (2004). Carnivalizing the future: A new approach to theorizing childhood and adulthood in science fiction for young readers. The Lion and the Unicorn, 28(2), 247–267. Shaviro, S. (2012). Without criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shaviro, S. (2016). Discognition. London, UK: Repeater Books. Shelley, M. (1994). Frankenstein. New York, NY: Dover Publications (original work published 1818). Slaughter, R. (1987). Futures in education. Futures, 19(3), 341–342. Standish, P. (2002). Essential Heidegger: Poetics of the unsaid. In M. A. Peters (Ed.), Heidegger, education, and modernity (pp. 151–170). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Takami, K. (2003). Battle royale. San Francisco, CA: VIZ Media. Tan, S. S. M. (2013). Burn with us: Sacrificing childhood in The Hunger Games. The Lion and the Unicorn, 37(1), 54–73. Tesar, M. (2016). An overview of childhood studies. Encyclopaedia of educational philosophy and theory. Retrieved from https://link-springer-com.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/referenceworkentry/10.1007/ 978-981-287-532-7_261-1. Tesar, M., Rodriguez, S., & Kupferman, D. W. (2016). Philosophy and pedagogy of childhood, adolescence and youth. Global Studies of Childhood, 6(2), 169–176. Vaughan, B. K., & Chiang, C. (2016–2017). Paper girls. Portland, OR: Image Comics. Vaughan, B. K., & Staples, F. (2012–2017). Saga. Portland, OR: Image Comics. Wolff, K. (2016). Childhood and globalization. Encyclopaedia of educational philosophy and theory. Retrieved from https://link-springer-com.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/referenceworkentry/10.1007/ 978-981-287-532-7_268-1.

Part I

Relationship

Franken-Education, or When Science Runs Amok Andrew Gibbons

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow. Shelley (2009, p. 54)

Abstract The story of Victor Frankenstein is popularly and critically regarded as, among other stories, the story of a mad scientist. In this chapter, that mad scientist narrative is explored in relation to the study of childhood. The relationship between the scientist and the child is examined first through the story of Victor and his nameless monster creation. Mary Shelley’s critique of science is engaged as a critical element of that relationship. The chapter then examines three further relationships of children to science and scientists through the stories of Ender Wiggin, Tetsuo, and CHAPPiE. In each narrative, Promethean problems are revealed for the study of childhood. The chapter concludes with the provocation that Victor Frankenstein’s failing was not his apparently failed experiment but rather his failure to care for the monster.

Introduction Victor Frankenstein’s warning that opens this chapter is a warning that offers insight for the study of childhood. Learn from his example and seek the happy life of ignorance in which the whole world is already present in our lives. Greatness, it follows, is defined not by the greatest scientific experimentations in the name of progress, but by the art of living the simple life. In this chapter, Victor’s tragic journey towards this discovery is explored as an exemplar of the concern, in science fiction, with the A. Gibbons (B) Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 D. W. Kupferman and A. Gibbons (eds.), Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_2

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meanings and experiences of science and progress. This concern with science and progress is then taken as a theorization of the study of childhood, the sciences of childhood, and the study of the sciences of childhood, including in particular here the educational sciences. When we consider the name Frankenstein, popular imagery often conjures the prominent forehead, closely cropped black hair, bolts protruding from the neck… an image first portrayed by Boris Karloff in the 1931 adaptation of Shelley’s (1818/2009) Frankenstein: Or A Modern Prometheus. Over time, the character that had no name has become associated, particularly by children, with his creator’s surname. The tendency to think of the “monster” or “daemon” as “Frankenstein” is an important provocation, not just because the creation may take on the surname of the creator but because the monster is Victor Frankenstein. In other words, what at first appeared as some kind of interpretative error had always already been a provocative truth. This element of Victor’s character is particularly imagined, in this chapter, through Victor’s abandonment of his work and his creation. For Brown (2003), it is not just the creation and the creator but also both the novel itself and the very idea of childhood that are the monsters at work. The novel is, he argues, “the unformed, inchoate existence of childhood” (Brown, 2003, p. 145). In this chapter, the problem of identifying the monster in these relations is engaged through science fiction with a particular focus on the child and childhood as objects of the sciences of learning. To these ends, four relationships are explored: Victor Frankenstein and the monster; Colonel Shikishima and Tetsuo in the movie Akira (Otomo, Suzuki, & Kat¯o, 1988); Colonel Graff and Ender Wiggins in the movie Ender’s Game (Hood, 2013); and Deon and CHAPPiE in CHAPPiE (Blomkamp & Kinberg, 2015). Each relationship offers a particular take on childhood: the childlike monster creation of adult parts; the lab child experiment gone wrong; the child superweapon in a galactic war; and the AI as child. Each narrative engages with continuities and apparent distinctions in the development of these different constructions of “child”. These children are of interest for their various manifestations of monstrousness, and for their constructions as the subject of the sciences of childhood and education. With a focus on each creator-creation relationship, the chapter explores fictional challenges in the identity and experiences of the child and their scientist. Progress is identified as a central concern in these relationships and, in a sense, is shown in this chapter to be the source—the thing that presences monsters and monstrous acts. These literary acts are taken as provocative imaginations of when science runs amok (Napier, 1996) in its tinkering with childhood.

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation. (Shelley, 2009, p. 47) But to open oneself with hope to the Promethean endeavor is also to recognize its error and terror, its madness within. (Hassan, 1977, p. 847)

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Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley’s novel has the acclaim of many students and scholars of science fiction for being the first of the genre. For Brown (2003), this quality lies in the myriad interpretations of the novel’s style and meaning, its form and its impact—a quality that lends to his exploration of the novel as the monster. There are indeed many competing positions on Shelley’s intentions with the novel. Certainly, there is a popular reading of the work as a critique of imperial science and progress. Alternative readings suggest that the novel is a simple ghost story devised to win a competition among authors keen to scare their audience; a tale of repressed and predominant sexualities; and a biography of a young writer’s relationships with her parents and wider world (Brown, 2003; Ellis, 1999; Haynes, 1995; Hindle, 1990; Lecznar, 2013; Nagy, Wylie, Eschrich, & Finn, 2017, 2018) and most importantly here, a tale about childhood (Brown, 2003). Each of these interpretations enhances Shelley’s contribution to science fiction—each possible narrative being an entirely reasonable premise and purpose for a science fiction novel. Hence, in her work, Mary Shelley forges a critical scholarly pathway for science fiction—a pathway which certainly many science fictions have also failed to notice in their attempt to contribute to the celebration of science and progress, writing fiction which has entrenched anthropocentric ways of thinking about the world and beyond in the minds of the science fiction reader (as discussed in Chap. 1). Rather than celebrate science, the novel and its film adaptations of the novel have contributed to a fear of science and progress, promoting “Western society’s deep anxieties about genetic engineering, IVF, and the human genome project”, or at least to the idea that Western society has a deep anxiety (Haynes, 1995, p. 435). However, according to Haynes (1995), the cinematic productions fail to engage with the depth of Shelley’s thinking and in particular with the question that Victor is essentially asking throughout the novel: what have I done? This question is contrasted to the writing, and the reading, of novels and films for which the overriding mantra is “yes we can” and hardly ever, “but should we?”—a question evident in the work of Biesta (2016) who looks at the role of the teacher in inviting this latter question, and whose critique of measurement cultures is informative in wondering what kind of child is being created in the age of big data and gold standard sciences. That kind of science and science fiction that celebrates human achievement in the pursuit of progress, and of the humanization of the universe, is the kind of interest in this chapter. In Shelley’s novel, the power that the idea of progress holds is introduced in Walton’s letters. In Letter 1 to his sister Margaret, the narrator says: “I may there discover the wondrous power which attracts the needle and may regulate a thousand celestial observations that require only this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent forever” (Shelley, 2009, p. 4). Great discoveries compel this “adventurer”. But why? What is this urge to render the world consistent and predictable forever? And now, dear Margaret, do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose? My life might have been passed in ease and luxury, but I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path. Oh, that some encouraging voice would answer in the affirmative! (Shelley, 2009, p. 6).

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Walton is warned by Frankenstein: “You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been” (Shelley, 2009, pp. 22–23). In Frankenstein offering this warning, he accounts for his being “deeply smitten with the thirst for knowledge” (Shelley, 2009, p. 32) as a cause of his misfortune. What had been a source of delight turned into a frustration, and a compulsion to reveal “the secrets of heaven and earth … whether it was the outward substance of things or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquiries were directed to the metaphysical, or in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world” (Shelley, 2009, p. 34). The modern systems of science were insufficient for Victor because they didn’t go far enough. He refers to Newton’s sensation of being “like a child picking up shells beside the great and unexplored ocean of truth” (Shelley, 2009, p. 36) and referred to Newton’s “successors in each branch of natural philosophy” as “tyros engaged in the same pursuit” (Shelley, 2009, p. 36). Frankenstein then observes that the modern scientist knows no more and is no more useful to the pursuit of truth, than a peasant. The untaught peasant beheld the elements around him and was acquainted with their practical uses. The most learned philosopher knew little more. He had partially unveiled the face of Nature, but her immortal lineaments were still a wonder and a mystery. He might dissect, anatomize, and give names; but, not to speak of a final cause, causes in their secondary and tertiary grades were utterly unknown to him. I had gazed upon the fortifications and impediments that seemed to keep human beings from entering the citadel of nature, and rashly and ignorantly I had repined. (Shelley, 2009, pp. 36–37)

Unlike the untaught peasant, and the Newtonian physicist, Frankenstein, rashly, obsessively, and ignorantly, strives to create a being on his laboratory table. His imagination and fantasy drives his work in alchemy and science, driven not by ideas of wealth but of glory. His search for meaning in his work was confronted by the revelation that the visionary alchemists who so inspired him were largely disregarded in science. However, while being forced to take account of Modern scientific discoveries, Victor’s interest in intersections of science and alchemy was theorized thus: In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery and wonder. A mind of moderate capacity which closely pursues one study must infallibly arrive at great proficiency in that study; and I, who continually sought the attainment of one object of pursuit and was solely wrapped in this, improved so rapidly that at the end of two years I made some discoveries in the improvements of some chemical instruments, which procured my great esteem and admiration at the university. (Shelley, 2009, p. 51)

The story of Victor Frankenstein is then an exploration of the story of science, the role that science can and does have for communities and societies, and a story of the desires of the scientist situated within (and against) their social worlds. This aspect of the novel has had a critical and enduring impact on the ways in which science and scientists are characterized and, paradoxically, demonized throughout the twentieth

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and early twenty-first centuries (Nagy et al., 2017). Hindle (1990, p. 29) argues that “early-nineteenth-century science had much more of an impact” on the novel than is typically allowed for by critics. The question of science is raised not just because of the alchemy that occupies Victor’s desires and labors, but because the novel itself attends very little to the actual work done in stitching together and giving life to a collection of body parts. In defence of Shelley, Laplace-Sinatra (1998, p. 259) argues that “Shelley integrates the scientific dimension of her novel within the text by simultaneously eliminating traces of science and retracing these elements in the sub-text of the main narrative.” Ellis (1999, p. 28) suggests “the creature is created by invoking both contemporary science and an older tradition of necromancy and alchemy” (Ellis, 1999, p. 28). Ellis (1999) emphasizes that the science isn’t as haphazard as claimed, arguing that in Victor’s story “we see the history of the scientific revolution, and the Enlightenment, being played out in miniature” (Ellis, 1999, p. 29). The difference between being science and being about science is important here. The book is set in the last year of the eighteenth century—a year that for Hindle is significant on account of “a cluster of related events and people—all linked to science” (1990, p. 31). “Scientific knowledge, as had been the case from the seventeenth century, was knowledge that was verified in public” (Ellis, 1999, p. 13). In other words, if there were no open access to the design and results, then the work was not a work of science. Science is open, while alchemy is secretive (Ellis, 1999). This criterion of science is, for Ellis (1999), an important indication of the nature of Frankenstein’s work—the work was barely revealed to Frankenstein himself, let alone Frankenstein’s public, or the reader. Frankenstein has a reason beyond his inability to understand what he did (whether through sloppiness or grief). He argues that “the power he now possessed was too great for the mere human scientist to bear” (Ellis, 1999, p. 40)—only a god or titan can wield the power. “The public knowledge demonstrated by his discoveries is not scientific but moral and political” (Ellis, 1999, p. 40). Who is entitled to this power? According to Prometheus, humans are entitled to the power—hence the Titan of Greek myth offers up the knowledge of fire to humanity (Beller, 1984). By the time of the Enlightenment man has forgotten Prometheus’ gift entirely, and now believes the gift to be inscribed in natural law. Ironically, the appeals to the laws of nature that underpinned Enlightenment sciences (Taylor, 2013) arguably at the same time began the process of isolating the scientist from the “common man” (Camus, 1995), the untaught peasant, and the social world, fanning the flames of science and fuelling the madness of the scientist. Now, Victor is never referred to as a scientist (there being no such named professional at the time), but rather as an artist (Hindle, 1990)—this is an important point for understanding his madness, his failings, and his alternatives. Hindle (1990) states, in neither the novel nor the then contemporary society, does the word scientist appear in use. He is a “man of science” (Ellis, 1999, p. 27) but not a scientist. Interest in science during the Enlightenment did not equate to a dry and clinical view of the world. “Coleridge compared the chemist to the poet as one searching through a multiplicity of forms for unity of substances” (Hindle, 1990, p. 30). Those who had a concern for knowledge of the material world “thought themselves to be as much

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philosophers as scientific workers, and were concerned to maintain their status as thoughtful interpreters of a world which they nevertheless studied primarily in its material aspects” (Hindle, 1990, p. 29). How is it that this way of thinking about science appears to have been forgotten? For defenders of the work of scientists, the answer is the novel written by Shelley (see below for a development of this point). For others (for instance Heidegger, 1993), science and progress have become inseparable from technology, and technology inseparable from exploitation. Science is bound into the exploitative relationship of technology in the shift from, for instance, the poetic and artistic endeavors of the artisan or “craftsman’s” revealing as artist or poet (Hindle, 1990), to the “revealing that rules in modern technology” as a “challenging … which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supple energy which can be extracted and stored as such” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 320). For instance, science is drawn into Modern technology to deduce the most efficient means of employing technology. More than this, the essence of enframing is a forgetting of other modes or forms or relationships of presencing that are obscured and/or neglected. The science of the fiction is then a critical element to explore in understanding the failures of Victor in his care for his work—care here being a dimension of politics, morality and ethics. Is this treatment of Victor unfair? He is certainly a thoughtful interpreter of the world and talks of the benefit of his work for the world. While Haynes (1995, p. 435) agrees, she argues he is driven by something more selfish: “Victor’s research originally derives more from hubris, later dressed up, like many a modern application for a research grant, to sound beneficial to humanity.” Haynes explains that in “Frankenstein, the pursuit of science is most obviously associated with the desire for power, in particular power over nature and over the limitations of the human condition” (Haynes, 1995, p. 437). The story of Victor Frankenstein is then a story of scientific and technological progress and in particular the desire for power manifest in inventions from atomic bombs, to genetic engineering, to AI, to behavioral drugs—with little to no consideration of the scope of impact on individuals, communities, and ecologies (Haynes, 1995). Some of the elements that lead to this moralistic reading have been considered to be Victor’s ability to sacrifice everything for his work, including his sanity, his “God complex”, and his disrespect for ethical and moral conventions (Nagy et al., 2017). Victor also models a scientific failure to consider the application of the invention in terms of questions concerning who makes the decisions about a discovery’s applications, and who benefits from the applications, an oversight that is based on a failure to recognize that science rarely if ever has universal benefit and that benefits are typically distributed along existing patterns of privilege and power. The madness of science and scientists has then become a lens through which to understand twentieth and twenty-first-century developments. That Shelley’s novel is one of the most influential narratives for the way in which science and scientists are popularly imagined is a problem for scientists (Nagy et al., 2017). In part, this is because, Nagy et al. (2017) claim, the public do not just enjoy the narrative as a myth, they use the myth to guide their attitudes to “real-world” science. Science–public relations are, in other words, mediated by Mary Shelley’s novel from two centuries

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ago. There is an “instinctive reality” (Nagy et al., 2017, p. 1143) to the work, that doesn’t require actually reading the novel, or for that matter even watching any of the cinematic productions—although the cinematic productions, and in particular the ways in which they develop the scientific elements of the novel for contemporary audiences, are argued to be quite influential in creating the public perceptions of the dangers posed to society by scientists. That the novel is “widely perceived as the preeminent tale of modern hubris” (Nagy et al., 2017, p. 1144) is a problem for scientists who regard their work as guided not by hubris but by strict codes of moral and ethical behavior and for whom the public good is their central motivation (Nagy et al., 2017). In the claim that “Frankenstein crystallized an old fantasy into a modern myth, linking humanity’s endless pursuit of scientific discovery to ancient narratives of forbidden knowledge like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods” (Nagy et al., 2017, p. 1144) lies some of a complex and multifaceted answer. The perceived problem here is the ancient fantasies, not the endless pursuit of discovery. The “public” are essentially wrapped up in a convenient and naive myth that stigmatizes scientists as dangerous megalomaniacs and are either unable or unwilling to work with new narratives. This is particularly the case for sciences in fields of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence (Nagy et al., 2017). The development of the stigma both comes from a fear of the unknown and change helps manage that fear, and, according to Nagy et al. (2017), entrenches a preference for more predictable, familiar, and safe scientific research. The self-perpetuation of this relationship occurs as a result of scientists then becoming coy or secretive about their work, concerned that the work will be vilified, and in so doing amplifying the mystery and the doubt (Nagy et al., 2017). Following Nagy et al. (2017), it is not the scientist but the fiction writer and the media who are to blame for the public perceptions of scientists. The novel is indeed the monster not just because of its unruly structure, its departure from novelistic style and rules, and its resistance to being pinned down for its meaning (Brown, 2003) but because of the narrative reinforcement of negative views of the scientist. Given the power of narrative to shape views, Nagy et al. (2017) argue that scientists need to look for empowerment in new, more accurate, narratives of scientific successes and contributions, and of the ethical and moral behavior of scientists. The problem of normalization that is associated with sciences of education and development (Cannella, 1997) is ironically also seen to be a problem for scientists subjected to the specter of Victor Frankenstein—Shelley’s character and novel have, according to Nagy et al. (2017) argument at least, manufactured the stigma of madness that undermines the work of the scientist. Nagy et al. (2017), following the line of a Foucauldian critique of the psychological sciences, argue that the history of classification of people as having some kind of illness and the association of illness with deviance leads to negative experiences in society. They explore the experience of stigma in order to show how the scientist experiences negative labeling, stereotyping, is discredited, and experiences a loss of social status. Scientists, as with other people who experience stigmatization, “tend to consistently devalue themselves because society does not accept them for who they are” (Nagy et al., 2017, p. 1150). The scientist is being positioned as the real victim here—and

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this positioning, or perceived positioning, is worth engaging with in considering the complexity of the scientist–child relationship that is the focus of this chapter. While the educational and psychological sciences have mutually stigmatized many social groups, here the scientists themselves are the subject of poor treatment at the hands of the public. The tendency to normalize, to regard people as needing treatment or being corrected according to a norm, seems to have been overlooked here. It follows that if scientists are to combat the stigma then they need to be more involved in public debate to properly represent their work; however the way in which they represent their work may reinforce negative perceptions. As a result of this dilemma, scientists tend to stay out of the media and of public debate (Nagy et al., 2017). In order to address the possibilities of poor representations, Nagy et al. (2017) recommend embracing the power of narrative. This involves first understanding the impact that Frankenstein has on their identities and the reception of their work. An alternative might be to engage in public debate about the ways in which “science always operates in advance of the ethical discourse and hence of the moral preparedness of society” (Haynes, 1995, p. 438). If ethics committees cannot protect society from corporate interests (Haynes, 1995) and science is not open on account of “economic rationalist policies” (Haynes, 1995, p. 438), then public debate becomes the opportunity for science to dissociate itself from the stigma and to be, in a sense, loved and loving—to show that they do not and will not abandon the products of their educational scientific experiments. In exploring how scientists can manage, and move on from, the specter of Victor Frankenstein, Nagy et al. (2017, p. 1144) recognize that the novel “is often seen as a warning that research can easily become dangerous if irresponsible scientists, driven by their obsessive pursuit of scientific knowledge, defy the ethical principles of science”. “Frankenscience” is a term used to stigmatize “sciences that are perceived as dangerous by the public” while “Frankenstein syndrome” refers to a fear of those sciences and their creations (Nagy et al., 2017, p. 1145). The novel’s success and its popular interpretations indicate not that the public loves science, but rather it loves being scared, and that scientific work is suitably scary. Scientists might lament then that they might be viewed as Frankenstein’s children and that without the failings of their father they would be free to experiment. The public might lament that science typically fails to ask the right questions concerning not whether it can create beings, but whether it should (see for instance Biesta, 2016). Exploring the ethical dimensions of one’s work involves understanding the social and political implications. Victor, Haynes (1995) argues, dedicates his whole life to a successful experiment and all the while overlooks a simple equation of acceptance that is revealed to him at the moment of life-giving to the monster. The living monster becomes another being that Victor has to engage with (when throughout the novel he spends considerable energy at cutting himself off from the social world). Victor’s failures may be symptoms of his isolation (Haynes, 1995). Cut off from society, he can disregard the rise of his ambition to create and at the same time overlook the importance of necessary elements of being able to relate to that which he creates. Cut off from

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nature, he develops a spiritual sickness (Haynes, 1995). His close friend Clerval, a minor exception to the rule of his isolation, highlights the condition Victor is in through his (Clerval’s) concern with “the moral relations of things” (Shelley, 2009, p. 34), contrasted to Victor’s interest in the assemblage of disparate body parts and a failure to recognize the whole (Haynes, 1995). In Frankenstein’s defence, he reflects that any scientific pursuit that harms a love of life is “not befitting the human mind” (Shelley, 2009, p. 57). Not only this but he then goes on to castigate the scientist who, in his lust for unlocking the secrets of the world, fails to care for the “the tranquillity of his domestic affections” (Shelley, 2009, p. 57). He surmises where the scientist takes seriously this ethic of care he would live in a world where “Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed” (Shelley, 2009, p. 57). This realization however does not appear to extend to a care for the monster of his creation. Victor fails to recognize his child with even a name (Hindle, 1990). Victor the mad scientist is the monster and the murderer here, consumed in an elaborate and “inextricable doppelgänger relationship” (Haynes, 1995, p. 436). Could he, like Caesar, have responded with different feelings for his work? The daemon fruitlessly invites Victor to consider this alternative: “Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due” (Shelley, 2009, p. 118). In Victor’s “highly suspect” motivations for status of the god that creates a being and all the piety and deference he imagines this would create in the mind of the being (Hindle, 1990, p. 34), he fails to consider what caring for that being might actually entail. Victor’s passion and his imagination drive him on until the point of apparent success, instantly followed by a realization: “the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart” (Shelley, 2009, p. 60). The privilege and excitement associated with parenting become the mistake of ownership rather than care and/or responsibility. At the same time as revealing, through Victor’s shame and despair, the exploitative tendencies of his work, Shelley reveals the way in which Victor and his wider social world fear and loathe the Other (Brown, 2003). “I expected this reception,” said the daemon. “All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by dies only dissolute by annihilation of one of us.” (Shelley, 2009, p. 117)

The failing of Frankenstein is not that he made something grotesque, soulless, or daemonic, not that he succeeded in performing a forbidden and unnatural performance, but rather that he failed to exercise an ethic of care for another being—a being whose becoming constantly reminds him that the Promethean gift should be understood in relation to the Pandoran box.

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The Troublesome Promethean Children of Science Fiction Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even YOU turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred. (Shelley, 2009, p. 158)

This section explores the Promethean problem in Frankenstein and a selection of more recent science fiction works. While Frankenstein’s creation, the daemon monster, recognizes himself as a child and has a problem with this (Brown, 2003), the children below, with the notable exception of CHAPPiE, are not concerned with being children, with their childishness. Having child-like qualities are, in other words, only a problem in Shelley’s work. All the same, their stories and the stories of their creators take up Shelley’s themes, and do so in ways that enrich the contribution of Frankenstein for the study of childhood.

The Weaponized Child There is a science fiction storyline that is not played out by Shelley in relation to the potential misadventures of the creation—a narrative that has had many literary and cinematic iterations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in which the outputs of science are turned to the art of war. What if Frankenstein had some more influential friends in the military who were looking for an advantage in the European political affairs of the time? In Ender’s Game (Hood, 2013), the task of driving and applying science is taken up by a world government, the International Fleet that, through the course of the film, is observed to have lost its moral compass. The relationship between military leader Colonel Graff, child psychologist Major Anderson, and child prodigy Ender Wiggin evidences the amalgamation of the art of war and the sciences of child development. Ender is the experiment that Colonel Graff invests in, in order to triumph over the Formic. The Formic attacked earth. The governing International Fleet decides to develop a programme that harnesses the potential of a generation of smart and fearless children raised on a diet of war games. In the movie, Graff explains why children are the weapons of choice in this war, drawing on contemporary models of the plasticity of the child’s brain. The children are subject to all forms of educational experimentations in order to produce their maximum effectiveness as weapons. They accept this role, are proud to be experimented upon, because they accept the war propaganda and know that their very birth was a contribution to the war effort. The sciences of Ender’s creation don’t have any kind of a clear objection to the war, and only to the toll of the programme on the children. Graff exemplifies the extent the military will be willing to go to with the science in their hands. Graff is patched into each child’s brain through a neural shunt that enables him to see and hear through their eyes and ears. He can then manipulate their

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environments to test out different responses. For instance, with Ender, he looks for the opportunity to isolate Ender and create a sense of rejection. The psychologist Anderson, the actual scientist in the plot, says of Ender: “He has a complicated response to authority. He wants to please the over bearing father figure but resents the lack of reciprocated affection.” In a conversation with the Colonel, she challenges: Anderson: You really don’t see them as children do you. Graff: When the war is over we can have the luxury of debating the morality of what we do. Anderson: When it’s over what will be left of the boy? We are using these children to win the war… When they come home it’s my job to put them together again At the climax of the plot, Ender, the daemon, rages against Graff, crying of the shame he will bear for apparently decimating an entire species. Graff responds: Graff: We won that’s all that matters. Ender: No, the way we win matters. Ender, like the monster, is not monster enough. Ender is at times cute, always precocious, and burdened by demons. His monstrosity is his burden to bear as he becomes more attuned to Colonel Graff’s game. However, Ender is also the instrument of the Formic, who use their advanced hive mind and powers of intergalactic telepathy to intervene in Ender’s programming. They not only succeed in destabilizing his mental and emotional wellbeing but they also succeed in creating a new humanity of welcoming the Other, resulting in Ender’s commitment to saving their species. Both the Formic and the International Fleet have created an educational mind game that can’t be controlled: a Franken-education. Ender realizes that Graff and the Fleet might actually be the enemy. Meanwhile, the Formic communication with him leads to their own downfall, not realizing that, in Ender’s immortalized military advice that begins the movie, once he empathizes with his enemy then he defeats them. In other words, through reaching out to him, they created a bond with him, and that bond enabled him to plot their downfall. Ender is the monster “constructed like a machine” (Haynes, 1995, p. 439) by the sciences of educational machinery. This machinery externalizes the child’s education through appeals to causes and effects, and the efficiency of the system in creating a particular output with little to no questioning as to the desirability of that output (Biesta, 2007). Hence, the educational sciences of concern for Biesta (2007) overlook the critical role of debate not just for education, but as education. He states that there is “always the question as to whether particular interventions are desirable” (Biesta, 2007, p. 9). The most important question for Victor as an educational scientist is not about whether he can effectively create a learning being but of the educational desirability of such a creation. This includes questioning the educational desirability of the normalized idea in whose image the learning child will be constructed: Who will define ‘perfection’, or even the ‘norm’? If we produce the ‘perfect’ child, what opprobrium will attach to those who fail to ensure such ‘perfection’ for their children, and

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Even if the sciences of childhood and education can establish the most efficient techniques for guiding the child in their development, the question remains as to who has defined the trajectory as desirable, and how it is that they took seriously the question of social and cultural values associated with their desires. Guiding policy makers, teachers, and communities away from questions of value to questions of efficiency guides societies away from education. This trend is particularly evident post World War II when the sciences of childhood and education intensified their efforts to produce particular kinds of populations. Science was experiencing somewhat of a peak in popularity, evident in the heroic portrayals of scientists in the science fiction of the time (see for instance Hirsch, 1958)—a brief golden period for the scientist when contrasted to the general vilification of scientists in science fiction (Nagy et al., 2017). This is a narrative of Enlightenment thinking in futurist policy development, promising “a rational, perfectible world in which all social problems would be solved by the application of rationality, epitomized in science” (Haynes, 1995, p. 437). The child is subjected to intense observation, “surveyed repeatedly … charted in texts and measuring devices”, for the scientists of childhood to establish “normalized and normalising vision of childhood with the express purpose of alerting them to the presence and diagnosis of abnormality” (Rose, 1996, pp. 183–184). This normalization of the child dates back to the times in which Shelley was fleshing out Victor Frankenstein’s madness. This is the beginning of the century of childhood (Ariès, 1962), in which “an abundant literature began to flourish on the theme of preservation of children” (Donzelot, 1979, p. 9). New disciplines of paediatric science emerged focused on the body and mind of the child and on the production of a moral order. Note here, that the question of aims, at least in a Foucauldian reading of the disciplinary knowledge of childhood, cannot be separated from the sciences of observing and experimenting with the child. The horrors of two world wars and the presumed reality of the cold war fuelled this intensification. For instance, Walkerdine (1988) argues that Piaget’s work can be understood as a scientist’s contribution to the end of war through the educational technologies producing a just society. The developmental sciences have made a considerable contribution to the construction of the child out of the machine—and in so doing have arguably contributed to the subsidence of questions concerning educational aims. The child is known as this or that subject on this or that developmental trajectory (Walkerdine, 1988, p. 202), a product of a scientific way of thinking about the nature of child development (Cannella, 1997; Walkerdine, 1988). It is in this climate that twins and triplets are separated at birth in order to study their development in alternating family settings and parenting styles (see Wardle, Read, & Hughes-Hallett, 2018) in order to classify not just the child but the world around the child. The techniques that ostensibly are implemented to intervene in the production of the monster (the desired outcome

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being the production of the perfect child) not only actually produce the monster, those techniques are monstrous. In Ender’s Game, the question of desired outcomes is treated a little differently. Graff is asked the question of whether he should be tinkering with Ender’s programming, but rejects it on the grounds of a desirable outcome no matter what the cost. This desirability resides in an “enlightenment belief” in the power of the natural sciences, and “is well illustrated in the construction of child development” (Cannella, 1997, p. 58). After Frobel, others in education have connected “the Romantic philosophical and literary idealization of nature and its conflations with idealized childhood (via the likes of Rousseau, Wordsworth, Thoreau) into the scientific practices of observing and validating nature’s truths about children and learning” (Taylor, 2013, p. 43). The sciences of childhood, development, learning, and education elevate “scientific observations” as “quasi-religious acts, bringing observers closer to the divine truths of nature” (Taylor, 2013, p. 45). The educational scientist builds the model of the child in their own, desired, image: as a normal, natural, curious scientist, attendant with qualities seen as both critical and exemplary in the identity of the scientist. This identity might be “good for growing consumers and capitalist entrepreneurs, but it does little to prepare children to deal with the already entangled and increasingly interconnected, boundary-blurring and hybridizing global world that carries the challenges that I have identified above” (Taylor, 2013, p. 117). The suggestion here then is that the child that comes out of this kind of educational machine knows only that machine—the world is populated by scientists who have no connection to alternative ways of thinking about childhood, about education, and about the human and more than human condition. The child scientist is unaware of their construction as scientist and unaware of the particularity of their ways of thinking about the world. Is this the monster that is being created in a system determined to be an efficient machine that produces the perfect, and exploitable, child of developmental and educational sciences?

The Experiment Gone Wrong Child Like the monster in Frankenstein, in the early manga film Akira (Otomo et al., 1988), a science dream becomes a horrible reality that the Government spends significant energy and resources to cover up. Akira is a child test subject for a government intent on unleashing the potential of the child in the will to progress. The children in the narrative are observed to have special powers, and could be, like the character Tetsuo, any child—hence all children have the potential that will be of interest to the scientists seeking to solve the riddles of bio-power (in a radical science fiction extension of the Foucauldian concept). Akira is a failed experiment with catastrophic consequences. In Neo Tokyo, only a select few know the cause of the destruction of a large chunk of the city. And few people know that hidden under the ruins is a secure military storage unit that

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contains the remains of the failed experiment. As with Frankenstein’s work, the public is unaware of the actual experiment. While there is much dialogue in the movie to ponder, a few conversations between ¯ a scientist, Dr. Onishi, and a colonel, Shikishima, are of particular relevance to the Promethean story and the exploration of Frankenstein and Franken-education. The teenager Tetsuo has accidentally crossed paths with a child who is a part of the Akira project. The Doctor calls in the Colonel and they discuss his special powers, ¯ evident from an accumulation of data on Tetsuo. Onishi regards Tetsuo as a key to the mysteries of human potential, mysteries that had been unleashed in Akira. ¯ Shikishima then asks Onishi whether they will be able to control the power of Tetsuo and wonders whether this Promethean gift might be better left alone. He answers his own question: “But we have to. We have to touch it and control it. If it looks like it’s too much for us to handle, terminate him at once. There can be no hesitation.” And then, standing by the Akira vault: Look at what they abandoned in their panic. They were afraid. They were too scared, so they hid it away from the public. They forgot all shame and honour… and cast off the civilisation and science we had created, and shut the lid of the Pandora’s Box they themselves had opened.

The theme of science running amok comes from Akira. These dialogues of earnest conversations play with many of the critiques of science and scientists that are associated with Frankenstein and in this section are explored for their perceived impact on science and scientists. The critical narrative in Akira is then one of the monstrosities of the sciences of childhood in attempting to unleash some kind of ¯ potential in the child. The scientist Onishi is determined to experiment with the child in order to unlock this potential—and this regardless of the warnings of previous failed experiments, and regardless of the warnings, however thin, of the colonel. The scientist’s attitude towards the children is reminiscent of Victor’s towards the ¯ daemon. Onishi regularly refers to the children by their laboratory number: they, like the daemon of Victor’s creation, have no name. They are raw material to be tested on the basis that within them is some kind of exploitable energy. However, unlike the daemon monster of Victor’s creation, these children had a name, and have that name stripped from them in the process of turning them into laboratory experiments. And in contrast to Ender’s Game, it is the military character that reaches out to the children, referring to them by name not number, and recognizing each child as a child: Shikishima risks his life to connect with each child and at the same time ¯ to save the city from another disaster. Meanwhile, Onishi stares longingly into his instrumentation looking for evidence of the growth of potential that might both ¯ explain the mysteries of life and become a resource to exploit. Unlike Victor, Onishi doesn’t run scared from the laboratory upon seeing what he has created. He stares longingly into his instrumentation urging Tetsuo on in his monstrous transformation; and staring into his instrumentation is how he perishes, consumed by the mystical ¯ energy that Onishi has unlocked from Tetsuo in this experiment gone wrong. As with Frankenstein, the story of Akira plays on a fear of science and a tendency to expect the worst of scientists—and in both Ender’s Game and Akira, at their worst

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when intervening in the lives of children. And as with Shelley’s work, there is a complex interplay between the idea of the Romantic and the Scientist. According to a Romantic critique of society’s influence on the child, Akira and Tetsuo might be seen as evidence of what happens when adults intervene in the natural processes of growth. However, the Romantics are talking in similar languages of potential unleashed, albeit the natural potential that cannot emerge when disrupted by the social world (see for instance Taylor, 2013). Froebel (1887) alerted his society to the idea that the younger the child, the closer to nature, and hence the heightened concern for controlling (through negation of the industrial interferences) the child in their environment. And yet, in their work, they laid the seeds for further sciences to take root, sciences that took the nature of the child as the object of their disciplinary gaze—as the very gaze itself. More than this, the turn of the Romantics, Progressivists, and others towards an ideal child in and of nature, and in developing the nature of that natural child, is a political movement (Taylor, 2013) that creates its own monsters—including the mythical monster of the natural child who has become the object of contemporary sciences of childhood. The story of Tetsuo in Akira offers a counter-narrative to, and a critique of, the discourse of potential that proliferates in the sciences of education and childhood (see for instance Arndt, Gibbons & Fitzsimons, 2015). The movie explores the extents that these sciences are willing to go in the name of unlocking the child’s potential through their education. Each child in the education system is in a sense living a version of Tetsuo’s life—children subjected to more or less experimental techniques designed to unlock something that is imagined to be exploitable. When those experiments fail, and when the child’s potential is not the imagined potential that the sciences of education and childhood have in mind, the educational and developmental scientists, like Victor, run from the scene, leaving the child to navigate a world that regards them as the unloved, feared, daemon monster.

The Creation that was Loved A strange measure for ordinary and in particular also for all merely scientific ideas, certainly not a palpable stick or rod but in truth simple to handle than they, provided our hands do not abruptly grasp but are guided by gestures befitting the measure here to be taken. This is done by a takin which at now time clutches at the standard but rather takes it in a concentrated perception, a gathered taking-in, that remains a listening. (Heidegger, 1971, p. 223)

Haynes (1995) and Hindle (1990) both play with the idea that a late twentiethcentury reader will be less inclined to reject the monster. A postmodern Victor, like a postmodern reader, would think quite differently about his creation and its relationship to physical and intellectual norms, perhaps even moral norms. The monster might not be discriminated against or damned, at least not in the same way. How would they be treated? Guided by this question, the final narrative to explore is a movie with more evident ironies that play out the key element of Frankenstein’s story in contemporary contexts and directions. For this task, the chapter explores the story of CHAPPiE in the movie of the same name.

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Briefly, in CHAPPiE (Blomkamp & Kinberg, 2015), a damaged robotic police officer (CHAPPiE) is programmed with an experimental AI consciousness (by Deon/maker) and then stolen by a gang (Ninja and Yolandi/mommy and Amerika)—chaos ensues. There is a strong resonance between Deon’s and Victor’s work. Victor’s largely accidental research on electricity is critical to his animation of life. The Promethean qualities of electricity (Beller, 1984) are regarded as the “‘vital fluid’ animating all living things” (Hindle, 1990, p. 33). The human soul “shares its life-nature with electricity” (Hindle, 1990, p. 34). Electric beings like CHAPPiE would then be considered to have not only life, but also soul. Perhaps this is one reason that work on artificial intelligence tends to be regarded with suspicion, as noted above. Certainly, there is much concern with the moral and political message that should be considered in the creation of coded life. What is more, in CHAPPiE, the coded creation quickly becomes the scientist, evolving the research on artificial intelligence. There could perhaps be no more symbolic scene than the moment when CHAPPiE makes sense of their predicament and resolves to discover a solution to his limited lifespan—sitting in bed with “mommy” reading the children’s story, The Black Sheep, (a gift from the maker Deon who had been searching the internet for the entry: when babies talk). The story does much more than speak to the science of learning language. To CHAPPiE, the story offers a language of survival and identity. CHAPPiE, blessed with a supercomputer brain, refuses to admit defeat and turns from created to creator—experimenting with and then succeeding to transfer not only their electronic consciousness but also that of Yolandi, or mommy, and of Deon. Like Victor Frankenstein, Deon is engaged in the creation of life. And like Victor he is successful. Unlike Victor, his work is not conducted in isolation, at least not all of it. The science and the scientists in CHAPPiE compete in both the public and private spheres. Deon is a celebrity for his design of police robots. He is responsible for an advanced police force that has provided a military solution to the problem of crime in Johannesburg. His corporation and the city are profiting from his creation. Deon’s celebrity is an ironic device for the plot. Yolandi, desperate to find a way to “raise” money and save the lives of the gang, advises Ninja that all they have to do is switch the AI robot police force off, and that in order to do that they just need the switch, which they presume the creator Deon has—and Deon is easy to track down and kidnap on account of his celebrity. Deon is also working in private. His dream is a fully self-realizing artificial intelligence and for him, the evidence of that would be a poetic machine, a machine whose measure of the world was not enumerated. With this personal project rejected by his employer, he continues his research privately with devices that he shouldn’t be taking off site. The point at which he resolves to continue his work in private is the point at which he gazes at the cat in sunglasses in the poster pinned to his cubicle wall: Craft life, don’t let life craft you. The message here resounds throughout the narratives. It is at first a motivational message and then, in the context of this story and the others in this chapter, a very naive and dangerous message that Victor, Deon, and the colonels might have taken more care to consider. Reinforcing the trope of the mad scientist, Deon is just crazy and obsessed enough to not spot the paradox here. He is

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not, however, as crazy and obsessed as Vincent, his competitor and colleague who is opposed on spiritual/religious and scientific grounds to the AI design, preferring a human–robot interface linked by a neural helmet. Vincent is an ex-soldier turned engineer who offers a moral rejection of science at the same time as being the mad scientist. His ego-driven affection for his creation, the monster MOOSE that has no (apparent) mind of its own and is simply a militarized wireless prosthetic appendage connected to a human, drives him through a series of questionable decisions. The most questionable of these is the shutting down of the entire AI robot police force when advised in jest by the police force that the only way they would be interested in purchasing the MOOSE would be if things got a whole lot worse in Johannesburg. Deon is unaware of Vincent’s mad plan on account of his own obsession that results in CHAPPiE’s creation. When Deon creates CHAPPiE, rather than fleeing the scene like Victor, Deon instead suffers separation when the robot lands in the possession of the gang that had planned to kidnap Deon, mistakenly thinking they could then control the police force. Deon refuses to leave his creation in the hands of the gang and convinces them to let him visit in order to care for CHAPPiE. In doing so, Deon becomes the kind of creator and father that Victor failed to be. Deon has a particular interest in understanding how he managed to create an artificial intelligence and how this creation would develop as an intelligent being, but he approaches his responsibilities to care for CHAPPiE with an openness and commitment to wellbeing that makes a difference for the robot. He maintains this ethic of care even at times where CHAPPiE rails against Deon, having been advised by the gang that they were put in a broken body with a defective power source and had a limited lifespan. Deon, in his defence, asks: how was I supposed to know that you’d become you? His admission of his own failing to imagine what would arise from his laboratory table is taken in an altogether different direction than that of Victor, who throws down his tools and runs away. Deon takes responsibility and interest. Deon recognizes CHAPPiE as CHAPPiE—and indeed CHAPPiE has a name. Perhaps it is this gesture, as well as the black sheep narrative, that fuels CHAPPiE’s will to look for a solution to the problem of their defective body. If it wasn’t for this care, CHAPPiE wouldn’t have the drive to save themselves and hence wouldn’t develop the technology to save Deon and Yolandi. Perhaps also it is the gesture of poetry that Deon offers when he brings CHAPPiE paint and a canvas, offering CHAPPiE tools for a different approach to understanding the world. Victor can learn from Deon in his openness to “the challenge of living peacefully within an increasingly complex, interconnected, mixed-up, boundary-blurring, hybrid and radically uneven world characterized by difference (human and morethan-human)” (Taylor, 2013, p. 116). It is perhaps through exploring and making sense of the problem of seeing childhood creations as artificial as the moment of reconsideration that would make the difference for Victor. Let us imagine he has read Reconfiguring Childhood (2013) by Affrica Taylor. Why this book? He initially grabbed the book because the word reconfiguring got his attention—perhaps someone had some clues as to how to stitch disparate body parts together in the creation of a new being?

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Victor would also be introduced to a different kind of science fiction, not utopian, or dystopian, but heterotopian. “Heterotopias are similar to utopias, but instead of representing perfectly imagined alternative societies, they are ambiguous in-between spaces that remain as a part of the existing ‘real’ world while offering possibilities beyond it.” (Taylor, 2013, p. 32). Following Foucault, Taylor (2013) invites Victor to see the monster as a creation that reveals the problems of nature and creation. Rather paradoxically, it is now science’s job to validate Nature’s impeccable credentials to do its own thing. Three centuries after Rousseau offered his ‘negative education’ thesis, we now seem to have come full circle. But these days, it is science that decrees that we must return these endangered children to Nature and trust that Nature alone will restore, heal, guide and teach them…. (Taylor, 2013, p. 57)

Victor wallows around in this relationship between science and nature. He wants to perform the miracle of nature, and having done so, observes what he has made as unnatural. He has broken the very laws of Nature to which he aspires and abides. He has created the anti-Nature, the unnatural, the monster. And yet, what he has created could have woken him up from this ontological slumber, to observe the hybridity of being in a mixed-up world (Taylor, 2013) that the monster represents. The monster challenges our world-making distinctions. Like the monster and like Victor who sees his unnatural self in the monster’s image, “we” all have multiple and complex belongings: we do not need to seek them, they are in and around and through, before and after us. These belongings are evident to us when we take a particular turn, a shrugging off of a kind of thinking and a learning to live with difference that transcends boundaries of human and machine, adult and child, creator and created. Through Taylor’s lens, Victor Frankenstein is taken by the idea that there is nothing unnatural about his work. He sees not a daemon but an “interestingly variegated” childhood (Taylor, 2013, p. xiv). This is a way of thinking that can be seen in Deon’s introduction of the arts to CHAPPiE—efforts to show that artificial intelligences can take up poetic measurements of the world. Following Heidegger (1971), in poetry, an altogether different understanding of measurement is felt, an understanding and a feeling that invites a different kind of thinking for Victor. The kind of enumerating, technical and instrumental measuring that Victor understands and applies “is confined within a quantity and order which can always be determined at a glance” (Heidegger, 1971, p. 224). Rather than grasping at the creation of a being, Victor would, as the poetic scientist, let being be. However Victor is an “incorrigible” and misguided Promethean man (Laplace-Sinatra, 1998, p. 256) and succeeds only in letting the being be in his urge to flee the laboratory and imagine that he had never chosen his path and created, in himself, the monster. The argument here is that a turn to the poetic offers scientists of childhood and education the kind of measurement that will help them to avoid Victor’s most significant mistake.

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Conclusion Alas! Why does man boast of sensibilities superior to those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst, and desire, we might be nearly free, but now we are moved by every wind that blows and a chance word or scene that that word may convey to us. (Shelley, 2009, p. 115)

Victor Frankenstein had an insatiable desire to create life but chose to do so out of body parts from graves, rather than procreation with his intended wife, Elizabeth. Why does he reject the bedroom for the laboratory? This line of thinking lends weight to the literary critique of Shelley’s more or less explicit concerns regarding gender and sexuality. Victor Frankenstein’s creation is not what he imagined and is a life of its own (Nagy et al., 2017), if indeed he actually imagined anything. The pressing question, and the central concern in this chapter, is not the question of why he created life, but why he abandoned it. What is it about Victor, about his relationship with the world, that drives him to succeed at creating life and failing to see the beauty of that creation? If he had procreated with Elizabeth, and she had given birth, what would have prevented Victor looking upon his child with the same horror? If, as some critics and theorists argue, when Victor looks upon the monster what he is looking at is himself (Brown, 2003; Haynes, 1995), what he is horrified by is himself. What then is to prevent him from being horrified by himself when he looks at his “natural born child”? Victor can be freed from the responsibility of being creator. There is in a sense no maker, only making-relationships. In this state of being and belonging, Victor still engages in the making, but without the self-idolization, and without the idea of saving the world. For science and scientists, their work with children and childhood then is released from an idea of the “heroic rescue of ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘deficit’ childhoods and no miraculous antidote for postmodern childhood disorders” (Taylor, 2013, p. 115). This is not a call for a “dreadful morality” that “results, exactly like absolute cynicism, in making men despair and in keeping them from taking responsibility for their own life with all its weight of errors and greatness” (Camus, 1995, p. 240). Rather, it is a return to the idea that scientists are “beings who are facing moral dilemmas and who recognize that science alone is an inadequate guide for the choices they must make” (Hirsch, 1958, p. 512). “This is not about abandoning children to an unforgiving world, but recognizing where they come from in order to be able to make some useful response” (Taylor, 2013, p. 115). To Taylor, useful means to provide children with a kind of approach to the world that is more in tune to the crises of metanarratives, in other words, to shrug off the cloak of modernity that still hangs on the shoulders of children in order to fully connect with the complexity that is supposedly postmodernity: whether considered economically in terms of the loss of job security; environmentally in terms of understanding the implications of the ongoing use of land, space, air and water; or politically in terms of the constant shifts in communities and cultures. The stories recounted above suggest not just that writers continue to enjoy playing with the Frankenstein narrative, but that they see that science fiction still has a role

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to play in telling stories of the failures of science and progress. The very success of this “misshapen novel” is itself a reminder of the possibilities for rethinking the ways in which the monster is known and cared for (Brown, 2003, p. 147). The direction of this chapter has been to consider the implications of Victor Frankenstein’s urges in relation to the urges of the child development and educational sciences. The purpose in drawing in these authors to the discussion is not to show that there is a more authoritative or legitimate approach to studying the problem of science and childhood, but rather to present some of the arguments to which science fiction can and does contribute.

References Ariès, P. (1962). Centuries of childhood (R. Baldick, Trans.). London, UK: Jonathan Cape. Arndt, S., Gibbons, A., & Fitzsimons, P. (2015). Thriving and surviving: The incredible problem of constructions of normality and otherness in early childhood settings. Global Studies of Childhood, 5(3), 279–290. Beller, M. (1984). The fire of Prometheus and the theme of progress in Goethe, Nietzsche, Kafka, and Canetti. Colloquia Germanica, 17(1/2), 1–13. Biesta, G. (2007). Why “what works” won’t work: Evidence-based practice and the democratic deficit in educational research. Educational Theory, 57(1), 1–22. Biesta, G. J. J. (2016). The beautiful risk of education. New York, NY: Routledge. Blomkamp, N. (Director & Producer), & Kinberg, S. (Producer). (2015). CHAPPiE. USA: Columbia Pictures. Brown, M. (2003). “Frankenstein”: A child’s tale. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 36(2), 145–175. Camus, A. (1995). The wager of our generation. In Resistance, rebellion, and death: Essays (J. O’Brien, Trans.) (pp. 237–248). New York, NY: Vintage International. Cannella, G. S. (1997). Deconstructing early childhood education: Social justice and revolution. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Donzelot, J. (1979). The policing of families. New York, NY: Pantheon. Ellis, M. (1999). Fictions of science in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Sydney Studies in English, 25, 27–46. Froebel, F. (1887). The education of man (W. N. Hailmann, Trans.). New York, NY: D Appleton & Co. Hassan, I. (1977). Prometheus as performer: Toward a posthumanist culture? The Georgia Review, 31(4), 830–850. Haynes, R. D. (1995). Frankenstein: The scientist we love to hate. Public Understanding of Science, 4, 435–444. Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetically Man Dwells. In M. Heidegger, Poetry, language, thought (A. Hofstadter, Trans.) (pp. 211–229). New York, NY: Harper & Row. Heidegger, M. (1993). The question concerning technology. In D. F. Krell (Ed.), M. Heidegger, Basic writings (pp. 311–341). New York, NY: Harper Collins. Hindle, M. (1990). Vital matters: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Romantic science. Critical Survey, 2(1), 29–35. Hirsch, W. (1958). The image of the scientist in science fiction: A content analysis. American Journal of Sociology, 63(5), 506–512. Hood, G. (Director & Writer). (2013). Ender’s game [Motion Picture]. USA: Summit Entertainment. Laplace-Sinatra, M. (1998). Science, gender and otherness in Shelley’s Frankenstein and Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation. European Romantic Review, 9(2), 253–270.

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Lecznar, A. (2013). Aryan, German, or Greek? Nietzsche’s Prometheus between antiquity and modernity. Classical Receptions Journal, 5(1), 38–62. Nagy, P., Wylie, R., Eschrich, J., & Finn, E. (2017). Why Frankenstein is a stigma among scientists. Science Engineering Ethics, 24(4), 1143–1159. Nagy, P., Wylie, R., Eschrich, J., & Finn, E. (2018). The enduring influence of a dangerous narrative: How scientists can mitigate the Frankenstein myth. Bioethical Inquiry, 15, 279–292. Napier, S. J. (1996). The fantastic in modern Japanese literature: The subversion of modernity. London, UK: Routledge. Otomo, K. (Director), Suzuki, R., & Kat¯o, S. (Producers). (1988). Akira. Japan: Toho. Rose, N. (1996). Inventing the self: Psychology, power, and personhood. New York, NY: Routledge. Shelley, M. (2009). Frankenstein: Or the modern Prometheus. Melbourne, Australia: Penguin (original work published 1818). Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Walkerdine, V. (1988). The mastery of reason: Cognitive development and the production of rationality. London, UK: Routledge. Wardle, T. (Director), Read, B., & Hughes-Hallett, G. (Producers). (2018). Three identical strangers [Motion Picture]. USA: Neon.

The Monstrous Voice: M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts Lauren Ellis Christie

Abstract “The Monstrous Voice” explores constructions of childhood, pedagogy and posthumanism in The Girl with all the Gifts. This chapter will consider traditional tropes of science fiction, whilst questioning the fluidity of this genre with horror and fantasy. A disease that neurologically hijacks the host, turning them into a “hungry”, infects the protagonist. However, due to her age, Melanie remains psychologically juvenile, innocent and vulnerable. The unique narrative voice of such a naïve character emphasises the brutality of mankind (questioning the definition of a monster), the impact of her pedagogical upbringing, and the role of scientific intervention. This chapter will explore the relationship between the reader and the protagonist, regarding Melanie’s struggle against instinct generated from this artificial parasite. Above all, it will show the development of Melanie’s character, how her love for education enhances her maturity and how she is forced to decide the best course of action ensuring the future of mankind.

True horrors in life are often either a result of human evil or the destructive force of nature. What happens, therefore, if both horrors were to combine and engulf the world of a vulnerable child protagonist? M.R. Carey’s The Girl with all the Gifts explores a post-apocalyptic and infected world where the “hungry pathogen”, Ophiocordyceps, is in the process of destroying humanity. This parasite hijacks the neurotransmitters of the body, artificially controlling the actions of the host. The primary function after infection is to spread the pathogen further through bodily fluids, turning the host into a “hungry”. The significance of the “monstrous voice” in this novel is monumental due to the fact it is that of a child. Traditionally, in literature and popular culture, monstrous figures are grotesque in appearance and horrific in behaviour. Rarely are they portrayed as vulnerable. As demonstrated in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the eloquent voice of the Creature can often counteract outward appearances, thereby influencing the readers’ relationships with the so-called monster. L. E. Christie (B) University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 D. W. Kupferman and A. Gibbons (eds.), Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_3

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The Girl with all the Gifts is the story of a young child viewed by society and government officials as a monstrous figure. This chapter will demonstrate the importance of narrative voice in the development of the protagonist, Melanie, and will examine the flaws in humanity as witnessed through the eyes of a child. In Carey’s world, this pathogen does not become fully destructive until pubescent maturity. Therefore, although Melanie is biologically infected, at the age of ten she remains in control of her psychological functions. This voice of innocence magnifies the brutal world surrounding her, building a relationship with the reader. Often, in horror and science fiction, children represent innocence and vulnerability against a background of evil and corruption. The child characters in this novel are crucial to Carey’s overall message: criticising the state of humanity, Melanie’s artificial pedagogical upbringing and the arrogance of man interfering with nature. This urges the reader to consider the concept of children ex machina. The intentional presence of children in this novel succeeds in heightening terror for the reader. Witnessing the brutality these children are subjected to, both by humanity and the controlling nature of the disease, is exploitative of a child’s vulnerable nature. This chapter will examine the inclusion of childhood and pedagogy in a novel that is a combination of science fiction and horror. Understanding the role children have in reflecting these issues in the text will simultaneously examine the intentional presence of vulnerable children in Carey’s post-apocalyptic world. These posthuman children are crucial to the overall understanding of the novel as a scathing depiction of the cruelty of mankind, and abuse of science over nature. Due to the biological construction of the children as posthuman beings, this notion can be taken further to consider how children are actually part of a machine that masquerades as an infection. Not only are these children victims of an ecological accident generated by man, but within the government facility and through Melanie’s narration, it is clear that they are also entangled in the machine of pedagogical testing and scientific experimentation. They are now children of a new posthuman world, and serve as a reminder of the lost children (and childhood) of the past. Carey unfurls a narrative, gradually revealing that Melanie is a posthuman, “infected” child; this prompts a reconsideration of posthuman figures and scientific power. External appearance concealing horrors within is a key theme throughout the novel. This is present through the infection controlling Melanie’s neurological responses; Carey’s mention of the creation myth, Pandora, and her box concealing the evils of the world; external appearance masking internal evil is also evident with the brutal actions of humanity as documented by Melanie. Melanie demonstrates a love for knowledge and history for a world that no longer exists due to the infection. As humanity attempts to birth a new civilisation in this post-apocalyptic world, Melanie’s purity of ethics, morals and understanding are likewise, at this stage, uncorrupted by the negative examples of mankind that she is exposed to. Each section of this chapter will explore key issues raised by the text, and will relate back to our understanding of juvenile pedagogy, humanity and childhood. The first section, “Man versus Melanie”, will analyse the pedagogical upbringing of the child protagonist as she attempts to understand the environment and characters that surround her. Significantly, Melanie is never informed of her condition. As a result,

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Melanie’s awareness is heightened as she attempts to unlock the secrets of her past. This chapter will examine the development of key characters, and their interaction with Melanie, a biological Other, from the beginning of the novel. Key passages will highlight instances where Melanie demonstrates deeper levels of humanity than the so-called human survivors; this, in turn, examines of the fragile state of mankind under pressure. The next section, “The Animal Within”, studies the animalistic representation of Melanie, and considers how this reflects her unusual biological condition. Carey reveals that Melanie’s sense of her own childhood and educative background have been an illusion in order to mask a government-controlled facility. Once the characters are forced to flee this environment, they enter unfamiliar territory infected by feral “hungries”. Melanie’s behaviour in these surroundings questions the role of instinct. The remaining human survivors removed Melanie at birth from her natural environment, and placed her in a forced, unnatural world for the benefit of scientific experimentation. This not only highlights the brutality of man in the name of scientific progress but also the ethical issue of imprisoning a vulnerable child. It is only when these figures of authority are forced into the outside world, they learn to trust Melanie as her repressed natural instincts are revived in order to ensure their survival. “Ophiocordyceps and the Future of Mankind”, the subsequent section, examines the scientific and science fiction make-up of the novel. The characters must explore a hostile world, plagued by an infection that they cannot understand. Whilst Melanie’s love of knowledge is central, education remains a primary theme throughout. The human survivors must learn about the infection that destroyed mankind. This pragmatic view of education is extended to a moral level, as each individual must decide on the level of cruelty that they can ethically accept in the treatment of Melanie and the other infected children. Biological separation between Melanie and humanity enables Carey to indirectly question the ethical boundaries of the characters and the reader. This scrutinises the difference in behaviour between the innocence of childhood in a universal sense, and the corruption and panic brought about by environmental uncertainty in the future. Melanie’s abundance of emotion and ethical understanding throughout the novel is, to some extent, a direct result of her upbringing and the work of her teacher, Miss Justineau. Although research on the posthuman character as empathic and emotional remains highly debated, Daniel Dinello proclaims: “Human extinction brings a technologized posthuman figure that lacks joy, empathy, and happiness” (2005, p. 13). Carey’s controversial depiction of a posthuman character enables a reconstruction of this viewpoint. Whilst this novel explores the posthuman child of the future, other tropes traditionally related to Science Fiction are present, such as unease around technological advancement and environmental uncertainty. Edward James discusses the trend of modern Science Fiction in examining “death and destruction on a large scale… in the face of a dangerous universe” (1994, p. 18). The Girl with all the Gifts explores a world infected by an uncontrollable disease generated by scientific intervention, a common enough trope in alarmist Science Fiction. However, the novel demonstrates

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a fluidity between different literary genres: “Horror calls on… death and the unknowable; fantasy draws its inspiration from mythology and folklore… much of sf is concerned with… possibilities presented by scientific… change” (James, 1994, p. 3). The graphic reality of the “hunger” in this novel offers the reader elements of horror; Melanie’s love for mythology is introduced through education; whilst the novel depicts a post-apocalyptic world commonly seen in genre fiction. One trope that Carey’s novel strictly adheres to is the necessity to question the behaviour of humanity after societal order disintegrates; “Sf writers have often been more interested in speculating about how disaster might cause the slow breakdown of society, rather than its total elimination” (James, 1994, p. 90). Global devastation through Ophiocordyceps removes traditional law and order from society. The voice of the protagonist is that of naive purity, allowing Melanie to scrutinise the behaviour of man, the artificial origins of the outbreak and the future of mankind, all under the objective auspices of the outsider. Each of these themes prompts a more intricate analysis, examining societal behaviour, eco-concerns and anxieties over science: in the novel, the behaviour of man highlights the brutal treatment of children; the abuse wrought by scientific intervention is evident from Melanie’s pedagogical upbringing; development of the infection urges a reconsideration of posthumanism. Ophiocordyceps results in new generations of “infected” children that are capable of emotive responses. Melanie’s narrative allows the reader to consider posthuman characters who retain emotion, values and ethics. Melanie’s actions will result in a new generation of infected children—children with the ability to coexist with the pathogen, representing the dawn of a new era of humanity.

Man Versus Melanie Melanie’s narrative represents the voice of the Other; an Other that is victimised and punished by authority figures despite her vulnerable state. Exposure to this narrative offers insight into Melanie’s mind, demonstrating the purity of her nature. As a contrast, the behaviour from scientists and the army officials forces the reader to question the evolving ethics of humanity. Regarding the nature of change in both human and posthuman characters, Stefan Herbrechter notes, “It is not so much human “nature” but humanist values, human rights and human dignity that are at the centre of change… which also raises deeper and more far-reaching questions concerning the reinvention and transformation of the human as such” (2013, p. 44). The brutality demonstrated throughout the novel through the abuse of power from science, and the harsh nature of the military, demonstrates the broadly unkind and uncaring transformation within human society. The novel begins by introducing several characters that are crucial in the development of Melanie’s character, as they starkly abuse her vulnerability. It is not until further into the first section of the novel that Carey reveals information about Melanie’s infected condition and her deceptive environment. This part of the present chapter will begin by analysing the segregation of Melanie from other characters

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in her isolated surroundings, and will examine specific passages that demonstrate emotional vulnerability, a willingness to learn, and her exceptional intellect. Unease for the reader continues to build throughout the novel with Melanie’s vulnerable narration. The inclusion of children as a primary focus, in a world that is crumbling through disease and societal corruption, is a successful depiction of the concept of children ex machina and what this says about the desperation and cruelty of humanity. Whilst this concept can be viewed with negative connotations, for example, the use of children as a cheap and common plot device, Carey’s novel demonstrates the opposite. In this world, Melanie’s narration presents a chilling account for the reader of the brutality and cruelty of the corruption of mankind. Carey’s intentional inclusion of children in this novel succeeds in heightening the level of fear for the reader. Although children, by nature, trust the adult figures in their life, the adults in Melanie’s world are selfish and deceptive. The true danger comes from the child’s inability to recognise the monstrous qualities in humanity. Eventually, the brutal force and experimental treatment that they are subjected to alerts the children to the fact that adults cannot be trusted. Melanie’s exceptional intelligence provides a chillingly detailed account of her surroundings, as her peers are removed individually, and killed for the purposes of scientific exploration. In this world, Melanie feels as though there is only one adult she can trust—her teacher Miss Justineau. The bond between these characters strengthens throughout their journey, with Justineau frequently defending and protecting Melanie’s emotional well-being and safety. Contrasting with this maternal behaviour, Dr. Caldwell is the government scientist employed to investigate the origins of the infection. Caldwell is one of the most threatening figures for Melanie, as she demonstrates no remorse in experimenting on the children. She is unflinchingly determined to find a cure to ensure the survival of mankind at any cost. Contributing to this threat, Sergeant Parks is an army official who exercises no remorse in his brutality towards Melanie, both verbally and physically. Analysing the construction of Melanie as both a biological and emotional outsider furthers Carey’s emphasis regarding the flawed nature of mankind. Carey’s depiction of a monster wearing the mask of a child provides the reader with a character that is pure of intent, an as-yet uncorrupted figure of humanity. The novel immediately segregates Melanie by introducing her as “the black girl” (Carey, 2014, p. 1). Drawing attention to Melanie’s racial difference creates an Other out of this character. As Edward Said argues, “For there to be an ‘us’, there has to be a ‘not-us’, an Other… the opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’, or between man and not-man” (1995, p. 8). Patricia Kerslake offers a more in-depth explanation of the Other and the self that is pertinent for our purposes: “The Other has always been and must always be perceived as different and as the ‘outsider’. For the Other to possess narrative power, it is vital… [that] they are different and apart from us. They are outside” (2007, p. 9). Both definitions emphasise the necessity of perceiving a sense of “self” identity in order to appreciate the isolation of Melanie. It is only through truly appreciating a sense of one’s own self (including flaws) that the reader is able to comprehend ways in which Melanie is truly isolated in all senses of the word.

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Intellectually Melanie stands out within the facility. Heightened levels of perception and ability isolate her from her peers, and further threaten the human survivors. Not only do the survivors possess no knowledge on how the infection originated, but also they lack the ability to contain and control it. Biologically Melanie is an Other throughout the novel. Morally, through the levels of kindness that she unfailingly demonstrates, Melanie is likewise an Other to the crumbling remains of human society. If the Other opposes the “self” in humanity, it is worth questioning which characteristics of mankind Melanie contrasts. The first section of the novel is dedicated to Melanie’s educative surroundings. At no point here does Carey reveal Melanie’s infected condition. Melanie’s innocence is frequently constructed through juvenile, over-descriptive commentary indicative of a typical childhood. Once the scientific background of the programme is divulged, Melanie’s daily routine brings new light to her strict pedagogical upbringing. Through narrative voice and deft characterisation, Carey explores the difference between pedagogical structure and education on the well-being of the class. The first phase of the novel explores these different teaching methods. Miss Justineau’s choice of material and relationship with the class optimises the personal growth and development of the children. This is swiftly contrasted with the abrupt viewpoint of the army representatives, in this case, Sergeant Parks: Sergeant’s voice breaks in with, “What the hell is this?” Miss Justineau stops and looks round. “I’m reading the children a story… It’s important to see how they process information”… “You want to tell them stories, tell them about Jack the ripper… you don’t want to read them Winnie-the-Pooh. You carry on that way, you’ll start thinking of them as real kids. And then you’ll slip up.” (Carey, 2014, pp. 14–15)

The outburst from Sergeant Parks represents the stark pedagogical nature of the facility. Warning Justineau that if she builds a relationship with the children, she will begin to relate to them as such, serves to highlight the fact that Parks considers Melanie as only a test subject. At this stage of the novel, the reader remains unaware of Melanie’s biological condition. Debating whether or not Melanie should be regarded as a child highlights the underlying question as to what would be a true representation of a “real child”. The forceful nature and abuse of the adult characters towards Melanie serves as a better representation of what would be considered “true humanity”. Unlike this cruelty, Melanie’s narrative possesses all of the qualities and purity present in every young child; yet she is ostracised for her biological difference. It is later revealed that Parks’ forceful nature is a technique employed to detach himself emotionally from the children. Parks is aware that each child only exists for the purposes of Caldwell’s live experimentation, therefore objecting to Justineau’s teaching material coheres with Caldwell’s scientific teaching method. This method and scientific outlook frequently clash with Justineau’s liberal view towards education, as is evident in her choice of literature. Mentioning Jack the Ripper suggests that Sergeant Parks will only view these children as monsters, perhaps he feels they would only ever relate to such figures. As the novel develops, a maternal bond is duly formed between Justineau and Melanie, “It was test subject number one… that tripped Justineau up…Those big,

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trusting eyes, in that bone-white face. Death and the maiden, all wrapped up in one tiny package.”(30). Differing narratives further depth and diversity of prominent characters. Referring to Melanie as “death and the maiden,” with “big trusting eyes,” Justineau recognises that despite Melanie’s biological condition, she remains naive and vulnerable. Justineau’s recognition of Melanie as “death and the maiden’ merges the opposing images of death and innocence in order to create one being. This combination acts as a further example of the contrasting forces and psychological turmoil Melanie is battling internally; the maiden represents her innocence, death represents her biological infection and hunger. The uncanny element of Melanie’s character symbolises the contrast between her biological status and her ordinary appearance. Melanie’s appearance generates anxiety from the adult characters in this novel. They are aware of her biological infection (labelling her as an Other), however, she is too similar to uninfected children to be recognised as an Other (Kerslake, 2007, p. 16). Kerslake continues to argue “To see the Other as we see ourselves necessitates the complete absorption of the subaltern culture…the moment either group is aligned too closely with its alternative is the moment difference becomes similarity and when the Other merges into “us” (2007, p. 20). Representing a new understanding of posthumanism, Melanie’s empathy and emotive narrative depict her as the Other merging with the same. In the facility, Justineau’s teaching style enables Melanie to increase her knowledge and understanding. Disregarding the strict curriculum, Justineau discusses discursive subjects such as classical mythology and literature. Justineau’s interaction with the children is aligned with her instinctive beliefs with what she considers to be a natural process of learning for the children. At no point does she accredit Melanie’s pure ethics to her teaching style, Justineau pities the children and exposes them to content that she feels is fundamental to their development: Melanie got to find out about Pandora…and the box full of all the evils of the world… “All the gods had blessed her and given her gifts. That’s what her name means—‘the girl with all the gifts’. So she was clever, and brave, and beautiful… But she just had the one tiny fault, which was that she was very- and I mean very-curious.” (Carey, 2014, p. 12)

Introducing the class to the creation myth of the first human woman is significant due to the conflicting external and internal biological nature of the children, similar to the external/internal conflict with Pandora’s Box. The Gods created Pandora. Highlighting her curiosity mirrors Melanie’s desire for knowledge. In this lesson, Justineau has chosen to teach the children about Pandora, or, the girl with all the gifts. Melanie is particularly fascinated by this story and expresses great interest in the box of hidden evils. This draws for the reader a significant connection between Pandora and the protagonist, as Melanie is likewise challenged with an external appearance concealing the infection within. Carey emphasises the classroom setting as a fundamental part of Melanie’s daily routine. This allows for an examination of teaching style through contrasting viewpoints and protocol. Justineau disregards governmental procedure for teaching material, and wilfully exposes the children to nature, literature and classical mythol-

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ogy. Furthering the importance of this particular mythological connection, Vered Lev Kenaan details more about Pandora’s legacy: Pandora appears in the world and immediately takes the form of the ultimate Other… She is not an inherent element of the world, nor a daughter of nature. The first woman lacks the autochthonic roots of men… Pandora introduces a new form of giving. She is… an artificial product contrived by the gods. She is a foreign element in a world of men. (2010, pp. 48–49)

As with Pandora, Melanie is “not an inherent element of the world” or “a daughter of nature”. The ability to function with artificial DNA demonstrates a character unlike anything ever produced by nature. Connecting mythological figures with this posthuman child furthers a sense of distancing Melanie: “Posthuman… also means this: to acknowledge all those ghosts, all those human others that have been repressed during the process of humanization: animals, gods, demons, monsters of all kinds” (Herbrechter, 2013, p. 9). Pandora “lacks the autochthonic roots of men”. The word “autochthonic” in this scenario possesses a dual meaning. Similar to Pandora, Melanie lacks the autochthonic roots of men, as she represents a new biological era of children. Melanie and her peers are different from humanity biologically as they are infected by the disease. Despite this, Melanie remains visually indistinct and similar to the children that came before her, making her an Other that represents qualities of the same. Another quality that isolates Melanie from the human survivors is that due to her captivity and age, she remains vulnerable and pure of ethical and moral intent. It is her educative environment that has developed her intellect, teaching her to observe the world surrounding her, and nourishing her instinctive nature to survive. Similar to Pandora, Melanie is an unnatural creature; a pioneering female of her kind, and the future of posthuman children. Pioneers by definition threaten the established order and so come to be demonised. Pandora’s Box is, in this purview, a potent symbol known for concealing the evil within. In Carey’s novel, it later transpires that this refers to the deception and concealed nature of pandemic disease. Melanie is biologically monstrous. But she is also kind, emotional and empathic. Whilst in captivity Parks is physically and emotionally abusive towards Melanie. Dr. Caldwell treats Melanie and her peers as her personal lab rats, experimenting on them in order to determine the cause of the disease. At no point does either character consider Melanie and her peers as children, or as deserving human rights. Such a level of physical and emotional abuse urges the reader to question the definition of “monstrous”. The post-apocalyptic setting of the novel examines what is a “natural” and “healthy” environment in which to raise a child. Outside of confinement, the risk of “hungries” and the severity of the infection are rife. The children are, however, at greater risk when confined in this clinical and unnatural facility. Living a fabricated existence that they have grown accustomed to the children are frequently abused, and treated as experimental test subjects. Melanie’s primary narrative enables her to step back and observe the behaviour and conflicts around her. Herbrechter notes, “In the same process by which the posthuman is beginning to take shape, a power struggle arises between different positions and interests regarding the nature of the posthuman, be they religious, economic, mil-

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itary, scientific or humanist/moral in orientation… the posthuman discursive object has already become the plaything of diverse institutions” (2013, p. 37). Described as a “plaything of diverse institutions”, Melanie elicits sympathy from the reader, especially young readers, as we can readily empathise with the lack of control Melanie possesses over her own life. Meanwhile, Dr. Caldwell’s clinical approach mirrors her strict curriculum. It is as a result of this strict upbringing that Melanie is able to control her psychological strength and animal instincts after the characters escape. Varying narrative voices allow Carey to create a significant contrast between the strictness of Dr. Caldwell and the maternal instinct of Miss Justineau. Friction is evident between these two characters and what they represent as Justineau refers to the facility as “a maze you’ve built for them to run through” (2013, p. 63). This imagery complements the experimental ways in which children are abused and objectified. Caldwell clinically severs the psychological identity of the children by referring to them as test subjects. Separating the human from the hungry reminds the reader of Melanie’s Other status throughout the novel, as well as the brutality and rejection she experiences from the human survivors due to the infection. Caldwell is remorseless in the treatment of the children, for her, they are infected vessels, not humans. The doctors do not consider Melanie to be a proper child, and therefore are not hesitant in violating her essential human rights. This sense of physical vulnerability is present from the start of the novel and continues once the group are forced to flee into the external, infected environment.

The Animal Within Once the human survivors and Melanie escape the “hungries” and leave behind the sanctuary of the government base, they are at the mercy of unchartered territory. They are exposed to an environment plagued by an infection that science cannot define. Character relationships are furthered in this section of the novel as the reader learns more about Melanie’s internal psychological and biological struggle with the infection that is controlling her instincts. This section of the present chapter demonstrates the extent to which Melanie’s educative and behavioural experiences within the confinement has taught her to repress these animalistic urges. Melanie’s ability to control her animalistic instinct is due to her psychological strength as developed through her prior education and social interaction. This highlights two separate issues, the fact she possesses this destructive animalistic instinct, but also that she exercises the strength to control it. Discussing this connection between intellect and monstrous instincts, Vernier explains “In order to avoid becoming a monstrous creature… devoid of all ethical sense, man must develop his intellect and will, and fight evolution” (1977, p. 78). Melanie is able to apply ethical and moral boundaries, and her acute intellectual abilities in order to fight the animal within her. This urges the reader to consider whether or not humanity would be able to do so in a situation of stress and despair. For humanity to avoid becoming mon-

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strous, it is vital to channel and develop their knowledge base. Melanie contradicts this assumption, as she is biologically a monster, yet is passionate about learning. The hungry pathogen forces Melanie to fight against her DNA and channel her educated mind in order to apply reason and restraint. In the facility, science controlled the structure and fate of the children. Now that they are in a foreign, post-apocalyptic world, their daily routine is in disarray, immersed in the reality of a post-apocalyptic world: “The technological aspect of posthumanization would thus be the logical outcome of an irreversible loss of control… The initial human reaction to this loss of control was, precisely, that which started the process of technologization of the human species, and… threatens to engulf its own “creator”” (Herbrechter, 2013, pp. 54–55). The arrogance of man attempting to control nature has resulted in a widespread epidemic. The government facility represented order and structure, in order to mask human corruption and ulterior motives. Once the characters are forced to explore the post-apocalyptic environment, they must confront the issue of control both over humanity (with the treatment of Melanie) and nature (with the infection). The remaining human survivors must acknowledge the consequences of interfering in both. Despite Melanie’s biological equivalence to the hungries, her domesticity deems her as ignorant as her companions. This forces Melanie to question her own origins: She’s not a little girl. She’s a hungry… she stepped in front of Sergeant Parks-impulsive, without thinking, wanting to fight the monsters… the monsters are named for the feeling that filled her when she smelled Miss Justineau in the cell… the hungries smell you, and then they chase you until they eat you… Melanie knows exactly how that feels. Which means she’s a monster. (Carey, 2014, pp. 220–221)

The duality Melanie struggles with internally is captured in the extract above as she relates to both humans and hungries. Repeated reference to monsters in this quotation prompts analysis over the identity of such: “The monster illustrates difference as threat. Usually markedly non-human in appearance, the monster… reminds humanity of its… physical limitations… the most ‘challenging’ monster cannot be distinguished by sight” (Kerslake, 2007, p. 13). As in the case of Melanie’s invisible infection, Kerslake observes the unrecognisable (and therefore threatening) nature of modern monstrosity. “Monsters” can no longer be defined by their grotesque appearance; the modern monster is hidden amongst the mundanity of everyday life. As with the new generation of posthuman children, they are biologically different yet physically indistinct. Carey frequently uses animalistic imagery to describe Melanie’s behaviour, which is closely followed by her innocent nature, or the brutality of man, “Melanie runs as if there’s a tiger behind her…she’s trapped. She makes a sound inside the muzzle, an animal squeal… ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Dr. Caldwell says. ‘I won’t hurt you. I just want to examine you.’” (Carey, 2014, pp. 221–223). This imagery constructs Melanie as a frightened animal, one who panics at the presence of danger and ends up trapped. The presence of a muzzle, a most uncivilised and therefore inhuman object, and the squealing noise of panic, refers to Melanie’s animalistic representation. Instincts are fundamental throughout the novel in developing a reader relationship with the

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posthuman character. Melanie’s narrative reminds the reader of the struggles she is encountering internally. Melanie is constantly battling between external actions, psychological restraint and physical hunger, all within this innocent girl. Eventually, the human survivors with the exception of Caldwell form relationships with Melanie and begin to consider her as some form of a human equal. Confined within the government facility, Melanie was physically vulnerable due to experimentation and psychological abuse. In the wild, this balance is restored as each character is as vulnerable as the next. When a group of feral hungries kill a soldier, Melanie demonstrates more compassion than anyone else throughout the novel: “We should bury him” Melanie says…. “Honour a fallen soldier Sergeant!” “Honour a… Where the fuck did that come from?” “The Trojan War, most likely,” (2014, p. 381). Melanie’s insistence in this scene to “honour a fallen soldier’ represents her loyalty to and respect for humanity, a quality often lacking in Parks. Melanie frequently refers to her ethics for guidance on her behaviour; ethics that were made possible due to her balanced educational and emotional upbringing under the guidance of Justineau. The significance of Melanie’s domesticity is evident with the encounter of feral children, “Naked as the day they were born. And filthy, although their skin underneath the dirt was the same bone white as her own…. They were … chasing rats… biting off their heads and dropping the limp bodies into the bags… Children like her. Children who were hungries too” (2014, p. 360). The naked appearance of these children as they hunt and catch their prey refers to the tribal origins of humanity. Discussing this primal nature, Herbrechter questions, “Is the human in fact human because of its ‘nature’ or its ‘culture’?” (2013, p. 8). Defining humanity through either “nature” or “culture” emphasises the distinction between whether humanity is defined by physical appearance or through behavioural actions. This continues Carey’s complex interrelationship between a world that has ended through an apocalyptic infection and a new breed of posthuman children. Melanie is forced to realise that she is not alone, that there are other children who have been born into the condition—other children who share the same skin. Through appearance she “belongs” with them; however, these children demonstrate brutality and cannibalism in order to survive—savage but uncivil human qualities. These children were raised in the wild: they are brutal, cannibalistic survivalists. Born with the infection they have chosen to be killers, fiercely territorial, and merciless towards anyone that is not their own. This is what Melanie is afraid to become, a part of a civilisation without a moral compass. Referring to the primal origins of humanity, “Earlier societies had no separate social institution called education… as an ordinary part of growing up, children learned what was necessary to get along in life… Education was synonymous with acculturation, learning a culture. It still is in today’s tribal groups” (Henslin, 2007, p. 498). This quotation emphasises not only the distinction between Melanie’s educated background and the feral children’s lack thereof, but points out that there are still societies relying on this method of instinctual learning. These children are more dangerous because they are both calculating and deadly. Unlike Melanie, these children are not educated; as a result they lack remorse. In this scene, a soldier is

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hesitant to harm this group because it is in the programming of a human not to harm a child. However, these children are indicative of a new age: a cruel new generation of children taking charge.

Ophiocordyceps and the Future of Mankind In the last phase of their journey, the characters reveal more information about the infection regarding origin, growth and future development, “At some point a Cordyceps came along … Of course, the fungus might have had a helping hand. It might have been grown in a lab” (Carey, 2014, p. 60). Caldwell’s continuous analysis of the infection enables the reader to learn in tandem with the characters. Suggesting the fungus may have been created or adapted in a laboratory significantly alters the reader’s response to the role of scientific intervention. The ruthless manner in which Caldwell dissects the infected children resembles Frankenstein’s control over the Creature, control that is subsequently lost once the Creature gained a narrative voice. There are constant similarities between Frankenstein and The Girl with all the Gifts regarding the function of the narrative voice as evoking sympathy from the reader, and questioning the actions of man attempting to resemble God. Adam Roberts’s comments can be applied to Frankenstein’s Creature and Melanie as he discusses: “what all these monsters have in common is their protean ability to transform, to move from unexceptional ‘human’ behaviour to barbaric, violent, transgressive… a form capable of… assuming the shape mundane” (2012, p. 31). As with Melanie’s posthuman nature, understanding the artificially forced origins of the infection alerts the reader to the dangers of interfering with nature. If the fungus was a product of scientific experimentation, then Melanie and the children are victims of man’s hubristic abuse of nature. At this point, we might invoke the notion of the romantic-era Sublime, the overwhelming presence of the infection in the wild invites similar emotional responses: “Mountainous scenery… grand thunderstorms… all evoke that awe which is the essence of the Sublime: a feeling of helplessness and terror when humans realise their frailty and small size in the face of the might and magnitude of the universe… in the mind of most Romantics… there is no divinity to protect mankind from the universe” (James, 1994, p. 104). The arrogance of mankind has resulted in a post-apocalyptic awakening. As with feelings of inferiority evoked from the Sublime, each character is overcome with a sense of helplessness regarding the extent of the infection. Perhaps one of the most chilling factors in this novel, and in Science Fiction of this type, is the capability of the “fantastic” to invade reality. Carey’s globally destructive Ophiocordyceps is an infection that plays an active role in restoring the balance of nature: Spores from a parasitic fungus called Cordyceps have infiltrated their bodies and their minds… like something out of science fiction, the fruiting body of the Cordyceps erupts from the ant’s head… when finished the deadly spores will burst from its tip… parasites like

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these stop any one group of animals getting the upper hand. The more numerous a species becomes, the more likely it will be attacked by its nemesis. (Attenborough, 2008, Planet Earth)

Placing a functioning infection at the heart of this novel demonstrates the narrow margins between reality and science fiction. As if contrived through the fantastical imagination, an infection like this demonstrates the intellect and survival function of nature, through constant mutation and development in order to infect future generations of animals. As with humans, mutating cells are to account for the successful development of this infection: “DNA is a noncognitive intelligent system that learns about its environment and adapts to it. Reproduction and mutations are the means by which DNA learns and adapts. Darwin’s work is confirmed each time mutating cockroaches in your kitchen laugh at the insecticide you keep spraying” (Cox & Paul, 1996, p. 49). Carey employs the stereotypical trope of speculative Science Fiction by asking “what if?” and explores the consequences of science interfering with such a powerful infection. Much like the mutating cockroaches, Melanie is a product of an infected species reproducing, and evolving, in order to survive a world dominated by Ophiocordyceps. Therefore, as critic Mark Hillegas explains, fantasy becomes reality when “the worldview shifts from a supernatural explanation of phenomena to a rational explanation” (1979, p. 2). The catastrophic possibilities of this infection allow Carey to highlight the damage of scientific intervention. It is only after the group advances further into this infected landscape the pathogen exposes its true form, “The hungries have fallen down… There’s nothing of humanity left in them… they’re more like clothes that someone has taken off” (Carey, 2014, pp. 418–419). The mature pathogen exploding out of the host is the final stage of the fungus. Notably, Melanie acknowledges that there is “nothing of humanity left in them”. Throughout the novel, despite her infection, Melanie is the epitome of compassionate humanity contrasting with the brutality of mankind. The lack of humanity in the shell of a fallen hungry represents the lack of humanity in mankind. Melanie is unable to relate to them due to the fact she is a posthuman of a new generation. She remains in control of her morals and humanity. Merging Science Fiction and Horror enables the reader to explore fictitiously explore a world lacking reason and order. The danger of this world is apparent through the consequences of science and humanity abusing nature: There are… pods full of seeds… they can’t open by themselves… they needed something to give them a push… There’s no cure for the hungry plague, but in the end the plague becomes its own cure. …their children will… grow up and have children of their own and make a new world. “But only if you let them grow up… if you keep shooting them and cutting them into pieces… nobody will be left to make a new world.” (Carey, 2014, pp. 455–456)

Melanie was stripped of her childhood. At the end of the novel, she strips humanity of its future. Setting fire to the fungal wall releasing the spores into the atmosphere destroys the evil of mankind. This introduces a new world of second- and thirdgeneration infected children, with Miss Justineau as their teacher. Although science

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lacks control in this new environment, Melanie represents the monster regaining control by forcibly destroying the spores in order to create a new world. The rebirth of a post-apocalyptic world mimics the birth, ageing and death cycle of a regular human. The fact that a posthuman character forcibly activates this environmental trigger is symbolic as Melanie is a biological anomaly in the creation of life. As Melanie possesses infected DNA, yet is psychologically human, she is initiating a new era of post-apocalyptic humanity; Melanie is a symbol of the new generation of posthuman inhabitants. In this climactic conclusion, Melanie defends her decision by explaining that in order to secure future generations, she must destroy humanity and all of the evil within. Relying on children similar to herself who are in control of their pathogen but lack education demonstrates Melanie’s maturity. Melanie is bringing the state of the world back to its original origins. Reprogramming humanity will make way for generations of posthuman, artificially programmed children. It is vital that Melanie ends the war of mankind through global devastation. Ending mankind and violence will make everyone equal in order to ensure future survival. The plague will fix itself. As Pepperell states, “Post-Humanism [is] not about the ‘End of Man’ but about the end of a ‘man-centred’ universe or… a ‘human-centred’ universe” (1995, p. 176). The Girl with all the Gifts explores the treatment of children and childhood through the voice of a posthuman child. Carey’s entire message is pivotal around one child. It is the intentional presence and focus on children that enables this text to examine the degradation of humanity, the abuse of science and nature, and the future of mankind. As demonstrated above, this novel explores the origins of a new generation of posthuman inhabitants that are biologically altered humans. Melanie’s psychological purity succeeds in highlighting the behaviour of man under pressure, whilst tackling the monumental decision to ensure a future for mankind. The pedagogical structure of the facility in which Melanie was raised has taught her discipline and the ability to control her animalistic “hunger”. Justineau’s liberal style of teaching instilled a sense of ethics in Melanie and the rest of the class, which allowed Melanie to recognise good and evil in mankind. This gave her the strength necessary to recognise that for a new generation of posthuman children to exist, the current evil from mankind must be purged. She must put an end to war for the birth of a new era of posthumanism. Presented with the opportunity, nature will triumph over the ego and greed of humanity. The focus on pedagogy of this class questions education policies outside of the novel, and the impact of this genre on child welfare. Is our growing reliance on technological advancements likely to help or hinder the educational advancement and ethical development of future generations of children? In the novel, through the innocent narrative of Melanie, Carey succeeds in stressing the significance of personal development and the educational benefit of instilling moral guidance. This is achieved through a combination of pedagogical upbringing and personal educational development within the facility. After the characters have escaped into the wilderness, Carey is able to scrutinise the interference of science over nature within a unique take on science fiction convention.

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Whilst classed as a post-apocalyptic novel within the genre of speculative Science Fiction, Carey explores fluid boundaries between this genre, fantasy, horror and fact. Science fiction enables an exploration of a new, infected world brought about through biological interference. However, engaging with the narrative voice of a child the reader is made aware of Melanie’s sense of emotion, empathy and civility. As with Frankenstein’s Creature, the “monstrous voice’ in this novel highlights the flaws of mankind: “Post-millennial sf… leaves us fearful of biological warfare, and wondering how our moral traditions of the past millennia will survive the technological challenges of this one” (Levy & Slonczewski, 2003, pp. 184–185). The common fear regarding posthumanism and the developments of mankind is that the more heavily we rely on technology in our everyday lives, the more detached we will become, thereby losing our essence of common humanity. With “technological challenges” interfering with the human race, how will this affect inbuilt morals, ethics and compassion? Carey’s message through the case of Melanie questions whether or not mankind has already lost its humanity. Although biologically altered by the infection, Melanie demonstrates more compassion than the human survivors. How can mankind claim to religiously follow a pure and moral ethical code, whilst simultaneously coexisting with individuals capable of mass destruction? Melanie resolves that in order to cure the plague, forceful mass destruction is crucial. This will make way for a new generation of posthuman children, pure of intent and ready to be educated: “DNA will accumulate change after change until it codes for a plant or creature whose form is so different from the ancestral species that the new organism… looks and works differently enough to be a new species” (Cox & Paul, 1996, p. 50). In this novel, all that scientific interference has succeeded in is accelerating the release of a deadly infection. Melanie’s account of survival, however, highlights the necessity to purge mankind of existing evil and inequalities, in order to create a new era of posthumanism. Although Melanie was born into the infected world, science is responsible for genetically modifying the pathogen to the extent of global devastation. At what point do scientific advancements border into abuse and intervention? The presence of Ophiocordyceps in the novel is a stark reminder of scientific interference, whilst the treatment of Melanie in the facility demonstrates an abuse of power. This novel questions what is natural and unnatural, forcibly attempting to define an environment, or restructuring a world: clinical detachment and power contrasting with nurture and care, the cycle of a human life contrasting with a new form of being—a creature that is posthuman, one that is part infection, part human. Melanie is mocking nature through forcibly destroying, that which was in the process of destroying mankind. Destruction of the post-apocalyptic infection initiates the dawn of a new era.

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References Attenborough, D. (2008). Cordyceps: Attack of the killer fungi. BBC Worldwide Planet Earth. Retrieved November 13, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8. Carey, M. R. (2014). The girl with all the gifts. London, UK: Orbit Publishers. Cox, E., & Paul, G. (1996). Beyond humanity: Cyberevolution and future minds. Massachusetts: Charles River Media Inc. Dinello, D. (2005). Technophobia! Science fiction visions of posthuman technology. Austin: University of Texas press. Henslin, J. (2007). Sociology: A down to earth approach. Boston, MA: Pearson Publishers. Herbrechter, S. (2013). Posthumanism: A critical analysis. London, UK: Bloomsbury. Hillegas, M. (1979). The literary background to science fiction. In P. Parrinder (Ed.), Science fiction: A critical guide (pp. 2–7). New York, NY: Longman Inc. Publishers. James, E. (1994). Science fiction in the 20th century. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Kenaan, V. (2010). Pandora’s senses: The feminine character of the ancient text. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Kerslake, P. (2007). Science fiction and empire. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press. Levy, M., & Slonczewski, J. (2003). Science fiction and the life sciences. In E. James & F. Mendlesohn (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to science fiction (pp. 174–185). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pepperell, R. (1995). The posthuman condition. Oxford, UK: Intellect Publishers. Roberts, A. (2012). Gothic and horror fiction. In E. James & F. Mendlesohn (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to fantasy literature (pp. 21–35). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Said, E. (1995). Orientalism: Western conceptions of the Orient. In P. Kerslake (Ed.), Science fiction and empire (p. 8). Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press. Vernier, J. P. (1977). Evolution as a literary theme in H.G. Wells’s science fiction. In D. Suvin & R. Philmus (Eds.), H.G. Wells and modern science fiction (pp. 79–89). London, UK: Bucknell University Press.

Toy Gory, or the Ontology of Chucky: Childhood and Killer Dolls David W. Kupferman

“And I saw my doll, Rosie, too. And I always treated her like a real person, you know what I mean? You ever have a doll and you treat her like a real person, you know, ‘cause you’re afraid if you don’t she’ll kill you?’” Sarah Silverman, An Evening at the Improv, 1992

Abstract This chapter considers the ways childhood is produced as monstrous through the embodiment of killer clowns, killer dolls, and ventriloquist dummies in speculative horror, and how that construction strips children’s agency and makes them unequal partners in a dystopian symbiosis. Here, children become the playthings of killer dolls, and by extension, society’s ills. Deploying speculative realism, which counters a perception of the world that does not and cannot exist without human reason, along with a consideration of the occult—that which is both hidden and reveals something about the world-in-itself—the chapter looks at examples of the demontology of childhood toys in the popular imaginary from the films Poltergeist and Child’s Play, as well as an episode from Tales from the Crypt. Killer dolls and their ilk reflect the social construction of childhood as naive, agentless, and simultaneously monstrous, murderous, and Other while compelling us to reimagine the ethical engagement with childhood as complex and ultimately unknowable.

Introduction: Valley of the (Killer) Dolls Like all good (and not so good) horror films, I will offer three small portraits that may at first seem tenuously connected, but in actuality are all part of the same story. The first of these vignettes involves my daughter, who lived for years with a pair of harlequin dolls at the top of the bookshelf in her bedroom without comment (see Fig. 1). It was not clear to me whether it was because they were so high up that D. W. Kupferman (B) Minnesota State University Moorhead, Moorhead, MN 56563, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 D. W. Kupferman and A. Gibbons (eds.), Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_4

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Fig. 1 Creepy dolls keeping the children up at night. Photograph by the author

she couldn’t really see them that she never complained—nor did she ever want to play with them—but when I took them down one evening to dust the top shelf, she seemed to notice them for the first time, with abject terror. “Turn them around,” she said. “I’m scared. They’re creepy.” From that point forward, the dolls faced the wall, and even then she would be careful not to look too directly at the top of the shelf. (Admittedly, the harlequin dolls that have so vexed my daughter are, in fact, creepy.) In The Daydreamer (1994), Ian McEwan presents a series of snapshots from the imagination of a young protagonist named Peter Fortune. Peter spends his days and nights in a variety of fantastical projections that commingle with so-called reality, such that the reader is left to puzzle out where Peter’s creativity begins and the world as we know it ends. The first chapter, aptly titled “The Dolls¸” tells a tale about the time that 9-year old Peter and his sister, Kate, with whom he shares a room, begin to fight so much that their parents decide Peter should move out and into his own space in the house. Peter is relieved not only to be away from Kate, but also away from her 60 or so dolls, and especially the one that is missing an arm and a leg that Peter has dubbed “The Bad Doll.” One rainy day a few months later, Peter wanders into Kate’s room and, while sitting on her bed, watches in amazement as The Bad Doll hobbles over to him from across the room, all the while intoning that it’s now the doll’s turn to have its own room. The Bad Doll is joined by the entire doll population in Kate’s room, and they pin Peter down on the bed and pluck off first his leg and then his

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arm, both limbs of which become attached to The Bad Doll, who is now physically “complete.” Peter watches with stunned horror and quizzical imagination, as he can’t quite understand how his arm and leg are such a perfect fit for The Bad Doll. His reverie is interrupted by Kate, who catches him in her room, and Peter finds himself physically restored, if still struggling with The Bad Doll on her bed. Interestingly, McEwan in his preface explains that he wrote these stories initially for his children at bedtime. One wonders at how they may have reacted to his first chapter, and what types of dolls lined their bedroom shelves. The 1995 Pixar film Toy Story (Arnold, Guggenheim, & Lasseter, 1995) has been venerated for ushering in not only a new era of animated filmmaking, but also for introducing depth and complexity into storytelling for what are ostensibly “children’s” films. Yet even here, in a world inhabited by sentient toys trying to make their way back to Andy’s (their “owner”) playroom, there is an element of horror and malice. In the third act of the movie, the main characters Woody and Buzz, a cowboy and spaceman, respectively, find themselves in the bedroom of Andy’s neighbor, Sid, a sadistic, brutal child who creates Frankenstein’s monster-type hybrids of both his toys and his younger sister’s dolls. We see Sid (whose name I couldn’t help but finish as Sid Vicious upon any number of viewings) snatch one of his sister’s dolls out of her hands, place the doll’s head in a vice, and proceed to perform a sort of medical procedure in which he decapitates the doll and replaces its head with that of a plastic pterodactyl. Horrified, Woody and Buzz look for a way out of Sid’s room. Woody jumps off the bed and heads for the door, which has multiple locks. Seeing a yo-yo roll out from under Sid’s bed, Woody slowly approaches what appears to be a baby doll’s head moving toward him; once the doll has emerged from its subterranean hiding place, however, Woody screams in fright, as the doll is one of Sid’s creations: a baby doll’s head missing one eye, with all of its hair messily cut off, sitting astride what appears to be a set of crab legs made out of an Erector Set. A parade of these monstrous toy composites marches past Woody, who is now appropriately petrified, heading for the door. Yet while like Woody and Buzz these composites are apparently sentient, ontological beings, they are also mute and frightening; even in a film where toys talk, walk, and make friends, these ones are somehow evil and not of even that world. What these three seemingly unimportant vignettes have in common is an engagement with creepy dolls. More than that, however, is the notion of sentience, of being, of an unknowable Other, and of evil. What is it about glass eyes peering out from porcelain faces—seemingly following us as we cross the room—that scares my daughter, Sarah Silverman, and Woody? Why do we impart human intentions upon dolls and dummies, and often malevolent intentions at that? Why do these ubiquitous and typically discarded artifacts of childhood creep us out, even as adults, and more importantly, what does that tell us about how we view children and childhood? What is the sense in foisting these toys upon children, only to be spooked by them—both the doll and the child? What I argue here in attempting to answer these questions is that dolls—and in particular killer clowns, killer dolls, and ventriloquist dummies—stand in for a sociological mistrust of childhood and the child; that is, we as adults don’t quite buy

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the construction of childhood as a time of innocence and/or naiveté, even though that construction is completely our responsibility. Moreover, I contend that beyond this skepticism of childhood’s motives, killer dolls and their ilk offer a medium upon which to exorcize society’s misgivings about childhood, and reveal what we really think about children: that they are monstrous, evil, possessed, and are able to exercise only a perverted (and inverted), self-centered form of agency. If we are to take Kant’s analysis of evil at face value, we see that it “is the deliberate attempt to subordinate what we ought to do in favour of what pleases us” (Anderson-Gold & Muchnik, 2014, p. 2). It is here that such notions of self-love coincide with our constructions of children as ultimately selfish little monsters. In order to begin to unravel this knot of twisted doll hair, we will consider the killer clown, killer doll, and ventriloquist dummies in a trio of examples: the clown in Poltergeist (Kennedy, Marshall, & Spielberg, 1982) that ultimately tries to kill Robbie Freeling, the little boy in whose room it sleeps; Morty, the killer ventriloquist dummy who wreaks havoc on both Don Rickles and Bobcat Goldthwait in an episode of Tales from the Crypt (Darabont, 1990); and Chucky, the doll who becomes possessed by the soul of a murderer and goes on a killing spree in Child’s Play (Kirschner, 1988). There are, of course, myriad other examples that we could use, ranging from the Twilight Zone episode “Living Doll” (Beaumont, 1963) to the more recent films Annabelle (Safran & Wan, 2014) and Annabelle: Creation (Safran & Wan, 2017), or even any of the six Child’s Play sequels (each of which comes highly recommended). There is no shortage of killer dolls in the social imaginary. Nevertheless, in each of our chosen examples, I deploy the concept of speculative realism, which seeks to reverse the Kantian imperative of experience and correlationism to return to a precritical position wherein we are interested in the process (rather than content) of knowing what there is (Shaviro, 2015). In contrast to vital materialism, which assumes that we “ally” with the power of things when we use them as tools (Bennett, 2010), speculative realism relies on positive ontologies and epistemologies: the real exists without and apart from us, and it is possible to speak about this world-in-itself without reducing it to correlationism. Additionally, this chapter conceptualizes killer dolls as demons, or the limits of nonhuman thinking and being, and considers implications for how we construct childhood and proscribe its ontological potentialities. Marrying speculative realism with Schopenhauer’s conception of nihil negativum and Thacker’s (2011) explication of the occult, this demonology allows us to consider the world-without-us: a nothingness, a “demontology,” opposed to childhood’s being—both child and being. We see killer dolls as both a stand-in for childhood (infantile, impotent), as well as modeling childhood’s inverse (misogynistic, murderous), and agentic in a way that children are not. Killer dolls are both a reflection and a negation of constructions of childhood, compelling us to reimagine the ethical engagement with childhood as complex and ultimately unknowable. In this way, we can regard childhood as possessing its own ontologies as a world-in-itself, and, equally as frighteningly, a world-without-us.

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Childhood and Horror/Childhood as Horror The notion of the child as a sociological subject arises notably in the work of Ariès (1962), Donzelot (1979), and beyond. Through a shift in discursive operations, “there is no essential child but always one that is built up through constitutive practices, in either a strong or a weak sense” (James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998, p. 212). In this way, we can explore the ways in which society—that is, adults—constructs childhood in contrast to understandings of childhood as either a universal or essentialized subjectivity, and one that is in need of “solving” (O’Loughlin, 2010). Prior to the socially constructed turn in childhood studies, conceptions of the “problem” of childhood were neatly resolved in psychological terms that imbued both developmentalist and behaviorist proscriptions in how to “deal with” the child, proscriptions that denied the child certain (and even all) forms of agency. But this is not to say that society treats children as socially constructed, and therefore capable of acting with and in response to various networks of agency and becoming. Rather, we have a discursive shift that allows us to see just how little society actually thinks and acts as if childhood is a social construct. A case in point here is the use of children in horror films, which, given the plethora of examples of the child in mortal fear and danger, is a thriving subset of the film industry. Accordingly, the roots of horror films are conventionally traced back to the Romantic period (Grunzke, 2015; Kendrick, 2013), an age that conceived of the child as eminently agentless, unknowable, and palpably “other”; unlike the psychological child, the Romantic child is simply unsolvable. (It should be noted that there is a distinction between the terms Romantic and Gothic, notably in literary studies, but for our purposes here we will use Romantic as an umbrella term.) A brief look at childhood as formulated by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau underscores this point (Tesar, Rodriguez, & Kupferman, 2016). The Hobbesian child, for instance, is born into sin in a society whose nature is that of a perpetual state of war. As such, the child requires constant monitoring and control by adults. By contrast, the Lockean child is a blank slate (tabula rasa), devoid of any natural tendencies, and therefore also, like in Hobbes, requiring parental/social control (by way of Locke’s euphemistic “direction”). For his part, Rousseau inverts the characteristics of the Hobbesian child such that the child is now born into a benevolent state of nature and distinguished by innocence rather than sin. Yet the engagement between the child and society remains eerily similar, so that Rousseau’s child must now rely on the very parental and adult protection that corrupts her innocence, purity, and naivete. And despite running the spectrum from original sin to empty vessel to original chastity, the Romantic child is, in the end, entirely without agency and practically other-worldly. Horror films serve to construct the child as, yet again, wholly bereft of agency, straddling the Hobbes–Locke–Rousseau gamut as either monstrous or naïve, and always without personality. At the same time, it is vital to recognize how the sociological turn in childhood studies (Ariès, 1962; Donzelot, 1979; James, Jenks, & Prout, 1998) also opens a space in which to consider how these very depictions of children in horror films serve as a mirror through which society (the audience) reflects

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its own discursive constructions of childhood. That is, Romantic horror acts as the lens through which we can now produce the child, not as a solvable psychological problem but as a construct that is unknowable, akin to Frankenstein’s monster (itself an avatar of Romantic notions of conception and child–parent relations). Before briefly exploring how horror, and horror films in particular, work, we need to take a moment to consider the flow of horror as a genre within and of the broader strokes of science fiction. My suggestion here is not to make the case that horror is a subset of sci-fi, nor are they discrete categories. Rather, horror and sci-fi operate in circulation with each other: in this way, sci-fi is informed by elements of horror, and horror pushes boundaries, often deep underground, within which sci-fi can wander. This circulation is vital for both of these variants of speculative imagining; as Shaviro (2015) writes, “The method of science fiction is emotional and situational, rather than rational and universalizing” (p. 9), a sentiment that I would contend applies to horror as well. Additionally, Shaviro notes, “Science fiction does not actually prove anything; but its scenarios may well suggest new lines of inquiry that analytic reasoning and inductive generalization would never stumble upon by themselves” (p. 9, original emphasis). Indeed, as a methodological counterpart to sci-fi, horror aims to present a similar set of ends, if the means themselves differ in important ways. Thus, one would never describe perhaps the most conventional (and staid) example of sci-fi, Star Trek, as a series rooted in horror. But what of, say, the Alien franchise? Certainly, the technological and speculative physics and biology of what one would classify as “science fiction” are essential to the inner workings of those films. Yet they would not be considered solely sci-fi, for they are propelled not by the “fiction” of science, but by the very real horror of space, isolation, and familiarity that drive their plots. The point here is to suggest that horror and sci-fi need each other, and, like the humans and xenomorphs in Alien, exist in a sort of genre-driven symbiosis with each other, in which horror exposes the internal while science fiction is primarily concerned with externalities. If pushed, I might go so far as to describe horror as a distortion of sci-fi, one that is concerned with examining a different set of fictions: fictions that science cannot explain or predict, but which challenge the very scientific method and Enlightenment doxa of reason and rationality. This is not to overlook the very important ways that horror and sci-fi differ from each other. Perhaps the most important distinction to make is that of perspective. While science fiction focuses on new modes of thinking and imagining, it does so often through the eyes of a child—that is, through a lens of innocence and wonder: “Science fiction returns the audience to the status of a child, forcing them to make sense of a newly discovered world” (Grunzke, 2015, p. 92). Horror, by contrast, offers new avenues for inquiry, but from the vantage point of the monster, so that horror films in particular coax “their audiences to see the world through the eyes of a monster. Instead of identifying with the victims, modern horror began to encourage audiences to identify with the monsters, and the line between predator and victim began to blur” (Grunzke, 2015, p. 93). It is here that a curious dance begins to take shape with regard to how we view children. On the one hand, rooted in Romantic

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notions of innocence, children are deprived of agency, and we can therefore not take on their perspective in horror films; rather, we share, and occasionally empathize with, the perspective of the monster, of the Other. Importantly, this monster does not come from our world (we shall see below how this plot point is often filled with notions of possession from elsewhere), and therefore does not belong to us; consequently, it forces us to view our rational world skeptically. On the other hand, those very other-worldly monsters are often the only characters in horror films who wield any form of agency, and in so doing become more like us than the agentless child whose viewpoint we cannot relate to. What results is an Othering of the child, of innocence, that alienates the audience from the so-called victims of murderous agency exercised by the ostensible monster. There is a third step to this dance as well, one in which audience members assume a childlike wonder, not as innocents, but as accomplices in horrific acts: “By projecting the audience’s fears onto a monstrous ‘other,’ horror films externalize internal conflicts, and they force their audiences to try to make sense of them” (Grunzke, 2015, p. 92). The audience is encouraged to employ agency, but through the monster’s eyes, making the monster familiar. The idea of childhood as agentic becomes foreign to the audience, and reproduces the very horrific Romantic notions of the child as the Other. The child, in turn, becomes the true monster. Indeed, “The tension of the horror film is not built by the structure of the plot, rather it is imposed on the text as a superstructure built of personal and cultural anxieties” (Grunzke, 2015, p. 171)—and in our example at hand of killer dolls, this tension rests on the anxiety that children are, indeed, monsters, and their playthings are merely the manifestations of that cultural dread. Let us remember that horror works most effectively when it is “the experience of fear in a safe place” (Grunzke, 2015, p. 98). And what could be safer than the innocence and naivete of childhood? Indeed, horror films work precisely because they “derive their capability to terrify from their plausibility” (Grunzke, 2015, p. 147). The monstrosity of childhood and the ontology of killer dolls only work because they seem so readily possible, and our imaginations and creativity are childlike in their openness to alternative realities: the way my daughter is frightened by a harlequin doll is not far off from the way that we jump when we see that the clown in Poltergeist has somehow become animate and disappears from its perch on the chair. The role of the audience in horror films cannot be underestimated, for the audience must construct the monstrosity of childhood, just as the film presents that ontology as the only one through which we experience the cinematic reality unfolding before us. Horror relies “heavily on audience participation in order to perform its social function” (Grunzke, 2015, p. 103), and “In order to scare people, films have to convince their audience that the threats in the film are, on some level, real. Psychologically speaking, horror filmmakers must be in touch with the fears of their audiences” (p. 97). Horror constructs the child as monstrous: here there are no innocents, only the ontology of an Other whose perspective both repels and attracts. We are frightened by the monstrosity we see before us, yet that is the way the context of the horror film constructs reality, and our perception of it. Agency resides in killer dolls, so we are left with children who are not conceived as complex constructs of bio/social/political power networks, but rather as monsters;

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or at best, the mediums through which monstrosities act out their (and our) own evils. An exploration of childhood as horrible, therefore, “is an ethical engagement with the monsters inside-outside ourselves” (Tesar & Koro-Ljungberg, 2016, p. 702). We are the monsters; we are terrified of the monsters—of ourselves—simultaneously. Horror films reveal how we depict the socially constructed, and still Romantic, child. This cinematic version of the agentless child, this Other, is what we really think of children and childhood—and of how we think of the society that can produce such social constructions—and it is frightening.

Unholy Trinities: Phenomenology, Speculative Realism, Demontology How, then, do killer dolls and their siblings, killer clowns and ventriloquist dummies, work? One way to uncover the ontologies of this Other—the Other of the monster and the Other of the child—is to try to move to what Shaviro (2014) refers to as a preKantian critical metaphysics, possibly through the avenues provided by speculative realism. In brief, speculative realism seeks to reverse Kant’s attempts to come to know how we know what we know, so that we return to a position wherein we are interested first in the process of knowing what there is (Bogost, 2012). Such a phenomenology, along with the Cartesian formula of cognition (I think, therefore I am), presumes a how of knowing without engaging with the process of that knowing as a product of how things are to begin with. What we know, and by extension what is known, is limited by the way we know it. There is a distinction, in Kant’s conception, between phenomena, which we experience firsthand, and noumena, which are things in themselves and are therefore ultimately unknowable. “The world [is] dependent on our knowledge of it” (Shaviro, 2014, p. 3), and the universe of experiences, as a result, only exists insofar as we experience them. Speculative realism challenges this model by arguing that how we know cannot come first. We must first acknowledge that our way of knowing is a product of how things are, and not the other way around. We cannot sublimate what is to how it is known—and importantly how it is known by us. The primary way speculative realism does this is by rejecting the notion of correlationism, an idea taken up by Bennett (2010) among others, in which nonhuman actors (food, metal, electrical grids) are defined by their thing-ness in relation to how humans experience them and ally with them through what has been termed vital materialism. Indeed, it might seem obvious to deploy a theorization of vital materialism in order to understand how killer dolls work, since, after all, their essence at first blush seems dependent upon their interactions with actual children (and adults), and they are thereby principally known as engaging with humans. But to do so would relegate killer dolls and their ontological being as secondary to human experience. In other words, the killer doll only interests me insofar as I interact with it, am threatened by it, have to try to survive its glassy-eyed stare while I am asleep. Such a position privileges me and my

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experiences; it does not consider that the doll, be it Chucky, the Bad Doll, or the Rosie haunting Sarah Silverman’s childhood, could exist in and of itself, regardless of how I or anyone else has dealings with it. Speculative realism frees us philosophically from correlationism and the prison of phenomenal supremacy by opening up the possibility that not everything can be understood as a function of how it relates to the human mind (Bogost, 2012). Here we do well to return to horror, and Thacker’s (2011) horror of philosophy, which he describes as “the thought of the unthinkable that philosophy cannot pronounce but via non-philosophical language” (p. 2). What we are interested in here is a marriage of sorts between speculative realism and horror, a posture that may supply us with a language with which to think the unthinkable: a philosophical method to allow for a precritical, non-correlationist position wherein we can treat the unknowable (the unknowable child, the unknowable killer doll) as a thing-in-itself, and to take it on its own terms. In order to conceptualize this rather neat trick of thinking the unthinkable, knowing the unknowable, and naming the unnamable, Thacker offers an example through the metaphysics of a trinity of “the world.” In the first instance, a Kantian phenomenology is concerned only with a “world-for-us” (p. 6), wherein all that concerns us and should concern us are phenomena we encounter in the “world.” By contrast, and one that we see but are ill-equipped to respond to, is a “world-in-itself,” what Thacker refers to as “Earth.” On Earth, we sense that there is a relationship between the world as we experience it and other, nonhuman actors that impact us nonetheless—think of earthquakes, say, or tropical storms. But this world-in-itself disappears the moment we begin to think it, since the world becomes the world-for-us once we remember our own operations on the planet, and never the planet for its own sake. Again, the world-in-itself is prevented from being, since all of the Earth’s activities—good, bad, and otherwise—are interpreted solely in terms of how they affect us, in terms of correlationism and our ability to ally with the power of the Earth. Herein lies the problem for comprehending the world-in-itself, for correlationism argues that “mind-independent reality cannot exist, because the very fact that we are thinking of such a reality means that it is not mind-independent after all” (Shaviro, 2014, p. 6). A third form of the world, however, provides a different route, both from our own correlationist tendencies as well as our fixation on how we know rather than the process of knowing what there already is. The “world-without-us” is a speculative world, one that allows us to consider the world-in-itself without imposing human phenomenology. Thacker (2011) refers to this world simply as “Planet,” what he calls “impersonal and anonymous” (p. 7). Granted, this version of the world is the most difficult to conceptualize, because contrary to popular belief, it’s not always about us. The world-without-us is not about us at all; it is speculative and rejects the correlationist fetish that undergirds the world-for-us. Enter speculative realism, which seeks to reach a place where we can think philosophically about a mind-independent world-in-itself by relying on positive (precritical) ontologies and epistemologies: in terms of ontology, recognizing that the real exists without and apart from us, and is organized without any help from us; in terms of epistemology, acknowledging that it is possible in some way to speak about this world-in-itself without reverting to cor-

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relationism. In order to encounter killer dolls and childhood as things-in-themselves, we need to delve into an exploration of the world-without-us. A theorization of horror allows us to develop the tools with which we can engage a world-without-us, a space that is inaccessible to phenomenological critique, what fans of the series Stranger Things (Duffer & Duffer, 2016) might identify as the Upside Down. For it is here that horror thrives, where killer dolls are born (or, perhaps more accurately, unborn). Horror, according to Thacker (2011), “is a nonphilosophical attempt to think about the world-without-us philosophically” (p. 9). In this way horror pushes us to our phenomenological limits in uncovering the unknown, the unknowable, the unthinkable: “What genre horror does do is it takes aim at the presuppositions of philosophical inquiry—that the world is always the worldfor-us—and makes of those blind spots its central concern, expressing them not in abstract concepts but in a whole bestiary of impossible life forms” (Thacker, 2011, p. 9). For our purposes, our bestiary focuses on killer dolls. A common trope about unruly children is that they are “possessed.” This observation is fitting, as the sentience afforded to killer dolls, killer clowns, and ventriloquist dummies almost always comes as a result of possession, and a demonic one at that. But rather than possessing (if the reader will pardon the pun) a particular sentience, or Bennett-like “thing-ness,” which situates killer dolls squarely back in the world-for-us, we should consider killer dolls as meontological beings, beings that exist in-themselves, and do so as nonbeings. Demons and demonic possession, in Thacker’s phrase¸ is “an ontological problem” (p. 45), and as such killer dolls exist at a level “in which demons possess not only the living but the nonliving, not only the animate but the inanimate” (p. 39). To treat killer dolls as things-in-themselves and not things-for-us, we must confront their (and our) demons, a position that demands we enter the realm of the nonliving. Typically, the figure of the demon serves as a stand-in for some anthropological inquiry. Demons are a representation, to borrow Schopenhauer’s term, of the nonhuman as a limit, and specifically a limit to humanity—a limit that “designates both that which we stand-in relation to and that which remains forever inaccessible to us. This limit is the unknown, and the unknown, as genre horror reminds us, is often a source of fear or dread” (Thacker, 2011, p. 27) The aporia of horror, in which humanity and nonhumanity limn the border, and the task before us, is to find a way to transgress this limit. A demonology, on the other hand, is opposed to anthropology if it is to serve as a frame through which to consider the world-in-itself. It is not just a stand-in for human experience that has been co-opted in order to suss out the motivations of human evil; nor is it metaphysics, in the sense that the demon stands in for the nonbeing. Rather, demonology allows us to consider, in a pure form, the worldwithout-us, as a nothingness, a “demontology” in Thacker’s phrasing, wherein it is opposed to human being: both the human and the being. Thacker’s reading of Schopenhauer’s nihil negativum (world as “will”) considers the limits, in those dark and scary places, of “the world-in-itself as it is manifest to us in its inaccessibility, in its enigmatic, ‘occult qualities’” (p. 47). This is “about the horizon of thought as

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it confronts the unthought, the horizon of the human as it struggles to comprehend the unhuman” (p. 47). A Kantian orientation prevents us from engaging with the unknowable, the unliving, the unborn, the world-without-us. Noumena, in Deleuze’s (1984) analysis of Kant are “intelligible or supra-sensible things which mark the limits of knowledge and return it to the conditions of sensibility” (p. 30), again drawing us back into a correlationism. A compelling route to engaging with demons and the killer toys they possess, however, runs directly through a demontology wrought from a philosophy of horror. Why are clowns, dolls, and dummies so scary? It is precisely because they originate from another world, a world without us, that they are so horrifying. We fear them because they do not need us, and they represent our very dispensability to the world. The occult, the Upside Down, that which is unknown and unknowable, imply a thing that is hidden, and simultaneously something that is revealed. Our task is to reveal this world-in-itself. “How does one rethink the world as unthinkable?” (Thacker, 2011, p. 48). How do we think of un-knowledge, of demontology? Killer dolls are a manifestation of the world-in-itself, the nonbeing of inanimate objects. So let us now turn to killer dolls.

These Dolls are Killer Poltergeist: Robbie Freeling’s Clown The film Poltergeist (Kennedy, Marshall, & Spielberg, 1982) canonized any number of tropes of the horror film and continues to serve as a cultural touchstone for the genre, spawning as it has two sequels and one unfortunate remake in 2015. There is also a healthy set of urban legends about the haunting of the film in “real” life, as two of the film’s young cast members died between the first and third films. But it was the original outing, about the Freeling family’s encounters with ghosts and other spirits in their new home, that introduced audiences to the franchise’s most iconic moments: Carol Anne, the youngest daughter, sits in front of a television broadcasting only snow and static, informing the family that “They’re here”; the Freeling family’s new home sits upon an “Indian burial ground”; Robbie Freeling, the son and middle child, is attacked and almost eaten by the pine tree outside his bedroom window; and, of course, Robbie’s clown comes to life and tries to kill him. Perhaps the most important plot development comes during Robbie’s struggle with the tree, as Carol Anne is sucked into a portal that opens in their bedroom. The portal represents that which is unseen and unknown, a manifestation of the occult world that is simultaneously hidden and revealed. Within the portal, in the unworld, lives “the beast,” a demon that has captured Carol Anne because of her ability, while still in the world-for-us, to communicate with other spirits and ghosts. With the help of a medium, the Freelings are able to rescue Carol Anne from the beast, but

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the portal soon reopens, and this time the beast zeroes in on both Carol Anne and Robbie, putting Robbie’s clown to work. Upon reopening in the children’s bedroom closet, the portal sucks in Carol Anne and Robbie’s clown, whereupon both later reemerge in the bedroom. It soon becomes apparent that, unbeknownst to Robbie, his clown became possessed while in the portal, ostensibly by a demon from the world-in-itself that exists on the other side of the closet. Robbie tries to go to sleep, but notices that the clown is sitting in a chair facing his bed. He attempts to cover it up (to deny the world-without-us) by throwing a jacket over it, but he misses. Robbie then closes his eyes, but after a few beats sits back up to look over at the clown. What he sees, however, is an empty chair, what Thacker (2015) calls “a presence of an absence” (p. 68), and what Fisher (2016) refers to as the eerie, or that which is missing. Something should be there, even though we don’t want that thing to be there; when it is missing, its absence induces terror because “the eerie is fundamentally tied up with questions of agency. What kind of agent is acting here? Is there an agent at all?” (Fisher, 2016, p. 11). The empty chair, and Robbie’s impotence to deal with it, is the horror of childhood without agency. Robbie looks furtively around the room, then delicately and hesitantly begins to look under his bed, a metaphor perhaps for an underworld. The clown suddenly appears behind Robbie, and begins to coil one of its arms around his neck, allowing the clown to drag Robbie under the bed (into the world-in-itself). The clown is by this point possessed by an occult figuration, a demon that remains hidden from Robbie’s view, while being simultaneously revealed through the agency of the clown as the killer. The killer clown’s target, it seems, is Robbie’s innocence, and by extension, the innocence of childhood, because the only way for Robbie to survive is to exercise, for the first time, a form of agency by becoming a murderer himself. Robbie proceeds to disembowel the clown in order to defeat it, and in doing so seems to drive out the demonic possession. What is left is the fabric and stuffing of the material clown, leaving both Robbie and his defaced clown to operate once again in the world-for-us. The demonic possession of the clown thereby transfers onto Robbie, who becomes transformed into a monster as he fights, and ultimately defeats, the monster. While driving out the demon, Robbie becomes the demon.

Tales from the Crypt: Mr. Ingles and Morty Is it fair to suggest that all demonic possessions are the same? That is to ask, can there be positive, productive possessions that bridge the gap between the world-for-us and the world-in-itself? And what do our assumptions about how these crossings-over are interpreted say about how quick we are to categorize the unknowable as evil? Can we contemplate an inverse shift in the boundaries between the world-for-us and the world-in-itself, given an occasion where the latter tries to engage with the former for purposes other than those of malice and destruction? Here, we can examine the

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prototypical space in which the world-for-us and the world-in-itself come into closest regular contact: the ventriloquist dummy. The ventriloquist dummy operates on a number of planes of ontology all at once. Most obviously, it is the medium through which a ventriloquist throws her voice; in this figuration, the dummy “comes alive” at the insistence and under the control of the ventriloquist. Added to the “throwing” of one’s voice is a simultaneous set of mechanical movements, again functioning as an extension of a “real” person. The dummy in this analysis has no agency, no ontology, and no abilities to engage with the world-for-us without the intervention of a puppeteer. Yet at the same time, part of the wonder of ventriloquist dummies arises from their apparent ability to speak, think, respond, and move without the assistance of any human actors. We in the audience know intellectually that the dummy’s words, actions, and reactions only exist insofar as the ventriloquist directs them, but we want to believe that this dependent relationship does not exist and that the dummy is introducing some form of ontological influence into the equation. Returning for a moment to our earlier discussion of finding a precritical frame through which to consider things, ideas, the world-in-itself free from correlationism, Shaviro (2014) draws upon Whitehead to deploy the concept of prehension to mean “any process – causal, perceptual, or of another nature entirely – in which an entity grasps, registers the presence of, responds to, or is affected by another entity” (p. 29). In our case, one might initially ascribe this definition of prehension as applying to the dummy as acted upon by the ventriloquist. But what happens if in fact the inverse is the case, such that we are acted upon by the dummy, and by a dummy ontology that insists on becoming right before our very eyes? Shaviro’s admonition that how we know cannot come first, that we must first acknowledge that our way of knowing is a product of how things are, then opens the door to alternative sets of becoming, and alternative forms of ontology. Quoting Whitehead, Shaviro (2014) reminds us that “‘Being’ is constituted by ‘becoming’” (p. 2). That is, how I apprehend something operates upon what I am apprehending, and therefore “I am not a subject confronting…an object-world that lies outside of me, for both ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are themselves processes of becoming” (Shaviro, 2014, pp. 2–3). Perhaps there is no better example of such a becoming than in the being of the dummy. Ventriloquist dummies persist in the public imagination as demonic, and, considering that they often look physically like children (even if their faces may portray some older stage of life) and they typically sit on a lap like a child listening to a story, they remind us more often than not of children possessed. Such is the case in an episode of HBO’s late 1980s/early 1990s series Tales from the Crypt titled “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy” (Darabont, 1990). Don Rickles stars as Mr. Ingles, whose act with his dummy, Morty, captivates a youngster named Billy Goldman. The night of the show, a woman is mysteriously murdered and a cabin at the show business resort burns down. Mr. Ingles and Morty fade into obscurity, but Billy grows up hoping to become a professional ventriloquist in the mode of Mr. Ingles. Billy (played as an adult by Bobcat Goldthwait) tracks down Mr. Ingles and invites him to watch his act, but it soon becomes evident that Billy is no Mr. Ingles, and that Billy’s career is saddled by a lack of talent. After the show, Mr. Ingles is propositioned by a showgirl

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at the bar, and in an instance of history repeating itself, she is found a few moments later sitting in her car with her throat slit. Billy bursts in on Mr. Ingles in his house later that night, catching his hero in the act of injecting himself with drugs in his right hand—importantly the hand that purportedly controls Morty. At this point in the episode, the notion of the world-in-itself intruding on the world-for-us is upended, and we see what happens when a human crosses over into a demontology as opposed to the other way around. When Billy accuses Mr. Ingles of being a murderer, Mr. Ingles pleads his innocence, instead claiming it was Morty who killed both women. “Morty. He hates women. He’s never been able to have a woman in a normal way.” Billy expresses his disbelief, and suggests that Mr. Ingles see a doctor; Billy tries to explain that Morty is a dummy: “He isn’t real, he’s constructed of wood and cloth, some wire and cables. He has no mind, no soul…” At which point, Mr. Ingles, who has seemingly been negotiating with Morty under his breath, comes up behind Billy and tries to kill him with a cleaver. Morty is revealed here to be Mr. Ingles’ human Siamese twin, and very psychotic. As he chases Billy around his living room, Mr. Ingles explains “Morty’s like me. He’s real. He’s flesh and blood. In fact, Morty is my brother…We were born like this. I guess we were meant to be twins, but nature can work in a cruel way sometimes.” He pulls off the shroud covering his right hand and forearm to reveal a half-formed face with two undeveloped arms and hands protruding from below his elbow. This is the real Morty. But it is Morty who controls Mr. Ingles, and not the other way around: while Morty may play the role of the dummy, he is in fact the ventriloquist. What are we to make of this situation, in which the human literally fuses with the wood and wires of the dummy, masquerading as a doll? The dummy here—Morty as human being—serves as a bridge between the world-for-us and the world-in-itself, as Morty has always been part of the world-for-us, yet all the while calling forth the unknowable: a living, breathing, human operating as a meontological being. It is a rare example of a human posing as a demon possessed. The ventriloquist’s dummy as proto-human, in this case Morty, pulls back the curtain of the unknown, and feared, for us in a way that a more conventional killer doll cannot do. Thacker (2011) describes this exposure as “what is revealed is the ‘hiddenness’ of the world, in itself (and not, I stress, the world-in-itself)” (p. 53, original parenthetical). That is, in his attempts at crossing over into the world-in-itself, Morty actually discloses quite a lot of insight into the world-for-us, an insight that the social imaginary would prefer not to admit: the killer doll as human, as child—it doesn’t help that Morty looks like a newborn, even as he is supposed to be as old as Don Rickles’ character—as arrested development. The child in this rendering is misogynistic, murderous, infantile, and above all else unable to consummate physical relations. Morty represents for us the point at which the doll crosses the aporia of the world-for-us and the world-in-itself, but in the opposite direction, say, of our killer clowns. Here, the doll is already proto-human, and is attempting to enter the worldin-itself, unveiling the ways in which childhood is constructed as that ultimately Other, unknowable world-in-itself.

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Child’s Play: Chucky There is perhaps no more ubiquitous and lasting example of the killer doll in the public imaginary than that of Chucky, the antagonist of the film Child’s Play (Kirschner, 1988) and its six sequels that span the last 30 years. Like Robbie Freeling’s killer clown, Chucky is an artifact of childhood innocence defined by possession, and in both cases, we encounter the notion of the occult, avatars of Schopenhauer’s nihil negativum and windows into the unliving and the unworld. One could try to make a similar case as to the possessions of ventriloquist dummies, although as we have already seen, such possessions are neither identical nor are they predicated on similar motives. What makes Chucky stand out among this crowd is the painstaking way in which his becoming takes precedence over his being, and does so delimited by the worldfor-us. That is, the example of Chucky is a case of a bounded world-in-itself, but one whose presence makes the world-for-us unrecognizable. Unlike Robbie’s clown, Chucky is not possessed of a demontology from an unworld via a closet portal. Correspondingly, Chucky is not on a par with Morty, who is trying to cross over into the world-in-itself. Rather, the horror that is Chucky rests in the fact that his becoming, and the becoming of his demontology, occurs almost entirely in the world-for-us. Before considering this last point, and the importance of Chucky’s becoming, it is helpful to briefly note a few themes related to our discussion of childhood and horror sprinkled throughout the film Child’s Play. The plot of the film suggests as much: a serial killer, Charles Lee Ray, finds himself cornered by the police in a toy store; he uses an incantation to transfer his soul (and more—his entire ontological being) into a Good Guy doll (the eponymous Chucky); a widow named Karen Barclay purchases said doll for her son Andy’s sixth birthday; Chucky reveals himself to Andy and commits a spree of murders; Chucky tries to transfer his being into Andy; after a series of false deaths—a staple of horror films—Chucky is finally killed. Woven through these plot points we find the trope of innocence betrayed, and at the same time a suspicion of that very innocence. After Chucky kills Andy’s babysitter, Andy becomes the primary suspect. Andy blames Chucky, but he is not to be believed by the adults in charge, who dismiss Andy as having an overactive imagination (despite the fact that Andy’s “imagination” has killed an adult), and he is ultimately sent to a psychiatric ward. During the denouement of the film, Andy and his mother trap Chucky in the fireplace; while his mother holds the grate in place, Andy lights a match. Chucky pleads with Andy, “We’re friends to the end, remember?”, to which Andy replies, “This is the end, friend,” as he lights Chucky on fire. Once again we see that, like Robbie and his clown, Andy must kill his doll, and in doing so must utilize the only agency available to him, that of murder. What is more compelling about the example of Chucky, however, is his becoming. It is important to remember that Chucky is indeed possessed, but he is possessed not by a demon but by a human, a human who used black magic (for lack of a better term)

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in order to possess the doll. What then is Chucky “becoming” if he is already human? In short, Chucky represents a becoming of demontology in the world-for-us. Shaviro (2009) writes of the process of becoming that “Something new has been added to the universe; it marks a radical break with whatever was there before” (p. 20). Chucky the doll, possessed by a human, in turn, takes on biological human traits, and is only able to do so because he is “alive.” The initial transformation is rather swift: for the entire time that Chucky is at home with Andy, he talks to him, and the night of the babysitter’s murder, Karen hears the two talking. When she is alone with Chucky after the murder, Karen notices that the batteries included in the Good Guys box are still unopened. She confronts the doll, demanding that he speak, and thereby prove his metaphysical presence: “Talk to me dammit or I’m going to put you in the fire!” Chucky’s face contorts while he yells: “You stupid bitch! You stupid slut! I’ll teach you to fuck with me!” Then he bites her. It is jarring to hear a child’s doll engage in such naked misogyny, but it is arguably more shocking to learn that Chucky has teeth and that this doll can bite. Thereafter Chucky seemingly disappears, only to show up hiding in the back of a police car being driven by a detective named Mike Norris. While Mike drives, following Karen home, Chucky tries to strangle him with jumper cables. What is of note in this scene is that Mike grabs the cigarette lighter and burns Chucky’s face with it. Here we see that Chucky feels pain. After Mike crashes the car, he begins to shoot at Chucky. The doll boasts “Won’t do you any good, Mikey. You can’t hurt me!”, but Mike is able to shoot Chucky in the right shoulder, and we see blood spurt out from the site of the gunshot. Chucky, it seems, is in fact a biological being—or becoming human, defying any sort of explanation within the world-for-us—or rather, he is becoming human once again, since his ontological being is that not of an inanimate object but of a serial killer. Chucky makes his way to John Bishop, the voodoo mentor of Charles Lee Ray. Bishop explains that “The more time you spend in that body, the more human you become,” ascribing a becoming to the practice of possession: the becoming humanity of the childhood doll. He then goes on to inform Chucky/Charles that in order to escape the doll’s body and continue to “live,” he must move his soul into the body of the first person he revealed himself to: Andy. Thus, Chucky must become the child, or rather the killer doll, the monster, must become the child, such that “an object can only endure insofar as it renews itself, or creates itself afresh, over and over again” (Shaviro, 2009, p. 20). And so we enter into a new form of becoming, one in which the world-in-itself becomes the world-for-us. What makes Chucky so frightening is that he is not a visitor from the world-in-itself or the world-without-us. He is us. His demontology is ours.

Conclusion: Little Monsters What is significant about what speculative horror’s use of childhood’s artifacts exhibits is, in the end, not a fear of nonhuman objects nor even of a meontological approach to engaging with the world-in-itself. Rather, what these examples describe

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for us in gory detail is a fear of childhood itself, or perhaps more fittingly, the inability to think of childhood-in-itself. As Thacker (2011) suggests, “horror is not simply about fear, but instead about the enigmatic thought of the unknown…Horror is about the paradoxical thought of the unthinkable” (pp. 8–9). It is not merely a matter of fearing the unknown, but lacking even a basic vocabulary with which to speak about it. As a result, we have killer dolls, demontological nonbeings who stand in for childhood by acting on its behalf. It is the killer clowns, dolls, and dummies who have any sort of agency, and in turn, it is the child who becomes the doll’s plaything, unequal partners in a dystopian symbiosis, at least until—and perhaps especially once—the child undertakes an act of violence. “It is not the violence itself that makes a film horrifying; it is the way that the film approaches and treats the violence…It is rare in horror film for violence to exist for its own sake, tending, rather, to be part of a cycle” (Grunzke, 2015, p. 13). The violence perpetrated by the child in the horror genre is that which is both the most shocking and the most satisfying, for it is typically the final act of murder by the child that vanquishes the monster from the world-for-us. But in doing so, this violent act and moment of agency precipitates a becoming of the child into the monster, existing thereafter in the world-in-itself. The child-in-itself remains hidden. Part of the concern then becomes our insistence on a Kantian orientation to childhood: we are so preoccupied with how childhood works that we lose sight of, and begin to fear, that it even exists in the first place. We fear Robbie Freeling once he gives into his murderous impulses; we fear Mr. Ingles’ childish response to his brother Morty’s demonic commands; and we dismiss Andy’s warnings about Chucky as the ravings of “just a child” until it is too late—both for the adults and for Andy, who also becomes the monster. It is easier to produce monsters than face them: that is where the utility of killer dolls lies. But as Tesar and Koro-Ljungberg (2016) advise, “Meeting the other also includes meeting the other and difference within oneself; monstrous children, parents, and teachers, meeting different monstrosities within themselves” (p. 697). There is an ethical affair at stake here, one that asks whether or not it is even possible to creatively imagine new ways of being that transcend conventional notions of childhood as agentless and naïve. What we are left with is the monster—the unknowable monster of childhood, the child-as-monster—and we fear the agency that this monstrous being exercises. This is why we struggle with it in the world-for-us, for the mysteries of childhood and their powers do not easily fit in “our” world. The monstrosity of childhood is concerned with a “transformation [that] can lead to the creation of an undecidable zone of contact and connections, where new thinking, language, and experience can take place” (Tesar & Koro-Ljungberg, 2016, p. 698). Perhaps we would do well to consider childhood as a thing-in-itself, as an indication of a speculative realism, rather than trying to correlate it to the “real” world and in so doing produce the monsters that the social imaginary’s preoccupation with killer dolls so conspicuously reveals.

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References Anderson-Gold, S., & Muchnik, P. (2014). Introduction. In S. Anderson-Gold & P. Muchnik (Eds.), Kant’s anatomy of evil (pp. 1–12). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ariès, A. (1962). Centuries of childhood (R. Baldick, Trans.). London, UK: Jonathan Cape. Arnold, B., & Guggenheim, R. (Producers), & Lasseter, J. (Director). (1995). Toy story [Motion picture]. USA: Pixar Animation Studios. Beaumont, C. (Writer), & Sarafian, R. C. (Director). (1963). Living doll [Television series episode]. In W. Froug (Producer), The twilight zone. Culver City, CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bogost, I. (2012). Alien phenomenology, or what it’s like to be a thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Darabont, F. (Writer), & Donner, R. (Director). (1990). The ventriloquist’s dummy [Television series episode]. In W. Teitler (Producer), Tales from the crypt. Los Angeles, CA: Home Box Office. Deleuze, G. (1984). Kant’s critical philosophy (H. Tomlinson & B. Habberjam, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Donzelot, J. (1979). The policing of families. New York, NY: Pantheon. Duffer, M., & Duffer, R., (Writers & Directors). (2016). Stranger things [Television series]. Atlanta, GA: 21 Laps Entertainment. Fisher, M. (2016). The weird and the eerie. London, UK: Repeater Books. Grunzke, A. L. (2015). Educational institutions in horror film: A history of mad professors, student bodies, and final exams. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. James, A., Jenks, C., & Prout, A. (1998). Theorizing childhood. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. Kendrick, J. (2013). A return to the graveyard: Notes on the spiritual horror film. In S. Hantke (Ed.), American horror film: The genre at the turn of the millennium (pp. 142–158). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Kennedy, K., Marshall, F., Spielberg, S. (Producers), & Hooper, T. (Director). (1982). Poltergeist [Motion picture]. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Kirschner, D. (Producer), & Holland, T. (Director). (1988). Child’s play [Motion picture]. USA: United Artists. McEwan, I. (1994). The daydreamer. New York, NY: Anchor Books. O’Loughlin, M. (2010). Occupying the twilight zone as a space of possibility. In M. O’Loughlin & R. T. Johnson (Eds.), Imagining children otherwise: Theoretical and critical perspectives on childhood subjectivity (pp. 1–11). New York, NY: Peter Lang. Safran, P., Wan, J. (Producers), & Leonetti, J. R. (Director). (2014). Annabelle [Motion picture]. USA: New Line Cinema. Safran, P., Wan, J. (Producers), & Sandberg, D. F. (Director). (2017). Annabelle: Creation [Motion picture]. USA: New Line Cinema. Shaviro, S. (2009). Without criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Shaviro, S. (2014). The universe of things: On speculative realism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shaviro, S. (2015). Discognition. London, UK: Repeater Books. Tesar, M., & Koro-Ljungberg, M. (2016). Cute, creepy and sublime unnamed childhood monstrosities. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 37(5), 697–704.

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Tesar, M., Rodriguez, S., & Kupferman, D. W. (2016). Philosophy and pedagogy of childhood, adolescence, and youth. Global Studies of Childhood, 6(2), 169–176. Thacker, E. (2011). In the dust of this planet: Horror of philosophy (Vol. 1). Winchester, UK: Zero Books. Thacker, E. (2015). Starry speculative corpse: Horror of philosophy (Vol. 2). Winchester, UK: Zero Books.

Part II

Affect

Through the Black Mirror: Innocence, Abuse, and Justice in “Shut Up and Dance” Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo

Abstract Constructed as needing protection and lacking agency, the figure of the child is always a potential victim in whose name political battles based in moral panics are often waged. But where does this abstract child figure leave real children, who are not as void of desire, agency, and sexuality as contemporary understandings of childhood imply? The Black Mirror episode “Shut Up and Dance” approaches this question through the story of its teenage protagonist, Kenny, who is blackmailed into committing increasingly violent and dangerous tasks so as to prevent the release of a video that shows him masturbating to pornography. Although in being sexual Kenny has fallen from the pedestal of childhood innocence, his awkwardness, vulnerability, and intense shame about the video nonetheless mark him as non-adult, and the punishments he endures seem disproportionate and abusive—until, that is, we learn that it was child pornography Kenny was masturbating to. Faced with the idea of child-as-victim that the mention of child pornography evokes, can we still also conceive of Kenny as a victimized child, or does he, in that revelatory moment, irreversibly grow up into a predatory adult? Drawing on scholarship situated at the productive intersections of childhood studies and queer theory, this chapter interrogates conceptions of the child-as-victim and analyzes how “Shut Up and Dance” complicates the dominant discourse on child abuse.

“The endangered child, the molested child, the child of innocence: all are formulated by us, one way or another, as the child without means, the incapable child,” Kincaid (1998, p. 208) writes in Erotic Innocence, commenting on the myriad ways in which we construct the modern child as an emptied-out category defined by lack rather than agency. Stockton (2009), in her landmark study The Queer Child, similarly discusses the inherent strangeness—even queerness—of the abstract modern child figure, noting that childhood is characterized by a delay, a protected period of supposed innocence, and purity defined against the adulthood that the child nonetheless must approach. In need of protection, the child thus understood is always a potential C. Nolte-Odhiambo (B) University of Hawai‘i—West O‘ahu, Kapolei, HI 96707, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 D. W. Kupferman and A. Gibbons (eds.), Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_5

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victim, and it is often in the name of this abstract child that social and political battles based in moral and sex panics continue to be waged. But where do contemporary constructions of the abstract child of innocence leave real children, who are not as void of desire, agency, and sexuality as these constructions imply? And given the rigid child/adult binary undergirding our understanding of differently aged subjects, what are we to make of the turbulent in between space of adolescence? “Shut Up and Dance,” an episode directed by James Watkins as part of the third season of acclaimed science fiction series Black Mirror (2011–2017), approaches such questions about childhood and adolescence through the story of its teenage protagonist, Kenny (Brooker, Bridges, & Watkins, 2016). Portrayed by Alex Lawther as shy, awkward, and vulnerable, Kenny is blackmailed by hackers equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance into committing increasingly dangerous tasks so as to prevent the release of a video that shows him masturbating to pornography. Although Kenny has fallen from the pedestal of childhood innocence by virtue of being sexual, the intense embarrassment he feels because of the video nonetheless contributes to his depiction as non-adult, and viewers will find the series of punishments he endures upsetting and abusive—until, that is, we learn that it was child pornography Kenny was masturbating to. Faced with the idea of child-as-victim that the mention of child pornography evokes, can we still also conceive of Kenny as a victimized child, or does he, in that revelatory moment, irreversibly grow up into a predatory adult? On the answer to this question hinges whether viewers experience the show’s final moments—in which Kenny has to fight another man to the death and is then taken into police custody—as just retribution or as sadistic horror. What makes Kenny’s story particularly disturbing is its plausibility; unlike other Black Mirror episodes, “Shut Up and Dance” utilizes current rather than futuristic technology to terrorize its protagonist. The question this episode raises, then, is not whether the events it depicts could happen but rather whether they should. Drawing on scholarship situated at the productive intersections of childhood studies and queer theory, this chapter begins with an overview of contemporary constructions of the child as both erotic and asexual before delving into an analysis of how “Shut Up and Dance” interrogates conceptions of the child-as-victim and complicates the dominant discourse on child abuse. The episode invites us to question whether the laws prohibiting pedophilia and possession of child pornography are just and effective, and I offer a discussion of the extent to which such legal regulations inadvertently harm the children they are ostensibly designed to safeguard. By building on Marek C. Oziewicz’s findings in Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction (2015), a study which posits that we understand justice through scripts in narratives and which locates particular potential for investigations of ethical concerns in non-mimetic genres, I further discuss the ways in which Kenny’s story challenges contemporary forms of retributive justice that effectively remove pedophiles—whether they are legally children or adults—from the realm of the human. Given that constructions of childhood do, of course, take diverse shapes depending on their time and place of origin, childhood indeed arises ex machina, or out of the machine: instead of denoting a natural state, our usages of childhood reflect prevalent cultural attitudes toward children that delineate them as wholly

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different from adults, much like a species of their own. As Kincaid (1998) notes, the construction of the child is flexible as well as “functional, a malleable part of our discourse rather than a fixed stage; ‘the child’ is a product of ways of perceiving, not something that is there” (pp. 18–19, emphasis in original). Contemporary EuroAmerican constructions of the child have developed over the last two centuries, which saw a consistently increasing separation between the child’s and the adult’s spheres, culminating in the notion that the child has a right not to liberty but to custody, protection, and provision: as society’s youngest members, children need to undergo a lengthy process of socialization through the school and the family before they reach the age of majority and can actively engage their agency. Adulthood has thus become precisely what the child is lacking and must nonetheless approach, so that “adults walk the line—the impossible line—of keeping the child at once what it was (what adults are not) and leading it toward what it cannot (at least, as itself) ever be (what adults are)” (Stockton, 2009, pp. 30–31). As such, the modern child figure is largely characterized by its innocence and emptiness or, in other words, by its lack of qualities that are considered adult, and childhood “came to be in our culture a coordinate set of have nots, of negations: the child was the one who did not have” (Kincaid, 1998, p. 15; emphasis in original). Yet, it is exactly this lack and purity of the child that makes it such an appealing cultural figure, and its supposed innocence and weakness not only make it subject to protection but also render the child erotic despite, or perhaps because, of its supposed sexlessness. Contemporary ideas about the child in fact developed alongside of modern notions of sexuality, and they remain what Kincaid (1998) calls “close friends” (p. 14), with much of what is considered desirable also characterizing the modern figure of the child. As attributes such as smooth skin, large eyes, and small, thin body shapes dominate our cultural notions of attractiveness, “[t]he physical makeup of the child has been translated into mainstream images of the sexually and materially alluring” (Kincaid, 1998, p. 17). Hence, fashion and beauty models are often teenagers, the plastic surgery and wrinkle cream industries are booming, and it is considered a compliment for adults to be told that they look younger than their age. But the fetishization of the child extends beyond mere youthful appearance as innocence itself has been rendered sexually appealing precisely because of the virginal inexperience it denotes: “the instructions we receive on what to regard as sexually arousing,” Kincaid (1998) observes, “tell us to look for (and often create) this emptiness, to discover the erotic in that which is most susceptible to inscription, the blank page” (p. 16). The child figure, in fact, shares this emptiness with the modern construction of what constitutes sexually alluring women, as both are characterized first and foremost by their availability as what might be termed “empty vessels” that have been vacated of any indicators of individual subjectivity. In such a construction as an empty vessel, the child is, moreover, void of markers of race and class and, therefore, inherently understood as white and middle-class; children who are racialized, as well as lower class children, are typically imbued with a past and thus with experience that renders them starkly different from the innocent child. We can see here how innocence and the protection that accompanies it are essentially signs of privilege, the privilege of actually being considered children:

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as Stockton (2009) puts it, “It is a privilege to need to be protected—and to be sheltered—and thus to have a childhood” (p. 31). The child figure’s innocence, hence, empties it of color and other identity markers that would run counter to its construction as vacant and pure. As the category of innocence is, then, unevenly attributed to actual children, the violence inherent to our contemporary construction of the child becomes all the more apparent: if only some children are seen as embodying the purity that has become synonymous with our understanding of childhood, other children fail to fit these parameters of childhood, so that, for instance, racialized children’s “inclusion in ‘the future of our children’ is partial, even brutal” (Stockton, 2009, p. 5). Furthermore, the category of innocence does not adequately capture children who display signs of sexual curiosity, because “just as the black child is not innocent by virtue of being black, the sexual child is not innocent by virtue of being sexual” (Levine, 2017, p. 153). By effectively casting children of color, lower class children, sexual children, and all other nonnormative children outside the realm of childhood, our current understanding of what constitutes a child ultimately affords the privilege of childhood only to a select few, demonstrating the extent to which constructions of the child (and, by extension, of innocence) are steeped in persistent cultural hierarchies of race and class. But the category of innocence presents significant problems even for those children who ostensibly fit under its narrow umbrella. Because innocence, particularly when understood as the pairing of ignorance with virginal purity, has come to be defined by what Kincaid (1998) calls “negative sexuality” (p. 55), the innocent child too cannot be imagined without calling to mind the sexual and erotic, and although this intimate connection between innocence and the erotic appears paradoxical, it is precisely the construction of the child as entirely asexual that makes it impossible to think the child without also thinking (the negation of) the sexual. In fact, despite the fact that the child is understood as asexual and pure, we have, in many ways, come to regard the sexualization of children as normal, even inevitable. As Kincaid (1998) explains Our culture has enthusiastically sexualized the child while denying just as enthusiastically that it was doing any such thing. We have become so engaged with tales of childhood eroticism (molestation, incest, abduction, pornography) that we have come to take for granted the irresistible allure of children. We allow so much power to the child’s sexual appeal that we no longer question whether adults are drawn to children. (p. 13)

Of course, the ways in which we invest children with sexual appeal—all while denying their sexuality—are inherently problematic and harm the very children we so insistently claim to want to protect. In other words, as Kincaid (1998) puts it with characteristic clarity and bluntness, “[t]o the extent that we learn to see ‘the child’ and ‘the erotic’ as coincident, we are in trouble. So are the children” (p. 14). What is perhaps particularly noteworthy in this alignment of the child and the erotic is that it utterly robs children of any semblance of subjecthood: not only are children constructed as essentially lacking and empty, they are furthermore defined as void of any form of erotic or sexual agency themselves, able merely to attract adults’ sexual attention but incapable of engaging—or even having—their own sexual desires.

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We can consider, then, the extent to which our ideas about child asexuality, too, are ex machina and have grown out of not factual contemplations of children’s erotic desires and sexualities but rather deep-seated cultural fears and anxieties regarding the realm of sexuality. Children’s literature scholar Nodelman (2008) remarks on the challenge Freud’s observations of child sexuality as “bisexual, polymorphous, perverse” present to the notion of childhood innocence, concluding that this notion may ultimately be less about the repression of children’s sexuality than it is about warding off the potential complications such a sexuality posits to clear categorizations of “fixed” adult sexuality (pp. 161–162). Our insistence on childhood as a time of asexuality, even in the face of sexual children, thus indicates that this insistence is rooted not in the reality of actual children but rather in adult desires to, on the one hand, wrap childhood firmly in a cloak of nostalgic purity and, on the other, exercise control and power over children, all the while ignoring the questions child sexuality would pose to normative understandings of the sexuality of adults. Angelides (2004) points out that, on the whole, “notions of child powerlessness and child sexual ignorance stand as unsubstantiated assumptions, begging the question of their political and performative function. … Too often it would seem that adult discourses of sexuality function primarily to reinforce certain relations of power and domination between adults and children” (p. 152). Since Euro-American conceptions intimately link sexuality and age, so that child (sexual) ignorance and adult (sexual) maturity serve a form of age stratification that clearly separates the lifeworlds of children from those of adults, the acknowledgment of child sexuality ultimately threatens to unravel the carefully stitched yet precarious threads that keep childhood apart and distinct from adulthood. The dominant discourse surrounding child sexual abuse has only served to deepen this gulf between childhood and adulthood while further hindering any productive discussions of child sexuality. Although it appears obvious that the prevention of sexual abuse of children would be significantly aided by an appreciation of child sexuality, particularly if children were empowered in their sexual agency, the ways in which child sexual abuse is discussed instead serve to disempower children all the more and depict them as incapable, defenseless, and utterly dependent on the whims of adults. “[T]he discourse of child sexual abuse has expanded at the expense of a discourse of child sexuality,” Angelides (2004) argues: “Rigorous attempts to expose the reality and dynamics of child sexual abuse have been aided, if not in part made possible, by equally rigorous attempts to conceal, repress, or ignore the reality and dynamics of child sexuality” (p. 142). Instead of perpetuating the pervasive binary that attributes power to adults and powerlessness to children, Angelides (2004) suggests, we should not shy away from acknowledging children’s sexuality nor their agency, rethink our understandings of childhood and adulthood in ways that move beyond dichotomies, and give children the tools and space to engage with their sexualities and sense of power. Such an approach would, of course, radically shift the relations between children and adults—particularly as it would imbue children, too, with subjecthood and agency—and it would significantly alter, or perhaps do away with altogether, the contemporary construction of childhood and adulthood as opposite and discrete spheres. As a consequence, we may even come to see the

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manifold ways in which child and adult sexualities are not distinct but continuous, never completely lacking nor entirely fixed but always in a process of becoming. However, because children are currently constructed as the opposite of adults, both in the realm of sexuality and elsewhere, adolescents occupy a precarious position in between two ostensibly contrasting spheres. Adolescence has come to be the period in which the child grows up and begins to approximate adulthood, and since adolescence thus constitutes the transition between two such different poles, it is no surprise that this time is typically characterized by anxiety and insecurity. After all, “[h]ow can children be gradually led by degrees toward domains they must not enter at all as children?” (Stockton, 2009, p. 62). As teenagers leave childhood behind and find themselves increasingly exposed to the expectations placed on adulthood, the uncertainty they may experience is reflected in our culture’s ambivalence about adolescence, and this ambivalence is particularly pronounced when it comes to teen sexuality. “[W]e live in a society that objectifies teen sexuality, at once glorifying and idealizing it while also stigmatizing and repressing it,” Trites (2000) explains, while further noting that “[u]ntil the unlikely day when Western cultures can define sexuality in terms of jouissance instead of repression, discourses about adolescent sexuality are likely to remain stultified in this Möbius strip of denying sexual pleasure and then deriving pleasure from discussing that denial” (p. 95). Given how apprehensive adults tend to be about recognizing teenagers as sexual, let alone about facilitating teenagers’ appreciation for their own sexualities, it only follows that shame and denial so often characterize adolescents’ relationship to sexuality. Such shame and denial appear to be the driving forces for Kenny, the adolescent protagonist of the Black Mirror episode “Shut Up and Dance.” In many regards, Kenny seems to be what we consider a typical teenager: he is lanky, awkward, often a bit nervous, has fuzz and a few pimples on his face, and bickers with his younger sister, Linds, in an early scene of the episode. The cause for this spat between the siblings is that Linds had been using her brother’s computer, which then froze as she was attempting to complete a movie download, prompting Kenny to install a malware cleaner called Shrive in order to fix the problem. Unbeknownst to him, however, downloading Shrive gives hackers access to his laptop and webcam, and they later watch Kenny as he masturbates in front of his computer to what we can infer to be pornography. When, shortly after, he receives an email stating only “We saw what you did” along with a video attachment of his masturbating, Kenny’s panicked reaction serves to further delineate him to viewers as an adolescent rather than adult; an adult, it seems, would not experience such intense embarrassment and terror merely for “getting caught” watching pornography and masturbating. As Hector, a man whom Kenny is later blackmailed into robbing a bank with, puts it so bluntly, “Jerking off to porn or something? Well, everybody does that.” For Hector and, I would surmise, most adults, the threat of having a video of oneself masturbating made public would certainly be unpleasant, but it would surely be unusual for an adult to be blackmailed by such a threat into committing a series of dangerous and violent criminal acts. Yet this is exactly what seems to be happening to adolescent Kenny.

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As Kenny performs the various tasks Shrive instructs him via text messages to complete, the episode continuously reminds its viewers that he is only a teenager: he repeatedly cries and is shown with snot running from his nose, much like we sometimes see in images of young children. When Kenny is forced to partner up with Hector, a married man with children who is blackmailed by Shrive because he sent explicit nude photographs to a prostitute, the contrast between the adolescent protagonist and this adult man markedly enhances our perception of Kenny as a teenager who appears more like a child than he does a grown-up. It is Hector who drives them around since Kenny has not yet passed his driving test, and it is Hector who pays for gas because Kenny has no money. Furthermore, the adult man treats his teenage companion much like one would treat a child, and the episode thus heightens the power differential between them as Hector repeatedly tells Kenny what to do—yelling at him, for instance, to “Shut up and listen!”—and ultimately decides that it should be Kenny who robs the bank while he himself waits in their getaway car. During the robbery that Kenny commits with great hesitation, he is visibly shaken and pees himself. As is painfully clear at this point in the episode, Kenny is certainly not a hardened criminal nor is he, in any shape or form, adult-like; he is but a terrified teenager who finds himself living in a nightmare and, as such, he evokes our sympathy, even pity. The terror he is facing at the hands of the Shrive hackers is nothing if not abusive, and the fact that Kenny is so young makes watching the abuse unfold on the screen all the more uncomfortable for viewers. “Shut Up and Dance” culminates in a showdown between Kenny and an unnamed adult man, who meet in the woods per Shrive’s instructions. While a drone is flying overhead filming them, Kenny learns from the man that they are expected to fight each other to the death so as to keep the people behind Shrive from releasing the incriminating material they have collected on both of them. “I don’t know about you,” the man tells Kenny as he prepares for the fight, “but my life’s over if this gets out. Fucking over.” When the man inquires what Shrive is blackmailing Kenny with, his response indicates how disproportionate this punishment is for what he actually did: “I just looked at some photos. That’s all. I just looked at one or two photos.” So did the man, we learn, who then poignantly asks, “How young were they? In the pictures? How young?” As Kenny only shakes his head in horror in response, it is at this moment that viewers’ perception of Kenny may markedly shift: after all, he was not just looking at pornography and embarrassed to be caught masturbating to it, as the episode had thus far led us to believe, but he was viewing pornographic images of children, a crime so horrific that it may become difficult, at this moment, to continue seeing Kenny as a victim rather than a predator. When we later see Kenny emerging from the woods limping and with a bloodied face, we can only assume that he did indeed kill the man he was forced to fight. Yet, although he followed all of their instructions and committed the violent and disturbing acts he was tasked with, the Shrive hackers release his video anyway, as Kenny finds out when his mother calls him on the phone: “What did you do, Kenny? They’re saying it’s kids!” she sobs. “Kids, Kenny!” This Black Mirror episode thus employs childhood ex machina in its final scenes. While the familiar plot device deus ex machina functions to provide the denouement

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in the last act of a play or, more rarely, the last chapter of a novel, childhood ex machina here serves a similar purpose. By evoking childhood, or more specifically the child-as-victim that is called to mind by the mention of child pornography, “Shut Up and Dance” offers its viewers both an explanation for Kenny’s behavior—his intense terror about the potential release of the video is here retroactively attributed not to his young age but rather to the fact that he was looking at explicit images of children—and a resolution to the plot that now seems to resemble less an abusive nightmare and more a revenge fantasy in which pedophiles find their ostensibly justified demise. Because they are pedophiles, this use of childhood ex machina suggests, the unnamed man is presumably punished by death, whereas Kenny has to endure not only the release of his video but is also, in the episode’s last shot, arrested by police and likely faces many years in prison. Other characters whom Shrive blackmailed face less severe repercussions for their behaviors—infidelity and racism—as they are punished only via the release of the incriminating material in the hackers’ possession. Looking at child pornography, according to Shrive’s moral compass (which we as viewers may or may not adopt as our own), seems to exist on a different plane of criminal behavior, one that cannot be forgiven and that deserves the harshest punishment imaginable. The final moments of Kenny’s story thus speak to the extreme vilification of pedophiles in our culture that has rendered the child sexual abuser, including the consumer of child pornography, our collective boogeyman. Kincaid (1998) explains that “[t]he ‘pedophile’ is the place where a host of current revulsions are relieved; it is perhaps our most frequented cultural and linguistic toilet…. Pedophiles have not really been, as we like to say, ‘othered,’ or marginalized; they have been removed from the species, rendered unknowable” (p. 88). The extent to which the child sexual abuser has become dehumanized and reduced to something akin to a monstrous beast seems to reveal our shared desire to protect children from harm, but it also and more generally indicates the moral panic over issues related to sex that has dominated many public debates in Euro-American societies over the last several decades. The pervasive problem of child poverty in the United States, for instance, has much less of a stronghold on the public imagination than the fear of pedophilia, and so even as we labor to protect children from sexual harm by, for instance, instituting the U.S. sex offender registry as well as strict regulations regarding convicted sex offenders’ movements, jobs, and places of residence upon release, this same desire to protect children does not extend with equal force to other areas in which children are victimized. Given the severe punishments for child sexual abuse and the fact that minors themselves are frequently prosecuted in the United States for crimes that fall under child sexual abuse statutes, Halperin (2017) suggests “the possibility that sex offenses are being defined far too broadly and treated out of all proportion to the real danger they present—the possibility, in other words, that sex, not harm, is the actual target of regulation” (p. 15). It appears, then, that it is the specific combination of child and sexual abuse, not harm more generally, that has become culturally intolerable. Even as there seems to be such pervasive concern over sheltering children from sexual predators, however, laws passed in the U.S. during the last few decades have had numerous consequences that actually harm the very children they were ostensibly

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designed to protect. Rubin (2011) argues that “legitimate concerns for the sexual welfare of the young have been vehicles for political mobilizations and policies with consequences well beyond their explicit aims, some quite damaging to the young people they are supposed to help” (p. 218), as such policies have been utilized to, for instance, deny children and adolescents sex education materials and even prosecute them for sexting, as child pornography laws make it possible to charge minors for exchanging nude images of themselves. Aside from further disempowering young people and depriving them of sexual agency, then, child pornography and sexual abuse statutes have had the side effect of labeling some teenagers as sex offenders for the rather innocuous act of taking a nude selfie and sending it to a peer (Halperin, 2017). In fact, both the sender and receiver face potential prosecution (and possibly inclusion on the sex offender registry) in such a scenario: the former for the production and distribution of child pornography, and the latter for possession of a sexually explicit image of a child. Since current U.S. law defines anyone under the age of 18 as a child, or minor, child sex abuse laws function not only to deter potential adult pedophiles but also to maintain a clear distinction between childhood (sexual) innocence and adult (sexual) maturity. “Rather than recognizing the sexuality of the young and attempting to provide for it in a caring and responsible manner, our culture denies and punishes erotic interest and activity by anyone under the local age of consent,” Rubin (2011, p. 161) remarks. Other sex-positive feminists have echoed these concerns in noting that “the established culture of child protection,” characterized by “its fetishization of virginity and its constant battery of alarmist messages that equate sex with risk and danger,” curtails children’s sexual agency and development because “it tacitly redefines sex, like smoking, as a form of harm, permitted only to adults” (Lancaster, 2017, pp. 105–106; emphasis in original). It is, therefore, opportune to consider the ways in which efforts to ensure children’s sexual welfare in the United States effectively further the removal of all minors, children and adolescents alike, from the realm of adults and prohibit even consensual sexual play and experimentation among minors, thus hindering the healthy sexual development of young people. While it is my firm belief that we should, of course, pursue appropriate avenues for preventing the sexual abuse of minors by adults, U.S. laws, and policies designed to do so cast too wide a net in their pursuit of pedophiles and sex offenders. Those that end up caught in this net are often not the violent child rapists we associate with the term “pedophile” but rather children and teenagers themselves who do not conform to cultural ideas about young people’s sexlessness. Indeed, juveniles make up a startling 25.8% of all known sex offenders and 35.6% of sex offenders against minors in the United States, according to a study published by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (Finkelhor, Ormrod, & Chaffin, 2009). About 16% of these offenders are below the age of 12, but these numbers actually only include perpetrators who were at least 6 years of age; children below the age of 6 were omitted from the analysis because “the notion of very young children committing sex crimes is problematic” (Finkelhor et al., 2009). The study does not specify why age 6 is used as the dividing line between “very young children” and potential sex offenders, nor does it detail why 6-year-old children—or

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all those below the age of 18, for that matter—are considered capable of committing sex crimes but incapable of giving consent to sexual activity. The sexual crimes perpetrated by these minors further indicate that what many of these juveniles are ultimately punished for are not what we may term violent offenses but rather the “crimes” of demonstrating sexual desires and engaging in sexual activities with other minors. Drawing on her research into the matter, Levine (2017) suggests that the crimes committed by convicted juvenile sex offenders hardly square with our ideas of sexual predation and pedophilia: Some engaged in consensual sex—mutual masturbation and blow jobs mostly—with teens or pubescent kids a little younger than themselves. Some viewed online images of other naked kids. Like their adult counterparts, many end up on the [sex offender] registry for ‘indecent liberties with a minor’—a crime that in most states includes such noncontact offenses as speaking ‘lewdly’ to a child or (more commonly) to an agent masquerading as a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old online. (p. 153)

If we are serious about protecting children from harm, then we must ask what protections should be afforded to minors who engage in victimless crimes such as consensual sex or sexting, and we should take care, in responding to this question, to not be blinded by fraught assumptions about children’s supposed asexuality. As Levine astutely points out, juveniles and adults alike are sometimes convicted as sex offenders for having a sexually explicit or suggestive conversation online with someone they believe to be a teenager but who is actually an operative of law enforcement. Police not only pose as minors online, however; they also at times infiltrate and even run illegal child pornography websites. Recently, the extensive pedophile forum Child’s Play was taken over and maintained for close to one year by an Australian police taskforce in an undercover operation (Knaus, 2017). During that time, detectives not only monitored the forum’s active users, who continued to upload and look at images depicting child abuse, but also posted content themselves so as to maintain their cover; in order to ultimately protect children, the rationale goes, detectives had to share images depicting child abuse and exploitation (Knaus, 2017). Despite the taskforce’s unconventional methods, which effectively constitute the viewing and distribution of child pornography, Hetty Johnston, the executive chair and founder of the Australian child protection advocacy organization Bravehearts, expressed her support for this kind of police work: unlike the offenders targeted by the undercover operation, Johnston argued, the detectives did not produce new child pornography but circulated images already in existence (Knaus, 2017). However, most sex offenders prosecuted under child pornography laws are convicted not for the production of sexually explicit images of children but for their possession, a noncontact offense; indeed, “the number of federal prisoners [in the U.S.] serving time for possession (not production) of sexually explicit materials, usually child pornography, increased 60-fold between 1996 and 2010” (Lancaster, 2017, p. 83). The boogeymen punished under current child pornography statutes are, hence, only rarely the child-raping monsters Johnston hopes will be caught by undercover police operations such as that of the Australian task force’s. It seems imperative, then, not to paint all convicted sex offenders with the same brush, especially in those cases when the perpetrators are legally children themselves,

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like Kenny. It is also worth asking which methodologies for catching potential offenders are ethical and appropriate, and this is, of course, a question that “Shut Up and Dance” encourages viewers to engage. Whereas most episodes in the science fiction series Black Mirror are clearly dystopian and showcase the (ab)uses of technologies that could, potentially, be developed in the future, the skills employed by the Shrive hackers in “Shut Up and Dance” to collect incriminating materials on their victims are, in many ways, reminiscent of the technology detectives used to infiltrate the pedophile forum Child’s Play. The episode thus urges us to consider whether Shrive’s actions are just and whether close surveillance of computers is an appropriate technique for law enforcement officials. In other words, do the ends justify the means when it comes to catching (sex) offenders? On the response to that question hinges whether we ultimately see Kenny’s punishment as justified and Shrive as a commendable vigilante group, or perceive the Shrive hackers as abusive predators doling out draconian penalties to their victims. That Kenny, despite his young age and meek appearance, is not innocent goes, I believe, without saying, but the episode’s final moments nonetheless encourage us to contemplate what would constitute a just ending to Kenny’s story: Are the public shaming, violence, and loss of freedom he experiences appropriate retributive responses to his viewing of pornographic images of children? What other possible justice might we envision in a case like Kenny’s? Oziewicz’s (2015) observations in Justice in Young Adult Speculative Fiction, a book that analyzes the use of justice scripts in non-mimetic genres, prove helpful in this context. Defining speculative fiction as a large range of non-mimetic texts that include science fiction and fantasy as well as derivatives and hybrids of these genres, Oziewicz (2015) notes that these texts are invested with a more profound potential for inspiring ethical reflections than their mimetic counterparts: because speculative fiction depicts alternative forms of social organization, it presents “venues for an essentially philosophical speculation on the human condition that involves issues of justice and moral responsibility” and thus “offers liberating projections that testify to the need to imagine a more just world” (pp. 12, 13). Literary and filmic non-mimetic narratives allow their audience to imagine hypothetical realms and scenarios that, particularly as these are compared to the workings of contemporary society, can inspire alternative visions of the future and “keep our dreaming alive, including the dream of justice” (Oziewicz, 2015, p. 4). The Black Mirror series certainly fits within the parameters for speculative fiction that Oziewicz establishes, even as it tends to depict the future as markedly dystopian rather than utopian. In fact, I would suggest that it is precisely the cautionary, nightmarish scenarios the series showcases that inspire contemplations of our present moment, and especially of the nonethical uses to which technological advances might be put, which can, in turn, direct us toward envisioning a more equitable future. Yet the potential for evoking ethical considerations and new ways of seeing rests not only on speculative fiction’s depiction of alternative pasts, presents, and futures, according to Oziewicz, but also on these non-mimetic texts’ incorporation of justice scripts. Oziewicz (2015) explains that “complex ideas such as justice are stored and processed by the human mind as scripts—standardized sequences of causally linked events—and … actualized scripts, when described, take the form of multiply

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indexable stories” (p. 4). Although the cognitive process of scripting is universal, Oziewicz (2015) asserts that the specific elements of justice scripts vary depending on the cultural and historical contexts in which they develop. Classic European folk and fairy tales, for instance, tend to employ poetic justice scripts that ultimately present the world as inherently unjust so that the achievement of justice remains either elusive, attainable only in the afterlife, or deferred to the future; as such, these tales reflect the oppressive conditions peasants had to contend with in their feudal societies (Oziewicz, 2015). Contemporary Euro-American legal systems operate largely on the basis of what Oziewicz (2015) calls the retributive justice script, which “is activated by what is perceived as a harm or violation and … projects the achievement of justice as retribution against the offender” (p. 115). Consequently, the law tends to present justice as the attainment of a form of revenge and underscores the need to punish delinquents with incarceration or other penalties designed to achieve a kind of payback for their crimes. Oziewicz (2015) further explains that “[t]he two signature phenomena of the retributive justice script are the retribution imperative, no matter what the cost, and the license for unrestrained violence” (pp. 119–120). Kenny’s draconian and brutal punishment in “Shut Up and Dance” clearly illustrates these components of the retributive justice script. I do, however, want to submit that even as this Black Mirror episode follows the retributive justice script, it simultaneously contests the notion that retribution leads to the attainment of justice. Since “fiction is one of the main channels for the dissemination and evolution of specific justice scripts,” it provides its audience with “narratives [that] both reflect and challenge justice scripts predominant in a given society” (Oziewicz, 2015, pp. 18, 77). In presenting us with an adolescent protagonist who inspires compassion and pity, “Shut Up and Dance” turns our cultural expectations of what sex offenders are like upside-down, while its plot’s focus on the abuses Kenny endures at the hands of Shrive leaves us, I would argue, not with a feeling of satisfaction about Kenny’s utter downfall but with a bad taste in our mouths. As the narrative consistently emphasizes this young character’s shame and terror, it becomes near impossible for the audience to cheer the tragic ending of his story, which seems to succeed only in piling more violence on top of violence rather than in displaying any kind of real justice achieved through retribution. Although the revelation that Kenny consumed images that victimize children sharply alters our perception of this character, I posit that it cannot completely undo the previously sympathetic, even affectionate portrayal of Kenny. Given that he is depicted as both young and a victim of Shrive’s abuse throughout most of the episode, I find it unfathomable to shift my perception of Kenny so completely as to view him as an ostensibly adult predator during the final scenes. In other words, perhaps it is possible, even encouraged by the narrative, to condemn the ways in which Kenny has participated in the victimization of children while at the same time continuing to view him, too, as a victimized child. If Kenny indeed constitutes such a child-as-victim, then the retributive justice to which he is subjected feels far from satisfying and instead represents only an additional layer of the abuse this character has to endure. “Shut Up and Dance” seems to suggest, then, that the retributive justice script is problematic, even outdated perhaps, and that we would do well to imagine alternatives that more appropriately

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capture our sense of justice. Oziewicz (2015) observes that although our legal systems continue to be steeped in the retributive justice model, new conceptions of justice have already begun to develop: “In the last thirty years or so there has been an increasing stress on a situational rather than absolutist understanding of justice, based on a view of human beings as historically conditioned by specifically realized forms of social life rather than as rational agents or generic abstractions in a social equation” (p. 15). The retributive justice script in “Shut Up and Dance,” then, seems just only if we understand Kenny as the abstract embodiment of the culturally laden sex offender and pedophile figures; but as the narrative’s depiction of this character renders such a view impossible, the episode ultimately encourages us, as speculative fiction so often does, to dream of a different tomorrow in which the quest for justice is more humane. Given the extent to which sex offenders, and pedophiles especially, have been rendered as monsters and effectively removed from the realm of humankind, however, it can prove difficult to envision a society that regards even those guilty of the sexual victimization of children as worthy of redemption. Yet by compelling its viewers to develop affection for Kenny and by putting a human face, one that we are encouraged to regard with compassion, on the bestial figure of the pedophile, “Shut Up and Dance” implores us to do just that. The struggle for new conceptions of justice that see the humanity even in sex offenders—a group which, we may recall, includes a significant percentage of juveniles as well as perpetrators of contactless crimes—is doubtlessly fraught with ethical dilemmas and complexity, which are only heightened by the manifold quandaries involved in discussing any topic related to the sexual at our current political moment. As Amber Hollibaugh (2017) asserts, “There is great difficulty in trying to build a progressive moment to address issues of sex, desire, pleasure, and possibility, at a point in history when increasing conservatism makes it more and more difficult to talk about sex in any context” (p. 456, emphasis in original). Sex is, of course, political, and never more so perhaps than when it is spoken of in the same breath as the child. But in endeavoring to imagine a more just society for all, examining our attitudes toward children—and revising our conception of them as asexual beings who are nonetheless sexualized—might be a particularly productive place to begin. If we can strive to disentangle our cultural construction of the erotic from that of the child, while simultaneously empowering real children in their sexual agency, then, it seems to me, we will be off to a promising start.

References Angelides, S. (2004). Feminism, child sexual abuse, and the erasure of child sexuality. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 10(2), 141–177. Brooker, C. (Writer), Bridges, W. (Writer), & Watkins, J. (Director). (2016). Shut up and dance [Television series episode]. In C. Brooker (Producer), Black Mirror. London, UK: Netflix. Finkelhor, D., Ormrod, R., Chaffin, M. (2009). Juveniles who commit sex offenses against minors. National criminal justice reference service. Retrieved December 2, 2017, from https://www.ncjrs. gov/pdffiles1/ojjdp/227763.pdf.

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Halperin, D. M. (2017). Introduction: The war on sex. In D. M. Halperin & T. Hoppe (Eds.), The war on sex (pp. 1–61). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hollibaugh, A. (2017). Bringing sex to the table of justice. In D. M. Halperin & T. Hoppe (Eds.), The war on sex (pp. 454–460). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kincaid, J. R. (1998). Erotic innocence: The culture of child molesting. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Knaus, C. (2017, October 7). Australian police sting brings down paedophile forum on dark web. The Guardian. Retrieved December 1, 2017, from https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/ oct/07/australian-police-sting-brings-down-paedophile-forum-on-dark-web. Lancaster, R. N. (2017). The new pariahs: Sex, crime, and punishment in America. In D. M. Halperin & T. Hoppe (Eds.), The war on sex (pp. 65–125). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Levine, J. (2017). Sympathy for the devil: Why progressives haven’t helped the sex offender, why they should, and how they can. In D. M. Halperin & T. Hoppe (Eds.), The war on sex (pp. 126–173). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nodelman, P. (2008). The hidden adult: Defining children’s literature. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Oziewicz, M. C. (2015). Justice in young adult speculative fiction: A cognitive reading. New York, NY: Routledge. Rubin, G. S. (2011). Deviations: A Gayle Rubin reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stockton, K. B. (2009). The queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Trites, R. S. (2000). Disturbing the universe: Power and repression in adolescent literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Your Android Ain’t Funky (or Robots Can’t Find the Good Foot): Race, Power, and Children in Otherworldly Imaginations Walter S. Gershon and Reagan P. Mitchell

Abstract Imagination of the impossible is a common, delightful part of early childhood experiences, as are the content and contexts of what Donna Haraway calls SF, the multitude of possibilities for speculating futures and otherworldly imaginations. It is a wonder, then, despite deep histories of SF in African American intellectual traditions and recent further blooming of people of African descent in SF, there are so few young Black children in SF across literature and media. Not that there aren’t tweens and teens of African descent, even younger Black children with powerful voices, or a total absence of Black babies. However, grounded in a theoretical funk and underscored by an improvisational ethic, this chapter argues that such absences are the norm. As significantly, the authors also contend that an ongoing and growing attention layered, nuanced, writing with older Black child protagonists, should be more present in works about and for young children.

The notion that there are nearly no young children of color in science fiction resonates so deeply as to feel like low hanging fruit. What is perhaps even more disturbing is that overall veracity of this claim: quick, name five children of color in SF between the ages of 0–6. Androids who might be Black or dance the robot in a 1970s movie don’t count. Actual Black, Brown, Asian young children written or seen in a work of science fiction regardless of media. Part of the issue is that there are very few young children at all in SF narratives, especially when one narrows the focus to science fiction and removes occasional subcategories like horror. What a lack of faith in children: to encourage our most open minds to imagine other worlds then remove them from the story. Where did all those tweens in Harry Potter come from? And when there are kids, why are they so Anglo?

W. S. Gershon (B) School of Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Studies, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] R. P. Mitchell Department of Educational Studies, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 D. W. Kupferman and A. Gibbons (eds.), Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_6

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An exploration of these two central questions, where are the children and why are they so white, from our perspective, requires simultaneously contrary motions to arrive at a central point of resonance. On one hand, there is the notion that there are indeed exceptional characters of color, perhaps now more than ever, and that similar possibilities are both significant and warranted for young children within the genre. On the other hand, there is a continuing absence of representations of early childhood in general, and young children of color in specific, that continues largely unabated in SF. It is through attention to both of these motions that our argument rests. Yet, before taking another step, it is nonetheless important to note that there have and continue to be young protagonists of color, especially in light of a continuing boom in young adult literature and graphic novels/comics. Consider, the reboot of Spider-Man with Miles Morales, an Afro-Latino as the protagonist (e.g., Bendis & Marquez, 2014), Kamela Khan, a Muslim teen from Jersey City, as Ms. Marvel (Wilson & Alphona, 2015), and Miéville’s Zanna in (2007) Un Lun Dun (2007). Conversely, we are also not seeking to incidentally contribute to the erasure of young people of color throughout the history of SF, the children in the works of Octavia Butler or Nalo Hopkinson, for example. These and others associated works are simply lovely and we cannot recommend them highly enough. Our argument in this chapter focuses on a different group of young children of color books written for and about early childhood from infancy to age six. In order to make this chapter a bit more manageable bite to take in the space we’ve been graciously provided by the editors of this volume, we focus primarily on young children of African descent and to particular American expressions of Blackness. While this argument has a particular set of accompanying understandings and consequences unto itself, we also intend for it to be an indicator of other absences. If young children of African descent and attending Black American aesthetics in which they are grown are generally absent across forms of media and expression, it is a strong indicator that young children of color in general are also likely absent from such media. We recognize that this has a particularly US-centric framing of imaginations and that an absence of young Black children in speculative fiction may not indicate a general absence of young children of color more generally (though we have our doubts). However, as the United States of America continues to utilize forms of popular media and culture as forms of contemporary neoliberal colonialisms (read “globalization”), and the hippest parts of US culture are often appropriated forms of Blackness, an absence of young children of African descent and an accompanying US aesthetic is indeed telling. As we articulate momentarily, we conceptualize this US Black aesthetic as the funk. Conversely, this is in many ways a non-African continental question, steeped in questions of ongoing (settler) colonialisms on one hand and the use of SF as a colonial act on the other hand. In the first instance, discussions throughout this chapter about an absence of Blackness are often much less present in sociocultural contexts and nation states with Black majorities. Of the latter point, Reider (2008) makes the following argument:

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If this study has succeeded at all in demonstrating how early science fiction articulate the structures of knowledge and power provided by colonialism, then it will also have indicated along the way—for example in the discussion of lost race fiction or of London’s “The Red One” that some of the racism endemic to colonialist discourses is woven into the texture of science fiction. (p. 97)

From this perspective, as we describe below, the general erasure of young Black children in SF, and the improvisational ethics it engenders as a means to negotiate those erasures, can be understood as a manifestation of these colonialist (under)currents. Our position necessitates a doubled theoretical underpinning allowing both iterations of the possible and trends of erasure (Mitchell, 2018a, b), to reverberate oscillating against one another (Gershon, 2013). For movements of the possible, we draw from Nnedi Okorafor’s Hugo and Nebula award-winning Binti series (2015, 2017, 2018) and Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staple’s Image Comics series Saga (2012)—works that speak to the depth and breadth of imagined Black worlds and the potential power in SF for young children of color and in general. Given the structure of our argument that moves from contexts and structures to examples, we return to these pieces in the final third of this article. In so doing, we arrive on the good foot of potential. A means to at once articulate a neither/nor of authenticity and absence for SF writers of color while underscoring a continuing minority history in science fiction: a place where multiple media platforms open up the fantastical to our most imaginary community members, young children. Here, we use the terms speculative fiction and SF interchangeably, borrowing on one hand from Carrington’s (2016) argument for the use of speculative fiction as a category of openness and possibility for what he terms “speculative Blackness”, and Donna Haraway’s (2013, 2016) use of SF as a means to make categories further messy toward queerly feminist possibilities: “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, so far” (n.p.). We begin our exploration from a particular positionality of embodied Black performative aesthetic: What does it mean to have the funk? Where is it kept? Bolden (2003), “argue[s] that the funk/spirit—or, more simply, the funk—operates as a distinct form of black vernacular epistemology” (p. 10). We wholeheartedly agree and expand upon this understanding so that the funk is not “simply” a complex epistemological framework but is also what we, following understandings in sound studies (e.g., Sterne, 2012) “as beingknowingdoing—the inexorably imbricated understanding that to be is to know is to do” (Gershon, 2017a, p. 48). However, unlike Bolden whose attentions are more focused on tracing and further unearthing the funk, our purposes here speak across all constructions of the funkified: that the funk is a particular expression of earthy, embodied, Blackness that is at once mutable as to exist across and within particular times, and constant enough to be recognized across its contexts. There has long been and continues to be a sonic color line (Stoever, 2016). It has been manifest in music and radio, both as a means of racial segregation and as a tool for resistance (Ward, 2004), in the ways in which music is scored and conceptualized as indicators of national norms and values about race (Higginson, 2017; Hill, 2013),

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and, to the heart of our argument here, in sonic expressions at intersections of race and technology (Chude-Sokei, 2016; Steinskog, 2018). More specifically, we are not speaking about the funk musically but in terms of ways of beingknowingdoing—it’s got to be funky. As the scholars throughout Bolden’s (2003) special issue articulate, funk is an act of naming the unnamable amalgam of isness that serves as aesthetic affects, signals sent and received. We have come to think of these signals that vibrate between like frequencies of understandings and experiences as resonances (Gershon, 2013, 2017a, b, 2018; Mitchell, 2018a, b). Funk, then, can be understood as resonances with particular affects and understandings that signal and signify (e.g., Gates, 1988) Black American ways of beingknowingdoing. And, as we began considering what it might mean to write a chapter on early childhood and speculative futures, we were struck by a particular absence, a notable gap of resonances across media: your robots ain’t funky. By this we do not mean that you specifically are missing the funk or wish to incidentally erase the history and progress of Black authorship across media and spacetimes. Rather, the royal and normalized “you” that is most often present in science fiction, regardless of their expression (e.g., as graphic novels), has a null curriculum, educational ways of beingknowingdoing that are notable for their absence (Flinders, Noddings & Thornton, 1986). Not only is there a visible absence of young children of color in these works, there is a missing vibration, a void in resonance. There’s no funk. Not that the funk is missing across media and forms of expression that can be categorized as speculative fiction, for there are works that are dripping with the funk, from founding foreparents Octavia Butler and Samuel L. Delaney to recent attention to Black Panther and Luke Cage in comic, television, and film forms or Colson Whitehead’s (2016) multi-award-winning works. Nor do we wish to incidentally erase children of color or their proxies in fantastical races from works of speculative fiction such as Maika, the protagonist of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s (2015–) excellent comic, Monstress. Yet, the absence of funky young ones is so profound that, even with ongoing nostalgia for the 1980s, there isn’t even a 3-yearold getting down with herself doing the “robot.” No babies doing the funky robot, no robots getting down like funky babies. Our argument therefore begins outlining the funk. This understanding is predicated scholarship (e.g., Bolden, 2003), musician’s discussions about the funk, and our respective experiences in playing the funk, an understanding that is intertwined with our respective histories and experiences in ways that underscore the imbricated, messy nature of its expression, its funkiness. We then attend to questions of erasure and the ethics of improvising as closely related understandings, a theoretical move that brings us to examples of the funk in SF, a presence that enunciates an absence (e.g., Wozolek, 2015; Wozolek, Wootton & Demlow, 2016): a null curriculum of funky babies. These understandings land in our brief conclusion where we argue that such an absence is an educational concern, and a longstanding one at that, in which young people learn about themselves in relation to others and recursive iterations of absence create ongoing blanks of Blackness. In its stead, we suggest that, as edu-

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cators, we start calling for publishers to get on the good foot, land on the one, and follow the babies who know how to move just fine. Then there is this final note about speculative Blackness. We understand our chapter to at once precede and supersede conversations about Afrofuturism and Afro-pessimism. While not necessarily framed in this fashion, these two constructions can be conceptualized as opposite sides of the same coin. Where Afrofuturism holds at its core that current trajectories of Blackness can give birth to worlds where such Blackness is liberated, valued, loved, and normalized, Afro-Pessimism believes that such worlds are impossible without first rejecting both contemporary trajectories and their anti-Black underpinnings that insist upon the negative framing of Blackness for the positive invention and framing of Whiteness. For, without Black babies there can be no Black futures, Black ways of beingknowingdoing that are grounded in the funk. It is a proposition of funking theory about funking practices for funking babies who, in turn, help funkify worlds, lived, imagined, or otherwise.

Con Clave y Curriculum: A Material Expression of African Sensibilities The funk is a Black American embodied expression that is in no small part a result of the tension between sociocultural intentions of erasure and a resulting fluidity of improvisational ethics described below. It is also, in spite of its musical expression, in many ways floating from US back to the Motherland—as in the move from James Brown to Fela Kuti, for example—inexorably African in its intention, attention, and expression (for more on intention, attention, and expression, Gershon, 2018). Although there are certainly other ways to conceptualizing its roots and trajectories, one way is as a distinctly African combination of clave and complexity. Clave is the syncretized Spanish word for the foundational rhythms of rumba that is also utilized to describe such rhythms for songs with drumming at their roots throughout Cuba, Puerto Rico, and, by extension, the United States. A clave is also a key to a particular idea (a key understanding) and a sonic sibling to the word llave, keys as in those to a door. Clave does two things that are central to our argument here. First, it provides a means for negotiating rhythmic patterns that shouldn’t really exist according to Western constructions of rhythmic function. By this we mean what is conventionally called “six against four,” meaning that the rhythms exist simultaneously in two time signatures, four-four time (four beats per measure, the most common time signature in Western popular music) and six-eight time (six eighth notes per measure, the time signature at a rather slow tempo for Ray Charles’ version of “Georgia” and, at a more mid-tempo, both Aretha Franklin’s original version and En Vogue’s cover of the song “Giving Him Something He Can Feel”). Clave is the key to negotiating the push–pull tensions of these overlapping rhythmic pulses that align like a Venn Diagram where only a few key pulses are shared.

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Here’s the complicating part about clave in this regard: it doesn’t tend to sound the overlapping pulses that musicians often utilize to align these patterns in their minds (although, of course, some do more than others), which brings us to the second central function of clave. In rumba, clave is the pattern that plays all the central rests between the tones in the interlocking drum patterns that are its sonic signature. In sum, clave is the key through interlocking impossibilities that gives voice to rests, creating a backbone for the ebb, flow, and improvisation of song. It at once voices erasure and imposes an improvisational ethics. This, at its core, is the funk: voice erasures and improvising ethics. Another central understanding to take away from this discussion of clave and funk is that it is undeniably and essentially African in origin. Our decision not to land such understandings in a specific region of Africa, although it is primarily West African, or in a given peoples, while it is in many ways primarily Yoruban, has to do with the horrors of enslaved peoples, the syncretic nature of their solutions to oppression and violence, and the utter disregard of person that also contributed to a mixing of traditions, norms, and values that were part and parcel of everyday survival. Our purpose for outlining this musical trajectory is to provide a practical example for the funk in the form through which it is most often conceptualized, as a genre of music. However, the point that is most germane to our argument here is that the funk is the result of a particular aesthetics that form ways of educational beingknowingdoing that are at once knowledge explicitly passed between people and that seep into broader sociocultural milieu(s). From this perspective, funkified musics and movements are expressions of an aesthetic. This aesthetic is, in turn, an understanding of sociocultural claves that press back at erasures, most often in forms of oppression and their accompanying expressions of violence. When placed alongside one another, this means that funk is as much a signifier as it is a curriculum. That funk is a curriculum means that it can be, for example, forms of formal, hidden, enacted, or null curriculum (e.g., Gershon, 2017b, 2018). While formal curriculum often is considered to be that which is taught in schools, and there is indeed a case to be made for funk to be formally taught in music classes and schools, it can also be formally passed down outside of schools, passed down through generations, for example. When one person gets schooled by a friend outside of school, they’re expressing their sociocultural proficiencies and knowledge, no less a formal experience than answering a question incorrectly in class. Formal curriculum can also be expressed in signals and signifying as well as specific rituals, how children greet each other and their teachers with a handshake or a bow, for example. Hidden curriculum here in many ways inverts the often-negative way in which hidden curricula are most often conceptualized as sociocultural behavioral expectations (e.g., Jackson, 1968) or as norms and values that recognize dominant groups at the expense of nondominant groups (e.g., Apple, 1991). A hidden curriculum of funk is how oppressed people of African descent in the United States signal their shared communal understandings in the face of intentional acts of erasure, an improvisational expression of value that articulates presence in a supposed absence (e.g., Wozolek, 2015). All funk is, to some degree, an enacted curriculum, co-constructed through everyday face-to-face interactions. Finally, in most schooling, and in domi-

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nant understandings in the United States, the funk is a null curriculum, intentionally excised from “proper” codes of conduct, as can be seen in how young Black bodies are read as wrong in their movement and too much in their volume (e.g., Tatum, 1997). That funk is ways of beingknowingdoing and that those ways are also expressed in/as/through curriculum is particularly helpful for our project here. This is because it situates funk as polyphonic paradoxes of possibilities. For example, it is an inherently Black diasporic set of understandings and experiences yet can become known to both future generations and those outside of Black diasporas through formal and hidden curricula. In a similar fashion, it is at once embodied ways of beingknowingdoing that are signifying signals and curricula that can be examined as such. All of which brings us back (Sankofa, Sankofa), to where we began as we move forward. There is both an absence of young Black children and the funk in SF. Such an absence is attributable to an accompanying dearth of Blackness in the creation of speculative fictions, regardless of media, a gap that is due as much to a lack of attention to Blackness as it is to forms of authorial redlining, the intentional disenfranchisement of Black creatives that in many ways continues unabated today. Also missing is the funk, an indicator not only of Black people but Black aesthetics. As Gateward and Jennings (2015) note in their introduction to the Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, Black characters often rang false to Black readers for what we would characterize as a lack of funk. All of this is to say nothing of the further oppression of queerness and gender in comics (e.g., Gibson & Huxley, 2015; Whaley, 2016), though attention to combinations of queerness and race in the art form remains generally overlooked. What is missing in this explanation is a governing set of understandings that function as a kind of aesthetic ethics, serving as governing principles around which such flexibility of form and critical expressions are constructed. For, it is likely not enough to argue that the funk is fluid, a marker for particular expressions of Black(American)ness, and moves according to its inherent principles. What are those principles and how are they related? Through what modes of understanding might they be conceptualized? As we have implied throughout this section and articulate below, the funk is in many ways the result of what we understand as twinned tensions between erasure and improvisational ethics. This is our last theoretical move before we return to some expressions of the funk and how they might further facilitate the presence through the processes of erasures and focus of young Black people in SF across genres and age groups. Conversely, we understand movements of erasure to reside within broader implications and constructions of authenticity that often create rigid mappings, dampening literary resonances from communities of color. In the following section, we turn to Percival Everett’s novel Erasure (2001), a humorous depiction through the eyes of a Black protagonist/narrator, Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, and his oppositional relationship with his fictional publishing agent. At the heart of their conflict is the agent’s belief that Ellison’s work is not authentically Black enough, a concern that leads the agent to try and press the focus on more marketable deficit-oriented “Black subject matter” (e.g., welfare queen, hypermasculine, and thug tropes).

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Erasure Versus Improvisation Everybody wanna be a nigga, but don’t nobody wanna be a nigga. (Chappelle & Brennan, 2003)

Paul Mooney’s utterly serious joke, improvised during a segment of Chappelle Show “Ask a Black Dude,” brilliantly articulates the existential struggle tensions between overly common forms of oppression in everyday Black life and the high cultural capital of Black sociocultural, aesthetic expressions: only someone who isn’t Black can benefit from using an everyday Black aesthetic. In this direct, ironic fashion, Mooney’s comment also characterizes the capital in commercialized desires for the swag of Blackness, monetizing a Black aesthetic only made possible by intentionally decoupling aesthetics from politics, how people “be” from the conditions in which they live. Wanting your funk uncut is one thing, valuing, let alone living, the inner city blues quite another (Clinton, Collins & Worrell, 1975; Gaye & Nyx, 1971). In order to document how this tension between erasure and improvisation forms funk foundations, we turn to the Arts.1 More specifically, we consider the potential of the Arts for conceptualizing and naming modes of oppression as well as improvisatory pathways for their interruption. Here, we enunciate such possibilities through a kind of doubled Arts argument, points made by a protagonist about the Arts within a piece of literature—a passage about protagonist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison’s ideological discord with book agents in Everett’s (2001) novel Erasure. This passage occurs in the opening pages of Erasure where Ellison tells the story of an engagement primarily attended by fellow writers and writing agents. Ellison, who is well situated in an echelon of already established writers and one of few Black authors at the event, describes it as, “one of the tedious affairs where people who write mingle with people who want to write and with people who can help either group begin or continue to write” (p. 2). At the party, an unnamed book agent approaches Ellison. Unsolicited, as if Ellison is unaware of his own intentions and understandings, the agent pedantically explains to him that Ellison’s work centers on a combination of a reconceptualization of Greek tragedy and French postructuralism. Were this not enough, the nameless agent continues providing “advice” that Ellison abandons his foundationally Western intellectual project and shifts to writing about the “true, gritty real of black life” (Everett, 2001, p. 2). Through these comments and suggestions, the critic seeks to erase Ellison through two twinned moves: first disallowing Ellison the possibility that he might have a sense of how his own work is situated through a Western, more academic lens, then insisting that Ellison would be better off reinforcing stereotypical representations of Black life in the United States. Not only can Ellison not be himself as he intended, he should be someone else that is better understood by white critics as “Black,” as if Blackness is monolithic and more Western, high-art-oriented understandings are the sole purview of Anglos. Erasure coming and going. 1 The Arts are capitalized here to underscore the notion that we are speaking of all visual, performing,

and inter/transdisciplinary arts regardless of subfield, media, or forms of expressions.

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Ellison’s response offers an embodied, lived critique of the everyday oppression of this attempted erasure, an improvisation that gives voice to the inescapable presence of his everyday Blackness. His response can also be understood as an interruption to neoliberal, capitalist discourses in which an artist must be properly quantified and categorized to matter (Black, male, writer, previously published) and Art must be put in Western terms in order to be properly monetized, as if money is an actual measure of quality and nuance. Ellison states, “I told him that I was living a black life, far blacker than he could ever know, that I had lived one, that I would be living one” (Everett, 2001, p. 2, emphasis in original). Regardless of what or how I write, Ellison says, I am Blackness in ways that not only you are not but you cannot ever be. It is a reclaiming of self in the face of erasure through an emphasis of Blackness-as-being as well as a correction of multiplicities of Blackness in the face of an attempted reframing of Black as monolithic. Perhaps most importantly, Ellison’s comments are a challenge to the idea that the only “true” or “real” Black experience is “gritty,” writing about Blackness as equivalent to hardships and oppression in ways that implicitly venerate Anglos and re/position Blackness as violently lesser. From this perspective, Ellison’s response is an ethics of improvisation in the face of an attempted erasure. Here, again, it is worthwhile to underscore that this is at least a doubled expression of improvisation in the face of erasure. For this is author Percival Everett’s writing about a character named Ellison who is responding to another character’s attempted erasure. In both cases, it is Everett who is expressing his authorial interpretation in this fashion within the opening pages of a novel, emphasizing his Blackness and ability to tell a Black story how he feels fit in the face of possible erasures not unlike those his protagonist faces. An excellent example of how it is often precisely this kind of improvisational ethic—a spontaneous talking back that insists on one’s right to be in the face of erasure or denial of presence—that is voiced in expressions of a Black aestheticsas-funk is made expressly clear in Niles Rogers’ tale about the creation of his band Chic and their first hit song, Le Freak. As detailed in several places including a short documentary titled Niles Rogers: The Hitmaker (Stevens, 2013), in order to appeal to a wider audience and not be further pigeonholed (erased), Rogers and bandmates chose to call their band Chic and not have band members on the cover, creating an impression that the group was French. The story around Le Freak (note the faux-French “Le”) is that Rogers and bandmates were denied access to famed disco/club Studio 54. Rogers pissed off, went back to his apartment, and improvised the now famous guitar riff from the song to the lyrics “Fuck Off.” Fuck Off became “Freak Out!” for more radio-friendly ears and the rest is musical history. It is also a clear move where an erasure became an improvisational movement of presence and voice within the funk, a clearly Black, deeply rhythmic, and polyphonic aesthetic. Deep musical pocket, funky presence. This moment of erasure and its improvisational reassertion of presence as an ethical act is what Moten (2003) famously called “the break,” an aesthetic and intellectual disruption of everyday experiences, from joy to oppressive violence, that characterize intellectual resonances with embodied experiences (Gershon, 2017a).

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While breaks are intentional, they are improvisations and they are responses to intentional erasure of individuals and groups to maintain power and privilege for dominant interlopers, in the form of settler colonialisms (e.g., Barnd, 2017; Bonds & Inwood, 2016; Park, 2015; Short, 2016). It is therefore not surprising that such improvisational ethics move within, around, through, or disregard the sociocultural, psychological, that often break with norms and values that frame accepted codes of beingknowingdoing (Gershon, 2017a, p. 48), the often-implicit understandings that serve as the foundations for the kinds erasures described in this section. Finally, Moten (2003), like LeRoy Jones (Amiri Baraka) (1963), Houston Baker (1984), and others before him, argues for the impossibility for the singular in improvisation. Similar in kind to Bakhtin’s (1982) notion of heteroglossia—that any word is imbued with multiple histories, meanings, and understandings that are all socioculturally created and contextualized—any improvised act is comprised of already present understandings, sociocultural contexts, and modes of everyday interactions. Improvisations are also necessarily plural in their meanings and expressions, as it is impossible for any improvisational iteration to address only one thing.

Young, Gifted, and Missing? Tension between erasure and improvisational ethics serves as a strong means for describing a pair of paradoxical-seeming relationships: (a) a continuing dearth of young Black children in SF vs. a history and more recent blossoming of Black tween and teen protagonists, particularly in young adult (YA) literature (YA lit); and (b) a parallel absence of children of color in general in SF vs. contemporary works that highlight young children of color. When placed in conversation, these trends suggest the argument we pursue in this section. In spite of continuing trends of erasure, there are not only models for attending to the depth and breath of Blackness for youth in SF but also works that illustrate the power and potential of young children as central figures in speculative fiction. What makes this argument sticky is that there is a history of younger characters across SF. Classic examples include Dorothy in L. Frank Baum’s Oz series (1900–1920); the protagonist in The Little Prince (de Saint-Exupery, 1948); and Charles Wallace in L’Engle’s (1962) A Wrinkle in Time. More recent examples include Ender Wiggin in Card’s (1985) Ender’s Game; a young Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace (1999); and the android boy Tim-21, the protagonist of Image Comic’s Descender (Lemire & Nguyen, 2015–). Yet, as this list indicates, most of these protagonists are male and, if not Anglo, Anglo-based characters. They are children in imagined worlds where the majority reflects broader sociocultural assumptions of a preponderance of white people and accompanying value and normalcy of whiteness. Complicating matters further, as Thomas’ (2000) Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora documents, it is not that there somehow isn’t a history of Black SF but instead that it has been rendered largely invisible

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due to processes of erasure. W. E. B. DuBois wrote SF. Derek Bell wrote SF. To wit, the title of Thomas’ introduction to the collection is “Looking for the Invisible.” However, we agree with the argument that, until recently, there are comparatively few Black characters, while important, is a point that has been made well elsewhere, as well as the case for expanding and potential for Blackness in speculative fiction (Howard, 2017; Lavender, 2016). Furthermore, it is our understanding that such work is already well underway and has made crossovers into mainstream contemporary consciousness in the United States. This can be seen, for example, in recent movies based on Black Panther, which is in many ways a love letter to contemporary Black culture, and DuVernay’s (2018) A Wrinkle in Time that features a predominantly Brown and Black cast in what have been previously envisioned as Anglo characters. What nonetheless remains is a general absence of young Black children in SF. Rather than further belabor this point, in the face of this erasure we seek to provide our own improvisational ethical response that is this section. More specifically, we turn here to both some of the ways in which young Black children are present and how their presence is generally articulated, examples of the beautiful complexities of Blackness in recent YA lit, and in non-Black young children of color in recent graphic novels. Although there are an ever-increasing number of excellent potential examples of sculpting complex young Black characters in truly diverse world-building, here we focus on Nnedi Okorafor’s award-winning series of novellas Binti (2015, 2017), with Binti: The Night Masquerade (2018) completing the trilogy, a case we also utilize to present how young children are often presented in YA-oriented lit. This is followed by an argument for the potential for young Black characters, as exemplified by Huey in The Boondocks, a non-SF, slightly older protagonist than the age group that is the focus of this volume; and Hazel, the protagonist of Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staple’s comic Saga, a multi-biracial character whose life as a young child is a focal part of the story, but who is not Black.

Children as Indicators of the Presence and Complexity of Black Communities That children are utilized as markers for community and barometers of health are not necessarily particular to narrative constructions of children of African descent in SF. For example, the engagement of children as monikers of community health is a point of exploration taken up through disciplines ranging from anthropology, as seen in Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ Death Without Weeping (1992/1993), in which a central theme situates infant survival as abnormal in Brazil, to music and popular culture in Michael Masser and Linda Creed’s song The Greatest Love of All (1977), a song popularized by Whitney Houston in 1985 in which she sings (or sang) “I believe the children are our future.” Leaving aside arguments like Meiner’s (2016) argument about the use of children as a central cog in the reification and maintenance of a

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carceral state, as in these examples, children are seen simultaneously as indicators for a community’s health and the trajectory of that health, whether ascending or collapsing. As noted above, this is also the case in SF more generally. What makes this a more profound point for Black communities in SF is that, to one side, there is a comparative lack of representation of Blackness. On the other side, that a robust, healthy Black community continues to be put forward as imagined futures, a means to consider the problematics in violences at once excused and prescribed to Black children nationally and internationally, which is a strong indicator of the continuation of that violence, systemic, interpersonal, and otherwise. To be clear, we are by no means suggesting that healthy Black communities do not exist, that such possibilities are present only in the imaginary, or that there is something about Blackness that moves against community, its construction, or its ongoing upkeep. Rather, we are speaking to continuing local and less local ideas, ideals, and practices that continue to make healthy Black communities both a literal and metaphorical hardship, as well as the ways in which Black struggles are part and parcel to Anglo successes (e.g., Sharpe, 2016; Taylor, 2016; Varenne & McDermott, 1998; Winfield, 2007), including how those understandings are internalized, perpetuated, resisted, and rejected within community (e.g., Cooper, 2017; Spence, 2015). From these perspectives, the presence of Black children is often utilized as a signifier of multigenerational Black communities and, in some instances, the depth and complexity of those ecologies. While not all such constructions are indicators of healthy communities, nor is our point that they should be, here we have intentionally selected a contemporary example of the kinds of robust communities present in SF. The series Binti, by Okora for (2015, 2017, 2018), establishes plot with a rich with discourses relating to the presence and complexity of Black communities. Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dabu Kaipka of Naimb, the protagonist, is presented as an individual from “respectable” family stock and faces stigmatization as a result of electing to leave her community, the Himba, to seek higher education at the Oomza University. As Binti begins the journey aboard The Third Fish, she explains, “We Himba don’t travel. We stay put. Our ancestral land is life; move away from it and you diminish” (Okorafor, 2015, p. 12). Binti’s statement presents the belief system of the Himba community. Her statement is an acknowledgement of the belief system she embodies imparted from the Himba. Exiting the nest of home constitutes a sort of death. The connection with home Binti speaks of is conceptual and literal. Conceptual in the collective belief that a member’s exit equals an immediate disconnect with cultural ontologies and epistemologies. Literal in that a member’s exit from the land the Himba resides equates to non-accessibility to the otjize. Otjize is the soil from the region the Himba reside which they apply from head to toe. Otjize is simultaneously a cosmetic, but more importantly serves as a health enhancer for the Himba community. However, the larger point to be observed when reading this trilogy is how the younger community, more specifically late teen to early adult, presents variations of struggle related to navigating acceptance and/or rejection of communal traditions. Perhaps the most pressing discussion in Binti relates to travel. It is the transgressing of boundaries throughout this trilogy that speaks of the complicated notions

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of boundary crossing which exist for Black communities. While Binti confronts the psychosis of leaving her community, she is also presented with the reality of resistance in entering other communities. The most pronounced conflict occurs with the Khoush community which views the Himba as the equivalent of country bumpkins. In one scene, a Khoush woman touches Binti’s hair, saturated in otjize. After the engagement, the women derogatorily refers to Binti’s community as “dirt bathers” (Okorafor, 2015, p. 16). This instance reflects the simultaneity of Binti’s stigmatization. While Binti is receiving resistance from her community for traveling away, she is receiving resistance from the Khoush for being outside her community. These instances of Binti transgressing boundaries stand as points articulating a broader continuum of challenges confronting Binti. Additionally, even as Binti comes back to her Himba community, she must deal with family and friends who do not see her as a member anymore. Binti’s entrance back into the Himba community is fraught with challenges due to the alteration of her DNA from Meduse, a nonhuman community who have blue tentacles and who view humans as enemies. Binti is both human and Meduse, as indicated in the shift of her hair to blue tentacles. In one instance after Binti comes home, she has a confrontation with a childhood friend, Dele. Binti mentions how she and Dele had not interacted since she moved. In their interaction, Binti learns that Dele has become part of the Himba Council, the governing structure, and has adhered strictly to the traditions of the community. As a result, Binti is scrutinized by Dele for choosing to travel away from the community. Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti trilogy presents a lens to utilize SF to view ways respectability politics functions in Black communities. The complexity of respectability politics as presented in the above examples shows variations through expression of generational values, class, and notions of cultural authenticity.

Complex Young Children of Color As noted above, just as there aren’t many examples of young children of color or young Black children in SF, there also aren’t many young children in SF in general. Rather than suggest that such representations require a model or that there is some kind of mimetic representational obligation or its inverse—an idea that something need be truly removed in order to truly be SF, for example—we offer the following example as but one of myriad possible approaches to young Black children in the genre, regardless of media. The case in question is the ongoing graphic novel/comic Saga, written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Fiona Staples. Part of what makes this work unique is the artistic freedom that Image Comics has given this team of creatives. Where Vaughn is given full control of the story, in a far less common move, Staples does every step of the art herself including the coloring, inking, and framing of the works. Taking full advantage of this creative freedom from the start, the team created a multi-world universe in which the overwhelming majority of characters are creatures of color. To wit, it is the robots, humanoid figures with television heads, who are the most Anglo

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of the cast, an inversion in which that which is most constructed is white and that which is primarily organic is not. This is perhaps best embodied, literally and figuratively, in the story’s narrator, Hazel. Her parents Alana and Marco are, respectfully, modeled after East Asian and Indian characteristics, racial markers that are further emphasized by the fantastical. Where Alana’s race is winged, Marco’s race is horned. Hazel, a heretical product of her parents’ warring worlds’ union, is mixed race on both counts: biracial in a human sense and biracial in that she has both wings and horns. What sets this story apart from other narratives in equally excellent works with elementary-aged protagonists is not only the age of the character who grows from birth throughout the story but also the attention paid to age-appropriate, thoughtful conversation, and the ability for Hazel to be a voice in significant social issues in the comic that mirror contemporary conversations. For example (two paragraph spoiler alert), at the beginning of issue 43, Hazel’s mother is 8 months pregnant when her male child has tragically died in utero. In trying to process this event, Hazel turns to their traveling companion Petrichor, a trans woman, about something that’s been troubling her, a question about Petrichor’s penis. When Petrichor sees Hazel near tears, she interrupts her own talk about how she insists not to be “defined by my genitalia. When you question the biology of someone who happens to be transgender, you don’t just objectify us, you make us feel…What in the world is the matter.” Hazel’s response is that she’s “super, super scared.” When asked why, hazel responds, “I, I, I, have wings like Mommy but also horns like Daddy. But, but, but, I have girl parts in my swimsuit places, and I don’t know if maybe I’ll grow boy parts next. What if everything goes wrong and I die?” Hazel continues two panels later, “I wish…I just wish I was normal,” to which Petrichor responds, “Little one, you are unlike anyone who has ever existed, and that makes you exactly like everyone who has ever existed. I don’t know what the future holds for you or your body…but I promise that you will never be alone,” a comment that is followed by a panel that takes up a third of a page with Hazel diving into Petrichor’s midriff in the kind of hug only a child between 4 and 6 can give an adult. Then, Hazel asks, “Also, can I ask you a question about your nipples?” From genuine question to deeper question based on deep thinking logics, relief, then back to a question learning more about bodies. Parts of this sequence are complicated to be sure. The notion of promising a child something you can’t necessarily deliver, never being alone. Similarly complex and possibly problematic is part of the dialogue prior to Petrichor’s talk about trans people and genitalia in which Petrichor asks Hazel to keep her transness a secret, at once a call not to out someone’s sexuality and asking a child to keep a secret from her parents. Although we don’t have the room to more deeply attend to such complications further here, the point is that, while there are aspects to this work that bear further exploration and critique, they nonetheless involve a young child of color as protagonist, a character that is complex, growing, and central and present in the overarching narrative told by her older self.

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And yet. Hazel is not funky, nor is she supposed to be. There are no sociocultural markers in aesthetics, affect, ontology, or epistemology that suggest a Black point of reference. To date, for example, there are comics in which all Black people have superpowers (Osajyefo & Igle, 2017–), a realistic comic in multiple forms where a young Black boy speaks to the world in the language and ideas of the 1960s Black Power movement (McGruder, 1996–2006), and an ever-expanding cast of Black characters in SF across genres (e.g., Howard, 2017). However, in SF worlds, in spite of expanding tween and teen Black characters and children of color in general, the world is much more often like that of Descender, an android boy who is separated from both his humans and thrust into a world of robotic and human/oid adventures. In spite of a continually evolving awareness that includes a broadening of young Black characters and complex Black-centric worlds built on the histories of luminaries like Octavia Butler and Samuel L. Delaney—work that is more mainstream than ever before, in many ways mirroring national changes in demographics that is the Browning of America—there is much progress yet to be made.

We Want the Funk Getting back to the good foot, and stepping back a layer of scale, we wish to suggest that what it means to be a young child and Black in SF is an indicator of ongoing erasure of the funk in unintended yet no less continuing patterns. To one side are an increasing attention to characters of color that, while significant and present, often obscure a comparable absence of young Black children. On the other side, while there is a similar blossoming of younger protagonists of color in SF and associated richness and depth of Black communities in those narratives, the presence of young Black children remains negligible. When added to an overarching absence of children six and under in SF in general, this combination is indeed a kind of erasure. Yet, we are at least as inclined to another vista. Rather than consider this ongoing gap solely as an erasure, it can also be understood as a collective improvisational ethic, chipping away at pressures of those layered systems of erasure, and creating space and possibility where there once was nothing but absence. When placed alongside one another, they represent the continuing tensions between systems of erasure and improvisational ethics that allow for movements that invert, subvert, resist, and circumvent those ever-shifting vantages of racism. And, in the end, we want the funk. However, in getting to the point of desire, the funk, we presented the discussion as an invitation to inquire about the negation of Black children in SF. While we call for the unleashing of improvisational ethic in these matters, we also emphasize the necessity for the inquirer to be in a reflexive space, a reflexive space which causes the inquirer to challenge the embedded and embodied spaces of self which have allowed for continued practices of erasure. Perhaps the more challenging act of erasure to understand is the tenant which sustains a culture of forgetting. Forgetting

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is a force that creates psychological rigidity, whereby the individuals are unable to feel presences, hear voices, seek histories, and/or value the presence of the young Black children. Furthermore, forgetting is a colonial act that we acknowledged in order to get open to the funk. Bringing awareness to negations of Black children in SF through the colonial act of forgetting is not about negativity. Rather, we seek to dream, enact, and be embodied in a world of SF that boldly remembers, stories, and sees the funky center, that is, the possibility of Black babies’ presence.

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Tension, Sensation, and Pedagogy: Depictions of Childhood’s Struggle in Saga and Paper Girls Amy N. Sojot

Like most people over thirty, they’re monsters. Erin, Paper Girls, Issue 9 (Vaughan & Chiang, 2016b)

Abstract Science fiction is untethered by assumptions of how people, things, and environments should act. The perceptions and portrayals of childhood in two science fiction comic series, Saga and Paper Girls, provide engagements with affective encounters. Attention to these encounters and the disruptive portrayals of childhood encourages the exploration of the pedagogic potential of sensation. Comics, as a genre, and childhood in each series inhabit ambiguity: comics blur the boundaries of popular culture objects and “properly” educative materials, while the younger characters in Saga and Paper Girls are not quite adult or child, nor innocent or monster. An examination of Chapters 1 through 48 of Saga and Issues 1 through 18 of Paper Girls reveals approaches to engaging sensations of tension and discomfort. Using affect and new materialism as guiding frameworks for this examination of two comic series, it is possible to sift through the provocations of affect suggested by interaction with the material comic itself and the meanings this exploration holds for reconsidering educational habits.

Introduction This chapter addresses the possibilities provoked by sensations experienced through encounters with two comic series, Saga and Paper Girls. Saga, written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Fiona Staples, is an epic war-consumed space opera depicting two enemy soldiers in love and the galactic consequences of their relaA. N. Sojot (B) College of Education, University of Hawai‘i at M¯anoa, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 D. W. Kupferman and A. Gibbons (eds.), Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_7

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tionship, especially following the birth of their daughter, Hazel. Paper Girls, also written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Cliff Chiang, follows four preteen girls as they encounter eerie mysteries originating in their suburban Ohio neighborhood. Both series’ interaction with and rendering of childhood influences the primary focus of this chapter: provoked by these portrayals of childhood in Saga and Paper Girls, what can attention to the affective encounter reveal pedagogically? When I read Saga and Paper Girls, there are multiple modes of interaction: first the physical, second the emotional response, and third the hazy after-effect glaze that lingers long past the comic is finished. This residue of ephemeral aspect signals the interaction affect has with pedagogy. Neither series portrays an uncritical nostalgic view of childhood, preferring interpretations that are “far less concerned with idealizing ‘lost innocence’” (Weldon, 2016). The stories purposefully confront the reader with fully realized child characters dealing with discomfort arising from complicated issues, instead of plot devices reduced to signifying innocence. Childhood is not quite disrupted in the comic series for mere shock factor; instead, the science fiction premise of the series allows young characters to encounter situations presented slightly askew that parallel real social, cultural, and political issues (Jarvis, 2005; Schade Eckert, 2013). These depictions provide effective–affective commentary when considering the sensations derived from the physicality of the comic book, including its narrative and material affect. This chapter establishes the pedagogical value of attending to sensation through new materialist and affective perspectives. Describing and exploring pedagogical spaces in science fiction is productive because each story is a sense of worlding into itself; this worlding encapsulates futuristic temporalities, loosely defined, for “a story is also science fiction whether the story in question is, in fact, extrapolation about the future or using the future to comment on the past or present” (VanderMeer & VanderMeer, 2016, p. xvi). Enriched by the comic book medium, Saga and Paper Girls provide a heightened experience of science fiction worlding. A comic book’s materiality enhances affective encounters beyond sensations provoked by sight since other senses are “communicating information and contributing to the formation of memories and emotions around comics in ways that sight cannot” (Hague, 2012, p. 99). While print books themselves evoke similar reactions of smell and touch—though still privileging the optic—the experience of reading comics is a dynamic visuality unhindered by textual traditions and a freer approach to other aesthetic sensibilities. An examination of the sensuous interaction between the actual physical material of Saga and Paper Girls and the anomalous pedagogical spaces that emerge from engaging with these comic series suggests further implications for reconsidering the educational practices that delineate accepted ways and spaces of knowing.

Why Comics? Comics occupy a uniquely liminal space of pedagogic potential and representational object of popular culture. Though increasingly recognized, especially from the

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efforts of comics scholarship field, as a line of academic inquiry and a valid aesthetic and form of cultural meaning (Schade Eckert, 2013), which includes exhibitions at museums and galleries (Roeder, 2008), derision of comics as productive pedagogical objects continues. These objections generally align around several areas of dispute: perception of comics as a “young boys medium” (Ndalianis, 2011, p. 113); “the taint of commercialism” as “the means of their production is bound up with the machinations of the commercial publishing industry” (Roeder, 2008, p. 5); and in relation to the first criticism, the unanchoring of pure text as the sole indicator of intellectual legitimacy by introducing an abundance of visual and other senses as contributing components (Hansen, 2012). Hansen (2012) argues, “Imagery and drawings are not inherently less valuable than verbal ‘literary’ art. In fact, images often convey a richness and depth of ideas that require interpretation and high-level critical thinking, analysis, and evaluation skills” (p. 59). The ability to interpret the multilayered modalities present in comics does not depend solely on the difficulty of its narrative content for the very act of interpreting—the process—is brought to the forefront for pedagogical consideration. In fact, the commercial availability of comics provides ample opportunities to engage in reflective and critical learning processes (Schade Eckert, 2013; Sealy-Morris, 2015). The potential held by affect theory and new materialism to examine pedagogical experiences through “anomalous” spaces of learning (Ellsworth, 2005) and sensations, such as those produced by interacting with Saga and Paper Girls, informs this study. These sensations accentuate the discomfort of learning and the recognition of pedagogical tension as something to engage and not disregard (Boler & Zembylas, 2003; Ellsworth, 2005). This tension is productive rather than an impediment, for it provides space to develop ways of thinking that speak to the in-between-ness or, as Gregg and Seigworth (2010) reflected, the “process always underway rather than position taken” (p. 4). Recognizing that there are other ways of learning, knowing, and being holds significance for enriching experiences in educational settings. Intentionally engaging with these sensations—the “pedagogico-aesthetic” (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 9)—provides additional pathways to explore the possibilities highlighted by interacting with difference. The perspectives of affect theory and new materialism to interrogate the pedagogical have context. In her work of exploring the implications of the material in post-qualitative educational research, MacLure (2013) revisits previous research to theorize the affect of data collected during a study of classroom behaviors in the UK through new materialism. Referring to this earlier piece, MacLure discussed the “glowing” of the project data while the research team conducted their analysis as an affective quality. She then writes of “being pulled back to it” (p. 661) as if affect’s ephemeral characteristic did not fully attend to her engagement with this data: It strikes me now as an account of the emergence of sense in encounters with data. The glow seems to invoke something abstract or intangible that exceeds propositional meaning, but also has a decidedly embodied aspect. The passage thus calls up the double-sided, materiallinguistic status of sense, “resonating in the body as well as the brain.” (p. 661)

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The embodiment of the affective encounter illuminates a seemingly contradictory quality where the material object provokes in different yet related ways. This new recognition does not displace the echoes of the previous “glowing” affect. MacLure experienced the sensation of data as a thing calling her back, demonstrating the “thing-power” (Bennett, 2010) while remaining cognizant of its affective quality. The dynamic implies an opening to recognize that nonhuman objects and entities engage as much with us as we do with them. Oftentimes, these sensations can act as catalysts to reticulate approaches to considering educational issues; for ambiguity edges out assumed control, since “in a materialist ontology, data cannot be seen as an inert and indifferent mass waiting to be in/formed and calibrated by our analytic acumen or our coding systems. We are no longer autonomous agents, choosing and disposing” (MacLure, 2013, p. 660). This disruption of habit reiterates the tenuous assumptions held regarding legitimate ways of doing research and producing knowledge, “as if we have chosen something that has chosen us” (MacLure, 2013, p. 661). The intra-twining perspectives of affect and new materialism provide ways to readdress normative approaches to conceptualizing the process of education, from complicating static determinations of learning to emphasizing the politics and ethics implied in the process. Affect grabs and stays with you: the stickiness of the ambiguous whatwas-felt (Ahmed, 2010, p. 29; Watkins, 2010). The theoretical approach to affect here is indebted to Deweyian usages that emphasize the pragmatic attention to experience (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 8) and the Spinozan undercurrent of monism (Spinoza, 1994), which recognizes embodied capacities. From a pedagogical perspective, Watkins (2010) revisits Spinoza’s distinction between affectio and affectus: “Affectio may be fleeting but it may also leave a residue, a lasting impression that produces particular kinds of bodily capacities” (p. 269). The concept of “residue” is important for “it suggests that we grapple with this as a pedagogic process, whereby a sense of self is formed through engagement with the world and others and the affects this generates” (pp. 269–270). The ephemeral nature of affect, although resistant to prescriptive efforts to purposely enact solutions, may not be as fleeting as suggested. The pedagogical perspective implies some manner of relationship, whether it is with data (MacLure, 2013) or as a student–teacher dynamic (Watkins, 2010). Perhaps this is “what transpires when the patho-logy of a body intersects with the pedagogy of an affective world (as they mutually constitute a rhythm, contour, shape, timing” (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 15). Using affect and new materialism as guiding frameworks for this examination of two comic series, it is possible to sift through the provocations of affect suggested by interaction with the material comic itself and the meanings this exploration holds for reconsidering educational habits. Paying attention to the materiality, the sensations of the comics, and feeling pedagogical spaces they subsequently support holds significance when considering educational settings. To focus on the process and affect, not just the content of an object of examination, allows for the exploration of aspects and complexities that engage with the indeterminacy of experience. The process opens up possibilities beyond a predetermined route to find the right answer, an attitude already saturated by the supposition that a correct answer exists. To carefully observe sensation and feeling, while trying to describe the ambiguous nature of emotion during an

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encounter with a thing, is to attend to the pedagogical encounter and amorphous affect (Watkins, 2010). Broadly considered, creative works are artistic in their ability to provoke an aesthetic experience (de Bolla, 2001; Dewey, 1934). I use aesthetic here to refer to that which provokes sensation as opposed to aesthetic as value judgment. The disruptive power of creative works (Butler, 2000; Carroll, 1987) lies in its capacity to affect (Colebrook, 2002). Untethered by the “factual” world, the settings and storylines in Saga and Paper Girls are provided the freedom to explore themes in creative ways that encourage sensation. Following Sousanis and Suzuki’s (2015) use of philosophical–aesthetic inquiry to reflect on Maxine Greene’s work, I look at issues of Saga and Paper Girls to examine the meaning held by attending to the sensations and affect provoked. Sousanis and Suzuki’s attention to the productive question of experience resonates with this exploration’s active engagement with aesthetic as sensation instead of aesthetic as value judgment. Fueled by the self-generative quality of continuously asking after the question itself, their perspective also acknowledges the limitations of solely engaging with written text as the mode of consumption. So why use comics as an object, or “popular culture artifact” (Wright & Sandlin, 2009, p. 119), of examination? Wright and Sandlin (2009) note, whether “intentional or not, adults learn from the practice of cultural consumption in their everyday lives” (p. 119). Furthermore, this learning is not limited to traditional modes and environments of schooling (Wright & Sandlin, 2009; Miller, 2001), like the classroom. Indeed, many scholars explored the pedagogical possibilities present in spaces other than formal schooling environments. Learning and educating are experienced informally, like in social situations (Levinson, 2000) or in architectural situations (Ellsworth, 2005). Indeed, as Ellsworth notes, it is often within these ambiguous and transitional spaces, whose primary purpose is not one of formal education but of sensation and engagement, where the confrontation of a moment of one’s knowing, or “pedagogy’s hinge” (p. 37), can occur. These interactions hold significant pedagogical meaning for they highlight self-object-place-sensation interrelationality/inter-affectivity and the substantial value associated with the ability to create one’s own knowledge and knowing instead of ingesting knowledge previously determined as needed to know. Informal objects of learning offer spaces to encounter the generation of one’s own knowledge outside of formal learning institutions. Comics, generally low cost and available in multiple formats, are popular culture materials readily accessible to the public. For example, Panel Syndicate (www.panelsyndicate.com) offers digital comics without a set purchase price directly from creator to consumer. Instead, readers can determine how much they want to pay for the comic from $0.00 on up. In this chapter, comics are analyzed as scholarly sources of data through a mode of inquiry that emphasizes the unrestricted presence of sensation (Hague, 2014). Meaningful pedagogical encounters can occur through the provocation of everyday objects (Rautio, 2009), like the multisensory experiences encountered with comics (Hague, 2014; Keen, 2011; McCloud, 1993). The critical engagement with these moments present pathways to fully reconceptualize and readdress learning and education. It is necessary to distinguish the different physical objects of engagement as this chapter concerns the affective encounter provoked by the experience with and the

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sensations of the material itself, not limited to the narrative content of each series. Sensations provoked by the physical (digital in the case of Saga, Chap. 43) comic and narrative received careful attention and reflection. All issues published by December 2017 were reviewed for this chapter. As of December 2017, Saga released 48 issues, or “chapters,” as they are referred to in the series and will be referred to here. Paper Girls released 18 issues. For the review of Paper Girls, issues 1–15 were collected into three volumes: issues 1–5 (Volume 1), issues 6–10 (Volume 2), and issues 11–15 (Volume 3). Issues 16, 17, and 18 were examined as single issue. All interaction and review of Paper Girls came via physical copies. For Saga, Chaps. 1–42 were collected in seven volumes: Chaps. 1–6 (Volume 1), 7–12 (Volume 2), 13–18 (Volume 3), 19–24 (Volume 4), 25–30 (Volume 5), 31–36 (Volume 6), and 37–42 (Volume 7). Several of the chapters from Volumes 6 and 7 were read as digital copies prior to acquiring the print versions. Chapter 43 was downloaded only as a digital copy; a physical hard copy was not used. Chapters 44 through 48 were single issue read as print copies. Both series explore the challenges of growing up through the narrative lens of science fiction. Paper Girls follows four preteen female protagonists who, as the series title suggests, deliver The Cleveland Preserver in their neighborhood of Stony Stream, Ohio. The color scheme of Paper Girls is saturated and somewhat neon, but often muddied. The paper is matte in the collected volumes and the issues, evoking the feel of actual newspaper; the sensation is particularly meaningful since print newspapers are declining as digital platforms gain traction (Lee, 2016). Vaughan and Chiang keep the newspaper theme consistent outside of the comic narrative: the fan mail section in the back of single issues is a club called “The American Newspaper Delivery Guild.” The setting is challenging to describe. While the location of Paper Girls remains somewhat consistent throughout the story, their place in time varies: when carries more significance than where. The first issue of the series begins with an introduction to Erin as she prepares for her morning paper route on November 1, 1988. Following a run-in with a group of local teenage boys lingering in the neighborhood after Halloween night, Erin meets the other newspaper deliverers: Mac, Tiffany, and KJ (also spelled Kaje). Unwittingly, the four girls are dragged into a mystery especially characterized by unbound temporalities. They are inadvertently caught between the struggles of two groups ideologically opposed with how to approach time travel: old-timers versus kids. Grand Father, a man aligned with the old-timers, warns the group, “You have waded deep into a very old…generational conflict” (Vaughan & Chiang, 2016a, Issue 5). The reader, along with Erin, Mac, Tiffany, and KJ, uncovers the vast and complicated extent that this conflict covers through time. Unlike Paper Girls, the pages and covers of Saga are glossy. This sheen with a sleeker feeling is most noticeable in the collected volumes. The choice of paper and its particular feel evokes the tactile sensation of newspaper in Paper Girls, while the sleek smoothness of the paper in Saga brings to mind a sense of futuristic slickness. Saga, like Paper Girls, has a prolonged generational conflict that sustains the series’ momentum of struggle. Vaughan and Staples depict this conflict as an endless war whose effects extend in a chronologically consistent manner—unlike the loose

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temporalities of Paper Girls—while physically spreading through space. The relentless war between the inhabitants of Landfall (a planet) and Wreath (a moon orbiting Landfall) ensures its self-perpetuating characteristic: a nonhuman affective assemblage (Bennett, 2010). Bennett (2010) describes assemblages as “living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within” (pp. 23–24). In this war assemblage, forces attempt to “confound” the endlessness in its midst. Two soldiers from opposing sides, Alana and Marko, desert their armies. They then have a child, Hazel, thus setting off an intergalactic pursuit where the two main factions of Landfall and Wreath—who have not agreed during their perpetual war—can agree that the existence of Alana and Marko’s relationship and especially that of Hazel directly threatens the legitimacy of the war’s primary motivation: the profitable hate between Landfall and Wreath. Saga begins its story as Hazel begins hers, by depicting her birth in the first chapter. Family, broadly considered, figures significantly as a recurring theme in the series. And true to the space epic genre, multiple characters weave their stories within and without the central protagonists. Though children do not figure as directly in Saga as in Paper Girls, they do provide prominent storylines and meaningful character vignettes. Hazel is frequently present since she doubles as the narrator. Her role as character and narrator is blended immediately for she describes the context of her birth and the event itself. Hazel as narrator is omniscient. She describes, foreshadows, and reflects. This awareness and reflexivity as narrator creates an interesting tension with her role as child in the story. A childlike scrawl depicts the text, or “voice” of her narration, contributing to the affective quality of tension and discomfort. Another child introduced early in the series is Sophie. The disruption of Sophie’s childhood shapes an earlier development of self-sufficiency. The portrayals of Hazel and Sophie, along with other children in the series, will be discussed more fully later in the chapter.

A Comic’s Thingness One wonders if it is possible to even engage with comics on a purely shallow level: consumption without interpretation, a passive reception of material. Sealy-Morris (2015) considers this passivity impossible Reading comics well requires work that closely resembles the work of interpreting real life—with its cacophony of images, words, sounds, and states (emotional, mental, physical). A reader cannot read comics on one level only (say, the efferent, or superficial, gleaning only data), as the juxtaposition of codes requires mental negotiations. (p. 38)

To this assertion I would add the facets of sensation and feeling to the use of “to read.” Paying attention to the sensations and feelings provoked by the act of reading comics provides another layer of the pedagogical productivity of affective encounters. Hague (2014) reflects, “Readers do not interact with comics through their eyes alone; their whole bodies are involved in the performance of the work”

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(p. 7). The multilayered encounter with comics, from sensations, interpretations, and affect, provides opportunities for learning that are accessible and informal. I am an avid reader of Saga and Paper Girls. My experience with reading Saga and Paper Girls encompasses the comic series in different forms: single issue, collected issues in volumes, and digital copies. With digital, the issue still requires touch of a scrolling (up and down) movement rather than a page-turning (left to right) nature; however, both of these modes of reading comics remains distinct from the act of reading prose (Sealy-Morris, 2015; Sousanis, 2015). Sousanis (2015) observes that, “the visual, on the other hand…presents itself all-at-once, simultaneous all over relational” (p. 59). Similarly, Sealy-Morris (2015) observes: “The comics reader has the option of scanning the whole page first to view the elements as a structural unity and thus intuit one level of meaning before reading a single word or panel” (p. 37). Even if I had already read the issues digitally, I still sought out a physical copy, whether single issue or as a volume. Readers have different preferences and it is helpful to consider the interaction with each medium. Though procurement of digital issues provides instant gratification, the act of reading a digital copy is a different sensation than opening a physical book. This physical difference has economic implications as well: mint condition comic books have a higher monetary value for collectors. For example, a highly graded issue of Action Comics #1 sold for $3.2 million in 2014 (Cronin, 2016). In this contrast, the haptic presence of comics as components to an experience becomes apparent Indeed, so embedded in the comics reading experience is touch that it can seem strange when it is absent or different; reading comics in a gallery or even on a website can at times be unsatisfactory because they seem to lack the “reality” of the tangible object. (Hague, 2012, p. 99)

To highlight the nuances between reading digital and print copies of comics, I find it necessary to intentionally eliminate distractions when reading a digital copy/issue. In addition, the anticipation and anxiety of opening up the plastic sleeve that contains the comic is not present with digital copies. The plastic sleeve is opened in careful steps. Hindered by the plastic, the first question is: do I even want to open this sleeve at all? An unopened comic in mint condition increases its value. Carefully lifting up the plastic flap, unloosening the tape, cautiously taking the issue of the plastic sleeve like a precious gift, something to protect. Sensations are provoked. Care should be taken with this object. There is the sound of crinkling plastic; the feeling of tape that always becomes stuck to my hand, the plastic smell. An impulse to return the issue to the plastic sleeve forms. The physicality of the issues enhances the affective encounter, destabilizing habits that determine different approaches to objects of scholarship and objects of entertainment. This interaction with and attention to the materiality of the object, which in this case are comics, reworks what is assumed to be appropriate objects of inquiry in educational research (Tavares, 2016). Hague (2012) reflects on the possible productive discomfort incurred through the encounter with comics These works are not simply sequences of images; they are physical objects that affect us in ways that far exceed the limitations of the visual field. The feel of a book in our hands

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and the physical motions involved in turning a page on a computer affect how we perceive the images with which we are interacting and can lend a comforting (or even disconcerting) solidity to what we are reading. (p. 107)

The sleek feel of the pages of Saga contrasted with the newspaper-like feel of Paper Girls interact with me, the reader, in a continuous provocation and reminder of the comic’s thingness. The smell of the paper and plastic sleeve and sound of pages turning contribute to an activation of senses beyond the purely visual. The interaction with the comic’s materiality and its lingering affect recall the ability for things to affect us as we affect them (Bennett, 2010; MacLure, 2013). This discomforting “solidity” recalls the “residue” and “stickiness” of affect and sensation that encompasses a pedagogical experience.

Discomfort in Relationality, Relationality in Discomfort Saga and Paper Girls deal with complex issues and oftentimes through the perspective of children; this perspective is not stereotypically innocent but articulates with less residue and cynicism. Vaughan, Staples, and Chiang’s depictions of the children in Saga and Paper Girls possess clarity even in confusing situations; in these instances, the children encounter confusion reflexively. Happiness is fleeting in both series. What is happiness anyway? Perhaps the question is not quite about happiness, but rather one of the satisfaction: the desire to proceed, to not fail (especially with high stakes and to fail means death), to weave intricate webs of relationality and experience, and to use these experiences and relationships as a font to keep on going. Meaning resides in nurturing affective discomfort as a pedagogical tool. It sows tension and attends to the unresolved. Boler and Zembylas (2003) remark that this perspective “recognizes and problematizes the deeply embedded emotional dimensions that frame and shape daily habits, routines, and unconscious complicity with hegemony” (p. 111). Their approach to tension within the act of pedagogy emphasizes the structural educational components and processes that hinder engagement with difference while avoiding ambiguity due to the uncomfortable sensations this may incur. By pursuing such a model of pedagogical engagement, Boler and Zembylas suggest the need to articulate habits that still support hegemonic educational endeavors even though the language and presentation suggest otherwise (pp. 112–114). While focused on the politics of power dynamics, their exploration also reinserts the impact emotions, sensation, and affect have on considerations of pedagogy, education, and schooling. With compassion for complexity, there is tension and discomfort in relationality, which reveals a pedagogy. However, the pedagogical interactions revealed here through the experience of encountering Saga and Paper Girls are not quite the pedagogy of discomfort articulated by Boler and Zembylas; rather this is a specific attentiveness to the productive pedagogical affect of discomfort and tension. While the physical interaction with comics can induce discomfort (or comfort) through the senses (Hague, 2012), it would be remiss to not acknowledge the narrative

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contribution to the aesthetic components. The following sections will explore how the multisensory qualities of these comic series enhance affective encounters and provide pedagogical pauses to engage with tension as an affirmative quality for learning, especially in consideration of childhood’s portrayal in Saga and Paper Girls. Tension and discomfort are present within the comics’ storylines, characters, and aesthetics, as well as my experience with these materials as a reader. Saga and Paper Girls emphasize attending to the value of relationality. The affect of this interconnected tension unhindered by usually distinct boundaries of object of inquiry (comic book) and researcher recalls the ability for materials to remind us that the subject–object relationship is not unidirectional (Bennett, 2010; MacLure, 2013). In other words, there is discomfort in relationality and relationality in discomfort. The following sections articulate three such facets that engage with the affective dimensions and subsequent pedagogical possibility of tension and discomfort: how children and adults are both portrayed and perceived; the relationships children have with others; and the discomfort of learning while cognizant of multiple relationalities.

Who’s the Monster? Portrayals and Perceptions of Children What kind of assholes bring a kid into worlds like these? —The Will, Saga, Chap. 1 (Vaughan & Staples, 2016a) Once upon a time, each of us was somebody’s kid. —Hazel, Saga, Chap. 6 (Vaughan & Staples, 2016a) I’m not a kid. —Sophie, Saga, Chap. 28 (Vaughan & Staples, 2015)

How adults in Saga and Paper Girls perceive children is distinct from how children are portrayed. This contrast is conspicuous in Issue 5 of Paper Girls (Vaughan & Chiang, 2016a) when Erin, Mac, Tiffany, and KJ first encounter Grand Father. His presence arrives with an immediate order and a scolding, “Girls! I know you’re in there! Listen to your elders and come outside this instant! I’m sure you’re confused, but whatever those juvenile delinquents in there told you is completely untrue” (emphasis in original, Vaughan & Chiang, 2016a, Issue 5). Adults like Grand Father assume their authority without question and expect the same of children. When their authority is questioned, these adults punish and attempt to physically force the children to acquiesce. Other adults do not treat them as children to punish or protect upon first meeting them. Dr. Qanta Braunstein, introduced by Vaughan and Chiang (2017a) in Paper Girls, Volume 3, Issue 11, explains the purpose of the futuristic object found by Erin, Mac, Tiffany, and KJ upon first meeting them. When adults interact with the children as equals, the children appear to trust them more for this trust is earned. Those adults perceive the children with their own distinct identities as people.

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Several panels earlier, the girls meet Heck and Naldo, the “juvenile delinquents”; the encounter with Heck and Naldo emphasizes immediate unquestioned assistance, perhaps a tenuous trust, resulting from their help to escape old-timer soldiers to transport a wounded Erin to their “Whenhouse” in order to heal her. Youth recognizes youth and in this recognition exists an unspoken understanding (Vaughan & Chiang, 2016a, Issue 3). When Erin asks later why Heck and Naldo risked their lives to help the girls, Heck responds, “…you girls…reminded us…of us…kids just trying…to make a living…are always…the good guys” (emphasis in original, Vaughan & Chiang, 2016a, Issue 5). Here the distinction between young/old, good/bad, is explicitly made. Heck’s explanation comes as he slowly dies in a gruesome position: body partly stuck in the space ship, his hand going through Naldo’s head, and their flesh intertwined with the fleshy body of the ship. Just before Erin awakes she has a nightmare. We see the image of her father. His face is melting. The comic panel mimics this sense of melting and extends off the page without a border. The dripping face flesh, the panel itself bleeding off the page, and the background of the fleshy space ship (which now includes two bodies) create a somatic response of tension, sadness, and discomfort. As a reader, it feels confining and discombobulating. Early on in the series, children are forced to contend with uncomfortable and tragic situations. This scene is an example of a situation, an abrupt and confining pause. Other senses contribute to the reader’s pedagogic affect while reading Saga and Paper Girls. While comics remain primarily visual-centric objects that straddle art and text (Hague, 2012, 2014; Hansen, 2012; Roeder, 2008; Royal, 2007; Schade Eckert, 2013; Sousanis, 2015), the comic curates technical feats to evoke particular engagements with the object-as-comic and ensuing sensations. As perspective can be a trick used by artists to suggest the illusion of depth, the weight of the paper, the feel of the comic, the smell of the pages, and the sound as one moves through the issues also affect the senses and experience. The use of sound and motion, including other senses such as the impression of scent and touch within the comics creates or influences the encounter with a comic that extends beyond mere reading or narrative comprehension—it feels. For example, in Paper Girls, a version of main character Erin, her “future-selfclone,” is introduced. Clone Erin has the appearance of a 12-year-old girl. She understands how to use misguided perceptions of her youth to manipulate adults into aiding her. As she tells a ride-share driver waiting in her car, “I am obviously a child in urgent distress and you have a moral and legal responsibility to–” (Vaughan & Chiang, 2016b, Issue 7), they both hear the sound of the two massive, multi-legged creatures battling in a body of water (Fig. 1). The visual representation of their bellows is jagged and expresses loud, overwhelming sensations: “UUUUUUUUUUOUOUOUOUOU”. The textual and visual representations of sound extend into multiple panels, creating a personal sense of sound. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2014) clarified, “When I say I see a sound, I mean that I echo the vibration of the sound with my entire sensory being” (p. 243). The visuality of the panels provokes a vibrating sensation in my body. The creatures’ bellows are massive: Vaughan and Staples represent these cries as difficult to contain through strong lettering that extend beyond the panel and dwarf the human characters. It feels like the creatures

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Fig. 1 Erin and an adult hear a creature’s loud cries. From Paper Girls, by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang (2016b, Issue 7) Copyright 2016 Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang. Reprinted with permission

are roaring from the page. The somatic discomfort of the imagined volume of the creatures challenging each other is accompanied by the discomfort of Clone Erin’s self-awareness of how children are portrayed and perceived by adults. For Clone Erin, the discomfort is productive. Her ensuing manipulation of the situation conveniently uses the adult’s discomfort to finally convince the driver to give her a ride. Clone Erin, a child, knows what the creatures are and their capabilities. The driver, an adult, does not. The adult’s discomfort partially manifests as confusion, both because of the otherworldly creatures appearing and because it is a child who holds the understanding necessary for immediate survival. The somatic response to feel hearing the creatures roaring and fighting intensifies the pedagogic discomfort for myself as a reader while witnessing the discomfort of the adult character. Repeatedly, children are portrayed and perceived by the adults in the series as the physical manifestation of discomfort. Children are considered capable of destruction and infused with the potential to destroy time, space, and myths, or as in the case of Erin’s future clone, the ability to manipulate adults’ perceptions of children. Adults (who assume their unquestioned authority over youth) seek to destroy or at minimum control the latent power of the child characters. While Paper Girls directly depicts an “intergenerational conflict” where the girls have the unintended ability to alter timelines, Saga explores other allusions to children as amalgamations of innocence and destruction. The affect of Hazel simply being is significant enough for the governments of Landfall and Wreath to go to extreme ends to silence her existence, from hiring contract killers (called Freelancers in the series) to using allies (e.g., Prince Robot) to do their “unseemly” work. The Brand, a Freelancer, observed, “It’s the stories with no sides that worry them” (Vaughan & Staples, 2014b, Chap. 17). The refusal of Hazel’s family to be bounded by a prescribed way of being mirrors the inability to

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contain or intentionally create affect. Hazel is unhindered potential and possibility; this unpredictability directly threatens the structures, both physical and ideological, that support the Landfallian–Wreather war. For some, Hazel’s presence is a negative sensation of discomfort. For others, the tension engages pedagogic possibility and the potential to learn about other ways of existing. While some characters negate Hazel’s personhood (and consequently, the destructive potential associated with her as a person) by viewing her as an object to trade rather than a subject (Vaughan & Staples, 2015, Chap. 29), others acknowledge her capability in addition to her as a child. For instance, Vez, a high-ranking Wreath official, orders the killing of Marko and Alana yet tells a Freelancer (The Will) that “in order to collect your completion payment in full, you’ll need to deliver us their orphan alive and unharmed” (emphasis in original, Vaughan & Staples, 2016a, Chap. 1). For Vez, Hazel’s status as infant affords her some innocence even though her existence as infant is destructive the narrative guiding the war between Landfall and Wreath. This ability to hold two seemingly incongruous aspects together simultaneously—the innocent monster—is a pragmatic cognitive dissonance. Landfallian and Wreather governments attempt to enforce damage control by containing knowledge of Hazel’s existence. However, containing a different representation of childhood in Saga is completely impossible: the Timesuck. Timesucks take on the appearance of infants in Saga; their inherently destructive nature does not belie their intention. Timesucks are born in space. They are the size of planets. These embryonic, celestial monsters, whose births are sometimes worshipped, are capable of annihilation on a physically massive scale by their very nature. When a Timesuck births itself, it emerges from a womb-like shell. Their infantile appearance contradicts their predatory and nondiscriminatory destruction. When hurt, the Timesuck violently lashes out; this force is so extensive that it is used as a weapon. Vaughan and Staples devote full pages to depictions of Timesucks. Their massive scale provokes an overwhelming sensation of discomfort for the reader because the foreknowledge of destruction is complicated by the imagery of a space infant. Children in both series experience difficult situations of death, violence, and ambiguity. Yet they are not solely plot devices. The focus on developing the stories of the female children is meaningful. Anna Jorgensen and Arianna Lechan (2013) chronicled the depiction of female characters in comic books. They acknowledged a history of female superheroes and exploration of social issues relating to women in comics. However, Jorgensen and Lechan directed attention to the troubling turn in the 1990s of increased sexualization of female characters, remarking, “the focus on appealing to an adult male audience became clear” (p. 273). Their observation of “a number of stories focusing on taking something ‘pure’ and turning it violent and sexual” (p. 274) is particularly relevant to this chapter. Instead of sexual assault and violence against female characters used as a shallow plot device to justify a male character’s actions or to further only his character development (Jorgensen & Lechan, 2013, p. 281), Saga and Paper Girls portray fully realized female characters. By doing so, the two series engage with the rich complexity of these characters and the discomfort of their tragic stories. The tension in the stories extends to the tension sensed by the reader. Perhaps the most striking example in either series is Sophie’s story.

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In Saga, adults seem conflicted at times on how to perceive Sophie. When introduced by Vaughan and Staples in Chap. 4 (2016a), she lacks a name and is referred to as “Slave Girl.” She only receives the name “Sophie” after another character chides The Will for not referring to her by any name. Sophie is 6 years old. She is enslaved on the pleasure planet of Sextillion. Until her family sold her to a Sextillion manager, Sophie lived on the comet Phang. Hazel, in her role as narrator, imparts, “Phang was left with only one real export…REFUGEES” (Vaughan & Staples, 2017a, Chap. 37) due to the ravages of the war and the competing sides struggling for control of Phang’s fuel resources. Shocked by her questions and unapologetic observations, adults like The Brand and Gwendolyn still answer her truthfully as much as possible. How can you go back to protect someone in their past? The Will, disgusted that a child is considered a sexual object (and possibly because the manager believed that The Will was a pedophile), unsuccessfully attempts to rescue her after killing the man who bought her. It is only with the help of another character, Gwendolyn from Wreath (who is tasked with keeping The Will on his task), that he is able to get Sophie away from Sextillion. Sophie’s portrayal of growth and development as a character provides an example of a fully realized child character who is not used solely as a plot device. Gwendolyn, who has a position in Wreath High Command, proceeds to care for Sophie after The Will is incapacitated; Sophie serves as Gwendolyn’s page. Sophie’s conversation with The Will in Chap. 41 (Vaughan & Staples, 2017a) imbues her character with growth. Vaughan and Staples do not present The Will’s part in removing Sophie from Sextillion as justification to immediately realign with him after years of his absence. Sophie acknowledges that she “will always be in your debt for rescuing me from the nightmare that I was trapped in, The Will”; however, she recognizes her agency to make the choices for her own life that will empower her and to not acquiesce to someone else’s request because of a past kindness. Characters like Clone Erin and Sophie demonstrate the difficulty for several adults to perceive children as anything other than an innocent or monster. However, adults exist who are able to engage with this affective ambiguity. These adults are then able to develop relationships that consider discomfort of ambiguity as productive rather than hindrance. The tension of confusion is enhanced by the affective encounter of the comic’s materiality in scenes like the sound of creatures battling in Paper Girls or a Timesuck’s destruction in Saga. Intentionally interacting with this tension and discomfort implies that the pedagogic potential exists through ambiguity and not in distinguishing a predetermined category or answer.

Relationships with Others Goodbye, interesting women. I’m glad you found your friends alive. Don’t piss away that gift. —Wari, Paper Girls, Issue 14 (Vaughan & Chiang, 2017a)

Relationships figure strongly in Saga and Paper Girls. Science fiction depicts characters, including things, whose fantastical ontologies blur the boundaries of

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subject/object and how interactions occur. The fictional premise allows for an exploration of the possible beyond real-world limitations; this enables a working through of habits guided by these considerations, like what determines a relationship. Examples of these relationships in Saga and Paper Girls are extremely varied, from Hazel’s relationship with a teenager’s spirit from the planet Cleave (Izabel, the spirit, is literally soul bound to Hazel) to Erin in Paper Girls who meets up with her future-self in 2016 and a 12-year-old future-self-clone of the same age. Another example not directly related to childhood is the Saga family unit’s relationship to their tree-like rocket ship. Relationships are ambiguously defined and fleeting. The depictions of relationships provide examples of how the characters encounter the discomfort of ambiguity especially as the children in each series learn to navigate the varied landscapes (and timescapes for Paper Girls) of relating to others and things. Navigating these relationships, where a predetermined path and set of instructions are not provided, conveys the pedagogic potential of the answers still sought. This lacking resolution contradicts an educational rationality that assumes an answer, which is both attainable and correct, exists as a fixed outcome. Rather, what the affect of tension and ambiguity as the characters develop their sense of relationality suggests is one, such a permanent, unchanging answer does not exist, and two, even more so, to actively seek out such an answer is useless. The potential pedagogic productivity paradoxically lies instead in its very uselessness, or at least, the letting go (Ellsworth, 2005) and the process of seeking a sustained, open-ended question (Sousanis & Suzuki, 2015). Sorrow is a recurring theme in the relationships developed in Saga and Paper Girls. How the children engage with death in the two series provide examples of their relations to others in uncomfortable situations and how they learn from the sensations of these encounters. In Volume 7 of Saga (Vaughan & Staples, 2017a), Hazel experiences the ruptures of death during her last days on the comet Phang. Collusion between the governments of Landfall and Wreath initiates Phang’s collision with a Timesuck. In rapid succession, Hazel loses: Izabel, whose death painfully wrenches her spirit from Hazel’s soul; Kurti, her local friend from Phang, a refugee from his home and her first kiss; and her unborn brother when Alana miscarries. In the last pages of Chap. 42, Vaughn and Staples (2017a) powerfully use pauses and empty pages to convey the enormity of silence and loss. Hazel reflects on how sound, including its absence, can be overwhelming. Silence, or quiet, can be a holding place for sound, the emptiness of what could be or what was there. Hazel describes her relation with sound in different ways. When directly discussing it, Hazel yearns for the diminishment of noise, or the “quiet” life. For a child whose entire life has consisted of being pursued by entities that she and her family eliminated, the idea of quiet is a sort of utopia (Vaughan & Staples, 2017a, Chap. 41). Yet, on the other hand, silence can also endure as deafening and suffocating through its absence. The final panels in Chap. 42 (Vaughan & Staples, 2017a) use a visual interpretation of the absence of sound where one event must have noise in its reality (Phang’s collision with the Timesuck) and another event where life goes quietly (Alana’s miscarriage).

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The ways these are depicted in the issue communicate a sensation of loss and claustrophobia through all the black frames and pages—the darkness that creeps in as death, absence, and silence. The last four pages are completely black. Hazel’s reflection is left open, lacking resolution. It is useful to share Hazel’s reflection in the seven panels prior to the pitch-black pages in full here. The first three panels show inhabitants of Phang succumbing to the Timesuck, a drawing of Izabel by Hazel, and Hazel in the foreground looking back at her parents grieving. The last four panels, all one page, show Kurti being consumed by the Timesuck as he cries for help. Over these panels, Hazel reflects You know that old cliché about millions of deaths being a statistic……while the loss of just one life is a tragedy? If that’s true, what is it when you lose something that never even had a chance to be born? I’ve had a lot of relationships in my time, platonic or otherwise, but the ones I think about most are those that never quite made it to term. The dashing first date who didn’t call you back. The lady on the train you had that amazing conversation with but never saw again. The cool neighbor kid you met the first time a week before he moved away. I guess I’m just haunted by all that potential energy. One moment, the universe presents you with this amazing opportunity for new possibilities……and then… (Vaughan & Staples, 2017a)

These deaths hurt Hazel: a friend lost, love lost, and the emptiness of a severed connection. What is the affect of sorrow? How does the soul-wrenching sensation when Izabel perishes prepare Hazel for these different components of loss? Hazel says it feels empty. The emptiness of knowing something was there but the intangible feeling is gone. An emptiness made all the more hollow because the space is left vacant yet the memory imprint of feeling lingers. Physically touching the pages and the contrast of visually vivid comic panels to pitch black provoke a jarring sensation. This affective encounter with the material comic combines with the narrative’s weight, thrusting the reader to reflect on how they relate to these sensations of discomfort. The ambiguity of these relationships’ beginnings and endings reveal other lessons as the children learn to relate to each other, their own selves, and their own moments of uncomfortable learning. Likewise, Erin’s encounters with her older self and future clone-self in Paper Girls (Vaughan & Chiang, 2016b, Issues 6–10) highlight the difficulty of relationships and learning how to develop trust. When Erin, accompanied by Older Erin at Stony Gate Mall, finds KJ’s field hockey stick with a message carved into the wood—“DON’T TRUST OTHER ERIN”—a dilemma unfolds. This is further complicated when the future Erin self-clone appears. Younger Erin and Older Erin have already confronted uneasiness and disbelief upon interacting with each other. Unclear how it is even possible for them to be together at the same place and the same time, both Erins tentatively go with it; this is again an example of tenuous trust. Erin as a self is portrayed as multiple selves. Older Erin and Younger Erin refer to themselves individually and also as a collective “we”, although it is clearly challenging, particularly for Older Erin, to conceptualize this unlikely situation. When confronted with the warning carved on the stick, Younger Erin must determine which one of her other selves she should not trust. This challenge creates a palpable tension among the characters and aesthetically for the reader experiencing the comic. Erin finally decides which

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other Erin to trust and the messiness of ambiguity shows. When the relationship is a determining factor of survival, the anxiety of determining trust in ambiguous settings does not have a checklist. While a confrontation with multiple selves is uncommon, the consequences are severe: “Learning is literally life—without it they die. There is no suggestion that however dangerous, difficult or demanding the knowledge may be, it should be shunned” (Jarvis, 2005, p. 44). The affective ambiguity is pedagogically uncomfortable. Erin had to feel her way to her decision and to trust herself. Perhaps Erin’s encounters with her multiple selves can provoke us to consider the confrontations with our own learning selves.

Discomfort of Learning To “learn from experience” is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things in consequence. Under such conditions, doing becomes a trying; an experiment with the world to find out what it is like; the undergoing becomes instruction—discovery of the connection of things (Dewey, 1916/1944, p. 140). The human body can undergo many changes, and nevertheless retain impressions, or traces, of the objects (emphasis in original, Spinoza, 1994, p. 154). Hazel muses in Chap. 30 in Saga, “Every relationship is an education” (Vaughan & Staples, 2015). Relationships provide the most meaningful learning opportunities and situations. How do I relate to you? How can I help or hurt you? Will you help or hurt me? What can I share with you to help you learn and will you share with me? The discomfort of being thrust into ambiguity provides a pedagogic edge in relationality. Sometimes, these educative moments come via direct explanation and other times they occur through demonstration with the self or others. The hinging moment of learning in one’s own self is an individual sensation (Ellsworth, 2005) but that distinctive moment does not preclude the influence relationships with others (e.g., people and things) may have in assembling the possibilities for that moment. Thus, describing the individual learning self does not necessitate the habitual construction of binaries; that is, considering the individual self in their moment of learning as completely disconnected from others. Saga and Paper Girls depict learning selves yet simultaneously question ideas of the individualized learner; the characters’ learning often involves a sense of collective, if not direct relationality. Ahmed (2010) observes, “The pedagogic encounter is full of angles” (p. 37). The affect of this “pedagogic encounter” is not isolated from environment (Ahmed, 2010) or relationality (Watkins, 2010), though it is “pre-personal” and unable to be preempted or planned (Guattari 1989/2013). Ahmed states, “Situations are affective given the gap between the impressions we have of others, and the impressions we make on others, all of which are lively” (p. 37). The pedagogy of the affective encounter reveals itself within the relationality of characters and objects present within the narrative and the interaction between the reader and the materiality of the comic itself.

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In an examination of learning in the television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jarvis (2005) highlighted the value of informal education for the characters, identifying the stark division between perceived values of institutional and everyday knowledge. Furthermore, “institutional learning, whether at work or university, is consistently presented as exploitative and restricting, self-directed learning appears to be more favourably treated” (Jarvis, 2005, p. 39). The pedagogic productivity of spaces, whether this space exists in the relationship between others and/or objects or physical locations, is often hindered by normative conventions of what places of learning and education should look like (Ellsworth, 2005; Levinson, 2000). In Saga and Paper Girls, this learning utilizes their relationships. When a formal schooling environment appears, its usage is not primary to the narrative development; rather, it is used as a reference to support character development or as a temporary setting. The relationality between people and objects provides educative moments; particularly in these science fiction settings of Saga and Paper Girls, “reality is not fixed and scientific, but lived, evolving and socially constructed” (Jarvis, 2005, p. 36). With the exception of Chaps. 31–36 of Saga (Vaughan & Staples, 2016b), traditional schooling environments are not featured as central settings. For Paper Girls, school is established as a signifier. The school each girl attends acts as identifying qualities of their characters. The first issue of Paper Girls uses the schools that each of the girls attends as embedded symbols to provide concise character information. One of the first details each girl shares, besides their names, is the school that they attend: Erin, Tiffany, and KJ attend different private schools. Mac declines to name her school and instead implies that she goes to public school by deriding them: “You rich girls going to compare report cards all night or can we get back to business?” (Vaughan & Chiang, 2016a, Issue 1). This sets up Mac as excluded from certain circles, combined with the knowledge (and possible resentment) that she is not included in these physical and social schooling spaces. For Hazel and Noreen in Saga, the classroom is a temporary setting used to establish a sense of routine in an otherwise disruptive environment. There are several layers to this classroom setting. Although the teacher, Noreen, appears to care for the children, she is still employed by Coalition (sided with Landfall) forces inside a detention center. Other detainees, like Petrichor, refer to the class as Hazel’s “re-education” because of their imprisonment and the classroom’s political motivations. Noreen takes a sincere interest in Hazel. Hazel, sensing this budding trust, confides her full identity; valuing this trust, Noreen becomes determined to help Hazel escape the detention center. As with the first pages of Paper Girls, the school or conversation about school is a jumping off point to creating and nurturing important relationships and connections, however, long or brief. Other than these vignettes, the school classroom, a traditional space of learning, is passed over for other spaces of learning outside of traditional environments. Particularly, children learn through observation, interaction, and relationships. In Volume 3 of Paper Girls, Vaughan and Chiang demonstrate this informal learning when Erin asks Dr. Qanta Braunstein, the adult the girls just rescued, the function of a device found by in Volume 1. The girls previously asked Older Erin who did not know the device’s purpose but could access basic functions. Now in a different

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when, the girls use their rapport with Dr. Braunstein to better understand their previous encounters with the device’s affect. The device creates an interface between the user’s brain and the device’s computer. Learning the function of the device becomes a matter of life and death (Jarvis, 2005). Watkins’ (2010) discussion of affect and the student–teacher dynamics of learning highlights concerns with approaching individual learning, or “self-directed learning”, in certain ways. Watkins explains that a purely mechanistic view of self-directed learning and its prescriptive application emboldened by educational trends does not take into account the complexity of learning, the pedagogical nuances, the unexplainable affect of teaching/learning, and the necessary role of the teacher. Though resistant to empirical deduction, the affect that remains as a stickiness helps the student to learn years later. However, does this educative event and affect always need to happen in a classroom with the teacher as a guide? Or is there a way to indulge the exploration of learning’s other spaces and affects that, while outside of formal schooling spaces, speak to the possibility of the learner’s own pedagogical hinge (Ellsworth, 2005)? Self-directed learning from a purely technological standpoint neglects the care and possibility of a self’s learning through sensational perspective. Awareness of an embodied pedagogy’s affect widens educational encounters to include everyday, accessible objects, activities, and environments. The sensational perspective engages senses, feelings, and can operate as a catalyst to interrogate ways of acting, living, knowing, and learning. While purposes of education are continually debated and worked into goals that may not cohesively resonate, the body, self, and individual continue to learn. As social creatures (Levinson, 2000), communication and sensory input persist. The question of learning as a self-involved experience that can combine within a communal activity concerns affective encounters. Is affect the unexplainable that one “accumulates” (Ahmed, 2010; Watkins, 2010), carrying with one’s self as one learns? Take, for example, the exploration of Hazel’s loss and the affect induced. The stickiness of this leaves a residue—but a productive one. Hazel’s miscarried brother appears to the family as a projection of his (formerly) possible future-self. Introducing himself as Kurti (also the name of Hazel’s friend on Phang), Hazel enjoys this figment of her brother as a companion. However, the recent painful experiences have provided her with an enriched reflective maturity: while she appreciates Kurti’s company, she is able to acknowledge him as ephemeral, a fleeting and haunting reminder of what could have been. Hazel ends up reflecting on her own sensations of loss—that which sticks and aches—in order to comfort him as his projection ceases to exist. Jarvis (2005) reflects on this kind of prolonged encounter as a mode of learning, for it Raises questions about identity and the idea of an authentic self, and then, as the characters mature, shows how they learn to cope with ambiguity and question simple ideas about difference. This could certainly be described as an uncomfortable learning process. (pp. 40–41)

Risk is present in the process of education and learning. As Biesta (2013) stated, “The risk is there because students are not to be seen as objects to be molded and disciplined, but as subjects of action and responsibility” (p. 1). In Paper Girls, Heck and Naldo’s attempt to escape the old-timers highlights the risk of their experiment because it necessitates the deviation from an imposed rule of curfew (Vaughan &

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Chiang, 2016a, Issue 5). The risk is uncomfortable by its nature and ultimately deadly for the two teenagers. Yet as a result of this experience (including her interactions with Heck and Naldo), Erin emerges with additional knowledge about the time travel situation, though the cost is death and sadness. This sensation of loss carries over to myself as the reader, initiating a reflection of the unsaid of learning. The sensations of learning accumulate and adhere but in ways that are unknowable and unforeseeable.

Conclusion The interactions with Saga and Paper Girls happen on multiple levels for the reader: physically, emotionally, comprehensively, and the stickiness of affect that remains long after the encounter with the comic. Depictions of childhood in each series complicate perceptions of what it should look like and how children should act. These disruptions create palpable tension and discomfort, both within the series and its characters and through the interaction of the reader with the materiality of the comic itself. The discomfort of the ambiguity of children as innocents or monsters, the discomfort of developing relationships with others, and the discomfort of learning direct sustained attention to the affective encounter. Tension as a pedagogical tool resonates in its productive ambiguity. If this discomfort is introduced and encouraged as a not-negative possibility, then other pathways for learning and ways of approaching education can be explored. At its core, what can comics teach us? They can teach us the value of looking to other places, objects, and events, as potentialities to encounter pedagogical hinging, as in the self’s sensation of apprehending something to know. The discomforting ambiguity sustains its pedagogical productivity in multiple ways and through different modalities; this tension is expressed narratively, materially, and reflected within the reader’s affective interaction with the comic. These sensations provoked by interactions with the comic imply that the affective encounter in education cannot be prescribed or contained. It defies educational practices and ideologies that demand a finished, complete answer.

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Part III

Pedagogy

A Utopian Mirror: Reflections from the Future of Childhood and Education in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Island Joseph Todd

In an era of deep-sea exploration, interplanetary space travel, electronic communication technologies, and rapid technoscientific advance, some of the extravagant and utopian visions of Jules Verne, Arthur C. Clark, and Isaac Asimov are becoming actualities. Yet, aspects of the surreal nightmare worlds feared by Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Philip K Dick also are haunting the techno-culture of the Third Millennium. Best & Kellner (2001, p. 103)

Abstract Science Fiction (SF) literature offers a ripe space to analyze and critique modern conceptions of the child and childhood. The landscapes of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Island provide specific insights into the dystopian and utopian dimensions of adult–child relationships. Mapping these models onto contemporary schooling practices informs the work we do as educators and parents with an effort to reconceptualize our communities by arguing for new forms of subjectivity afforded to the child and alternative agencies that have been excluded from childhood in most educational environments. This chapter helps to identify how our adult–child interactions and educational settings approach the dystopian or utopian, and how we can reimagine these spaces with models informed by SF, thus bringing our dreams and nightmares to bear on our educational realities.

At the current crossroads—where science fiction intersects with reality, formal education and teacher education are defined by narrowed conceptions of curriculum, as well as the management of educational disciplines and behaviors—the need for innovative critique that highlights the dystopian dimension of our schools and the promise of utopian alternatives is more pressing than ever. This chapter offers a critical analysis of the dystopian and utopian representations of pedagogy and J. Todd (B) Montana State University-Northern, Havre, MT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 D. W. Kupferman and A. Gibbons (eds.), Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_8

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childhood in science fiction literature in order to illustrate how education has evolved into the very systems that were feared in classic science fiction novels such as Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451. At the same time, we find minor instances where childhood and pedagogy were reconceptualized in a utopian context in order to refute these prophesied educational nightmares and where education inhabits an oppositional space that explores and redefines connectivity, conformity, and creativity. Science fiction literature offers innovative forms of critique but also provides inventive ways to reimagine education for the twenty-first century and beyond (Best & Kellner, 2001; DeLeon, 2015; Jameson, 2005; Lewis & Kahn, 2010). Literature, young adult literature, and children’s literature represent critical opportunities to analyze concepts that are implicit in the characterization of individuals and communities. Critiques of this form offer ways to understand concepts of gender that either reinforce or challenge typical gender stereotypes (Kortenhaus & Demarest, 1993) and concepts of the other that serve to reinforce a power dynamic painting a specific cultural hierarchy (Nodelman, 1992). This research aims specifically to evaluate educational models in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Island (1962) in order to understand how power operates in both adult–child relationships and also citizen–society relationships. Pedagogical insights from these two novels reveal educational models that are dystopian. Brave New World offers a purely micromanaged educational experience for its young citizens, where children are recognized as nothing more than an economic asset, not of parents, but of the state: a natural, rational, resource to train, shelter, manipulate, and finally exploit. Island, on the other hand, provides the extreme counterpoint of a childhood experience, one based on radical forms of community, mutual trust and responsibility, autonomy, and freedom, pushed to the same boundaries of possibilities but just out of reach. In some ways, the two dimensions in these novels provide us with a set of expectations that graft onto formal education and alternative educational models. Within the dystopian realm, we find the reduced and contained expectations for an infantilized citizenry and society. However, within the utopian, albeit on a much smaller scale, and one that struggles to survive against technology and capitalism, we find educational models that move beyond these dystopian fears. The overall framework for this analysis takes its cue from a number of different theorists and critics, all of whom resonate with the dimensions of Brave New World and Island that can be used to inform education. Philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich (1989), in an unpublished manuscript titled “The Shadow the Future Holds,” which was to become Mirror II, forecasts some of the limits we see with consumption, environmental sustainability, and the posthuman. We can use science fiction to uncover these limits casting their shadows backward from the future yet to come, and it is in this shadow that we find the end game for many of these social practices, many of which can be found in Huxley’s texts and SF literature (Jameson, 2005; Suvin, 1976, 2010). The reflection of the future that is cast backward in time presents us with ways to understand these limits in both dystopian and utopian descriptions. Childhood and children are, first and foremost in this chapter, our object of analysis and are introduced and exploited as an overused plot device in order to imply the machinic (DeLeon, 2015; Postman, 1994).

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Michel Foucault, in both Discipline and Punish (1977) and History of Sexuality (1978), provides a rich and insightful critique of the ways power operates on a society, and particularly for this chapter, the way disciplinary power could serve to manage the pleasure of individuals. Within Brave New World sovereign power is represented by the World Controller, the ways that humans are created to fill specific societal/economic niches, and also from the control that is exerted to keep those who begin to question such policing, whether in the form of additional conditioning or, at the extreme, exile. Disciplinary power can be seen in the ways that social interactions self-police individuals. Authority, in this case, is more democratic and dispersed throughout society, not found in a centralized or totalitarian context. We will be looking at both forms of power, but as we relate Brave New World and Island back to schools and education, it will be important to recognize how sovereignty is reproduced in the microenvironment of the school in adult–child relationships, and how disciplinary power affects all educational relationships in schools. Children, as the inhabitants of Brave New World, are guided through parenting, schooling, and community interactions, toward a preset idea of human or citizen. This guiding can be seen as a form of domination as there are few alternative arrangements available that will preserve a radical diversity of individual identities. The majority of the analysis will engage with Brave New World, which although often a point of contention with parents and communities, remains, along with other dystopian literature such as 1984, Animal Farm, and Fahrenheit 451, on US highschool reading lists. However, we might speculate that the emphasis on literary devices trivializes the messages of the book. The novel provides a disruptive and subversive hope to be found within public education. This analysis will focus on the situation of the children of Brave New World while also being mindful of the ways the metaphors of childhood (in this case, infantilization) affect the subjectivity of the inhabitants (DeLeon, 2015; Postman, 1994). Finally, we’ll turn to posthumanism to postulate what Huxley’s examples offer in terms of a practical model to engage children, education, individuals, and community (Lewis & Kahn, 2010; Snaza et al., 2014). Here, posthumanism refers to the ways in which “cybernetics, biotechnologies, prosthetics, and computerized communications devices are reshaping human cognition, embodied experience, and relation with the wider world” (Snaza et al., 2014, pp. 42–43). This understanding of posthumanism explores the relationship of the child to a techno-culture like that in Brave New World. Other theorists have explored Brave New World in the context of how this dystopian landscape increasingly approaches our contemporary society and models of totalitarian democracy (Diken, 2011; Suljic & Öztürk, 2013), the intersection of science and spirituality (Congdon, 2011), and the way power and images operate in both Brave New World and Island (Varricchio, 1999).

Brave New World Before jumping headfirst into this discussion, I would like to share a brief anecdote about the importance of Brave New World to my own worldview development and

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eventual career. In a public school experience that rarely if ever approached the spectacular or even fantastic, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and 12th grade AP English in general, stands out as one of the most profound experiences of my education and, in many ways, set me on the course to become an educational philosopher. This is true not only for our classroom but also because I was aware that we were reading an author in public school who advocated the use of psychedelics for understanding the more-than-human world around us, and this fact had somehow slipped through the censoring bodies of our school board. This reading also ironically and synchronistically coincided with GAP’s khakis campaign, airing commercials rife with the Wachowski siblings’ “bullet time” photography, which lent a comedic and satirical dimension to class discussions on the attire-based class structures in Brave New World and the trendy fashion of hip high-school students. To elaborate, khaki was the color that Deltas wore and which one of the main characters, Lenina, despised, though it was part of her conditioning to think so and she could not think otherwise. Years later, while working on my graduate studies but never forgetting the critical experience in my senior year, I found my way, after a deep dive into Huxley’s catalogue, to Island. The juxtaposition of these two novels served as a critical point and counterpoint exposing the promise and fear of learning in general, and state-run public compulsory education in particular, but also deeper questions concerning the emergence and ultimately the disappearance of childhood (Postman, 1994). Within Brave New World there exist instances where the presence of children in the narrative will serve as our object of analysis. We also find childhood and “the child” framed in metaphors in the text that reinforce the concept of child as minority, as insubordinate, as inferior (Nodelman, 1992). It is in these spaces where we can observe childhood as the deus ex machina that introduces children as tools to describe the process of how a society like Brave New World can emerge in the first place. The exploitation of the child in this sense is almost a form of blackface where the child is presented as a stereotype of an adult in process. Using children in literature reinforces the concept that children are not finished and require adult intervention in the form of schooling and authority in order to achieve access to the space and the life of adulthood. Without models that confront and reinvent childhood, relationships with children, and communities that afford children more autonomy, we are left with the usual allegories that reproduce existing adult–child dichotomies, especially in cultural spaces of families and schools. It is in this dialectical space between dystopian fiction and a dystopian reality that we find parallels with current mass educational institutions and where Illich (1989) describes the threat of a society based on “satisfying the boundless wants of the possessive individual” which is exactly what we find in Brave New World (p. 4). The concept of delayed gratification is entirely alien to the individuals in Brave New World. The Society is prefaced upon immediate consummation of any desire or need that arises, be it recreational, social, sexual, and even spiritual. These desires and needs are those that do not threaten the state and therefore are able to be satiated, but those that are found beyond the state-approved conditioning must be repressed or exiled for the sake of the perpetual motion of the conveyor belt. Through the text of Brave New World there is a constant theme of the infant–adult dichotomy. Huxley’s imagined society severely limits the maturation of each social

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group by controlling both their educational level and the amount of leisure time they experience, all of which reinforces ones social status and the stability of the social structure in general. Knowledge and leisure are reserved for the top-tier Alphas only, and come with imminent dangers. Critically reading Brave New World reveals the experiences of one’s own education within this context of socialization and conditioning. Beginning with the infant–adult dichotomy, we find many instances where the conditioning of the child in Brave New World parallels the explicit and instrumental conditioning that each child receives and some of the topics taught in Educational Psychology courses. In this context, the teaching of the history of educational psychology, covering Piaget, Pavlov and Skinner, in itself is not troubling. However, we find places in classroom management and behavior management where such theories have been embedded in classroom practices. We might see parallels between the motion or rhythm of Brave New World and that of the classrooms in the US, especially in elementary settings, where the adult drives the constant barrage of transitioning between lessons and activities. There is no downtime, no moments for reflection resulting in a reduction in disruptive behavior, but at what cost? In some ways, the child is unaware of their exhaustion or anxiety of the process of education just as Pavlov’s dogs are unaware of why they are salivating at the presence of the bell. Psychology has informed education in this regard to nurture voluntary and possibly involuntary responses from children in the name of efficiency and management, for the good of the social climate of the classroom, possibly to the detriment of nurturing self-actualized children that do not rely on such management to remain self-disciplined as they develop into adults. The example below, though extreme and maybe not directly linked to schooling, makes me wonder how closely some of our schooling practices mirror the painful practices the infants of Brave New World are subjected to; cruel reinforcements in the form of loud sounds and electric shocks. Take the passage below, for instance, where the Delta children are taught to associate books and botany with pain. Upon crawling toward books with rich illustrations that had been laid out, the brutal alarm system is triggered: The children started, screamed; their faces were distorted with terror. [After the alarm sounds an electric current is put through the floor in a contraption similar to Skinner’s box and the] screaming of the babies suddenly changed in tone. There was something desperate, almost insane, about the sharp spasmodic yelps to which they now gave utterance. Their little bodies twitched and stiffened; their limbs moved jerkily as if to the tug of unseen wire. [After the alarm and electricity had been switched off] the stiffly twitching bodies relaxed, and what had become the sob and yelp of infant maniacs broadened out once more into a normal howl of ordinary terror. (Huxley, 1998, p. 21)

This inhumane treatment of infants casts with utter clarity what the State is willing to do to individuals in an effort to maintain order and conformity. These children will never find value in books and the knowledge to be found within, nor will they find anything to appreciate in nature, except that which involves their purchasing of recreational equipment to play Obstacle Golf or some similar outdoor activity which does little to develop any type of relationship with nature. The goal of this type of conditioning is obvious, but the method, to inculcate and control

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involuntary response and unconscious reflexive thoughts and actions through the State’s “neo-Pavlovian conditioning,” seems perverse (Huxley, 1998, p. 50). The conditioning achieves a totalizing force against the child’s own individual impulses and proclivities, “Till at last the child’s mind is the suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too—all his life long” (Huxley, 1998, p. 29). This conditioning serves its purpose to achieve a stratified society, one that is carefully curated by the Controller. The conditioning is done in the face of and at the expense of freedom, liberty, and individual definitions of happiness. Maybe, this society has removed disease and poverty, but at what cost and how might our societies approach such institutional conditioning? By conditioning the child, the State limits what the future adult appreciates by placing strict boundaries around their cognitive ability, their economic labor, and their leisure consumption. Just like the infant above who will be kept safe from books and botany, conditioned to resist any deep knowledge about nature and book learning in general, each social group from the Alpha class all the way down to the Epsilon-Minus Semi-Morons has its tastes predetermined by the Controller and the Director and reinforced by their conditioning to work, consume, and recreate in certain ways that specify economic, social, and political stabilities. Everyone grows and develops in a stunted form, but keeps moving smoothly nonetheless. This description of the movement through the space of Brave New World resonates with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of striated and smooth spaces from A Thousand Plateaus (2013). The description of the topography overlays onto the types of possibilities available to the inhabitants of the Society, and is complimentary to the metaphor of the conveyor belt. We can see how this topography is useful not only to analyze space and movement in SF landscapes, but also in understanding the concept of cyberspace and is multifaceted environment that, in some ways, resists a totalitarian model (Nunes, 1999). Virtually opposite to that of Brave New World where the constructed world bends to the will of the State and the space itself is perfected to allow for smooth movement without the populace being aware that such movement is the will of the State and not their own. On the one hand, striated describes the set of choices, of spaces that are already predetermined by the Society. This movement from space to space, from experience to experience is State-driven, but it is in the reality of citizens moving through these spaces that we find how flawlessly the grid work of spaces was established by the State. Without these available spaces the smooth movement would not be possible, and in the moment where the movement is irregular, anxiety, curiosity, and confusion emerge, which are to be repressed at all costs in Brave New World, for the sake of Society. And every good citizen does their part to not inhabit these uneven spaces and jarring moments. Smoothness on the other hand maps onto the space, the landscape of work and play in Brave New World that is entirely regulated or fixed, what Deleuze and Guattari (2013) would describe as “determined,” by those in power in Society and reinforced through the conditioning each child receives. This movement is a perfectly fluid traversing through economic and social experiences. Since it is perpetual there is never a moment where the inhabitants of Brave New World are at a loss for what to do, their conditioning has

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already decided what their next step is. “What shall I wear, what shall I buy, who should I date and sleep with tonight, is it time for a soma holiday yet” is part of the ongoing internal dialog of every member of the Society. This determinedness or regime of movement produces a closing effect that eliminates possibilities deemed undesirable by the State (Nunes, 1999). This parallels the control of classroom behavior and management of available choices in contemporary classrooms in order to maximize the efficiency of the learning environment by minimizing disruption, outbursts, reflection, etc. Children, therefore, are not expected to act like children in school and be curious, questioning, critical, or distracted, but are to repress these urges and direct them into the learning environment. The use of exercise balls or other forms of interactive seating in classrooms represents such a desire to control behavior without the child being explicitly aware. The goal is to subvert the distractibility and need for exertion of the body, while simultaneously focusing the mind on the learning objective, maximizing efficiency at the expense of the human child.

A Conveyor Existence In the entire first section of the book, Huxley employs the metaphor of the conveyer belt to describe society at large and the things that must be done to keep the belt moving, without interference, and indefinitely. That is, until, we are introduced to Bernard Marx, a social outcast about whom others whisper behind his back that alcohol was introduced into his blood surrogate during the decanting process. Bernard represents a break in the status quo, a kink in the belt that cannot be smoothed; an authentic break to the potential within Brave New World. Otherwise, “[the] machine turns, turns and must keep turning—forever. It is death if it stands still” (Huxley, 1998, p. 42). Any sense of individuality is to be repressed, or risk the disruption of the conveyor belt and the machinery of the social body, as we will see with Lenina. Although we are introduced to Lenina as the seemingly perfectly conditioned Beta-minus female, she undergoes a transformation due to her relationship with first Bernard, but ultimately with John. We also see that an explicit individual awareness of the neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopedia children are subjected to haunts the world that it informs, as if something weren’t quite right, or real, about it. We see this first in Bernard, who is part of the apparatus that manages this aspect of society and writes the hypnopedic curriculum. Second is Lenina, who woke as a child to hear the repetitive phrases uttered during sleep, “Lenina remembered her first shock of fear and surprise; her speculations through half a wakeful hour; and then, under the influence of those endless repetitions, the gradual soothing of her mind, the soothing, the smoothing, the stealthy creeping of sleep…” (Huxley, 1998, p. 74). It’s not only this awareness that begins Bernard and Lenina on their subversive character development, but the idea that any duration of time that is spent engaging in activities not State-sanctioned is dangerous. Play, just as work, is something that becomes another form of discipline for children either in the form of prearranged playdates that parents control the set of peers, or even the types of play that are available, often

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in the form of interacting with technology, rather than other individuals face-to-face or playing in and exploring nature. In Brave New World this is why every effort is made for each social group to move from work to play without ever being alone, or having time to reflect about the world or their lives, and it seems as if conversation itself is conditioned, and they are just reciting the words of the soothing voice coming to them while they sleep. This perpetual social life, this constant company, this smooth movement between labor and leisure is intentional and for the State has an important function. The space of waiting is also a threat to the stability of Society as it represents a space where the conditioning cannot reach. “Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those old unnecessary barriers” (Huxley, 1998, p. 44). The conditioning determines one’s desires, and the social body works to consummate these desires virtually immediately; otherwise, there is feeling, anguish, pain, reflection, and maybe even rejection. This displeasure is also not exclusive to the lower castes; each social caste can find themselves in these moments where unconditioned thoughts creep in and haunt their subjectivity. The distinction here is that the Society of Brave New World has maximized the science of sexuality and transformed it into another form of disciplinary power, in a way that does not threaten social castes, but in fact reinforces them as each class has specifically designed forms of pleasure that are conditioned from birth (Foucault, 1978). Remember the conditioning of the Delta infants earlier. It is only when the conditioning unravels that we see alternative forms of pleasure, or even a satisfaction in the denial of instantly gratifying such needs and desires, as is the case with Bernard and John. Even the Director Mustapha Mond remembers times when there was real fear in his past, which he shares with Bernard as he “lapsed into the silence of reminiscence” before becoming embarrassed and changing the subject (Huxley, 1998, p. 97). There is no place for reminiscence in Brave New World, one need not engage in reflection as the social body has been perfected not to require or allow for it. But what does one do in the moments where anxiety begins seeping into consciousness and there are moments of waiting that cannot be avoided? Huxley’s answer to that is soma. Soma is a synthetic drug that creates euphoria and mild hallucinations and serves as a distraction, a way to pass the waiting, a way to allay the fears and anxieties. Even John’s mother Linda, after she is reintroduced to the Society and taken off the reservation, finds solace in soma, so much so that she slowly overdoses perfectly willingly and content. In the meantime, as she waits for death, and distracts herself from the pain of her existence, Linda would bask in the “infantile contentment” of the experience (Huxley, 1998, p. 200). Soma allows the user to take a holiday from the moments when the human condition seeps in affecting a perpetually stunted development. How would one mature if every moment of difficulty is diverted into a drug experience which causes one to forget, even within the waiting. Soma acts as a safeguard, in conjunction with the conditioning, to maintain a specific level of infantilization in the population. We might also ask how this practice can be understood in the current context of pharmacological intervention in the management of children’s education and what types of habits of dependency, effects on cognition, and lack of resilience emerges as a result?

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This infantilization is often connected to the socialization of individuals, particularly in the name of identifying a universal human nature for which all globalized individuals must adopt (Epstein, 2012). However, we also find that a potential self-awareness of this process of infantilization (as in Bernard’s case) of youth culture recognizing a talking down to them by adult culture often provokes or antagonizes a sense of rebellion against the adult culture of which youth are approaching, but from the authority of the adult, never quite attains (Skager, 2009). Although this research is emerging out of the study of youth culture and teenage resistance to authority, we find similarities in Brave New World, in the citizens who remain wholly ignorant to this process of infantilization and as such have nothing to rebel against, since the process keeps them thoroughly content, and the conveyor belt moves on.

Arcs of Maturation and Infantilization Bernard’s and Lenina’s character arcs allow for a deeper appreciation for just how totalizing the conditioning can be. Because of a transparent awareness of the hypnopedic conditioning mentioned earlier when Lenina awoke during her nightly conditioning as a child and Bernard actually constructs and implements as part of his work in the Society, we see how easily it could all become undone when the waiting and reflection become more intense and the soma seems not to have the same effects it once did. Bernard begins as a misfit and slowly becomes more representative of a conditioned individual, once he loses some of his misfit status, in part thanks to his proximity to bringing John off the savage reservation and into Society. Lenina, on the other hand, starts out perfectly conditioned, but slowly, also due to her relationship with John, becomes deconditioned and more misfit as the narrative develops. Both of these character arcs reveal just how tenuous the conditioning is and just how easily external forces, ancillary to the State, can unravel the conditioning of the individual. Lenina’s character, at first represents the conditioned individual, who is a tool of the state and has a certain awareness of how important it is to be a contributing member of the state and not an outsider, before she digresses and transforms into a misfit. Upon making arrangements to be taken to the savage reservation by Bernard, the two speak briefly before she abandons Bernard to go on a date with another individual: “Isn’t it beautiful!” [Bernard’s] voice trembled a little. She smiled at him with an expression of the most sympathetic understanding. “Simply perfect for Obstacle Golf,” she answered rapturously. (Huxley, 1998, pp. 59–60)

First, we see some of the effects the conditioning creates, that without an appreciation for nature, after Bernard’s comments about the beauty of the day she can only connect such sentiments to the type of recreation her caste enjoys, Obstacle Golf. The pleasure is not found within nature or the experience of nature or weather, but nature and weather are subsidiary to it being a perfect day for Obstacle Golf. Bernard, since he has a self-awareness of the conditioning, finds pleasure in nature because he also

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finds pleasure in the idle moments between conditioned pleasures that a raw experience of nature might actually compliment. The quality of the day is irrelevant but for engaging in her caste’s conditioned favorite pastime of consuming both sports equipment and transportation. The weather is only perfect for Obstacle Golf, not in and of itself. She remains safe from botany and nature, as per her conditioning. Second, we again see how idle time, the waiting between the dialog introduces confusion, even apprehension. This waiting, this space between the intervals, the interstices of action and conditioned thought is where those lurking feelings and fears might creep in. The idle time represents that space to think, to reflect, to feel, a space to avoid at all costs. The effect of this conditioning and avoidance of reflective time is that maturity is stunted. Alternatively, in John’s case, he seeks to prolong the suffering he feels in order to earn the experience of fulfilling his desires. This maturity does not sit well with Lenina, who wants nothing more than to succumb to the sexual desires she is feeling for John. The science of sexuality of the conditioning of pleasure is working heavily on Lenina to bed John, at the expense of prolonging her own suffering, which begins her own journey to self-actualization. John, on the other hand, approaches the fulfilling of such desires in more of an art of sexuality, or a care of self that Foucault (1978) describes. We find the inhabitants are “adults intellectually and during working hours,” but “Infants where feeling and desire are concerned” [but Bernard wonders if] “it might be possible to be an adult all the time” (Huxley, 1998, p. 94). The analogy of infant and adult shares a great deal with Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power and the sociopolitical effect such forces have on individuals and social bodies. For instance, Foucault describes how: discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude’, a ‘capacity’, which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection. If economic exploitation separates the force and the product of labour [sic], let us say that disciplinary coercion establishes in the body the constricting link between an increased aptitude and increased domination. (Foucault, 1977, 138)

Brave New World represents a perfection of this form of disciplinary power such that the subjects are not merely constrained, but created and conditioned to be constrained and be happy about it. The architects of society, the Director, World Controllers and select alphas seem to be beyond this or sit above it to some degree. The Director, Thomas, John’s father, reprimands Bernard for his antisocial behavior and overly adult disposition declaring that “they do not have to be infantile in their emotional behavior,” that it “is their duty to be infantile,” and maintain for the sake of Society “a proper standard of infantile decorum (Huxley, 1998, p. 98). Bernard seems to be unique in his ability to not only engage in mature behaviors, but also to recognize the stunted development of everyone else, while at the same time, he seems to be aware of the childishness of his social anxieties and nervous disposition, though they appear as perfectly adult-like to his peers. Upon Lenina saying something about how awful khaki is or how she prefers to buy new clothes rather than mend old clothes, Bernard

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often responds with how many times a night for a duration of years, say from age 3 to 6, a hypnopedic conditioned response is internalized in the child’s sleep, making the individual virtually incapable of saying anything to the contrary. It is this peculiar ability that allows him to write in his report to the director about John engaging with Society. Bernard casually admits that he agrees “with the savage in finding civilized infantility too easy or, as he put it, not expensive enough” (Huxley, 1998, p. 159). By expensive enough, Bernard implies that the conditioning precludes any individual suffering or failure to which the individual must take risks and work and struggle to overcome. Instead of the struggle, Society prefers to create immediate gratification. Early in the story, Bernard and Lenina engage sexually and he gives into social pressure because he likes Lenina and he is weak and is conditioned to seek fulfillment. John, on the other hand, feels as though he does not deserve a sexual relationship yet because he hasn’t worked for it, has not demonstrated his worth or done anything noble, which begins Lenina on a different path, one of social maturity, something she has not encountered in any other men, even Bernard (Huxley, 1998, p. 166). We see an infantilizing of Bernard, now that he is accepted. Though at first a desperate outcast situated on the fringes of society, he remains almost ignorant of the change that has occurred with him and his relationships. His fulfillment now comes from the social circles of equals and superiors finding interest vicariously through his relationship to John. For the first time, he experiences a level of immediate gratification, and Lenina, on the other hand, undergoes a maturation. Her soma doesn’t seem to work, her relationship with Fanny seems strained, and she notices the moon in one of her melancholy moods, whereas earlier in the book, upon Bernard’s comment about how lovely the weather is, she says it’s a perfect day for Obstacle Golf. She now begins to notice nature, nature as a space where one can reflect and brood without the distractions of Society or soma, in the solitude of her watching the moon. This maturation even affects her work as she now agonizes about John and how he is unlike every other infantilized man of Society. Due to her reflective distraction Lenina, whose job is to provide each embryo with an inoculation to certain diseases, cannot remember if she has given the dose to a specific test tube and decides to risk two doses, resulting in the death of an Alpha-minus “[twenty-two] years, eight months, and four days from that moment” (Huxley, 1998, p. 187). Here, we see the beginning of the unraveling of her conditioning, the programming loses its power, and the conveyer belt begins to fray and doesn’t roll as smoothly. However, we find the opposite in Bernard, even if it is short-lived. We see how easily social reinforcements can bring someone from the fringes back into the social fray. In Bernard’s case, he is accepted for the first time ever in his adult life. For Lenina, she becomes disinterested in the social good and instead wonders about her individual situation with John. This individuation is a key to getting off the conveyer belt, to becoming a threat to Society.

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The Architecture of the Infant Society At first, Lenina admonishes Bernard for his idiosyncrasies, to which he responds that his practices of taking walks to reflect, of spending time alone, of not dating, of not taking soma made him feel “as though I were more me […] not just a cell in the social body. […] not enslaved by my conditioning” (Huxley, 1998, pp. 90–91). The conditioning infantilizes the adult and the Director too notices this deficiency in Bernard. Going as far as to tell him, “Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself” (Huxley, 1998, p. 148). Within Brave New World, diversity and variety threatens the conformity of social class and social structure and must be avoided and repressed at all costs. John, another outsider in the most extreme sense, begins to try to subvert society, but finds the conditioning to be so strong that the individuals do not even understand him, or their own predicament. He asks, in an outburst where he tries to destroy the workers’ daily supply of soma, “‘do you like being slaves?’ […] ‘Do you like being babies?’” (Huxley, 1998, p. 212). The workers do not see themselves as babies and have no ability to critically reflect on their lives and understand themselves as infantile. John is able to see that childhood does not end with growing up for “[even] after decanting, he’s still inside a bottle—an invisible bottle of infantile and embryonic fixations” (Huxley, 1998, p. 22). There is simply no need for everyone to reach a certain level of maturity, that which we often associate with growing older, being more patient, more reflective, etc. There is a need, however, to keep the masses satiated. The Controller explains to John about the structure of their Society—the goal not being a deepening of consciousness or search for universal truths, but sustainability of the status quo by achieving happiness through simplicity. The social expectation is “childishly simple” (Huxley, 1998, p. 224). By keeping responsibilities to a minimum, individuals have little to do but to engage in their menial and extremely narrowed work, and then play in the forms of soma, going to the feelies, and immediate sex with anyone not too far beyond their own caste. This adult–child dichotomy is problematic precisely because it sets up the social stratification connected to higher levels of educational attainment, beginning with tracking of students in primary school and differing sets of expectations. This does not even include the idea of differing schools based on a similar though more extremely stratified social body. When the conveyer belt begins to fray, individuals are sent away from Society, they are labeled outcast and are exiled. Here, Huxley introduces some of the metaphors that are revisited in Island (2009). Mond admits of his own history that he too, similar to Bernard, asks more questions than were permitted and he “was on the point of being sent to an island” (Huxley, 1998, p. 226). The motif of the island is introduced as a punishment for not playing by Society’s rules and structures, but also as a space for individuals to freely make community, not receive preordained community that is hypnopedically conditioned. Abraham DeLeon (2015), referring to the information age and data, speaks of the dehumanizing of knowledge: “Subjective ways of knowing have no place in a machinic technocracy; it must be demonized, objectified, and

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villianized, eaten by the processes that keep particular ways of knowing outside of the machinic phylum. […] [Children can be] commodified, objectified, and domesticated toward the will(s) of humanity” (p. 113). In this sense of knowledge being reduced to data, we can make the analogy of the adult becoming infant, a way to keep development, maturation, and learning controlled on the smoothly operating conveyer belt. Subjectivity and alternative ways of knowing do not belong in Society, they belong to the island. The Controller describes island life as such: He’s being sent to an island, That’s to say, he’s being sent to a place where he’ll meet the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one reason or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into community-life. All the people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy, who’ve got independent ideas of their own. Every one, in a word, who’s any one. (Huxley, 1998, p. 226)

We see the archetype or the allegory of the island being suggested in both a physical manifestation of being separate and also the psychological notion of being removed from Society at large. These whispers would ultimately become Island, which was foreshadowed in Brave New World: “The tropical sunshine lay like warm honey on the naked bodies of children tumbling promiscuously among the hibiscus blossoms. Home was in any one of the twenty palm-thatched houses” (Huxley, 1998, p. 39). This concept of home will be shown to be central to Island and the educational consequences that could inform new subjectivities and relationships with children—a concept that contrasts starkly with the description of home we find in Brave New World.

Island Before plunging into the analysis of Island, some information about the text and Huxley will be helpful to both more fully appreciate the novel and understand Huxley’s worldview. Thirty years passed between Brave New World and Island. Brave New World was published when Huxley was in his prime at 38 years old while Island was published in 1962 when Huxley was 68, only one year before his death in 1963. The development between these years can be felt as one reads the text, representing the full maturation of Huxley moving into the reflective and spiritual dimensions, rather than social, political, and technical dimension present in Brave New World. We can also see certain parallels that imply that both worlds could inhabit the same universe. That is, Island reads like a prequel of sorts to Brave New World, which acts as a harbinger of things to come. The Crusade of the Spirit, the spiritual doctrine of the island of Pala determined to spread and colonize the world, reads like an early attempt at the universal conditioning and hypnopedia present in the Society of the future. Subjectivity in Island is much more spiritually steeped in Buddhism; a life consists of “the incomprehensible sequence of changes and chances that make up a life, all the beauties and horrors and absurdities whose conjunctions create the uninterpretable and yet divinely significant pattern of human destiny” (Huxley, 2009, p. 30). The subjectivity of the islanders, the Palanese understand the randomness and

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unpredictability of life, one that contrasts the subjectivity of the inhabitants of the Society in Brave New World where there is no randomness and unpredictability. On the contrary, life is methodically controlled by a near perfect system. Island serves as a counterpoint to Brave New World, one where we find the type of hope Illich (1989) describes: “one places no trust in tools and instruments [of Brave New World]; one comes to hope based on human beings” (p. 5). As far as plot devices are concerned, Darko Suvin (1976) reminds that the, “island in the far-off ocean is the paradigm of the esthetically most satisfying goal of the SF voyage” (p. 59). Island provides at least some utopian hope that seems lost when we equate our own situation with that of the Society, though the hope is short-lived, as Island concludes in the same fashion as Brave New World, where it seems all hope is lost and the dystopian turn seems inevitable. Hope instead will be found in the context of learning from and applying the lessons of these texts to our work as educators, parents, community members, and citizens. By first studying the models of childhood, in SF as well as psychological and philosophical theories, new relationships can be nurtured with the goal of implementing new forms of childhood in society. Hope exists in the nurturing of these alternative forms of childhood and the child. Even when a child displays more self-reliance and autonomy, just as in Brave New World, this is something to be suspicious of and controlled, indoctrinating the child that a dependency on adults and schooling is the only trajectory to a successful adulthood, success defined primarily through employment and material gain. Island, however, posits entirely different forms of success in the form of self-actualization, happiness, mutual aid, and freedom. The question educators could ask themselves is which model of childhood they want to be nurturing? Are we reproducing the analogy of the conveyor belt, or are we working toward the analogy of the island? We find a wholly different concept of children and childhood in Island. The children of the island are raised in a radically different type of community than the Society of Brave New World. The exception to this is the future Raja of Pala, Muru, who is similar to Bernard in that he is separate from his peers but unlike Bernard he wields uncompromising power over the progress of Pala. He transitions into adulthood, not through experience and relationships, but on the date he becomes Raja. Muru himself is cast apart from the rest of the island community. As the sovereign of Pala, Muru is bound to control its development in terms of industrializing the rural island and ending its isolationism, with future trade agreements in a global economy that exploit natural resources and ignore human capital or spiritual capital, in part because he is not of the island but above the island. If only Muru had been raised by the islanders instead of being corrupted in the context of a family, namely, his domineering mother. For the rest of the island, the concept of family is altogether alien to the concept of a nuclear family. A critique is waged against the notion of the modern nuclear family in Brave New World, in support of the State that controls the “birth” and conditioning of the youth: A home was as squalid psychically as physically. Psychically it was a rabbit hole, a midden, hot with frictions of tightly packed life, reeking with emotion. What suffocating intimacies, what dangerous, insane, obscene relationships between the members of the family group! (Huxley, 1998, p. 38)

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This disgust for the situation of the Modern family is shared by the inhabitants of the island, albeit from radically different rationale. Instead of advancing the State, the islanders instead create a new form of community that advances a posthuman sensibility that focuses on social stability without sacrificing real human relationships. Keeping this concept of home in mind lets examine a passage from Island which describes in detail this new type of community and the type of relationships that emerge from this model. In comparing the island with the rest of the world, Susila, a young nurse, describes to Will how within “‘a single generation the whole family system was radically changed’ […] ‘Because from the moment [a child] could toddle, [they were] free to escape’” (Huxley, 2009, p. 106). Will is both amazed and confused at the amount of autonomy and self-determination the children are afforded on Pala, something that is entirely alien from his social experience. Susila adds: Whenever the parental Home Sweet Home becomes too unbearable, the child is allowed, is actively encouraged—and the whole weight of public opinion is behind the encouragement—to migrate to one of its other houses [where one finds an] entirely different kind of family. Not exclusive, like your families, and not predestined, not compulsory. An inclusive, unpredestined and voluntary family. (Huxley, 2009, 106–107)

Here, we find strong resonances with anarchist collectives that operate democratically but decentralized (de Acosta, 2009; DeLeon, 2006; Godwin, 1966; May, 2009; Suissa, 2001; Todd, 2012). These new families, these communities are based on radically secure forms of trust. Trust both for the child to be given such astonishing amounts of freedom and trust of the community and the families therein that the children are prioritized. This form of trust, introduced into the community also provides mutual security. It is with this community that contrasts so starkly with Brave New World that we find the posthuman, where the social system, the machinic dimension does not eliminate the human dimension, but instead compliments it. It is not a matter of converting the human into something nonhuman, say a Beta-minus, but allowing the human to flourish within an environment and structure that sympathizes with the human condition and acts to deal with it humanely rather than inhumanly, by not turning the child into part of the conveyer belt in the form of a productive citizen of the Society. On Pala, the focus is on “turning out good human beings” (Huxley, 2009, p. 108). The other cultures of Island, the non-Palanese escape the state-appointed baby-tamers; but your society condemns you to pass your childhood in an exclusive family, with only a single set of siblings and parents. They’re foisted on you by hereditary predestination. You can’t get rid of them, can’t take a holiday form them, can’t go to anyone else for a change of moral or psychological air. Its freedom—but freedom in a telephone booth. (Huxley, 2008, p. 108)

The baby tamers Susila mentions are similar to the State-approved nurseries in Brave New World, where the children received the electric shock conditioning. The type of freedom espoused in Brave New World, the freedom to make choices that are selected from a set of predetermined choices that the child inherits not through the neurosis of the family, but through the conditioning of the Society. Freedom in Island, however, is of an entirely different set of choices. The families and extended

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families that a child is able to escape are vital to the healthy development of the child and society. This dual-natured model of family/community guarantee: children against injustice and the worst consequences of parental ineptitude. It doesn’t guarantee them against discipline, or against having to accept responsibilities. On the contrary, it increases the number of their responsibilities; it exposes them to a wide variety of disciplines. In your predestined and exclusive families, child, as you say, serve a long prison term under single set of parental jailers. These parental jailers may, of course, be good, wise, and intelligent. In that case the little prisoners will emerge more or less unscathed. But in point of fact most of your parental jailers are not conspicuously good, wise, or intelligent. They’re apt to be well-meaning but stupid, or not well-meaning and frivolous, or else neurotic, or occasionally downright malevolent, or frankly insane. […] But now consider what happens in a large, inclusive, voluntary family. No telephone booths, no predestined jailers. (Huxley, 2008, p. 109)

These new models for family and community can deeply inform the interactions we strive for in educational settings. Schools often serve more as the state-appointed baby tamers or as the neurotic family model where competing individual identities struggle for recognition, thus setting up the social competitiveness of productivity and eliminating communal forms of cooperation, collaboration, mutual aid, and radical trust.

Stepping Out of the Dystopian Shadow These spaces, these moments in SF literature provide educators with opportunities to locate, experiment with, and extract new discipline, new pedagogies, new potentials of human and technological partnerships. Educators can revisit and critique the way culture and spirituality enter the discussion, the way that rearrangements of family (and in the same context schools and classrooms) produce different ways to interact and understand, and finally how such posthumanist structures image new models of subjectivity (Snaza et al., 2014). The question that should be troubling current educators and teacher education programs is how much meaningful teaching are we engaging with and teaching future teachers to embody and how much are we conditioning a student to function in society. Conceiving the school as a machine, a social machine that disciplines a body, where children: learn quickly to be quiet, stand in line, and place their finger over their mouths when in a hallway—or they will be punished by having privileges taken away, which also means no opportunities for experimentation through play. This machine demands a price from all young people. They become machines for Educational Testing Services, future workers ready to play their part as money makers, and consumers patriotically saving the economy from recession, buying up anything just to rev up the engine we call the economy. If you are unable to fulfill your mechanical duties, the pharmaceutical machine will come to your rescue. Pills will allow you to do more than you thought possible. This machine plugging in may cause a loss of appetite, listlessness, even thoughts of suicide but do not worry the machine has many types of pills for you; one type is rarely enough. (Snaza et al., 2014, p. 44)

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Analyzing SF illustrates the realistic ways we are already involved in a posthuman world where the machinic dimension of the school resonates with the conditioning in Brave New World. After acknowledging the posthuman situation, the question then becomes what type of posthuman will we decide to become (Snaza et al., 2014). SF not only gives us a way to critique our current humanist-rooted institutions and relationships, as is the case with Brave New World, but also ways to reimagine these institutions and relationships, such as in Island. In the same way, we can understand the dystopian in our world, we can work to create the utopian for the future. The utopian dimension in SF provides hope. Although Brave New World ends with the death of John and with him the power to subvert Society and Island concludes with the selling out of the island and the ruin of the paradise of Pala, hope remains. Hope remains in the way SF transforms us and informs our relationship with the world. Some of the ideas provoked by Brave New World that we can internalize as parents, educators, or anyone who spends time interacting with children from this analysis, as an effort to insulate against the dystopian movement toward a culture akin to Brave New World include (a) being different and respecting diversity as a voice against conformity, (b) the arrangement of spaces and educational choices available to children, and finally, (c) a radically different concept of childhood subjectivity that recognizes a child’s own agency. The homogeneity of society, although divided into castes in Brave New World, illustrates a reduction in all forms of diversity and limits both the choices and the potential of individuals and communities. The concepts are themselves cultural machines that determine how we act individually and socially, how we spend our time, and how we reimage our relationship with each other and the world. Being different seems to be a prerequisite to observe culture and society from the peripheral and not fall under its spell like John in Brave New World. Like the sunglasses from the movie They Live, John sees the damage wrought on the individual and society in the machinic forms of control. The same can be said of Island, “it simply isn’t possible for Pala to go on being different from the rest of the world, and, second, because it isn’t right that it should be different” (Huxley, 2008, p. 66). Being different makes all the difference. Second, taking time for reflection, thinking, learning, creating, loving, nurturing real relationships, taking time out of the conveyer belt that seems all too familiar allows for new solutions, without foregoing responsibility, only avoiding the bureaucratic deadlines and processes. Island offers hope with a form of living that does not seem to be exploitive in any dramatic sense, one that sustains the bodies in what has come to be known as the cybernetic triangle of human/animal/machine with some level of balance, neither overtaking the others (Snaza et al., 2014, p. 45). The tools that reinforce our expanding definition of the machine in an effort to remake culture, identity, community, and love, revolutionizing society in the same way as disruptive technologies. Part of the goal here is to be slower and more cautious, knowing what’s at stake, by taking the time to be fully informed, bringing in multiple and diverse perspectives, and anticipating consequences. Educators too must recognize their role in shaping the spaces and creating environments where children have a set of choices that compliment their natural inclinations to be curious, experimental, and even take risks. Building on

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the community in Island there is considerable responsibility on adults to foster new relationships with children that sincerely honor a child’s agency and recognizes the child as their own subject to become, not an object to master for the sake of the schooling apparatus. Island ends with its inevitable destruction. Upon setting in motion the wheels that eventually lead to this moment, “Will felt a twinge of conscience. What charming young people! And here he was, plotting with Bahu and the forces of history to subvert their world. He comforted himself with the thought, that, if he didn’t do it, somebody else would” (Huxley, 2008, p. 100). This story trope is reminiscent of the John Prine song “Paradise,” about the inevitable conclusion to a mining community when the mines dry up, nature has been pillaged, and the mining company has moved on. It seems we are too late and all hope is lost, just as in Brave New World and Island. But in this context SF is not without hope, on the contrary, hope does not lie in the narrative or the song, but in the cultural transformations that result in new ethics of childhood and relationships with children, which in turn posit new models of education; models of education that are hidden in the shadows of science fiction…until they’re not.

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Kortenhaus, C. M., & Demarest, J. (1993). Gender role stereotyping in children’s literature: An update. Sex Roles, 20(3/4), 219–232. Lewis, T., & Khan, R. (2010). Education out of bounds: Reimagining cultural studies for a posthuman Age. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. May, T. (2009). Anarchism from Foucault to Rancière. In R. Amster, A. DeLeon, L. Fernandez, A. Nocella, & D. Shannon (Eds.), Contemporary anarchist studies: An Introduction of anarchy in the academy (pp. 125–135). New York, NY: Routledge. Nodelman, P. (1992). The other: Orientalism, colonialism, and children’s literature. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 17(1), 29–35. Nunes, M. (1999). Virtual topographies: Smooth and striated cyberspace. In Marie-Laure Ryan (Ed.), Cyberspace textuality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Postman, N. (1994). The disappearance of childhood. New York, NY: Vintage. Skager, R. (2009). Extending childhood into the teen years “infantilization” and its consequences. Reclaiming Children & Youth, 18(2), 18–20. Snaza, N., Applebaum, P., Bayne, S., Carlson, D., Morris, M., Rotas, N., & Weaver, J. (2014). Toward a posthumanist education. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 30(2), 39–55. Suissa, J. (2001). Anarchism, utopias, and philosophy of education. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 35(4), 627–646. Suljic, V., & Öztürk, A. S. (2013). Where dystopia becomes reality and utopia never comes. Journal of History, Culture & Art Research/Tarih Kültür Ve Sanat Arastirmalari Dergisi, 2(2), 30–40. Suvin, D. (1976). On the poetics of the science fiction genre. In M. Rose (Ed.), Science fiction: A collection of critical essays (pp. 57–71). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Suvin, D. (2010). Defined by a hollow: Essays on utopia, science fiction, and political epistemology. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Todd, J. (2012). From deschooling to unschooling: Rethinking anarchopedagogy after Ivan Illich. In R. Haworth (Ed.), Anarchist Pedagogies. Oakland: PM Press. Varricchio, M. (1999). Power of images/Images of power in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Utopian Studies, 10(1), 98.

Filling the Mind: Cortical Knowledge Uploads, Didactic Downloads and the Problem of Learning in the Future Phillip W. Simpson and Andrew Gibbons

Abstract Many science fiction narratives employ the device of instant knowledge. In this chapter, that device is considered as very much a problem of the present for the study of childhood. Childhood is explored as a machinic production involving the technical and instrumental processes of electronically constructing the child’s knowledge of the world, and of themselves. As such, this chapter looks to the study of pedagogy alongside the study of childhood, engaging with the ideas of future learning from science fiction that has very real implications for the experience of childhood now. The particular experience of childhood that we are interested in is the child as learner. This learner is in many ways constructed by the institutions of schooling. And yet, in the twenty-first century, digital mediations of the child are beginning to assert some kind of pressure on the structures of schooling and wider educational systems. The chapter engages with problematic relationships that emerge in the science fiction imaginations of the future for learning and education.

Introduction There’s a line in the movie Jurassic Park (1993) where the sardonic character Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum, says: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Malcolm, in that narrative, was referring to creating dinosaurs using the DNA of their extinct ancestors. These words have a wider importance, being applicable to any scientific and technological development that has far-reaching social, economic and cultural effects. One such development might be the didactic download. Imagine a world in the not too distant future in which children learn through an electronic download—a world where cortical implants ensure that information is downloaded directly to children’s brains when required, or, for that matter, desired. P. W. Simpson (B) · A. Gibbons Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] A. Gibbons e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 D. W. Kupferman and A. Gibbons (eds.), Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_9

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Many science fiction authors have explored this trope—authors such as Peter F. Hamilton, Joe Haldeman, Iain Banks, William Gibson and Richard K. Morgan. It is also a popular theme in movies such as The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999) and Johnny Mnemonic (Longo, 1995). In these futures, implants and shunts give new meaning to accessing information, and to the idea that the child is an empty vessel or “void” to be filled to the brim. The learner’s mind as a void waiting for the electronically mediated information to be turned into knowledge is the central science fiction concept in this chapter. This possible future is of interest on account of its implications for the study of childhood out of the machine. One such future is imagined in Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn Trilogy (1996–1999) and his Commonwealth Saga (2002–present). These works present a vision of the future in which, through the technology of the didactic download, the teacher no longer exists (or at least in no form we recognise). Instead, children attend “day clubs” and receive new knowledge uploads on a daily basis. These cortical knowledge uploads (CKUs) appear as the ultimate manifestation of an instant, transactional “banking” model of education (Freire, 2000), where learning is based solely on access to the required technology. In this model, information is loaded into children with little attention to context, and disconnected from experience. There is also no student voice or agency—the information is exactly reproduced in the mind of the learner. However, let us pause for a minute. Perhaps the educational imaginations of science fiction writers are not so far fetched. Perhaps some elements of this future are already a concern for the study of childhood within the domains of learning and education. Learners are arguably already inundated with de-contextualised information accessed online with little to no guidance from a teacher, where experience means little, and where the main pedagogical aim is to get as much information into the child as quickly, efficiently and mechanically as possible. In addition, perhaps learning is already entrenched in particular and myriad technological relationships—depending of course on the complexity with which we understand technology and the technological society (see for instance Ellul, 1964). In this chapter then, the problem of knowledge downloads and the mechanical instruction of the mind-void is very much a problem of the present for the study of childhood out of the machine. Childhood is a machinic production involving the technical and instrumental processes of electronically constructing the child’s knowledge of the world, and of themselves. As such, our work looks to the study of pedagogy alongside the study of childhood. We are interested here in playing with the ideas of future learning from science fiction that has very real implications for the experience of childhood now. The particular experience of childhood that we are interested in is the child as learner (Biesta, 2016). This learner is in many ways constructed by the institutions of schooling. And yet, in the twenty-first century, digital mediations of the child are beginning to assert some kind of pressure on the structures of schooling and wider educational systems (see, for instance, Ministry of Education, 2017). Will education systems go through some kind of significant reform as a result of this new image of the learner, or will they assimilate new ways

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of thinking about learning into their machinery? And in either future, what will be, as Biesta (2016) asks, the future for the teacher–learner relationship? During the course of this chapter, we explore some of the (arguably) well-known examples of didactic downloading, and scrutinise these examples through the work of Rancière (1991), Freire (2000) and Biesta (2016). The chapter engages with problematic relationships that emerge in the science fiction imaginations of the future of the mind. For instance, relationships between information and knowledge, and between education and schooling. That these are shown to be in some form of opposition is not to suggest an oppositional reality, but rather to explore the implications of these observed realities. The purpose is not to settle on particular theories of mind but rather to keep thinking about mind and education open.

On Downloading Learning in Science Fiction The concept of knowledge uploading via a cortical implant, where knowledge can be downloaded (or is it uploaded?) directly into the brain, is of interest to science fiction writers. This interest extends beyond the uploading and downloading of knowledge as information that a character may then be said to have learned instantly, to the loading of memories and personalities—and often where the character has no knowledge of this process (see, for instance, the films Total Recall and Paycheck, both adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s work). In cinema, the didactic download generally appears as a device that makes for a more complicated, suspenseful plot with some existential quirks; however, in some novels, the future of a society in which all learning is purchased and shunted directly into a person’s brain is taken in more critical, thoughtful and philosophical directions. Early experiments with didactic downloads were highly militarised. While many science fiction writers attended to the creation of machine armies, some writers focused on the possibility of mechanising the mind of the soldier. This approach recognises more or less explicitly the disciplinary technologies applied to the subjectivity of the soldier, creating a synergy between the human being as machine and the machinery of military institutions. Learning is an experience in being programmed to fulfil distinct, particular, precise duties. Other possible thoughts are flushed out. Such creations are manifested in ruthless avatars such as Jason Bourne and the Takeshi Kovacs character created by Richard K. Morgan—both highly trained assassins working for covert government departments. For instance, in the Forever War (2010) by Joe Haldeman, a science fiction novel inspired by the author’s experiences in Vietnam, elite army leaders are created in a gas-filled tank (known as the “can”) for periods of 3 weeks. Inside, their brains are injected with knowledge the military deems as necessary or useful. These soldiers are officers. This privilege is not determined through aptitude, but rather through rank, because of the extreme cost and the energy requirement—the same amount of energy used to run the entire planet for a few days. A forerunner of scenes from The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999), in the can the soldier is injected with knowledge

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of how to use every weapon ever invented, and the history of every conflict or battle, facts and strategies: I learned the best way to use every weapon from a rock to a nova bomb…I felt the weapons in my hands and watched my performance with them. And did it over and over until I did it right. The illusion of reality was total. I used a spear-thrower with a band of Masai warriors on a village raid, and when I looked down at my body, it was long and black. I relearned epee from a cruel-looking man in foppish clothes in an eighteenth-century French courtyard. I sat quietly in a tree with a Sharps rifle and sniped at blue-uniformed men as they crawled across a bloody field toward Vicksburg. In three weeks, I killed several regiments of electronic ghosts. It seemed more like a year to me, but the ALSC does strange things to your sense of time…the machine kept my body totally inert and zapped my brain with four millennia’s worth of military facts and theories. And I couldn’t forget any of it! (Haldeman, 2010, p. 162)

In the book, this knowledge sets the officers even further apart from regular soldiers than rank would normally imply. Unlike in stories of ignorant officers being counselled by their experienced and wise troops, in Haldeman’s future, the educational value of the can reinforces existing privilege, the powerful becoming more so through knowledge denied to the lower ranks. This theme of privilege is an important contribution that we revisit below. We also look at the provocative idea of not being able to forget facts and theories. First, however, we would like to focus on the time that is taken to complete the procedure. The individual officer spends 3 weeks receiving this information—yes, 3 whole weeks. In the 1970s, this might have seemed like quite an efficient and speedy process reflecting an advance on the computer technologies of the time. However, with the Personal Computer, a significant phase in the electronic personalisation of learning, came a series of novels in the 1980s that would make 3 weeks of learning 3 weeks too long. These novels were then soon to be reinterpreted into a series of movies including The Matrix (discussed later in this section) and Johnny Mnemonic. The movie Johnny Mnemonic (Longo, 1995) was based on the dystopian short story with the same name by William Gibson (1986). Johnny is a “mnemonic courier” equipped with a brain implant that stores knowledge. This enables him to carry information deemed too sensitive to transfer via the Net—which is roughly the equivalent of the Internet but with more of a virtual reality aesthetic. Ironically, the implant has had unwelcome knowledge side effects on Johnny; he has lost his childhood memories and only the removal of the implant will restore them. He takes on one last job, a job that will earn him the money he needs to remove the implant. This last job requires him to store more data than his implant can handle, but, desperate, Johnny accepts anyway, despite the associated risks of the information leaking directly into his brain which could potentially cause psychological damage and death. William Gibson’s highly influential Neuromancer (1995), Count Zero (1987) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988) popularised concepts and terms such as cyberspace, netsurfing and the matrix (which would later inspire the movie of the same name) and cemented cyberpunk as a legitimate and influential genre. In the books, both human memory and knowledge can be mechanised and humans are able to download instructions directly into their brains through the use of implants. This idea of neural implants is Gibson’s particular influence of interest here, and cannot be under-

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estimated in terms of his vision, not only of implants into the brain but also the relationships between human and artificial intelligence through neural implants. Unlike the “can”, neural implants create an immediacy and instantaneousness to the learning process. What Gibson does not do, that is, taken up by Peter Hamilton, is considered the impact of these implants for formal and informal educational experiences. In Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn Trilogy (1996–2000) and his Commonwealth Saga (2002–present), the school teacher as instructor no longer exists. Instead, children attend “day clubs” and receive new knowledge uploads on a daily basis. Young children up to the age of 16 are filled with knowledge via didactic laser memory implants where subject matter is loaded directly into the brain. Unlike some of the technologies discussed above that discriminate only on the size of one’s bank balance or status, in Hamilton’s mind children are not equally biologically predisposed for their adaptation to learning with this technology. The rate and amount of knowledge uploaded are dependent on an individual’s ability to absorb it. School, a formal institutionalised educational event, consists only of a weekly didactic memory-absorption assessment, followed by the imprint of a new memory (Hamilton, 2000a). This takes very little time so children have a great deal of time to fill in during the day, and hence the formation of “day clubs”, where the children interact and foster their social skills through games and events. In other words, their social skills are not programmable, and in spite of this are still valued enough to be organised into the daily learning diet of the child. When the brain of an individual has stopped growing (somewhere between the ages of 16–18), adults are fitted with neural nanonics “…a web of neuralamplification circuits that are meshed directly with the brain, providing a datavise link with electronic circuitry” (Hamilton, 2000a, p. 6). This datavise link is a wireless connection, enabling users to interface directly with electronic equipment. Neural nanonics also enables knowledge to be imprinted directly into the brain, thus enhancing memory capacity (Hamilton, 2000a, b). In Hamilton’s vision of the future, up to 80% of those functioning within mainstream societies (“Adamists”) have neural nanonics, creating a new electronic knowledge culture. Knowledge is everywhere, omnipresent and essential for survival. There are those who try to take advantage of individuals and corrupt the system. For instance, sequestration nanonics are used to infiltrate a person’s cortex, thereby controlling the mind and body of another person. Governments also use sequestration nanonics to their advantage, using debrief nanonics to extract information directly from a brain’s memory centres (Hamilton, 2000a, b). Up to 70% of the population goes on to higher study at universities where they are subjected to more specialised didactic imprints. Those that do not go on to higher study have job-related imprint courses, continuing to update throughout their lives. Within Hamilton’s future universe, there is another culture called the “Edenists”, separated from the Adamists by contentious technology known as the “affinity gene”—a kind of telepathy. The Edenists live on giant floating biotech habitats in space, the habitats controlled by a “personality”—an AI that is grown instead of built. The seed for the habitat is germinated in orbit around a gas giant (which it relies upon for energy) and the personality grows along with the shell, aided by a team of Edenists specialised in assisting the development of a persona. The

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affinity gene enables Edenists to communicate easily with one another but is also used to absorb educational programmes directly from a habitat personality. These programmes are equivalent to Adamist didactic courses and knowledge is absorbed by the brain during sleep periods throughout their lives (Hamilton, 2000a). Hamilton makes it clear that this Edenist technique of knowledge uploading is much more effective than those of the Adamists: This procedure is in many ways more advanced than laser didactic imprinting, since the habitat can quiz an individual directly, and very accurately determine which sections of the education memory have been successfully absorbed, then repeat the missing sections until full understanding of a subject is reached. In this fashion, talent and aptitude can be developed to maximum potential, be it in arts or science. (Hamilton, 2000a, p. 27)

Controversially (according to the Adamists at least), morals and desirable behavioural traits are also part of this knowledge upload and this “conditioning” produces a society largely free from violence and crime. Upon death, the knowledge and memories of individual Edenists are not lost as they upload their personalities into the habitat where they live on as part of the multiplicity of consciousness. In Hamilton’s vision of the future, 600 years from now, there are hundreds of colonised worlds forming what is known as the “Confederation.” Each planet is free to write their own constitution and laws and structure their society as they see fit. Some planets have rejected advanced technology in favour of more nostalgically less complicated eras, ones where humans do not rely on advanced computing technology. Education is still in a form that we would recognise, with a traditional didactic teacher–student relationship and a heavy reliance on textbooks as the source of knowledge. One of those worlds is Norfolk. In the Night’s Dawn Trilogy (1996–2000), one of the main characters, Louise, born and raised on Norfolk, is forced to travel to Earth. There, it is almost essential for citizens to have neural nanonics in order to function in such an advanced society. Upon arrival on Earth, Louise decides to have them fitted: With the implant package in place, Andy fetched the didactic imprinter. Louise thought it looked like a pair of burnished stainless-steel ski glasses. He put the flek in a small slot at the side, and placed it carefully on her face. ‘This works in pulses,’ he said. ‘You’ll get a warning flash of green, then you’ll see a violet light for about fifteen seconds. Try not to blink. It should happen eight times.’ ‘That’s it?’ The edge of the imprinter had stuck to her skin, leaving her in total blackness. ‘Yep, not so bad, is it?’ ‘And this is the way everyone of Earth learns things?’ ‘Yes. The information is coded within the light, and your optic nerve passes it straight to your brain. Simple explanation, but that’s the principle.’ ‘…Your children don’t go to school?’ she asked. ‘No. Kids go to day clubs, keeps them busy and you make friends there. That’s all.’ She was silent for some time, considering the implications. The hours—years!—of my life I have sat in classrooms listening to teachers and reading books. And all the time, this way of learning, of discovery, existed. One of the demonic technologies that will ruin our way of life. Banned without question. That’s nothing to do with keeping Norfolk pastoral, that’s

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denying people opportunity, stunting their lives…She clenched her teeth together, suddenly very, very angry. (Hamilton, 2000b, p. 316)

In the Takeshi Kovacs series (Altered Carbon, 2002; Broken Angels, 2003; Woken Furies, 2005) by Richard K. Morgan, humans have “cortical stacks” inserted into their spines. These stacks record the individual’s memories and can be transferred to new bodies (“sleeves”) when the old body wears out, dies or suffers from disease or a fatal injury. This a concept explored earlier in Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967), where humans can transfer their minds into new bodies. While Morgan focuses on the transferral of memories and personalities, knowledge appears to be treated in the same way. Iain M. Banks’s Culture series (1987–2013) features the transfer of mind states and uploading and downloading information via what he refers to as a “neural lace”, a technological computer implant in a human’s brain, a term that has now appeared in hi-tech discourse (see, for instance, Bergen, 2016). With a neural lace, whole mind states can be copied. These mind states can be transferred from ship to ship over thousands of light years and housed within whatever body a user desires. In the egalitarian and somewhat hedonistic society of the culture, all members of their society have knowledge freely available to them, whether to upload directly into their consciousness or assimilated naturally. In terms of information available, there are very few restrictions and these serve only to safeguard their society as a whole with the Godlike AI Minds holding the keys. Intelligent machines (drones) share rights and citizenship with the organic members of the society, floating through the Ships and other habitats with the use of antigravity (see, for instance, Banks, 1996). Their society is seen by many outsiders as something to strive towards, a utopia. In the Culture, everyone is equal, there is no money, and information and resources are freely available. In such a society, where the continuous pursuit and acquisition of knowledge is neither valued nor required, humans are free to indulge in whatever experience they desire. It is only the Minds and their agents (a group called Special Circumstances) who pursue knowledge with any real intent. In The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999), viewers are presented with arguably the most familiar use of direct knowledge uploads. Inspired and influenced by William Gibson’s novels, the concept is one of the central conceits, and possibly one of the most important of the movie. Characters are able to upload knowledge directly to their brain via a jackpoint at the base of the neck. In a pivotal moment in the story, the central character Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, announces “I know Kung Fu”, after uploading the knowledge of how to fight directly into his cortex. Throughout the movie, Neo and the other characters conveniently upload knowledge when required, for example, another character, Trinity, has to escape from the roof of a skyscraper. There is no way down and they seemed trapped but then the camera pans over to a helicopter, sitting on a nearby platform: Neo: “Can you fly that thing?” Trinity: “Not yet.”

Instantly, knowledge of how to fly the helicopter is uploaded to her cortex and Neo and Trinity make their escape. This incident lends well to the idea of the didactic

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download as ex machina incarnate. There is no plot in our lives that cannot be changed when we, or at least some of us, can instantly add some kind of critical information and in essence change our minds on a subject. This is a significant shift in thinking. One critical concern here, referring to the provocation that begins this chapter, is if there is a lot of interest in whether science and technology can produce the didactic download, and not much attention to whether or not it should. For that problem, we look to the work of some serious educational philosophy.

Learning, Teaching and Education The science fiction imaginations above use new technological means to collect, process and apply information. The new technological means promise to fill the learner’s mind. The implications of filling this space are explored in this section, examined within a context of the Information Age in which teachers are expected to be furiously preparing learners for the apparently and paradoxically unknowable future (Tutton, 2017). Science fiction, as a source of engagement with education, presents possible futures at the same time as providing a critique of the present. There are two presents we would like to explore here. First, the reality of the didactic download and/or the CKU (cortical knowledge upload). Then, the reality of the technological learning society. Research closing the gap between mind and machine includes work on Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) in order to improve learning and skill retention of pilots (Choe, Coffman, Bergstedt, Ziegler, & Phillips, 2016) and in the field of genetic, robotic, information processing and nanotechnological processes (or GRIN) (de Hart & Farrell, 2012). The former explores the role of new technologies in supporting learning through, in a sense, massaging the brain guided by a knowledge of what makes learning possible. In the latter, technology can detect when certain neurons are fired or cause or prevent certain neurons from firing. This kind of technology has the potential to modify behaviour and consciousness (de Hart & Farrell, 2012). Writers on such technology believe that it will have a significant impact on education: Education itself will change profoundly once these technologies are widely available, for such direct downloading of information means that individuals will be able to disseminate and acquire information much more quickly. This, coupled with the extension of human life itself, leads some advocates to suggest that human knowledge will grow exponentially within a given generation and individual; and that this kind of knowledge growth will be in some way Godlike. Schools, if they exist at all, may consist of ‘downloading stations,’ and the typical school day may consist of no more than ‘five minutes’ of ‘downloading’ what now takes an entire day of lecturing to do. (de Hart & Farrell, 2012, p. 139)

Just as Hamilton warned in his fictionalised vision of the future, this technology allows a code writer to “remake an individual’s personality, memories, and gain a new level of influence over their behaviour” (de Hart & Farrell, 2012, p. 139). So who is the code writer? Or more importantly, what is the code writer? Here, AI is a technological advance many consider to have an inevitable impact on education

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with significant attention in the popular media (see, for instance, Dickson, 2017). AI has the potential to transform education and in particular the way communities and societies understand and experience education, school and learning (what it is and why “we” do it). There is significant interest in the rise of AI, particularly in terms of the trajectories of AI replacing human labour (Grace, Salvatier, Dafoe, Zhang, & Evans, 2017)—a concern that is not in any way new of course given centuries of resistance to a machine replacing a human across a range of occupations. The idea of the machine taking over from the teacher is arguably a little more radical and yet even this relationship has a genealogy—including theorisations of education as a mechanical and instrumental organising and disciplining of individuals and communities (Ellul, 1964). As noted in the introduction, Freire’s (1970) concerns with education as a form of machinic banking provides a very relevant critique of particular forms of didactic downloading futures. Cortical uploads are arguably the very embodiment of the banking concept of education, where students are empty accounts to be filled by the teacher. The “teacher” in this case is a universal data bank of knowledge, most likely an AI. This future of education may well provide access to unimaginable reservoirs of information. With direct cortical uploads, the learner appears to be freed from the apparent traditional teacher–learner hierarchies with their attendant imbalances in power. The learner is empowered by their ability to absorb as much knowledge as they want. Direct access to knowledge would, it follows, emancipate the oppressed, freeing them from ignorance that keeps them in chains—all people would be equal. Or not. Following Freire (1970), information and knowledge are more complex in terms of their emancipatory functions. Like the education system and the teacher in Freire’s world, the universal knowledge bank (the bank of apparent freedom) is not neutral. The banking system retains control, and the student is powerless (Freire, 1970). More than this, with a universal banking system, the machinery of control is further obscured within the technological system, and at the same time further reified as an educational advancement for human civilisation. In contrast, we argue that cortical implants continue a process of decontextualising education. Here, students opened up to a direct implantation of knowledge experience “the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human” (Freire, 1970, p. 74). In the world of the didactic download, the learner is simply there to have their mind filled. The knowledge transactions leave the learner with knowledge that they cannot unlearn—most notably knowledge about themselves as this or that kind of learner, knowledge about knowledge and knowledge about education. Biesta (2016) takes up the work of Freire in his analysis of education and, in particular, the role of the teacher in an age of learning. In this age, the learner constructs the learning—this is the constructivist reality. The constructivist reality transforms classrooms from places of teaching to places of learning (Biesta, 2016). The future learner, who can simply push a button and download information, would be the central character in the classroom, such that the teacher and the classroom disappear. Or would they? Biesta (2016) explores the role of communication. Where communication is viewed as the “transportation of chunks of information from A to B” (2016,

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p. 43), something critical about the nature of education is overlooked. Certainly, education as the transporting of bits of information is critical to the possibility of the didactic download. For Biesta (2016), the effectiveness of the tool would remove the risk from teaching. At the same time, the didactic download undermines the “dialogical potential [of education], that is, its ability to do justice to all who take part” (p. 43). More than this, it is not the learner constructing the learning, but rather the learning constructing the learner—a problem that recognises the ontological concerns expressed by Friere and leads to questions concerning the ways in which the learner understands the relationships between information and knowledge within the contexts of learning and education. For Biesta the difference between knowledge and information is significant here. Information is simply that—information without context, interpretation or action. …knowledge is always about relationships between actions and consequences. While this does mean that knowledge is a construction, it is not a construction happening somewhere in our head, but a construction ‘in transaction’, which means that knowledge is both constructed and real. From this angle, the question of truth ceases to be a spatial matter—that is of the relationship between statements about the world and the world itself—and instead becomes thoroughly temporal—that is, concerned with the relationship between actions and their consequences. Knowledge thus moves from the domain of certainty, the domain of ‘what is’, to the domain of possibility, the domain of ‘what might be the case.’ (Biesta, 2014, p. 47)

Biesta notes: …to learn from someone is a radically different experience from the experience of being taught by someone…where someone showed us something or made us realise something that really entered our being from the outside. Such teachings often provide insights about ourselves and our ways of doing and being—insights that we were not aware of or rather did not want to be aware of. (Biesta, 2016, p. 53)

In his thinking on teaching and learning, Biesta draws from the work of Jacques Rancière. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster Rancière (1991) recounts the story of the Frenchman Joseph Jacotot who through a range of arguably serendipitous discoveries, formulated three principles: that all people are equipped with equal intelligence, the ability of a man to instruct himself comes from God and that everything is in everything. Jacotot had discovered the redundancy of a particular explicatory model of the teacher (Rancière, 1991). The master explicator involved the centrality of the teacher, explaining products and processes in a didactic fashion in order for the student to construct meaning. Jacotot came to the view that the teacher as explicator was not a necessary condition and more than this an educationally limiting position. Put simply, the student could, with the right will, figure things out for themselves. Jacotot then took this premise a step further, arguing that any adult could teach a child subjects of which they had no knowledge, if applying his principles. What would Jactotot (and Rancière), think of a future in which digital devices provided instant knowledge? CKU characterised the act of learning—a characterisation which largely removes the teacher from the picture. With CKU, there is indeed nothing that a student cannot learn. Students might in some sense be regarded as

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intellectual equals; however, there is no intellectual equality because the student is still dependent upon the master explication of the information download. Students do not teach themselves in the way envisaged by Jacotot. This problem is presented in The Matrix when Neo and Morpheus are discussing Neo’s ability to learn Kung Fu. Neo still has to learn how to apply what has been downloaded. And for this Morpheus offers, “I can only open the door. You have to walk through it”. Technology such as the CKU challenges the very distinction between the AI teacher and the human learner. With a direct cortical link, where does the boundary appear between the teacher and learner, the machine and the human? In this sense then, the didactic download offers further provocation for a posthuman turn. The opening up of the mind to the downloading of coded information further hybridises “machine and organism” (Haraway, 1985, p. 149). However, that educational future does not need a technology like the CKU because machineries from which the child emerges are more than material machineries. Within this understanding, the child is already the cyborg learner in a learning society. The task for the study of childhood is then, arguably, to ask what kind of present childhood emerges out of this vision of the future? Many of these dystopian science fiction epics highlight both individual and social dissatisfaction and disaster when education becomes so mechanistically transactional. Those dissatisfactions reflect an ongoing dissatisfaction with various educational presents and realities in which the child emerges from the machine as an often failed attempt at the product of mind-filling downloads. One concern, key to the focus of this chapter, is the impact of instant knowledge for a child’s relationship to the world, and the world’s relationship to the child. This is where the concept of childhood ex machina appears to us as a significant provocation to consider how social and cultural narratives will play out in a world where all knowledge and/or information are just a click away. What happens to lived experience when the traditions of learning in a community are replaced with the practice of cortical implants? The questions and possibilities abound. We will attempt to limit these to ideas that have been gleaned from the scripts and pages of science fiction. However, we are also interested in how we think of childhood if, where, and when, the child’s learning is reduced to cortical implants and didactic downloads. In other words, what do these technologies (imagined or otherwise) say about childhood, and what will children do in (and to) an imagined future where their experiences of learning involve more or less instantaneous information transfer. Finally, in the spirit of science fiction that engages with the problem of the present through imagining their future, we explore how education, in the form of school, might in some contexts already be analogous with the didactic download. Science fiction novelists and movie makers are all too aware of not only the appeal of deus ex machina, but also the associated problems—typically the deus ex machina is their technology, their device. For science fiction this device, while arguably rightly challenged for its literary impoverishment, at the same time presents a freedom to explore concepts sometimes too far fetched or dangerous for those obsessed with the rational and predictable world. Many authors have conceptualised a future through the use of a technology ex machina.

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Examining this issue within an economic lens, if cortical implants become commonplace, what are the implications for the neoliberal drivers of the knowledge economy? In the New Zealand think tank Foresight project (see Fitzsimons, Peters, & Roberts, 1999), the economic benefits of technological breakthroughs and becoming a knowledge society were emphasised, stressing how important both technology and knowledge is to those with a neoliberal agenda. It is likely the use of cortical implants for knowledge uploads would be favourable to neoliberals. Neoliberals may see the didactic download as desirable first because it would be assumed to be more controllable and more measurable. In addition, it would be a desirable approach to reducing the significant cost of teacher salaries—no teachers equals less burden on the state for the education budget. There would additionally be much less need for schools as we currently know them, and the burden for education could be shifted towards the parents, something that Rancière (1991) offered in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. The government’s only obligation towards education might be providing the equivalent of Hamilton’s (2000a, b) “day clubs” for social acclimatisation. But these could easily be outsourced, a move that would be welcomed by neoliberals. Even the uploads themselves would be almost without cost, given that they would possibly disseminated by an AI. Within this context, but not limited to economic educational drivers, we are concerned with the childhoods made possible in this technological future. We briefly explore two ideas to conclude this chapter: the idea that information might be unforgettable, and hence a kind of eternally enframing knowledge relationship and the idea of information and/or knowledge wars. In Haldeman’s future, the main character Mandela reflects on one essential and damning outcome of his treatment in the can: “And I couldn’t forget any of it!” (Haldeman, 2010, p. 162). This is an important exclamation that highlights the immensity of the proposition that we might never forget something. In the rush to learn quickly, even instantly, it is worth pausing to consider Biesta’s challenge that this kind of transactional thinking might be an element of an educational relationship, but it also misses much of the deeper meanings and possibilities that are ascribed to the concept of education and being educated. Just because the child can learn something instantly does not mean that we should plug them into the machine. And we have absolutely no idea what kind of child will emerge from the instant didactic downloading and/or knowledge uploading machine—a child who has instantly learnt some information and can never choose to forget that information (is this not a scary thought?). An additional element to this thinking that has significant educational importance is not so much that we might not ever be able to forget an instantly learnt fact, an event or a relationship, but rather that we cannot forget a way of thinking. For instance, if the information that is coded into the mind of the child is written by a neoliberally minded code writer then it would be impossible, in this future, to think outside of a neoliberal way of thinking. Until the child downloaded “knowledge” coded by someone with a non-neoliberal bent—then what happens? If you cannot forget, then you cannot change, and you cannot learn. Ideas change, pedagogies change and old ones get discarded (or “forgotten”). What is the impact of this notion of change in this context? The definition of learning seems to require some level

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of forgetting, so is any of this actually learning anymore? [Ed.] The child is coded in such a way that, again for instance, neoliberal conceptualisations of knowledge are, in Haldeman’s future, unforgettable. Every child from this machine becomes the walking, talking, living, breathing, thinking manifestation of certain prescribed ways of thinking about the individual, the society and the market. Arguably, the way of thinking that is neoliberalism lends itself very well as an example of this concern because of the driving assumption that there is no alternative. Each child emerging from the machinic process of knowledge downloading is then the perfect manifestation of the idealised (in this case neoliberal) individual. Yet, of course, that future is a paradox for, and arguably a revealing of, the myth of autonomous individuals—the individual cannot be made to think in a particular way, they must choose to be; otherwise, the liberal elements of the organisation of individuals and communities get jettisoned unceremoniously. This issue of individual choice leads to the second idea, that of knowledge wars, that we wish to explore. Let us imagine for a minute that we are wrong about the problem of never forgetting and that more than this, individuals may reject the coding either through active choice not to be connected to the machine in order to learn, or because the process fails—no code could ever be an omnipotent code and no knowledge upload process would work perfectly. Will a system of educational successes and failures be required to compartmentalise those that reject the technology, and will means of discriminating and policing the children as technological failures and successes emerge? The CKU then creates new social and political hierarchies, new cultures and subcultures and new grounds for oppressing communities, as well as new flash points for unrest, upheaval and revolution. However, it is not just the product of the machine that might be a catalyst in the future knowledge wars. Consider the reaction that Louise, in Hamilton’s series, has to the realisation that she could have skipped years of school and simply hit download: She was silent for some time, considering the implications. The hours—years!—of my life I have sat in classrooms listening to teachers and reading books. And all the time, this way of learning, of discovery, existed. One of the demonic technologies that will ruin our way of life. Banned without question. That’s nothing to do with keeping Norfolk pastoral, that’s denying people opportunity, stunting their lives…She clenched her teeth together, suddenly very, very angry. (Hamilton 2000b, p. 316)

Imagine Louise’s realisation within the context of the start of a series of political movements. Louise represents a movement against political and civic leaders who deny access of these technologies to the population on moral grounds. Propaganda is used to restrict access. Whether Louise rebels or not, this is a kind of silent war on the people, purposively controlling each child’s educational pathways through the manipulation of the technologies with which they are to learn about the world. If Louise returns, does she incite a rebellion against Norfolk’s leaders in order to emancipate the children from this educational slavery? If she does, on what grounds does she believe that the educational solution is emancipatory and not the actual demonic technology that the propaganda has told her throughout her life? If she attempts, or even succeeds, to overthrow the Government in her educational revolution, who will fight against her in order to protect the people of Norfolk from the far more

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dangerous and insidious educational machineries? These imagined wars over access to education will involve not just who gets an education, but who gets what kind of education. And what kind of education involves not just the content, but also the delivery. In the midst of all of this are the instructional designers “so preoccupied with whether or not they could” create a CKU, forgetting the message of Jurassic Park and not stopping “to think if they should”. In what ways does an instructional designer recognise and engage with the far-reaching social, economic and cultural effects of the future discriminations and future ontologies made in some way possible by their labour? How does the designer of the instant educational download and upload understand the contextualisation of a child’s learning, and relate that context to concerns for the maximisation of efficiency in the transmission of information—a transmission that provides the child with little to no agency in their educational experiences? These are questions for the future of learning technologies that highlight the potential incoherence between discourses of digital advancement in education, and the discourses of personalised learning associated with educational futures and instructional design (see, for instance, Bolstad et al., 2012).

Conclusion In this chapter, we have explored the idea of a child whose learning takes the form of an instantaneous download and for whom life then becomes a series of events where, like Trinity in The Matrix, any problem will be approached with the question, “what can I download instantly in order to fix this problem?” This is not an imagined future reliant on cortical implants and so the debates here are not relevant only to the implanted future. The World Wide Web is frequently lauded as an instant source of knowledge. At pub quizzes around the world, smartphones are the equivalent of a performance enhancing drug because of the perceived instant and unfair access to knowledge. So there are themes here to explore of the implications of instantaneousness and fairness to our relationship to knowledge, and then to our shared relationships that are in some way mediated by this access. Technology at its most ambiguous is one predominant reason given for the lack of clarity around the future of education. It is assumed in much of the policy rhetoric that digital technologies will have a significant role to play in education (see Ministry of Education, 2017), and that this future of technological innovation in education, lacks clarity because technological innovations are assumed to be unpredictable. Hence, the rhetoric around technological developments in education warrant critique in terms of what kind of future of education is being imagined, and what kind of future of childhood is being imagined. For this critique, this chapter proposes the application of ideas from both the philosophy of education and science fiction to engage critical questions and concerns regarding the machinery of education and childhood ex machina.

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References Banks, I. M. (1996). Excession. London, UK: Orbit Books. Bergen, M. (2016, June 2). Here’s the cyborg tech that Elon Musk says he’ll do if no one else does. Recode. Retrieved from https://www.recode.net/2016/6/2/11837544/elon-musk-neural-lace. Biesta, G. (2014). Pragmatising the curriculum: Bringing knowledge back into the curriculum conversation, but via pragmatism. Curriculum Journal, 25(1), 29–49. Biesta, G. (2016). The beautiful risk of education. London, UK: Routledge. Bolstad, R., & Gilbert, J., with McDowall, S., Bull, A., Boyd, S., & Hipkins, R. (2012). Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching: A New Zealand perspective. Report prepared for the Ministry of Education. Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education. Choe, J., Coffman, B. A., Bergstedt, D. T., Ziegler, M. D., & Phillips, M. E. (2016). Transcranial direct current stimulation modulates neuronal activity and learning in pilot training. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Retrieved from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2016. 00034/full. de Hart, S., & Farrell, J. (2012). Transhumanism: A grimoire of alchemical agendas. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House. Dickson, B. (2017). How artificial intelligence is shaping the future of education. PC Magazine, pp. 105–115. Ellul, J. (1964). The technological society (J. Wilkinson, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books. Fitzsimons, P., Peters, M., & Roberts, P. (1999). Economics and the educational policy process in New Zealand. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 34(1), 35–44. Freire, P. (1970). The pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum. Gibson, W. (1986). Johnny Mnemonic. In Burning chrome. New York, NY: Arbour House. Gibson, W. (1987). Count zero. New York, NY: Ace. Gibson, W. (1988). Mona Lisa overdrive. New York, NY: Bantam. Gibson, W. (1995). Neuromancer. New York, NY: Ace. Grace, K., Salvatier, J., Dafoe, A., Zhang, B., & Evans, O. (2017). When will AI exceed human performance? Evidence from AI experts. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08807.pdf?_ sp=c803ec8d-9f8f-4843a81e3284733403a0.1500631875031. Haldeman, J. (2010). The forever war. London: Gollancz. Hamilton, P. (2000a). The confederation handbook. London, UK: Pan Books. Hamilton, P. (2000b). The naked god. London, UK: Pan Books. Haraway, D. J. (1985). A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s. In Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature (pp. 173–204). San Francisco, CA: Center for Social Research and Education. Longo, R. (Director). (1995). Johnny Mnemonic. Alliance Communications Corporation. Ministry of Education. (2017). Digital technologies and the national curriculum—What’s it all about. Retrieved from http://elearning.tki.org.nz/Teaching/Curriculum-areas/Digital-Technologies-inthe-curriculum. Morgan, R. K. (2002). Altered carbon. London, UK: Gollancz. Morgan, R. K. (2003). Broken angels. London, UK: Gollancz. Morgan, R. K. (2005). Woken furies. London, UK: Gollancz. Rancière, J. (1991). The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Spielberg, S. (Director). (1993). Jurassic Park [Motion picture]. USA: Universal Pictures/Amblin Entertainment. Tutton, R. (2017). Wicked futures: Meaning, matter and the sociology of the future. Sociological Review, 65(3), 478–492. Wachowski, A., & Wachowski, L. (Directors/Writers) (1999). The Matrix. DVD Video. Village Roadshow Pictures, Warner Bros. Zelazny, R. (1967). Lord of Light. London, UK: Gollancz.

Heretic Gnosis: Education, Children, and the Problem of Knowing Otherwise Adam Foster

Abstract This chapter explores the differences between the epistemologies of adults and those of children, as is evident through the tension between the institution of the school and the figure of the child. Epistemological practices are inherently political, that is, there are political conditions that determine the way persons think, including the very idea of something being rational, or, in accordance with supposedly objective, universal and scientific principles. The school, I argue, is a place where this rationalism is reproduced in subjects. While the school is a token of what Max Weber termed the disenchantment of modernity, this chapter rejects a fatalistic lamentation of a meaningless world, instead turning to psychoanalytic theory that suggests subjects must undergo a process of becoming disenchanted, forcing themselves to suppress their playful daydreaming, and do so as they move throughout the school, being transformed into adult citizens who think in accordance with what Brian Massumi terms State-philosophy in his reading of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as they become a part of the larger machinery of the capitalist nation-state. This chapter seeks to explore alternatives and envision scenarios where children’s epistemologies are not invalid, but in fact, their ability to think in ways adults cannot think (for they have been taught not to think in those specific ways) allows them to gain insight into the true nature of the horror their communities face in Stephen King’s novel It, and the Duffer Brothers Netflix series Stranger Things.

Introduction As a teenager, I learned about James I and IV in school. It was a standard lesson; one that I imagine many learned in other schools across Canada and the United States. I was taught about the unification of the English and Scottish crowns following the death of Elizabeth I, filtered through James’ relationship to William A. Foster (B) Department of Political Science, University of Hawai‘i at M¯anoa, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 D. W. Kupferman and A. Gibbons (eds.), Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_10

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Shakespeare—who allegedly wrote Macbeth specifically with the king in mind, and was a patron of his. What I didn’t learn was that James was himself a writer, albeit of an entirely different character. I didn’t learn that James was the author of a tract entitled Daemonologie, a work that focused just as much on classifying demons as it did on crafting a rationale for purging the British Kingdom from deviant subjects. Were someone to have brought this up, without a doubt it would have been brushed aside quickly out of fears of derailing the conversation or lesson plan. Quite simply, the fact that King James was part and parcel of an epoch focused on the eradication of demonic subjects was not part of the lesson plan. I don’t fault my teachers for this exclusion. Only so much can be covered in a high-school English class, and therefore it is the role of the teacher to ensure that students learn what they need in order to better themselves and become members of society upon graduation—presumably here learning Shakespeare’s play well enough to understand allusions to its plot when they are present in popular culture, honing one’s writing and critical thinking skills along the way. This, it could be said, is the rationale of the public school: to create useful citizens. Children and teenagers simply do not yet have the skills and maturity required to be anything but students, who are void of the knowledge that the school will provide. Yet coupled with this process of learning is a process of unlearning, forgetting, and purging the subject of things they need not know, and teaching them to think in a particular way. This chapter seeks to explore this notion, challenging its modus operandi and pointing to moments, wherein the child knows something the adult doesn’t know. It begins with Max Weber’s lamentation on the disenchantment of society under modernity that has accompanied its rationalization. Yet I argue that the issue is not that we have entered an epoch completely devoid of enchantment. Indeed, as psychoanalytic theory demonstrates, enchantment is a central aspect of the lives of children. The question that must be asked, then, is as follows: what happens when a person’s life is stripped of its magic and rendered void of meaning? I argue that this moment takes place in the school, and consider what Brian Massumi terms State-philosophy in his reading of Gilles Deleuze to conceptualize the school as an apparatus for rendering children machine-like, akin to interconnected cogs plugged into a larger network that constitutes late modern society. Yet perhaps our modern fate could be replaced. The chapter closes with a reading of Stephen King’s novel It and the Netflix series Stranger Things, examining the ways in which children’s enchanted knowledge can be fostered through different educational endeavors, in which the safety of these textual worlds depends on the knowledge the children protagonists learn through thinking in ways that adults cannot.

Enchanted Childhoods In 1918, Max Weber stood before an audience at Munich University, delivering a now-famous lecture titled “Science as a Vocation” concerning the role of inspiration

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in intellectual life.1 His address has a somber air to it, and at times his tone angry, or even resentful. Truly, all was not well in Weber’s eyes, for the university had become a site of mediocrity. In part, this mediocrity could be attributed to just how rare it is to come across a person who is skilled at both research and teaching, but to a larger degree, Weber attributes it to a change of “spirit” among members of the academy. According to Weber (2009), the scientific worker “will never have what one may call the ‘personal experience of science:’ “ideas occur to us when they please, not when it pleases us … [they] come when we do not expect them, and not when we are brooding and searching at our desks” (p. 136). The consequences of this are dire, for “without this strange intoxication … you have no calling for science and [in Weber’s eyes,] you should do something else” (p. 135). This passionate connection to one’s work seemingly did not exist in Weber’s time (and arguably not ours either), for he observed “in circles of youth … a widespread notion that science has become a problem in calculation, fabricated in laboratories or statistical filing systems just as ‘in a factory,’ a calculation involving only the cool intellect and not one’s ‘heart and soul’” (p. 135). Science and the pursuit of knowledge have become mechanical. One simply needs to assemble the epistemological machinery correctly for ideas to be produced; ingenuity isn’t needed. In Weber’s eyes, something has changed in the academy. But this shift is an extension of a larger “process of intellectualization which we have been undergoing for thousands of years” (p. 138). Paradoxically, this does not mean that there has been a general increase in a person’s understanding of the world, or the knowledge they possess; what it does mean is that if someone wanted to know something, they could learn it at any time. In this regard, intellectualization came with the rationalization of the world, and a sense that “there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation” (p. 139). In other words, the world has become disenchanted, for “one need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed” (p. 139). As Friedrich Nietzsche’s madman famously proclaimed in The Gay Science, “God is dead … and we have killed him” (Nietzsche, 2001, p. 120). Knowledge’s connection with the divine and the unknowable has been severed once and for all. Nietzsche’s madman doesn’t proclaim God’s death with joy, but rather out of great fear and panic that “the holiest and mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives,” asking how the human race could ever console itself (Nietzsche, 2001, p. 120). Similarly, Weber does not welcome this disenchantment, making it clear to his audience that he is speaking from “the standpoint that hates intellectualism as the worst devil” (p. 152). His use of a satanic metaphor is not accidental; as was the case with Nietzsche, what Weber sees as being lost in a disenchanted world is something religious, something “pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together” (p. 155). Disenchantment has not only 1 As

such, Weber is not concerned only with the so-called “hard sciences” that come to mind when one hears the term science; the so-called “social sciences” concern him as well.

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led to changes in the pursuit of knowledge, but changes in society at large as well. No longer are there meaningful bonds that hold members of a society together. For Weber, the disenchanted world might even run the risk of producing Nietzsche’s madmen, speaking of “the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man” for whom “the arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him” (p. 155). As Sigmund Freud (1989a) laments in Civilization and its Discontents, “life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks” (728). This is the state of affairs when the safety of religion vanished from our lives. Yet all is not lost. Perhaps society itself is not disenchanted, but rather society and its members are in a continuous process of disenchanting. Consider Karl Marx’s declaration that “every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks would perish” (p. 68) which Louis Althusser (1971) modifies to argue “every child knows that a social formation which did not reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as it produced would not last a year” (p. 127). If the notion of society requiring a constant reproduction of its conditions is extended to Weber’s account of a disenchanted world, the preservation of such a horror would depend on its continuous reproduction. If this is true, then relief can be found in disrupting these processes of disenchantment, or at the very least evading them. Admittedly, this is a daunting task. In many accounts, social ontology is thought to be so powerful that Althusser and Jacques Lacan both argue we can never escape it, as the human subject is “the slave of a discourse in the universal movement of which his place is already inscribed at birth” (Lacan, 2007, p. 414). But perhaps disenchantment is not part of this universal, organizing movement, but is separate and becomes engrained at some point after birth. Despite the pessimistic tone Lacanian analysis sets for concerns of societal change, psychoanalytic theory more broadly proves to be more optimistic, for it suggests that childhood is anything but disenchanted. As such, it suggests that children have to become disenchanted, and have to become rationalized, rather entering the world ready made as such. Consider Sigmund Freud’s (1989c) observation that the “germs of sexual impulses are already present in the new-born child and that these continue to develop for a time, but are then overtaken by a progressive process of suppression” (p. 261). No doubt, Freud sees this moment of suppression as tied to maturation—not in a biological sense, but rather moral and cultural maturation. Arguing that “it is during this period of total or … partial latency that are built up the mental forces which are later to impede the course of the sexual instinct and, like dams, restrict its flow—disgust, feelings of shame and the claims of aesthetic and moral ideals” (p. 261)—Freud concludes that “this development is organically determined and fixed by heredity” (p. 261).2 Such a conclusion is discouraging, it seemingly enforces the idea that the transformation of the child is inescapable, solidifying our destiny as one full of pain and misery. 2 In

Freud’s argument, the suppression of sexual instincts is hereditary rather than a byproduct of education. That Freud does not critique educational practices is important for later discussions of the school in this chapter.

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Yet Freud is not a biological determinist. His understanding of this process is nuanced, and offers the possibility of escape from Weberian disenchantment in his considerations of culture and civilization (territory that would be far more familiar to Max Weber). On this subject, his beliefs fall far away from the field of scientific fatalism, and instead come closer to those of Bruno Bettelheim (1976), a later psychoanalyst who lamented in his work on enchantment that “too many parents want their children’s minds to function as their own do—as if mature understanding of ourselves and the world, and our ideas about the meaning of life, did not develop as slowly as our minds and bodies” (p. 4). The organic and hereditary nature of maturation, then, is not just biological, but also contains the expectations imposed on the child by the adults in his life. Children don’t just mature, but are raised, with their parents and teachers playing an active role in their psychological development. I began my discussion of psychoanalysis by stating that all was not lost. It is true, all is not lost, it is just relocated. As Freud (1989c) notes, “historians of civilization appear to be at one in assuming that powerful components are acquired for every kind of cultural achievement by … [diverting] sexual instinctual forces from sexual aims and their direction to new ones—a process which deserves the name of ‘sublimation’” (pp. 261–262). While the connections between sexual instincts, and the cultural production and statecraft of civilization seems tenuous at first glance, this is because Freud does not understand these instincts to be sexual, in the sense that the term sexuality normally connotes. In this vein, it must be noted that when Freud writes that sexuality is present in children in their infancy, he does not mean to suggest that they have the sexual desires seen in adults (their libido is mapped on to the erogenous zones during puberty). Libido, then, has a broad definition in psychoanalytic theory that captures a variety of psychic processes and desires that can be understood through one of its two-component parts. The first of which is the object-libido, perceived in psychoanalysis as “concentrating upon object, becoming fixed upon them or abandoning them, moving from one object to another and, from these situations, directing the subject’s sexual activity, which leads to the satisfaction, that is, to the partial and temporary extinction, of the libido” (p. 286). The second of which is the ego-libido, defined as “the great reservoir from which the object-cathexes are sent out and into which they are withdrawn once more” (p. 286). Importantly, Freud argues that the “narcissistic libidinal cathexis of the ego is the original state of things, realized in earliest childhood, and is merely covered by the later extrusions of libido, but in essentials persists behind them” (p. 286). The clearest example of this is found in the child who, in his play, “creates a world of his own, or rather, re-arranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him” full of “emotion with which he cathects his world of play,” linking “his imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world” (Freud, 1989b, p. 437). It is not unlike Bettelheim’s (1976) account of the fairy tale, wherein enchantment is “experienced as wondrous because the child feels understood and appreciated deep down in his feelings, hopes, and anxieties, without these all having to be dragged up and investigated in the harsh light of a rationality that is still beyond him” (p. 19). Though Bettelheim sees adults as rational creatures to a large degree, Freud makes it clear that the adult, for his part, has not lost his inventive,

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whimsical nature he possessed in childhood. What changes is that the social norms of adulthood force the mature subject to sever “the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now phantasies” (Freud, 1989b, p. 438). Therefore, in essence, adults are no different than children in their possession of a psychic energy that can be mobilized into inventive worldmaking; though some may be embarrassed to admit it, that capacity to imagine and play is still deeply engrained in the adult psyche. What has changed is that adults are told not to rely on this mode of thinking. But this is not instantaneous, with the fantastic child and the rational adult as distinct entities in binary opposition. Rather, the subject undergoes processes of rationalization as they become an adult, nudged along by elders who (attempt to) direct them and ensure they grow up to be respectable members of society. But how does this take place? Or, where does it take place for that matter? There is perhaps no space where such processes of individuation take place to a greater degree than the institution of the school.

State-Philosophy and the Educational Apparatus In 1784, Immanuel Kant submitted a brief essay in response to the question: what is enlightenment? His response is remarkable when it comes to the relationship between maturation and epistemology, for Kant defines enlightenment as “mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity”, wherein immaturity refers to “the inability to make use of one’s understanding without the guidance of another” (1996, p. 58). Kant could just as easily have defined enlightenment as an escape from tutelage (as he is sometimes translated as saying) given how close his answer sounds to the model of the teacher and student. To simplify Kant’s rich and complex essay, enlightenment can be argued to entail both no longer being a child (maturity), nor a student (tutelage). While these categories should not be dismissed or discredited, in line with the findings of psychoanalytic theory, Kant’s philosophy proves useful in orienting one’s attention toward the institution of the school. Kant’s work (“What is Enlightenment” particularly), can be read as the foundation of the tradition of critical theory.3 In this vein, it is not surprising that some of the most powerful critiques of educational institutions have emerged out of the critical tradition of French post-structuralism, most notably those of Althusser and Michel Foucault, who each pointed to the ways in which the school becomes a site of individuation, molding subjects into citizens, or other bodies codified for the benefit of the State. Yet what is missing from those analyses is a direct engagement with the content of knowledge that fills these institutions, and are the fuel for the machinations of the educational apparatus, instead focusing on the function those knowledge serve, or the means by which they are operationalized. What concerns Althusser and Foucault 3 For

such a reading, see Michael Hardt (2011), who maps the development of critical theory as a tradition beginning with Kant’s essay and culminating in the contemporary era with the work of Michel Foucault.

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is what schools do to subjects, with concerns of what students are being taught either absent (in the case of Althusser) or secondary and marginal (in the case of Foucault). Though these critiques are of utmost importance and should not be dismissed, the content of this education is rife with social and political imports that is distinct from that of its utility for the State. For that, one must turn to the work of Gilles Deleuze. The concerns that underlie Deleuze’s project, and the beliefs that inspire his writings, make him a theorist whose work is immensely relevant to concerns of the school unit. As Brian Massumi (1992) argues, at the crux of Deleuze’s writing is a critique of “State-philosophy,” meaning “the representational thinking that has dominated Western metaphysics since Plato” (p. 4). As the term would suggest, Deleuze (2004b) sees this mode of thought is inseparable from politics: Imperial unity gave birth to philosophical discourse, through many an avatar, the same avatars which lead us from imperial formations to the Greek city-state. Even in the Greek city-state, philosophical discourse maintains an essential relation to the despot or the shadow of a despot, to imperialism, to the administration of things and persons … Philosophical discourse has always maintained an essential relation to the law, the institution, and the contract, all of which are the Sovereign’s problem, traversing the ages of sedentary history from despotic formations to democracies. (p. 259)

It is not surprising, then, that philosophy seeks to render “each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State” (Massumi, 1992, p. 4). To be a part of the State means to think like the State. The role of the institution in this rendering cannot be glossed over for it (along with the law and the contract) is a site of encoding, meaning a spot where Statephilosophy gives meaning to the space it occupies, giving meaning to its objects and dictating what role they will serve within society. The school is the place where these meanings are taught. It is worth pausing on and examining this notion, for it is here that the problem of content in the school becomes evident. The production of meaning is never simplistic for Deleuze and Félix Guattari (with whom he coauthored several books). Rather, meaning refers to a complex diagram of content and expression. Content refers to “formed matters … [that must] be considered from two points of view: substance, insofar as these matters are ‘chosen,’ and form, insofar that they are chosen in a certain order,” while expression refers to “functional structures … [which must] be considered from two points of view: the organization of their own specific form, and substances insofar as they form compounds” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 43). Content, then refers to the raw materiality of meaning, while expression refers to the way in which that materiality is conveyed to others. But in this annunciation, the expression also does something with content, and uses it in a specific way. The school’s expression, then, refers to Foucauldian and Althusserian concerns of education’s utility for the State. But such analyses—ones that focus solely on such expressions—run the risk of glossing over the power dynamics that permeate the school as an institution, for, not only does the school serve as a pipeline in which children are directed into certain positions and vocations as adults, but it is also where they learn how to think. My discussion of State-philosophy runs the risk of bandying the term philosophy around haphazardly, rendering its definition broad and unclear. Admittedly, not all

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thinking is philosophy—and Deleuze himself was certainly concerned with the standard, canonical history of philosophy in his critiques against the State. Yet I would argue that implicit in his critiques comes a critique of the educational apparatus itself. Deleuze is concerned with the institutionalization of State-philosophy perhaps just as much as he is concerned with its content and origins, denouncing the history of philosophy for creating “a formidable school of intimidation which manufactures specialists in thoughts—but which also makes those who stay outside conform all the more to this specialism which they despise” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1987, p. 13). Such specialists of thought are scholars, who often take up positions as professors in the university, meaning they are more often than not employed by the State. This characterization of the State-philosopher bears a striking resemblance to the publicschool teacher, whose curriculum is a matter of policy as much it is a question of pedagogy. As scholars of education who are concerned with a different form of public education, that of the State-sanctioned grade school, we still ought to heed Deleuze’s comments. Though Deleuze targets the academy and its intellectuals, the process of creating citizens no longer takes place in the university: it takes place in the public school. No doubt, for most people the importance and purpose of primary and secondary educations are tied to the development of the child. They might argue that school teaches children the necessary skills required to be functioning members of society. The assumption that follows is that, even if one chooses to not attend college after high school, the education they’ve had will allow them to enter the workforce in some form or another, and also enter the world of adults. They will have enough exposure to math to manage their finances. They will have read enough literary classics and know enough about world history that they will not be an uncultured cad. In short, the school presupposes epistemological criteria for adulthood that must then teach. Admittedly, this is more of an ideal than it is a reality; students may not retain as much of this information as we’d like. Nonetheless, the school attempts to embed a catalogue of skills and cultural knowledge into the student’s way of thinking that are requisite to entering the world of adults. Yet the true function of the school is not so much adding something to the student’s knowledge so much as it is changing their very way of thinking to conform with State-philosophy. This entails more of a new way of thinking than it does a new set of thoughts. After all, many countries succeed in creating a cohesive social body without a uniform, national curriculum in all schools (the United States being one of them). Furthermore, if one views the school as a site for vocational training, they will find, as Peter Kropotkin (1995) does, that “we prevent our children from obtaining this sort of knowledge—even those of our children who would prefer it to the heaps of useless stuff with which they are crammed at schools” (p. 100). Therefore, what goes on in the school is not so much the accumulation of new information, as it is the transformation of children into something else. Brian Massumi (1992) casts this process in the frame of Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, and the concepts of content and expression:

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Take a person in an institution, a high school for example. What is the content? It is not, as common sense might dictate, what is taught in the school. That, as any graduate knows, is largely irrelevant. The answer becomes obvious if the question is rephrased: What goes into a school? The content is the students. More precisely, it is human beings of a certain age and a certain ability. More precisely still, it is the human potential of those beings, for … content is ultimately a bundle of forces both actual and potential, and is not reducible to an object. (pp. 24–25)

Massumi is right. The standard against which an educational program is deemed successful is not so much what the child now knows so much as it is what the child can now do, and how easily they can be plugged into the machinery of the State: What a school does as its overall process is its “essence.” What might that be? Ask any politician what a school is for, and the answer will be: to build good citizens. The essence, therefore, is “to-make-young-bodies-docile.” (Massumi, 1992, p. 25)

But in what ways are bodies made docile by the school? What might immediately come to mind is the policing of the child’s movement, confining them to the chair of their desk and restricting their actions to those authorized by the teacher. While this is central to the production of workers and other citizen-subjects (as argued by Foucault), there is another dimension to this process that is often ignored. With the indoctrination of State-philosophy, the student is rendered docile in that their epistemology is worked upon until it is rendered consistent with the beliefs and sensemaking of the State. Certain vocations cease to make sense, as the subject’s vision of future work becomes narrowed to those that promise economic well-being, and this comes not from facing the harsh conditions of late capitalism, but rather is embedded into the child’s epistemology sometime before graduation so they are never forced to face material suffering. Increasingly, those vocations are ones deemed to have intrinsic value to society, falling in line with the values of the State: the accumulation of capital, scientific progress (but only insofar as it allows for future capital gain), and the care and maintenance of the social body (medically, legally, and architecturally). Never mind the student’s hopes and dreams, or the risk of future depression and burnout when bearing that sacrifice becomes too much. State-philosophy, therefore, entails a shift in the child’s agency away from the Freudian model of a self-determining child, who engages in practices of worldmaking in accordance with the hopes and dreams of her fantasies. In line with Deleuze and Guattari’s predecessor, Georges Canguilhem (2008), what is asked of the student is that they become machinic, insofar that “a machine is made by man and for man, with a view toward certain ends to be obtained in the form of effects to be produced” (p. 86). To think of the child as machinic, then, entails that the child be thought of as a social tool, not just in producing or doing something, but also in effecting change on the world. But for change to happen, there must be a disruption of the status quo. In doing so, individuality dissipates in Canguilhem’s account of the machine, for machines display “a clear functional rigidity … made increasingly pronounced by the practice of standardization,” wherein “standardization is the simplification of models and replacement parts, the rendering uniform of metric and qualitative characteristics, which allows for the interchangeability of parts” (p. 88). That students are a great

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deal different from one another is irrelevant, as they are reduced to their function within the larger social machinery (one that could easily be found in another body if needed). Though the notion of a cohesive social-machine that ensures all of the State and its citizens’ needs are met seems appealing, in practice it is far from utopian. What is at stake in a machinic-ontology overlaps a great deal with Max Weber’s critique of modernity. If disenchantment is equated with a lack of meaning, then certainly machines are indicative of such a world, for “machines don’t mean anything, they merely work, produce, break down” (Deleuze, 2004a, p. 221). Taking this argument further, Guattari (2015) argues that “every machine is the negation, the destroyer by incorporation (almost to the point of excretion) of the machine it replaces” (p. 319). While the machine is the technology of creation and production seen in the factory, it achieves this through destruction. The machine hammers and shapes the world into the parts needed to create new machinery, eradicating the object’s past ontologies and utilities. To this end, when the subject becomes machine-like, something is lost in the process. More specifically, the child loses their enchanted epistemology as the imaginative flows that constitute them are negated by the larger, social machinery. To this end, Guattari (2015) argues that “every change produced by the intrusion of a machine phenomenon will thus be accompanied in them with the establishment of what one may call a system of anti-production” which “will tend to effect a kind of re-tilting of the balance of phantasy” (p. 323). For he and Deleuze (who very much follow in Canguilhem’s footsteps), the machine therefore refers to “any system that interrupts flows, and [to this end] it goes beyond both the mechanism of technology and the organization of the living being, whether in nature, society, or human beings” (Deleuze, 2004a, p. 219). Through and through, this is a social process, for “a machine is inseparable from its structural articulations and, conversely, that each contingent structure is dominated … by a system of machines, or at the very least by one logic machine” (Guattari, 2015, p. 318). This is the unity brought by State-philosophy, and its indoctrination comes parallel with attempts to prevent any loose screws from falling out of the machine, and finding their own meaning and livelihood. But this machine is far from perfect: it’s always breaking down with “failures and backfires” (Deleuze, 2004a, p. 222). The school is no exception, often finding itself unable to capture students who it then deems to have “fallen through the cracks.” However, it is through these supposed failures and backfires that an escape from Weberian disenchantment is possible.

Heretical Gnosis in It and Stranger Things State-philosophy could easily be called a political theology, if one considers Jacob Taubes’ (2003) notion that “theology and revelation deal with man’s obedience; philosophy, by contrast, is the realm of knowledge” (p. 73). Yet the two are not separate from one another in Taubes’ (2009) eyes, seeking “a recognition of the inseparable unity of theology and political theory” (p. 232). Certainly, the rendering-machine

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of childhood undertaken by the school is such that children are rendered obedient through epistemology. But an appeal to the theological is not just a rhetorical flourish; the two truly are homologous. The repression and discrediting of knowledge are not unique to modern education. In fact, processes of authorizing knowledge can be seen as emerging out of the Middle Ages, and the attempt to form a unified Christian theology at the same time that theology entered into the educational apparatus, with many of “the then-emerging universities … were institutionally tied to the Church” (Thacker, 2011, p. 10). Indeed, discord between competing visions of a Christian faith dominates the history of the early Christian church. One simply needs to look within the Holy Bible itself, and consider the debate between Saints Peter and Paul over the rite of circumcision. Not only does Paul’s victory prove crucial in forging the Christian faith, but it also chills the potential for pluralism in the domain of faith. Though the contemporary era boasts a number of diverse faiths under the umbrella of Christianity that are able to coexist peacefully, for much of the religion’s history this was patently unacceptable. Rather, there was thought to be a single, true faith. God’s word was not ambiguous: there could be only one theology. The birth of Christian dogma came at the cost of the epistemologies from which it differed, for those epistemologies were soon deemed to be irrational. Historically speaking, Max Weber (2009) is right in saying that “theology represents an intellectual rationalization of the possession of sacred values” (p. 153). Take, for instance, the following quote by late ancient writer Pseudo-Galen (2017): “Anyone who wants to be a physician must act according to reason, making proud and confident use of what works because of active qualities, powers and operations, as power of hot and cool, dry and moist is understood by the method, along with the sour, bitter, acid, sweet, salt, sharp, acrid, clear, course and fine, as well as things that act to make the parts dilate, contract, cohere and so on” (p. 204). Though his conception of medicine is understandably dated, archaic, and subsequently obsolete, Pseudo-Galen is also forthcoming that understandings of the body during Late Antiquity were limited, and medicine still had to rely on the metaphysical inquiries of religion and magic to explain disease and healing. Declaring the tools of magicians to be “mainly without effect,” he argues that it instead “befits us as Christians to have recourse to our own mighty doctrines, the true mysteries” (Pseudo-Galen, 2017, p. 204). In short, for Pseudo-Galen there is a twinning of the discourse of reason and truth with that of Christianity. To think in Christian terms was to think rationally, something that is antithetical to a creative epistemology embodied by children. It is difficult to view an epistemology that operates exclusively according to rationality as valid when “in spite of our daily concerns, wants, and desires, it is increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are a part of” (Thacker, 2011, p. 1). Though we may try and think rationally, the world and its actors often do not act rationally. But more often than not, the world is actually acting outside of the parameters of what can be seen through the rationalist epistemology of adulthood. For Eugene Thacker (2011), this fact directs him to considerations of horror, wherein horror “does not exclusively mean cultural productions of horror,” nor “the human emotion of fear” (p. 8). Rather, true horror is what these representations and feelings reveal: that is, “the enigmatic thought of the unknown” (Thacker,

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2011, pp. 8–9) and “the paradoxical thought of the unthinkable” (Thacker, 2011, p. 9). In this regard, I turn to two works of horror fiction in which attempts to think the unthinkable can be found in childhood when an enchanted epistemology prevails: Stephen King’s novel It, and the Duffer Brothers Netflix series Stranger Things. In many ways, these two works are strikingly similar. Both begin with attacks on children. In Stranger Things, it is the disappearance of Will Byers, a young boy in the small town of Hawkins, Indiana. Though Hawkins seems like an average town, on its outskirts lies a large government-run laboratory, wherein scientists attempt to exploit the psychokinetic powers of a young girl named Eleven, using her ability to engage in astral projection as a means of espionage against the USSR. In this process, a gate to an alternate dimension dubbed the “upside-down” is created; it is in this other world that Will is held captive. From the outset, the knowledge Will’s friends possess, and indeed their very ways of thinking about the disappearance, are discredited by the adults in the community. This is evident from the first episode, when the three remaining friends (Mike, Lucas, and Dustin) are interviewed by the town’s chief of police, Hopper, who quickly becomes irritated and loses his patience when the kids refer to the street Will takes going home as Mirkwood (a reference to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit) rather than its actual name. When Mike offers to show Hopper the area, and help look for their missing friend, he and his friends are rebuked by their elder who gives them the following instructions: “After school, you are all to go home. Immediately. That means no biking around looking for your friend, no investigating, no-nonsense. This isn’t some Lord of the Rings book.” However, the three boys disobey him, and sneak out of their homes after dark to try and find their friend. To be clear, though they are headstrong, their decision to ignore Hopper’s orders (affirmed by their parents shortly thereafter) is not made hastily and without reason. Rather, it is made following a Weberian moment, wherein Mike has an idea—or rather, an idea comes to him. He remembers their pen and paper role-playing game the previous night, and a moment that would have been thought of as inconsequential by anyone but a child. When he and his friends were faced with a powerful monster named the Demogorgon, Will was presented with two options: his character could cast the spell “fireball,” potentially killing the Demogorgon and saving his party; or, he could cast a protection spell to save his character, but not the others. He chose the former. As Mike tells Lucas, “He could have played it safe, but he didn’t. He put himself in danger to help the party.” Though neither of them vocalizes this thought, they are seemingly in agreement: reality may have mimicked fiction. The two sneak out of their homes, alongside Dustin, to go to Will’s last known whereabouts to investigate for themselves. As the series progresses, it turns out their inclinations are right. Will does end up in a world occupied by the Demogorgon known as “the upside-down,” and attempts to retrieve him through the conventional means of a police force coordinated search and rescue prove fruitless—largely because the adults are ignorant to the world wherein they would find Will. It is only when adults like Hopper and Will’s mother, Joyce, cease to think rationally that any progress is made in rescuing her son—alongside the endeavors of the children. Even those adults who are privy to the “upside-down” from the outset, scientists attempting to exploit it as parts of the Cold War State

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machinery of America and its anti-Soviet pursuits, cannot access it themselves and must do so using children as proxies; the ability to know and master the world eludes their scientific rationality. King’s novel begins on a similar note, albeit a more gruesome one; it opens with the death of Georgie Denborough, whose older brother Bill serves as one of the novel’s chief protagonists. While playing in the flooded streets of Derry, Maine after a rainstorm, Georgie’s newspaper sailboat floats into a storm drain. When he goes to retrieve it, he finds a clown standing in the sewers described as follows: “The face of the clown in the stormdrain was white, there were funny tufts of red hair on either side of his bald head, and there was a big clown-smile painted over his mouth” (King, 2017, p. 13). The next time Georgie is seen by an adult, he is dead; his arm is ripped off by the clown, who goes undetected by the adults in the community. Their failure to detect the monster is not simply due to the lack of any witnesses. Early in King’s novel, the reader sees that adults are not able to understand the true nature of the creature, simply because they are not willing to think in a way that would allow them to do so. The reason behind this fact is simple: the facts of the monster lack reason. For there to be a monstrous clown responsible for a murder is just as preposterous for them as it would be if someone were to utter that thought in the so-called real world. This is established with the death of a young gay man, Adrian Mellon, and the reaction of Tom Boutillier, Derry’s Assistant District Attorney, when he hears suspected killer Chris Unwin’s account of seeing the creature: Adrian was dripping wet, choking, moaning. The clown twisted its head and grinned up at Chris. Chris said he saw its shining silver eyes and its bared teeth—great big teeth, he said. “Like the lion in the circus, man,” he said. “I mean, they were that big.” Then, he said, he saw the clown shove one of Adrian Mellon’s arms back so it lay over his head. “Then what, Chris?” Boutillier said. He was bored with this part. Fairytales had bored him since the age of eight on. (King, 2017, p. 35)

Boutillier’s characterization of the story as a fairy tale is revealing. In saying that such stories had bored Boutillier from a young age, King is equating the fairy tale with infancy in his characterization of the lawyer; moving beyond a juvenile interest in fairytales can, therefore, be thought of as a sign of maturity. With this in mind, by characterizing Chris’s account as a fairytale is an act of slander; it was a means of discrediting the content of his account, much like Hopper initially ignores the children’s Tolkien references in Stranger Things. Boutillier, for his part, does what all adults do in the novel: he tries to rationalize the crime. He tries to understand testimonies of several witnesses (credible and non-credible) that they saw such a monstrous clown, telling police officer Harold Gardner that …there was probably a man under the bridge that night. Maybe he was even wearing a clown suit, although I’ve dealt with enough witnesses to guess maybe it was just a stewbum or a transient wearing a bunch of cast-off clothes. I think he was probably down there scrounging for dropped change or roadmeat—half a burger someone chucked over the side, or maybe the crumbs from the bottom of a Frito bag. Their eyes did the rest, Harold. Now is that possible? (King, 2017, pp. 37–38)

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But his rational account is factually inaccurate, and cannot account for the bite marks and pieces of skin missing from Mellon’s body. Furthermore, much like how rescuing Will Byers was dependent on the other children in Stranger Things, it is the children of It who finally kill the monster who haunts Derry for nearly the entirety of the town’s history. The demise of the monster only begins when Mike Hanlon encounters the remaining members of what becomes the “Loser’s Gang,” a group of friends who each encountered the unnamable monster independently, and band together to kill the thing that they can only call “It.” They told him, one by one: the clown on the ice, the leper under the porch, the blood and voices from the drain, the dead boys in the Standpipe. Richie told about what had happened when he and bill went back to Neibolt Street, and Bill spoke last, telling about the school photo that had moved, and the picture he had stuck his hand into. He finished by explaining that it had killed his brother Georgie, and that the Loser’s Club was dedicated to killing the monster … whatever the monster really was. (King, 2017, p. 720)

Mike reflects shortly thereafter: that he should have listened with disbelief mounting into horror and finally run away as fast as he could, not looking back, convinced either that he was being put on by a bunch of white kids who didn’t like black folks or that he was in the presence of six authentic lunatics who had in some way caught their lunacy from each other, the way everyone in the same class could catch a particularly virulent cold. (King, 2017, p. 720)

The notion that Mike should have viewed the other children’s stories with disbelief means he should have discredited them for their apparent irrationality. In other words, Mike realizes that he should be thinking rationally. The alternative interpretations he procures as he ruminates on this encounter certainly seem more plausible. Yet Mike does not run away from them, for he too has encountered It. What he experiences in these ruminations, then, is a moment of self-awareness that he is departing from the epistemology of the status quo. He, like the other children, had not yet been overcome by State-philosophy and political theology. Though Stranger Things does not present the viewer with his thoughts, the same can be said for Lucas when he hears Mike’s theory regarding their friend’s disappearance, which is copied verbatim from the imaginative world of their role-playing game. They are able to preserve the enchanted epistemology. What the children are capable of is taking part in a counter-theology that stands outside the processes of rationalization, and pushes back when State-sanctioned rationality encroaches. Such a counter-theology would take the form of what Eugene Thacker terms demontology. On a surface level, such a theology is of great utility insofar that it allows the children to understand the physically and materially “real” demons and monsters that haunt and threaten their towns. But as Thacker (2011) notes, restricting demonological inquiry to the so-called “real” demons is a shallow interpretation for a “kind of philosoheme that brings together a cluster of ideas that have, for some time, served as problematic areas for philosophy itself: negation, nothingness, and the non-human” (p. 45), with the demon itself serving as “an example of the limits of the human to comprehend the non-human” (p. 28). While a true demontology for Thacker (2011) “comes up against one of the greatest challenges

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for thought today … how does one rethink the world as unthinkable” (p. 48), the enchanted (or horrified) epistemologies the children engender does not go so far as challenge thought tout court. Rather, it rethinks the world that is unthinkable if one thinks like an adult. To a large degree, “the fate of the world” depends on these enchanted epistemologies and demontologies seen in the two works I’ve discussed. But the question that needs to be asked is not how we as adults can return to an enchanted epistemology, as the characters of King’s novel do when they regress into childhood when returning to Derry as adults to kill “It” once and for all. Instead, what is important is that a reading of these two works challenges processes of rationalization and the modus operandi for a public education, asking if the desired goal is truly to create well-developed citizens, and if that entails turning children into tools. In this regard, a crucial way in which Stranger Things differs from It is that the former contains a character who serves as a stern reproach to projects that turn children into machines, and that is the character Eleven. Abducted shortly after her birth, and experimented on to maximize her inherent telekinetic powers, her life and subjectivity are reduced to solely their use-value for the government in their anti-Soviet efforts. Though Eleven does not attend a school, the laboratory on the outskirts of Hawkins serves the same function: it works to plug Eleven into the machinery of the State, turning her into one of its weapons. By way of her containment in the lab, Eleven’s relationship to the State differs from that of the public-school student. While her childhood remains the object of government control and regulation, it has immediate utility to the State that must be harnessed (rather than reorganized into a desired social role). To this end, the State fails. Dr. Brenner, the scientist responsible for the experiments on Eleven, is never able to fully control her. She rebels, escaping and later encountering Mike, Dustin, and Lucas. Certainly, questions concerning how to better preserve an enchanted epistemology and allow it to flourish cannot be answered here, for they are answers that children must provide themselves. But to be certain, the conversation is not one that is anti-school or anti-adult. Both texts contain a great deal of education, learning, and knowing. At times adults and schools are involved, as is the case with the figure of Mr. Clarke in Stranger Things, who runs the school’s AV club and helps the boys (unknowingly) in their quest to find Will by teaching them science when they approach him with questions. At other times, education does not take place in the school under the guidance of adults, as is the case with Stephen King’s It wherein research is conducted independently by the children in Derry’s library and their family photos. All that can be said is that it is inherently problematic to impose a single, unified model upon the figure of the child under the auspices of moral, civic, and intellectual development. What a Deleuzian critique of State-philosophy and its machinery achieves, then, is a politicization of what seemed obvious and unproblematic. Most parents likely do not bat an eye when their child goes to school every day, learning what they are told to learn and not what they want to learn, and that this comes by means of psychological repression on a deeply personal level. It’s a given that this would be the case, for it’s always been the case as the State’s machinery remains in operation. In such processes,

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a repression of knowledge that is glossed over, having been rendered mundane and banal. But this not need to be the case, and a Deleuzian critique elucidates the inherent contingency, allowing us to question how things might be different. Creative works of fiction like It and Stranger Things offer a terrain in which societies can be imagined wherein children’s knowledge-practices are not repressed but allowed to flourish. What will happen if such a society emerges is unclear—and that’s a good thing. To have a clear sense of what a world would look like where children are granted more autonomy in their education and intellectual maturity would be to continue to deny the voices of children to be heard. Children are not mute, and creative works such as those of Stephen King and the Duffer brothers may offer insight into how the machinery can be dismantled—at least enough that their voices can be heard over the grinding of the State’s machinery perpetually working, producing at the cost of utter destruction.

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Lacan, J. (2007). The instance of the letter in the unconscious, or reason since Freud. In Ecrits: The first complete edition in English (B. Fink, Trans.) (1st ed.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. Marx, K. (2010). Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, in Hanover: London, 11 July 1868. In Marx & Engels: Collected works (Vol. 43: Letters 1868–1870). Digital Production: Electric Book: Lawrence & Wishart. Massumi, B. (1992). A user’s guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Nietzsche, F. (2001). The gay science: With a prelude in German rhymes and an appendix of songs (B. Williams & J. Nauckhoff, Eds.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pseudo-Galen. (2017). 5.14 Undesirable properties: Pseudo-Galen, on kidney diseases, 5.676–9. In B. Copenhaver (Ed.), The Book of magic: From antiquity to the enlightenment. London, UK: Penguin Classics. Taubes, J. (2003). The political theology of Paul (D. Hollander, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Taubes, J. (2009). Theology and political theory. In C. E. Fonrobert & A. Engel (Eds.), From cult to culture: Fragments toward a critique of historical reason (1st ed.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Thacker, E. (2011). In the dust of this planet: Horror of philosophy (Vol. 1). Winchester, UK: Zero Books. Weber, M. (2009). Science as a vocation. In H. H. Gerth (Ed.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology. New York, NY: Routledge.

“Life is a Game, So Fight for Survival”: The Neoliberal Logics of Educational Colonialism within the Battle Royale Franchise Travis L. Wagner and S. Gavin Weiser

Abstract This chapter explores the deployment of educational ideologies within the Japanese horror/science fiction franchise Battle Royale as related to histories of colonization by Western countries. The chapter specifically interrogates the influence of American educational practices upon Japanese schooling to explore how both expectations of individualized success and the influences of capitalist-oriented economic advancement led to Japan’s failure to achieve economic global equity with the globalized West, while becoming a model of how not to engage in postcolonial logics of capitalism. Through analysis of the various literary and filmic products within the Battle Royale franchise, the chapter argues that the children, made to fight each other as a punishment for their bringing about Japan’s economic turmoil, become a figure of queer and subaltern status that can serve as a point of blame to Japan’s own failed assimilation into the auspices of the Western imperialist project. Using queer theory and postcolonial theory to argue this, the chapter asserts that the children of the Battle Royale Experiment are themselves unable to achieve the political status of The Child in need of saving, while simultaneously being an object for which national failure is thrust. The chapter concludes with a suggestion that the Battle Royale franchise provides a heavy-handed, yet necessary exploration of the limitations of postcolonial assimilation, while placing the potential for true revolution within the queer, subaltern children of Battle Royale’s many iterations.

T. L. Wagner (B) University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29209, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Gavin Weiser (B) Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61704, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 D. W. Kupferman and A. Gibbons (eds.), Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_11

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“At the Dawn of the Millennium, A Nation Collapsed”: Introduction A teenage girl whispers to her friends in a classroom. A teacher shouts reprimands at the girl and punishes her with detention. This description is not an uncommon one for classrooms either in the West, or those influenced by Western education. Shift the scenario ever so slightly and the response changes drastically. A Japanese teenage girl whispers to her friends in a room where the students are massed together crouching and covering their heads as their desks and chairs have been pushed to the corners of the classroom. A teacher shouts reprimands at the girl and then punishes her by throwing a knife into her forehead, killing her on impact. This violence is inexplicable. The killing of a teenager, especially inside of a school, is an act loaded with cultural traumas and such a jarring depiction only serves to disorient those who encounter it. Yet, this very moment occurs within multiple iterations of the Battle Royale franchise. To date, this series of narratives includes: the original novel (Takami, 1999/Translated to English in 2003); two films (Fukasaku, 2000, 2003); and more than a dozen manga adaptations (Takami, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004). However, the shock of Battle Royale is not only that violence is enacted upon students by their teachers, but that an alternative, dystopian Japanese society emerges, which creates and normalizes this violence through government mandate. The fictionalized mandate, known as Battle Royale Experiment No. 68 Program within the original novel, asserts that not only is such violence by school officials sanctioned, but that yearly a group of 50 randomly selected students from a thirdyear junior high class are to be drugged, captured, and placed on an island. The only way for a person to escape the island is to successfully survive a “battle royale” in which they are to kill their classmates. Equipped with randomly assigned weapons, the students cannot leave the island as they are given nonremovable neck collars that will explode if they try to escape. Nor can they merely choose not to participate as a timer is put in place that will detonate all collars if a person does not die within a given time frame. Finally, the game exists over a grid and as time extends, portions of the grid become Forbidden Zones, which if caught within result in collar detonation, forcing inevitable encounters by students who try hiding throughout the competition. Simply put, the Battle Royale Experiment is a kill-or-be-killed scenario for the junior high students. It is also a do-not-kill-and-be-killed scenario. The shock resides in a fictional version of Japan where such a reality might exist, one that not only normalizes such violence, but deploys it as a national spectacle where Japanese citizens look on with voyeuristic pleasure, while also realizing the power of the government to regulate Japanese citizenship. Battle Royale follows William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and trades in the same critiques of democracy’s illusory power in the face of social collapse. Battle Royale also precedes Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Game series, and shares the same poignant warning of creating spectacles out of displacing escape from suffering into a spectacle for mass consumption that only services hegemonic entities responsible for and benefiting from such suffering. While there are clear comparisons to plot and themes, Battle

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Royale stands as a stark contrast for the reason that it exudes cultural contexts specific to Japanese history. Moreover, these nuances speak within and against a history of Western imperialism that has irrevocably changed the way Japan approaches education. This is not to negate how Japan has produced its own nuanced and specific approach to pedagogy, but simply acknowledges that historical traumas have manifested directly within the Battle Royale franchise. As such, this chapter explores how Battle Royale operates as a text that echoes educational history within Japan. This echoing is one that holds accountable both the violence of neoliberalism’s insidious seepage into Japanese educational practices as well as the impact of accelerating global economies that leave the country inescapably under the gaze of Western eyes. In order to see how this operates, this chapter focuses briefly on a history of US–Japanese relations following World War II, wherein The United States used Japan (among other nations) as a means to “test” democracy through pedagogical restructuring. Furthermore, this discussion of education focuses specifically on these pedagogical shifts and their impact on Japan’s rise and fall as a global economic player, causing schools (and children more broadly) to be a space for experimentation and regulation. These regulations, as the chapter argues, worked to displace blame away from factors such as capitalist exploitation and increased militarization as causes of economic turmoil. Continuing the discussion of Japanese-specific education histories, the chapter notes the way Battle Royale both acknowledges and avoids very real moments of school violence in Japan, specifically an infamous moment referred to colloquially as the Kobe Child murders. Shifting away from historical contexts, the chapter then turns toward a theoretical lens to discuss how the teenagers depicted in the Battle Royale franchise simultaneously manifest figures within queer constructs of The Child (a figure created for political use without possessing an actual physical presence), as well as complicated version of Spivak’s (1988) construction of the subaltern. For the former, the chapter combines a reading of The Child through Lee Edelman’s (2004) discussion of reproductive futurism and Kathryn Bond Stockton’s deployment of children as bodies queered to grow sideways through, among other things, violence. More directly, The Child (vis-a-vis the teenagers) in Battle Royale are monsters as they are not the promise of a better future, but a thing to be destroyed to assure current sustainability, thus their existence is one that grows up under state-sanctioned violence and becomes inherently strange. The subaltern in this sense considers the teenagers of Battle Royale and their potential (or lack thereof) “permissions to narrate” against not only their school, but Japanese governmentality (Foucault, 2009) and on an even larger scope global disregard for past imperialist injustices (Spivak, 1988, p. 283). Fitting with this anthology’s larger theme of child ex machina, the teenagers of Battle Royale are the child at the limits of a systemic machina. Each student finds their role in a crumbling economy increasingly less valuable, yet the children exist to both solve the problem of economic collapse while simultaneously being the scapegoat for the collapse itself. Finally, while the chapter attends to the franchise at large, much of the discussion will focus on the original Battle Royale film and its sequel Battle Royale II: Requiem, as they were the first to receive an American translation and depict the most robust opportunities to analyze the aforementioned topics.

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“You are the Lucky Class”: A Brief History of American Intervention in Japanese Education and Its Impact Following an Allied victory in World War II, the United States sought to make “value” out of their defeated counterparts. Of particular interest were the war-torn countries of Germany and Japan. Masako Shibata (2005) notes that while both countries faced an attempt at redesigning schools to reflect American liberal ideals, the only success was in Japan. The initiative was led by the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), a term used to denote Douglas MacArthur, whose authority stood above the now disgraced Emperor Hirohito. This shift in perceived power afforded a moment in which US military forces could assure the “absorption of the Western patterns of political, economic, and social development” to bring forth “the modern Japan state” (Shibata, 2005, p. 31). This new American system of social structure offered Japanese citizens an alternative to rule through royalty, instead suggesting the potential of citizens earning social value through hard work and individual ability. Tellingly, to the truer intentions of American imperialism, the structuring of schools under this model of American liberalism built curriculum with the aid of Protestant-minded Army clergymen while also briefly outlawing the martial arts of judo and kendo from classrooms. These moves worked to decentralize Japanese religious and ethical values by outlawing texts and the practices linked to them. In doing so, US Occupation forces inserted an idea of the Protestant liberal state as a superior alternative (Shibata, 2005, pp. 82–83). Even with the reinstatement of the aforementioned Japanese martial arts and other Japanese values, the still untested promise of American liberalism seemed enticing enough to assimilate to its ideals. More contemporary studies note the ironic limitations of this evolution of education. Ironically, Willis, Yamamura, and Rappleye (2008) note that the collapse of such educational models, via the influences of America, within Japan become the very example of how not to do education within America and the West more broadly. If such maneuvers on the part of US Occupation forces read similar to other histories of colonialist intervention, it is because they are similar. In fact, when reflecting on the failures of American liberal education reform in Japan relative to post-war Germany, US intelligence suggested that it was partially the result of the “oriental” nature of Japanese citizenry that afforded such a passivity to change (Shibata, 2005, p. 126). As Said (1978) observes under Western colonialist constructs, “the Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike,” and “different” from their more (implicitly) advanced Western counterparts (p. 48). In becoming so, the post-war Japanese, and myriad other colonized nations, became coded as passive receptacles to what imperialist forces imagined to be a much needed (though rarely desired) cultural reform, from which guidance on how to be more advanced came from nations who imagined themselves as adults teaching children. The classroom, to no surprise, proved to be one of the best venues to deploy such guidance. The Child in the classroom served colonizers: the metaphor of colonized subjects “as men not fully grown” who could be trained, ordered, and punished within the eyes of the colonizing entity (Cohen, 1970, pp. 426–429). However, this particular imagining of The Child as one who can be built into a collective model of assimilated, colonized other contests the presump-

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tion of individuality latent in American liberalism. Attending to this assimilation process, American Occupation forces structured their training and modernization of the Japanese Other in a starkly different manner. America had to paint Japan as a child waiting to enter into modernity via technology. Adas (2006), in his text Dominance by Design, focuses on historical moves by Western countries to offer the entryway into modernity through technological power, which could in turn be exported for the consumption and use of Western countries, while allowing the colonized entities a seemingly real opportunity to produce as both individuals and as a global economic agent. In particular to US interventions in Japan, Adas notes that through American training and education “the Japanese conceded that science and technology were essential ‘tools’ for attaining what Americans and Europeans deemed modern civilization,” yet managed to retain “their vaunted sensibilities, time-tested patterns of social organization, and reverence for the natural world” (2005, pp. 123–124). Education, in the wake of US interventions, then became about making both school children (and the Japanese colonized Child) capable of being proficient citizens within the economic needs and desires of American consumers. Ostensibly, Japan thrived by facilitating the demands of America, which resulted in what is now retroactively known as Japan’s economic miracle. Japan grew from colonized American child, to a standalone adult outperforming their adoptive father. America found such success to be aggravating and jealousies emerged. This economic miracle fed the nation for decades, and the generation immediately after US occupation saw the benefits of sustaining growth in technology and exporting those wares to a Western consumer. However, the long-term viability of this model was ill-fated as, much like in the United States, whole-scale production was decentralized and items were now manufactured around the globe. Economic security faltered and Japan was awakened from its postcolonial lull by the late 1980s (Goto, 2003). Stocks plummeted and housing markets fell into downward spirals. A country believing itself to be working under the illusive auspices of triumph over Western reign, turned out to be completely beholden to America’s will. Japan immediately worked to overcorrect this collapse and looked not to its past for an explanation, but, alternatively, its future. Of this downfall Arai (2013) writes: Along with major reforms and restructurings of the economy that radically changed the structure of labor and education, the new recessionary context brought with it a profound anxiety about the naturalness of the imagined community of the Japanese nation and the ability of its youngest members to participate in the habits of forgetting and remembering that had naturalized national sacrifice and devotion…. (p. 175)

Clear in Arai’s explanation is the displacement of economic failures on youth. While much of the reform was culturally oriented, more intensified changes honed in on the school as a locus of inadequacy. The Japanese went so far as to coin the term gakky¯u h¯okai, which roughly translates to a cultural and civil collapse within the classroom. Moreover, gakky¯u h¯okai “served as a scapegoat for the displacement of anxieties concerning” a larger collapse both “culturally” and economically (Dumas, 2014, p. 55). The school was the thing to be regulated, reformed, and reprimanded. This shifting displacement of blame onto Japanese youth thus warranted government interventions which could mark youth as harbingers of economic collapse,

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while conveniently turning the nation’s gaze away from an actively occurring recession. Performatively, Japan restructured schools to focus on an egalitarian model of school. In the late 1990s and into the 2000s, particularly within primary school, administrators and teachers were encouraged to create raised floor classrooms that helped to make “those at the bottom” level to others (Tsuneyoshi, 2013, p. 54). This reform to a more equitable vision of schooling had its limits, however, as the farther up in one’s school career one got, the closer they came to being an adult and then needing to be a “productive” citizen within an abysmal economy. In turn, newly graduated students entering the job market found themselves at odds with the very adults who placed blame on their generation for ruining the economy. One response was to engage in hikikomori which was a social withdrawal full scale, one linked directly to dire economic times (Furlong, 2008). Thus, seeking out other means of self-sustenance became figuratively combative, whether it be for entry-level jobs or post-secondary educations. As a result, the implemented “egalitarian systems” fell apart and “schools bec[a]me more differentiated from each other” through ranking systems and implementation of exclusionary entrance exams (Tsuneyoshi, 2013, p. 54). This meant that students were being told to treat one another as equals, while simultaneously entering a schooling regimen that demanded they do everything within their power (or lack thereof) to get a slight edge over their “equals.” The Japanese model of education, in the wake of both American occupation and economic collapse, was one of deep neoliberal logics. The schooling practices of Japan in the mid to late 1990s mirrors Henry Giroux’s (2014) example of neoliberalism within the US, especially within the existence of a “political landscape devoid of accountability” that is combined with a “predatory competition for hoarding profit” (p. 16). More directly, Japanese youth could use every trick (legal or otherwise) to ensure their success in school so long as it did not quantifiably infringe upon the liberties of others. Doing harm, would, after all, be an offense to the promotion of a perceived egalitarianism. However, the drive to succeed without an assurance of meaningful regulations did result in antagonism as individuals failed and sought out retribution for their failures, seeing it as a numbers game in which they were destined to be at a disadvantage within. Tragically, the rhetorical limitations of such neoliberal logics were made clear on May 27, 1997, when a second in a series of child murders occurred at Tainohata Elementary School in Kobe, Japan. The infamous murder involved the disfigured heads of a special education student and their teacher being found outside the entrance gate of Tainohata. The thenunidentified killer left a note with a cryptic moniker that read: This is the beginning of the game…Try and stop me if you can you stupid police…I desperately want to see people die, it is a thrill for me to commit murder. A bloody judgment is needed for my years of great bitterness. (Daily Bushan, 1997)

Though debate remains over who actually committed the murders, a 14-year-old teenager (who remained anonymous) was eventually convicted of the crimes and sentenced to 7 years in prison (The Japan Times, 2004). The crimes led to a wash of juvenile justice reform “politically fuelled by anxieties about crime” (Fenwick, 2006, p. 152). Among the rule changes, which negated the assertions of child psychologists,

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academics, and legal counsel was the lowering of the age of adulthood for criminals. This change in juvenile law worked to assuage the fears of danger within schools by treating all students as subject to the same justice system as their adult counterparts. This change in law implicated Japanese youth as the reason for the economic and cultural downfall and provided the government with judiciary teeth to regulate their actions as a means of performative revitalization. The child was both a subject who could kill and therefore must be subject to punishments, and was a threat to the long-term sanctity of the Japanese national ideal that needed to be destroyed. Pairing these ideas together makes it possible to see how an alternative dystopian world like that displayed in Battle Royale could come to pass, and it is in that world where the Japanese anxieties of youth and their future become actualized. To hone in on the narrative of the Battle Royale franchise is, arguably, to look at a violently excessive actualization of the life of Japanese school children.

“Fight Correctly and with Energy!”: A Brief Primer on the World of Battle Royale Koushun Takami’s 1999 novel imagines a fictional Japan that exists under fascist rule wherein moral decay has resulted in heavy censorship and a direct regulation of cultural consumption. Part of the set of changes implemented by the Japanese government is Battle Experiment No. 68, which selects a random class of junior high school students and leaves them on an island to engage in a game to kill one another until a lone survivor stands. Offered in the text as a means to study military tactics and survival skills, the overarching implication is that such rules exist to assure complacency of not only Japanese youth, but the larger citizenship as well. The school chosen within the narrative is that of Shiroiwa Junior High, whose students are gassed while on their way to a field trip. Students awake to find themselves on an uninhabited island in a classroom (joined by two additional non-Shiroiwa students who have volunteered to be in the Experiment), where the begrudged teacher Sakamochi explains that they are part of the current group for Battle Experiment No. 68. The remainder of the book then centers on the battle that ensues, highlighting each of the students to some varying degree as they struggle to make sense of their identity as both students at Shiroiwa and as participants in Battle Experiment No. 68. Notable highlights include Mitsuko, a girl whose past with sexual assault comes to bear on how she viciously kills those she encounters, and the sadistic Kiriyama purposefully signing up as a participant out of an apparent desire to kill others. More centrally, the novel focuses on the relationship between Shuya, a popular boy at Shiroiwa, and Noriko. While Noriko is not intimate with Shuya, he has vowed to protect her as she was close with Shuya’s now dead friend Shinji. Shuya and Noriko eventually meet up with Shogo, a past participant in Battle Experiment No. 68 who has vowed to return to the game as a means to find a way to end its practice. As students continue to kill each other, commit suicide, or die at the hands of the vicious Kiriyama, the battle

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eventually leads to the trio of Shuya, Noriko, and Shogo confronting and killing Kiriyama. Shogo then feigns killing Shuya and Noriko using knowledge of how to deactivate their collars and taking advantage of the collar’s microphones to make it sound as though he has shot his competitors. Upon winning, Shogo returns to Sakamochi and prepares to leave the island. Sakamochi, however, asserts that he is aware of Shogo’s trick and attempts to kill him. Shogo bests Sakamochi and Shuya and Noriko reveal themselves as being hidden on the boat used to leave the island, hijacking it to leave on their own accord. In the process of escape, Shogo passes away from a previous gunshot wound, thanking his friends in the process. The novel closes with Noriko and Shuya returning to mainland Japan whereupon they propose an escape to America as a way to get out from the reign of their violent government. While the book lays out the plot for what is notable and notorious within the franchise, it is the film (and its subsequent sequel) which drive further the intensity of Battle Royale as a social commentary. The differences between Battle Royale the book and Battle Royale the film are few. However, those minor shifts carry exceptional weight. The film makes more distinct the economic downturn as an implicating factor in the introduction of Battle Experiment No. 68 (now simply known as the Battle Royale Act). Here schools are also depicted as sights of chaos, effectively and knowingly engaging in the concerns manifest within the gakky¯u h¯okai anxieties. Indeed, prior to the onset of the students being drugged on a field trip and placed into the game, teacher Kitano (Takeshi Kitano) is shown standing distraught in an empty classroom with a note on his board written by students claiming that they have canceled class because they wanted to. Noriko (Aki Maeda) arrives to class to see Kitano, also disappointed in her classmates. It is later revealed that Kitano and Noriko share a pseudo-father/daughter relationship outside the confines of the classroom. Kitano steps out into the hall and is stabbed by an unnamed student. Kitano and Noriko eyes meet as he looks for empathy. Moreover, the character of Shuya (Tatsuya Fujiwara) also receives a central plot point prior to the arrival at the abandoned island when he comes home to find his father has committed suicide due to his dire economic situation, a point revealed later within the film. The third-year class, much like the one in the novel, leaves on what they assume to be a field trip only to be drugged, finding themselves awake in a classroom. However, it is not an arbitrary deranged teacher this time, but the very Kitano whom they had all had as their instructor. The classroom also includes two transfer students, Shogo (Taro Yamamoto) and Kiriyama (Masanobu Ando), serving similar roles as that of their novelistic counterparts. Much like the novel, certain characters are given more extensive backstories than others, with considerable emphasis being placed on the sexual assault faced by Mitsuko (Ko Shibasaki). The fighting, over the two-plus days of the experiment, unfolds similarly to the novel, with an exception where Noriko runs into Kitano while engaging in the game, and he purports to be watching out for her. Eventually, it comes down to Shuya, Noriko, Shogo, and the silent Kiriyama, with Shogo killing him. Shogo then feigns killing Noriko and Shogo and returns to the school to claim victory. Kitano invites him inside and as they are drinking beer he reveals, much like in the novel, that he realizes Shogo’s attempts at deception.

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Noriko and Shuya arrive, at which point, Kitano expresses his obsession with Noriko, showing the group a painting he has made depicting all forty students on a green hillside maimed, beheaded, and bloodied, while Noriko stands in the center enveloped in a halo. Kitano, after noting that Noriko is an exceptional student, pulls a gun on the group. Shuya then shoots Kitano, who falls to his knees and pulls his trigger, revealing that he was only wielding a water gun. Kitano appears to be dead only to get up and talk to his actual daughter on the phone before actually dying. The trio of Shogo, Noriko, and Shuya then board a boat off the island where Shogo dies once again via a gunshot wound, leaving Noriko and Shuya to roam Japan as wanted fugitives (for the murder of Kitano). The freeze frame of the film is the couple running, presumably from the surveillance of the authoritarian Japanese government. There is no clear implication that they are headed to America, though the far more excessive and politically charged sequel Battle Royale II: Requiem offers an explanation as to why such an option is unavailable. The safety of America is directly negated in Battle Royale II; in fact, the plot operates by exploiting the still new trauma of the Twin Towers falling on 9/11. More specifically, a CGI shot of two towers exploding introduces an opening similar to that of Battle Royale with text suggesting that Japan has fallen into a “age of terrorism,” spurred by the Battle Royale survivor Shuya and his rebel allies known as The Wild Seven. This description is followed by Shuya with his group looking into the camera, implying a recorded message and undoubtedly trading in similar videos shot by AlQaeda during the era, as Shuya emphatically proclaims a “war on all adults.” The film shifts focus onto the new group of Battle Royale participants, who are picked from a self-proclaimed (by the students themselves) delinquency school. Much like in the original film, the students find themselves gassed while on a bus headed to their Christmas field trip only to awake later under the gaze of multiple news outlets announcing that they are under the watch of 10 million viewers. The students are then shuffled into a large caged area reminiscent of a transport station for refugees. With Kitano dead, the new teacher leading the Battle Royale Experiment is Takeuchi (Riki Takeuchi), who explains two notable distinctions of this year’s proceedings. First, unlike the past Battle Royale Experiments, individuals will be paired together, and should one of them die, their partner will follow suit, via the same tracking collars worn in the previous film. Second, instead of fighting each other, they are now tasked with working to take down Shuya and The Wild Seven who have taken residence on a deserted island. Much like past events, the students are expected to do so within 3 days. As the students break into Shuya’s base they confront The Wild Seven, and after a fierce shootout come to find allies with each other after Shuya disables their collar sensors. Realizing that their shared enemy is actually the Japanese Government, the group is then attacked by soldiers. During this attack, Shuya makes an announcement about the failures of parents, standing in as a metaphor for authoritarian governments. This leads to Takeuchi having a change of heart, albeit far too late. The Wild Seven/Battle Royale Experiment cohort then work to escape their island sanctuary against government attacks. The film’s false ending shows a handful of the group staring toward the camera into a freeze frame reminiscent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. After a fade to black, the surviving members

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are shown in a nondescript desert space (evocative of the Middle East) planning their next uprising. This locale evokes a sense of transnational scope, while also assigning a clear narrative of post-imperial spaces onto the world of Battle Royale, one whose educational space is deeply embedded within postcolonial complexities.

“If I Survive, Can I Go Home”? Neoliberalism, Education, and Postcolonial Anxieties in Battle Royale During the introduction of the rules of the Battle Royale Experiment within the film, the students, deeply distraught, find themselves ironically informed of the game’s rules by a cheery recording of a video girl (Yuko Miyamura). The video girl, reminiscent of a J-Pop star, evokes the concept of the idol republic brought forth by Kim (2011) which argues that the curated image of girls as pop idols simultaneously displays a concern for girl’s empowerment within national discourses, while reifying the female body as one to be consumed visually, and by extension, erotically. Though Kim is specifically analyzing Korean deployments of the idol republic, her analysis can extend to Japan as well, particularly within Battle Royale, as the video girl and other “girl bodies are defined as national property in celebratory tones for the conquering of the global market and exhibition of national power” (2011, p. 343). The irony of the particular video girl within Battle Royale is that she appears to be a teenager, meaning that she is a cheery, counterexample to the otherwise fatalistic rhetorics of children in the franchise. She is a nationalized ideal of not only a teenager but also a girl, both of which are denied agency in the world of hyper-masculine battling. In addition, while she is a commodified image, she is also the source of the rules for the Battle Royale Experiment, displaying expertise on the Experiment’s implementation. This knowledge matters as it is made clear that many of the students have no clue about the act prior to their arrival in the classroom. Such lack of awareness suggests many options. Perhaps the teenagers of this fictional Japan are truly desensitized to violence, even as it threatens to affect them. Alternatively, despite the Battle Royale Experiment being a huge media event, it is likely that information is kept from teenagers through purposeful regulatory mechanisms that treat them as unrelenting objects of potentialized threat. In turn, they become individuals who need to be watched. While the militaristic nature of the entire Battle Royale Experiment is one mired with metaphors of the military industrial complex, the commitment to surveillance technology within the execution of the game itself is impressively excessive. As noted, each student is harnessed with a collar. These collars also include GPS tracking and microphones in which Kitano and an entire military regiment can keep track not only of where the participants are, but when they die and, crucially, if they are conspiring against the game’s organizers. The collars then operate as a signifier of the panopticon, the model of prison surveillance introduced by philosopher Jeremy Bentham and then made popular as a metaphor for power via Michel Foucault (1975). The panopticon works because individuals believe they are being watched, even if

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they cannot physically see their surveillor, as the potential of being seen (caught) is enough to stop an individual from misbehaving. Wickedly redeployed within Battle Royale, the collars keep the students from doing anything “good” and, in fact, serve as a means to emphasize the need to expedite the killing of others. In the high-modern age, cultural messages about the body posit it as always visible (Azzarito, 2009). This visibility is a trap that forces those under surveillance to conform to the expectations, or face the consequences. Is it that far-fetched to take this panoptic schema to the next level, where being seen is constitutive of death? Bersani (1996) recognized that for queers, being visible was akin to death in the era of the AIDS crisis. For Bersani death was the outcome for queers. As will be explored, the children of the Battle Royale Experiment find themselves queered by similar circumstances. To be seen is to be found, and to be found is to be forced to fight for their lives. Beyond the fact that the students are under a constant state of surveillance is the latent inequity of the game, which distributes resources in an unfair (albeit arbitrary) manner. Resource inequality within schools is hardly an American phenomenon, but one with a transnational scope. The distribution of technology, instructors, and learning materials remains wildly disparate. In Japan, despite shifting to a more egalitarian model of schooling, the disparities are alarming and reiterate the actualities of the long-reaching effects of American liberalism post-World War II. Contemporary Japanese schools tend to provide higher quality resources to students who display merit or clear skill sets and leave remaining students to work with what is available. Moreover, the process of prioritizing resources becomes ascribed to a system that “is ‘fair’” as it presumes all schools are given equal opportunities and, further, that every student in a classroom has the ability to maintain access to schooling, which only serves to “legitimate existing inequalities in such a way that the powerful maintain, and even enhance, their resources and power” (Okano & Tsuchiya, 1999, p. 9). Much like in the schooling system of Japan, the Battle Royale game offers certain, unearned advantages to its participants. First, the game requires that the participants leave in an ascending order from their class numbers while alternating between boys and girls. This gives those leaving earlier the advantage of familiarizing themselves with the space and a chance to lurk near the entrance and kill students upon emergence from the school. Second, and more complex, are the assignments of disparate weaponry. Noted already were the pot lid and gun, but in the competition, students are given knives, nunchucks, grenades, tasers, pistols, and axes among other weapons. Those with firearms are able to best their classmates, even while lacking precision. The unfairness builds, however, as those with better weapons are able to kill students and then take their inferior, but useful, weapons and amass an arsenal. This is the case with Kirayama, who begins with a machine gun and is able to attain grenades, a katana, a handgun, and eventually a bulletproof vest, making him almost unstoppable were it not for him being blinded by a makeshift bomb other students build. Another notable “weapon” is the GPS device which Sugimura (Sousuke Takaoka) obtains that affords him the ability to see those around him and move as needed. To parallel it to a schooling experience, Sugimura essentially has the answers to an exam, alongside the ability to see the answers of his peers. This makes him not an immediate threat, but a long-term point of contention. Though it is certainly not a perfect parallel, the

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disparate distribution of resources whose use is somewhat context-based (such as the receiving of a poison capsule or a pot lid) echoes the way Western trade, following imperialism, extracted resources from colonized spaces while dumping excess and waste onto said space (Cubitt, 2017). The items given to the students are individually different and result in animosity for one player getting an unfair advantage and thus that person is targeted. No discussion is had about the rage against the provider of the weapons. In turn, the Battle Royale Experiment manages its players much like colonizers managed technology, making students possess slivers of a “complex system,” whose larger operations were still run by the officials, who retained their power to “defeat” their subjects (Headrick, 1988, p. 382). Operationally, the students of the Battle Royale Experiment are beholden to work with the tools and the logics of the game, much like the colonized were expected to produce with the tools and ethics of their colonizer, negatively affecting outcomes on their collective well-being. Battle Royale gained a considerable cult fandom after its release, but much like many fandoms, it was deployed through the space of young, male privilege. In accepting this, the aggressive heteronormativity of Battle Royale begins to make sense narratively. The forty Battle Royale Experiment participants (excluding the two volunteers Kirayama and Shogo) split their class between twenty boys and twenty girls, many of whom share their respective crushes for and relationships with one another. Indeed, Shuya only aims to befriend Noriko at the request of his late friend. Nothing in the world of either the film nor book suggests non-cisgender identities, nor does it offer moments to imagine same-sex relationships between the many students. If anything, Battle Royale plays into the tropes of many other high school movies and presumes the space of school to be an inherently heteronormative one. Battle Royale II takes this depiction even further by expressly coupling off players into male/female pairings, wherein if one dies the other dies as well. Seemingly arbitrary and, unfortunately, reflective of other cultural products during the time, the way that Battle Royale retreats into gendered essentialisms evokes other histories of educational colonialism (Dozono, 2017). In her germinal analysis of the role of colonization on the gender identities and sexualized practices of nations facing colonialism, Anne McClintock (1995) describes attempts to deploy “domestic education” as a means to code productivity onto bodies that engaged in procreative endeavors, thus casting out those persons who failed to produce either biologically or economically (p. 47). In doing so, things like samesex attraction became conflated with unemployment, and gender expression beyond a Western male/female binary became paraphilic. To be a productive colonized citizen within colonialist rhetorics meant to be heterosexual and to adhere to Western dictates of gendered labor and behavior. Moreover, by creating systems where gender and sexuality were regulated by such discourses, the strict adherence to heteronormativity became a symbol of success for colonizers writ large. In Japan, it became important that school children in US occupation schools learn such heteronormative ideals and, further, that they take such lessons and apply them to being procreative in their technological output for America. Incidentally, the idea of same-sex desire and sentiment was often allowed within Japanese schools prior to American occupation, with many girls engaging in d¯oseia relationships, which were seen as playful relationships that

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afforded them a “training ground for later heterosexual romance” (McLelland, 2012, p. 26). Upon occupation, such practices were more heavily regulated and the very idea of Japanese boys hanging out with boys and girls hanging out with girls together exclusively was seen as an indication of perversity. Through school lessons and their far-reaching effects, the heteronormative ideal became a long-term enactment of US occupation and a signifier of economic success, perhaps most evident in the pride in the housing market prior to collapse. Here the housing market reflects the reification of domestic, nuclear family logics, wherein heteronormativity equates to literal productivity with regard to the reproduction of children. Nonetheless, children were seen as sexual beings and their threat to social upheaval needed to be regulated toward a technology of procreation. Any act otherwise was destructive to such a fabrication, making the school child terroristic in their potential to upend said fabrication. Puar and Rai (2002) offer a useful analysis of post-9/11 rhetorics around nationalized heteronormativity as a means to create a monster out of terrorists through not only making them a racialized other, but a perverse monster who is bent on destroying the implied reproduction within such nationalist rhetoric, calling this construct the “terrorist-monster” (118). The terrorist-monster thus becomes a nonhuman entity that threatens the sanctity of family values within the given nation purporting the threat (i.e., the conflation of Muslim/Sheikh bodies in America’s War on Terror as those bodies which are nonproductive and thus nonhuman). No discussion is given to the sexuality of said terrorist-monsters aside from the implication that said sexualities is inherently nonreproductive and thus perverse. Battle Royale II takes this rhetorical maneuver and deploys it upon the survivors of the past Battle Royale Experiment winners and children as a whole, citing an “Age of Terrorism” resulting from a bombing with uncanny similarities to the Twin Towers falling on 9/11. Shuya and his Wild Seven are then shown expressing rage at “all parents” in Japan. Shuya and his cohort are labeled as terrorists, and throughout the film, their actions are criticized because of their direct effect on destroying nuclear family units. Curiously, the film turns toward America as an enactor of incredible violence, with teacher Takeuchi writing on a chalkboard every single country which the United States has bombed, accounting for some 60 total locations. It implicates, then, not the children of Japan, but American imperialism as a truly destructive force that prioritizes American nationalist production as a means to legitimize the destruction of countless other countries. In an odd, yet effective turn, the film also relocates The Wild Seven crew and the survivors of the Battle Royale Experiment to an undefined Middle Eastern state, wherein they are likened to other bodies under current American surveillance. In such a construction, Battle Royale II becomes not only a direct counter-narrative to the problem of creating a discourse of children as threat to success under colonialist rhetorics, but an outward expansion that observes how American ideologies enact a paternalistic force upon colonized bodies that makes them children who can be held accountable for global economic collapse. Simply, the narrative of Battle Royale II suggests that there is no difference between the “hopeless” children of Battle Royale Experiments and the populations of war-torn countries in the Middle East, in so much as America is to blame for such dire situations. Tellingly, Shuya delivers a monologue midway through Battle Royale II that is directed not only at the Japanese

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Government, but a transnational audience, as it is allegedly broadcast across many computers worldwide. Partially repeating the list given earlier by Takeuchi, Shuya states: How much blood has been shed? How many tears spilled? All of our friends who fought beside us are dead, killed in the last three years. But even as justice can never be vanquished, we terrorists will never vanish, however evil they deem us. Because we know, that a handful of adults, a handful of “nature” selfishly define the nature of peace as freedom in this world. But our world is more complex than that. This world has 63 billion people living their own lives, living 63 billion different ways, 63 billion kinds of peace, 63 billion kinds of concepts of what is “good,” 63 billion kinds of war and evil. No one has achieved peace without fighting for it.

Aside from the excessive imagining of what population growth might look like within the near future, Shuya’s monologue reprimands nationalist strategies to make the adults of the narrative (and more broadly America) good, and those who threaten such goodness bad. However, Shuya pushes back on this, suggesting agentic change can come from his contemporaries, rattling the very notion that past regulations worked. More telling still is that he asserts a willingness to “fight for” such change, shifting the passivity and purity of the social figure of The Child, making it both a figure stuck in the future and one complicated by its inability to be included in discussions about the future. Beyond this, Shuya and all the participants of the Battle Royale Experiment are subject to the oppression of the subaltern, making their speech and actions all the more intensified.

“Be Careful You Don’t Become an Adult Like Him”: The Child and the Subaltern Speak in Unison What continues to make Battle Royale an infamous work is the very simple fact that it shows children killing other children. This is because there exists around the construct of The Child a certain cultish status, one that Lee Edelman defines as “reproductive futurism.” To Edelman, social discourse deploys the infallible image of The Child as a body that needs to be protected and “whose innocence solicits our defense,” becoming the one topic that transcends political or economic divides and universalizes concern (p. 2). To Edelman, anything that is against kids is against goodness and cannot be discussed in any legitimate venue. Of course, Edelman offers up this analysis with no lack of ironic awareness noting throughout his text that such depictions ignore actualized violence against children, whether it be the covering up of child abuse within Catholic churches or failures to account for children born into poverty. He notes only that The Child gets deployed as a figure incapable of critique, because it always, and inescapably, signifies the future. Battle Royale, however, perverts the logics of reproductive futurism, for the children are not the future, but the very thing that prevents the promise of long-term productivity. The logical outcome of Battle Royale is not reproductive futurism, but anti-productive futurism, wherein procreation cannot happen, at least in an essentialist biological manner. Furthermore, because within the franchise’s initial narrative all children are

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suspect to threatening past economic successes, the figure of The Child is one that is deployed as a different kind of discursive roadblock. The junior high students are not a thing to be protected at all costs, but a thing to be destroyed without question. Battle Royale II makes this all the more complex as Shuya and his Wild Seven collective seemingly have created their own alternative future, to include children. The group literally has a baby within their legions. No mention is made of whether or not that child was created by members of the Wild Seven or kidnapped by the group, but the idea that The Child becomes deployed by children situates the power of the image in a way that Edelman did not anticipate. What happens when children deploy their own agentic means to center The Child (and subsequently the family)? If Battle Royale is our answer, global chaos happens. The very notion of futurity becomes one tangled in imperialist power and privilege, doing no good for any nation but America. Assimilated Japanese adults find their power rendered utterly illusory. Yet, children remain in the space of Battle Royale and, as such, they are children growing in a space of queerness. Children who, through the actions of adults, are subjugated to non-normative ways of growing up (e.g., a death island), find themselves incapable of growing up and instead grow sideways and against “cultural ideas” (Stockton, 2009, p. 13). Interested in the (non)existence of queer children in an inversion of Edelman’s (2004) thesis, Stockton argues that children exist as the subjects of adults. Without the ability for queer children, or children queered by the situation of growing up, they instead grow sideways (Stockton, 2009). This is made manifest through the strangeness of a child queered by circumstance. This strangeness is what makes a queer child so dangerous: it is an unusual manifestation of childhood, one that runs against common expectations (innocence), and is thus leveraged for horror in its strangeness. Adulthood, for children, “must be a wholly different state” (Stockton, 2004, p. 297) and thus be approached and taken on gradually and by degrees. In Battle Royale, adulthood, in the guise of the loss of innocence, is thrust on these children. An unintended result of this process is the creation of queer children. Yet, because the children are inherently antagonistic of adulthood in the Japan imagined within the franchise, they have no innocence to lose except that which they make for themselves. Figures like Shuya and Mitsuko do offer the particular experiences of violence during youth (via witnessing a parent’s suicide and sexual assault, respectively); however, in both instantiations, the traumas are implied as part of their becoming an adult. Also, adult status in the franchise becomes synonymous with success in the Battle Royale Experiment, though the depictions of those adults are markedly distinct. On the one hand is the vengeance-fueled Shogo who helps those around him unlearn their innocence and accept the rules of the game-making. In learning to do so, the participants can then shift from a strange child to persons that threaten to undermine the system of power that is in place. On the other hand, there exists Kiriyama, a child whose sideways growth works to literally stifle the growth of others. He takes depraved pleasure in killing those around him, truly embodying the strangeness made apparent in Stockton’s imagining of the queered child. The other factor implicating the sideways-ness of the students in Battle Royale and their

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inability to signify Edelman’s Child status is their status as subaltern bodies, ones whose voices are doubly excluded within the gaze of colonialism. Spivak (1988) deploys the idea of the subaltern to ask who can produce narratives in colonized spaces, taking care to locate the multiplicity of oppressions faced by women in countries working under the tyranny of colonization. Particularly, Spivak notes how the investment of resources biases those whose engagements with economies are public and, thus, work within technologies of procreation. Those who can engage in the “interests of maintaining the circulation of and growth of industrial capital” are allowed to assimilate into the acceptable citizenship model (1988, p. 83). Historically, and contemporarily, this excluded women and made them unable to advocate for their needs, especially those experienced under the oppression of patriarchal power. Domestic labor is productive to a familial unit, but is not quantifiable to an externally public-facing entity and is outright ignored. Similarly, the work of children in classrooms is not productive to the national capital and becomes illegitimate in the eyes of colonizers. This means that, within the imagined world of Battle Royale, students make the ideal subjects for destruction, because their loss has no immediate bearing on economic advancement; and since they are not children worthy of the moniker of “The Child to be saved,” their agency is nonexistent. The only way that children in the franchise can leverage their narrative is to be deliberately destructive and, understandably, much of this happens in a misdirected manner, such that the students attempt to leverage agency over one another. In Battle Royale, Kyouichi, the proverbial nerd-type within the high school (Ryou Nitta), dictates a series of math equations to Shuya and Noriko while holding them hostage with a weapon. He explains that he is “taking the game very seriously” because he plans to still attend a “good school.” At this moment, Kyouichi clings to the delusion that his work as a “good student” equates to “good citizen” in the eyes of the Japanese government; however, he fails to produce anything of direct value except for a handful of math equations, and while his eventual death in the film may be tragic to his classmates, the nation and the imperial gaze fail to bat an eye. Similarly, suicide is treated with little value in the film (though the book embellishes it a bit). The couple of Sakura (Tomomi Shimaki) and Kazuhiko (Yasuomi Sano) prove the futility of suicide with their debate about value before choosing to “never play this game.” Falsely believing in some greater value in escaping from the game than succeeding in it, their deaths by jumping off a cliff into the rocky water below merely means a change in the number of participants. To truly possess a narrative in the space of the nation and globe within Battle Royale is to directly confront the system and dismantle its logics. This happens most tellingly as Shuya and Noriko find themselves on the run from the government. Every death prior to their escape (excluding Shogo who dies post-game) is marked by the class number of the student. However, the all reports bulletin for the escaped duo removes such numbering and places their names and acts first, giving them a meaning, albeit one that is linked to terrorism. Yet, given Shuya’s clear awareness of what it means to be a terrorist in a world fueled by American imperialism, such a label is empowering more than stigmatizing. Simply, Shuya sees generative potential in being a visible

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and audible enemy on the run from a nation, as opposed to attempting to appeal to the logics and embrace of a nation always inclined toward enacting violence upon him.

“In this Moment, What Should an Adult Say to a Kid?”: A Tenuous Conclusion The above quote is borrowed from the director’s cut of the home media release for Battle Royale. In it, Noriko and Kitano are walking along a riverbank after eating freeze pops. Discussing Noriko’s unique value as a genuinely good student in a world where children have boycotted schools, Noriko inquires as to her value long term. She clearly wants to hear from Kitano that she is more than the image the media provides of her. Defeated, Kitano only answers with the above question. He knows that she is stuck inside the absurdity of colonialist education logics that treat her as a resource that is expendable, one that can be destroyed to placate the social angst of a nation in collapse. Noriko can be exceptional, but she cannot be an exception. Battle Royale in all its iterations turns an insightful and condemning lens onto Japanese culture and its continued inability to completely cope with national identity post-occupation. A surge of school anxiety riddled Japanese cinema following the release of Koushun Takami’s novel. Emerging from this were equally controversial titles like Suicide Club (2002), with is narrative of inexplicable mass teenage suicides; and the enigmatic Uzumaki (2000), based on the incredibly graphic Junji Ito graphic novel about people becoming obsessed within turning into literal spirals. It is clear that the Battle Royale franchise hit a nerve with the Japanese public, inviting ire from adults and government officials and tapping into the heart of Japanese youth. Yet, Battle Royale in all its iterative forms stands in stark contrast to other shocking works because it is about kids killing kids because adults said so. Violence is normalized by figures in power, and the works within the franchise make clear that Japanese youth are victims of nationalized failure, in which they are made the unwitting patsy of economic collapse. The many versions of Battle Royale, despite their gimmicky bent and near camp excesses, speak with an affirmation about a much larger issue than the decline of Japanese school children. Battle Royale excises the demons of American occupation and plays out the most extreme effects of its still unfolding history. The franchise evokes the traumas of educational systems implemented in Japan via America, which asserted ideologies onto a nation, whose past approach to schooling and national sentiment was hardly individualistic. The school became a sight to train students to become machines of technological production, only worthwhile if they could excel above and beyond their classmates, even if it meant securing unfair advantages in the process. Yet, upon yielding positive economic results, the need to perform for the interests of a Western audience meant failing to assure a centralized system that was self-sustaining into futurity. Battle Royale takes misplaced frustrations and imagines them in an alternative Japanese history whose authoritarian rule

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has made The Child a commodity to be destroyed and demonized as a means to displace the ineptitude of adults. Furthermore, Battle Royale makes clear (especially by the second film) that Japan as a nation has been playing the part of unwilling Battle Royale Experiment participant well before being fictionalized, suggesting that Japan is a nation vying for impossible approval from the United States. Meanwhile, America shows no qualms about real-life bombings of Japan and many other nations (along with their children). The works that compile the Battle Royale canon then become ways to reconstitute both constructs of the subaltern and The Child, showing that in a society fueled by techno-procreation, both heteronormativity and quantifiable labor reign supreme, making a school-aged child both a queer threat that cannot produce labor, but also one that should not be given a chance to compete in such production. The children of Battle Royale cannot engage in reproductive futurism within dystopian Japan as imagined, for they are existing in a time longing for retro-productivity, a means for children to be both the productive possibility of future success as well as the thing made to prove success into futurity. The junior high students of Battle Royale cannot be children produced “out of the machine,” because the machine rejects their ability to be productive. The youth of the imagined Japan of despondent violence are like Shuya and Noriko at the end of the story, on the run away from a machine that is constantly surveilling them. Yet, what makes their story worth something is that they return to try and dismantle the techno-procreative machine through violence. The hope, as Shuya says in his impassioned diatribe at the climax of Battle Royale II, is to “throw away the old rules” and reclaim “stole[n] freedom” from authoritarian adults. In this way, perhaps Japan too can throw away its old reliances on post-war America and reclaim its national identity as one no longer under the purview of an American parent who could care less if they, or any other country, “kill each other off till there’s only one left.”

References Adas, M. (2006). Dominance by design: Technological imperatives and America’s civilizing mission. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Arai, A. (2013). Notes to the heart: New lessons in national sentiment and sacrifice from recessionary Japan. In A. Anagnost, A. Arai, & H. Ren (Eds.), Global futures in East Asia: Youth, nation, and the new economy in uncertain times (pp. 174–196). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Azzarito, L. (2009). The panopticon of physical education: Pretty, active and ideally white. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 14(1), 19–39. Battle Royale. (2001). Blu-ray. Anchor Bay. Battle Royale II: Requiem. (2003). Blu-ray. Anchor Bay. Bersani, L. (1996). Homos (Revised ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen, W. B. (1970). The colonized as child: British and French colonial rule. African Historical Studies, 3(2), 427–431. Cubitt, S. (2017). Finite media: Environmental implications of digital technologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Dozono, T. (2017). Teaching alternative and indigenous gender systems in world history: A queer approach. The History Teacher, 50(3), 425–447. Dumas, R. (2014). From dangerous to desirable: Battle Royale and the gendering of youth culture. In N. Mamatas & M. Washington (Eds.), The Battle Royale slam book: Essays on the cult classic by Koushun Takami (pp. 55–64). San Francisco, CA: VIZ. Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fenwick, M. (2006). Japan: From child protection to penal populism. In J. Muncie & B. Goldson (Eds.), Comparative youth justice: Critical issues (pp. 146–158). London, UK: SAGE Publications. Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Paris, France: Gallimard. Foucault, M. (2009). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978 (G. Burchell, Trans.). New York, NY: Picador. Furlong, A. (2008). The Japanese Hikikomori phenomenon: Acute social withdraw among young people. The Sociological Review, 56(2), 309–325. Giroux, H. (2014). The violence of organized forgetting: Thinking beyond America’s disimagination machine. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Goto, K. (2003). Tensions of empire: Japan and Southeast Asia in the colonial & postcolonial world. Athens: Ohio University Press. Headrick, D. R. (1988). The tentacles of progress: Technology transfer in the age of imperialism, 1850–1940. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Kim, Y. (2011). Idol republic: The global emergence of girl industries and the commercialization of girls bodies. Journal of Gender Studies, 20(4), 333–345. Newman, K. (2001). Reviews. Sight & Sound, 11(9), 37–38. McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial conquest. London, UK: Routledge. McLelland, M. (2012). Love, sex, and democracy in Japan during the American occupation. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan. Okano, K., & Tsuchiya, M. (1999). Education in contemporary Japan: Inequality and diversity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Puar, J. K., & Rai, A. (2002). Monster, terrorist, fag: The war on terrorism and the production of docile patriots. Social Text, 20(3), 117–148. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. London, UK: Routledge. Shibata, M. (2005). Japan and Germany under the US occupation: A comparative analysis of post-war education reform. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Stockton, K. B. (2004). Growing sideways, or versions of the queer child: The ghost, the homosexual, the Freudian, the innocent, and the interval of animal. In S. Bruhm & N. Hurley (Eds.), Curiouser: On The queerness of children (pp. 277–315). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Stockton, K. B. (2009). The queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Takami, K. (2003). Battle Royale (Y. Oniki, Trans.). San Francisco, CA: VIZ. Tsuneyoshi, R. (2013). Japanese model of schooling: Comparisons with the US. London, UK: Routledge. Willis, D. B., Yamamura, S., & Rappleye, J. (2008), Frontiers of education: Japan as “global model” or “nation at risk”? In Living together (pp. 207–229). Netherlands: Springer. Wire Report. (1997, June 24). Kobe murders. Daily Busan. Wire Report. (2004, March 11). Kobe killer set free. The Japan Times.

Part IV

Conclusion

Children and Pedagogy Between Science and Fiction Paul Levinson and Petar Jandri´c

Abstract In 2016, Paul Levinson and Petar Jandri´c co-authored a dialogue about the relationships between media theory, human learning and science fiction. Published as a small book, From Media Theory to Space Odyssey: Petar Jandri´c interviews Paul Levinson, and reprinted in Jandri´c’s book Learning in the Age of Digital Reason, the unique positioning of the dialogue between academic research and artist talk has provoked a lot of interest. In this chapter, Levinson and Jandri´c embark on a new dialogic inquiry about the relationships between children, pedagogy and science fiction. Levinson and Jandri´c seek knowledge and inspiration about the relationships between children, pedagogy and science fiction beyond borders of academic disciplines, and beyond the distinction between academic inquiry and the practice of writing fiction. At the expense of breaking several academic conventions, the dialogue between Levinson and Jandri´c creates a meta-theory which synthesises diverse approaches to reality and offers fresh insights into complex relationships between children, pedagogy and science fiction.

Introduction In 2016 Paul Levinson and Petar Jandri´c co-authored a dialogue about the relationships between media theory, human learning and science fiction. Published as a small book, From Media Theory to Space Odyssey: Petar Jandri´c interviews Paul Levinson (Levinson & Jandri´c, 2016), and reprinted in Jandri´c’s book Learning in the Age of Digital Reason (Jandri´c, 2017), the unique positioning of the dialogue between academic research and artist talk has provoked a lot of interest. In this chapter, Levinson and Jandri´c embark on a new dialogic inquiry about the relationships between children, pedagogy and science fiction. Levinson, who is (among other things) an P. Levinson Fordham University, New York, USA P. Jandri´c (B) Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 D. W. Kupferman and A. Gibbons (eds.), Childhood, Science Fiction, and Pedagogy, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6210-1_12

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award-winning writer of science fiction, a celebrity professor who studied under Neil Postman and wrote with Marshall McLuhan, a pioneer of online learning, and the former President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, seamlessly links his writing practice with academic insights in diverse areas from child development to media studies. Jandri´c, who is (among other things) an educator, an academic researcher in fields such as education studies and media studies, a prolific writer specialised in dialogue, a strong proponent of post-disciplinary approaches, and a fan of science fiction, leads the conversation through the maze of viewpoints and perspectives. In the resulting dialogue, Levinson and Jandri´c seek knowledge and inspiration about the relationships between children, pedagogy and science fiction beyond borders of academic disciplines, and beyond the distinction between academic inquiry and the practice of writing fiction. At the expense of breaking several academic conventions, the dialogue between Levinson and Jandri´c creates a meta-theory, which synthesises diverse approaches to reality and offers fresh insights into complex relationships between children, pedagogy and science fiction.

The Horizontal Myths of Science Fiction and Fantasy Petar Jandri´c (PJ): As far back as the advent of oral histories and storytelling, children’s literature consists of fairy tales, myth and mystery. What, if any, is the difference between these vernacular forms of storytelling, fantasy and science fiction? What is in a name, and what are we getting from these classifications? Paul Levinson (PL): Myths, legends and fairy tales are very diverse. In some cases, like the Grimm brothers, we have some idea who wrote them; in other cases, they go so far back into the ancient world that the author is lost. In one of my first books, The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution (1997), I talked about the difference between vertical myths and horizontal myths. A vertical myth is percolated down to us through the centuries, even through millennia. A horizontal myth happens pretty much all at once. For example, Star Trek (starting in 1966) is a horizontal myth—it might draw on earlier ideas and myths, but basically, it happens all at once, or in the relatively short period of time between then and now, in 2017 (at the time of this writing). That is a very significant difference between the fairy tales, myths and legends, and the literary genres of science fiction and fantasy. Another important difference comes from a distinction between science fiction and fantasy as deliberately created genres. Both genres are horizontal myths, but there are very strong differences between them. The eminent astrophysicist and science fiction writer Gregory Benford once said: “Fantasy is science fiction being played with the net down” (in Spinrad, 1990, p. 93). Imagine that you are playing a game of tennis, and there is no net—there is not much challenge. To some extent that is insulting to fantasy, but I think that Benford did emphasise something very important. In my opinion, what makes science fiction a fiction entailing science is some kind of plausible science within the fiction (see Levinson & Jandri´c, 2016; Jandri´c, 2017 for a detailed elaboration of differences between science fiction and fantasy).

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Adult fantasy such as Game of Thrones has more in common with vertical myths we tell our children than science fiction. Children by and large do not care about the scientific trappings, they are more than happy to talk about ghosts, Halloween, witches, fairies, angels and all kinds of things we find in fairy tales, which have no scientific plausibility. Dragons projecting fire that kills thousands of people would be an example in adult fantasy. PJ: What are some of your favourite science fiction and fantasy stories featuring child protagonists and, more generally, the constructions of childhood? Why are they important? PL: I think that the best treatment of a child in a science fiction story is in Isaac Asimov’s “The ugly little boy” (1959). It is a time travel story, in which they are able to bring back a Neanderthal boy from prehistoric times into the present. The scientist who takes care of the boy realises that he is just as intelligent as human children, and she almost becomes like a mother to him. The story is really a great treatment of what makes us human. In the last couple of months, I read a novel which has not yet been published, Three Laws Lethal by David Walton (n.d.). Let’s say that a mother and her child are driving in a self-driven car. Suddenly, a tree falls in front of them. The car’s artificial intelligence is programmed to swerve out of the way. It cannot swerve into the pavement because that would kill the mother and child, so it swerves into another lane and kills a guy riding a motorcycle. If it was just a woman in the car, then the decision becomes ethically really tough—whom does the artificial intelligence save, an adult man or an adult woman? When you add a child, sitting in the car next to the mother, the decision is still profoundly difficult, but I think that most people would feel that everything changes. We just cannot let anything happen to a child if it is within our power to prevent it, and I think we are biologically programmed to feel this way. PJ: How does science fiction allow us to engage with questions concerning childhood? What are the distinct advantages and disadvantages of the science fiction approach over more traditional approaches such as psychology and educational science? PL: Science fiction allows us to consider hypothetical situations, which do not exist (yet) in the real world. Also, the valuable thing with science fiction is that one science fiction scenario often gets you into another. Let’s say that driving next to the woman and her child is another car with another woman and another child. What is the artificial intelligence supposed to do now? It is almost an insurmountable problem, because you are pitting two expressions of an incredibly important ethical value—save the children—against each other. Science fiction is not about gadgets; it takes our problems regarding technology, which exist in our lives and realities, and puts them into fictional scenarios where we can get a somewhat better perspective. PJ: According to McKenzie Wark, It is commonplace that science fiction is not about the future, but about alternative possible presents. Science fiction is one of the things that enables you to think through relationships between different kinds of knowledge… Science fiction is not always about science, some works actually ignore the science, but it is usually about a geopolitical reality. (Jandri´c, 2017, p. 132; see also Wark & Jandri´c, 2016)

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How does science fiction contribute to our understanding of children and childhood? PL: I agree with Wark’s assessment, except for one point. I don’t think science fiction is always about a geopolitical reality—that’s just one possibility. Staying with our example, you do not need to know what the actual artificial intelligence program is. The essence of this story is: Whose life do you value more? What do you do in a situation when you need to choose between a child and an adult? You do not really need a driverless car to pose that situation, there are many other literary scenarios you can use. Science fiction is about human beings—even when the plot is about robots, or about aliens. Actually, every robot, and every android, is in a sense a child, because some adult human created that robot and android. PJ: Please assess the potentials of science fiction for social change. Closer to our theme today, would you say that science fiction has the potential to reconfigure relations of power between and among children and adults? If so, how might such a reconfiguration work? PL: I think that science fiction has already reconfigured power relationships between and among children and adults. For instance, the famous science fiction novel, The Lord of the Flies (Golding, 1954/2001), talks about children governing themselves. The relationship between adults and children has all kinds of fascinating controversial aspects, and I think it is an area that could be much further explored in science fiction. I am on record as saying, and that is a science fiction theme in itself, that the voting age in democracies should be lowered to the age of 12 or 13. PJ: That’s very interesting… Why? PL: First, according to Piaget (1964), the pioneering and still enormously relevant cognitive psychologist, children aged 12 or 13 are capable of adult reasoning. Here is an example of childhood reasoning according to Piaget: A little child, say three years old, will insist that three pennies are worth more than one dollar, because three seems more than one. They cannot grasp the concept that a dollar is worth 100 pennies. By the time children get to be 12 or 13 years old, they are beyond that type of reasoning, and start thinking as adults—hence, in my opinion, they should be able to vote. Second, I think children should be able to vote, because they—more than anyone else—have an interest in the future. I am 70 years old, and I want to keep voting, but let’s face it—40 years from now I’m not likely to be here. Who has a greater interest in where our society is heading? Me, or somebody who is 14 years old? I think that teenagers intrinsically have a greater interest in the future. Third: democracy with our current voting age has fucked up many times. The elected president of the US is Donald Trump! Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote, but she lost in the Electoral College because 76,000 people from some midwest American states gave their votes to Trump. PJ: I recently did an interview with Astra Taylor, who spoke about the movement of child liberation based on a profound sense of trust, which was also “the most remarkable part of [her] unschooling experience” (in Jandri´c, 2017, p. 227; see also Taylor & Jandri´c, 2016; Jandri´c, 2014, 2015). Can you link your trust in children’s ability to reason and education?

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PL: I recently saw a commercial for The Secret Life of Pets (Renaud, 2016) which struck me as funny. The commercial shows a group of dogs, all on leashes, and another dog, also on a leash, walks up and starts talking to the others. The dog’s owner is not paying any attention, and yanks the dog away. The dog is trying to make a point, and gets yanked away over and over again. This shows that a dog has no freedom—it is literally at the end of the leash, and the human can pull the leash any time—the dog has no rights of its own. Although we don’t put children on leashes, we do tend to treat them like dogs—they have to do what we say. The school system works very well for some people; unsurprisingly, it does not work very well for others. I think we should be much more open, so I agree completely with Taylor. But the question of child freedom is very complicated… I’ll give you another example. Like all kids, at one point my son came down with an ear infection. We took him to the doctor, and the doctor gave us eardrops. My son did not like eardrops, so I had to hold him down to put them in his ear. What else is a parent supposed to do? In some cases, you just have to override what the kid wants! I think we would live in a better world if we gave children more freedom, but the limits to that freedom are very hard to determine. PJ: In many literary works, including but far from limited to science fiction and fantasy, children are portrayed with less nuance than grown-ups. Sometimes, such lack of nuance can lead to utopias and dystopias… What do dystopic and utopian imaginings of childhood and pedagogy reveal about contemporary society? PL: It is a true cliché that people write best from what they know. A lot of writers are out of touch with their childhood… They remember what it feels like to be a young adult, they remember what it feels like to be insulted by a boss, they remember what it feels like to be attracted to someone sexually, but all of those are young adult and adult memories—we often just don’t remember what it feels like to be a child. One of the ways of writing better children-characters is to at least remember what it is like to be a parent. In my novel Borrowed Tides (2001), children play a very important role. The novel is about the first starship to Alpha Centauri, where something called the boomerang effect sets the starship on a time rollback. There are no children on the initial ship crew, but the trip takes a total of 16 years, and in that time, two children are born. When I wrote Borrowed Tides, our son was about 16 and our daughter was about 13, so I had just had a great experience with kids of those ages, and I was incredibly aware of the way they talk to each other. PJ: What about children rights, Paul? PL: There is an extremely important story, by the science fiction master Ray Bradbury, that has to do with how we treat children and what rights children have: “The Last Night of the World” (1951, retooled into an episode of the anthology film The Illustrated Man in 1969). In the movie, there are two scientists, a man and a woman, and they have kids. They realise that some kind of meteor shower or whatever is going to hit the Earth in a matter of hours, and everyone on the planet will die in agony. So what do the parents do? They put their children to sleep permanently, they euthanize them. The next morning, the sun dawns, everything is fine, the meteor shower missed the Earth. That’s the end of the story. The well-meaning, loving parents had put their children to death—and it turns out, for no reason. Likely the

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children themselves would never have taken that action. But they had no say in the disposition of their very lives in this situation.

The Incomplete Humans and Their Tools PJ: Thinking of dystopic imaginings of childhood, I cannot help but recall Wyndham’s science fiction novel The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) and the films Village of the Damned (Rilla, 1960; Carpenter, 1995) (among many other examples). What, in your opinion, is the main difference between science fiction books and science fiction films? And, if I may complicate this oft-discussed dichotomy a bit further, what is your take on interactive science fiction computer games? Paraphrasing McLuhan, what kinds of messages do we get from these different media? PL: Portrayal on the screen has certain advantages, because you see and hear the physical people, and if the acting is good, you are brought into the story in a very different and more visceral way than when you are reading. For example, The Walking Dead (2010–present) started as a comic book series, but it’s also a hugely successful television series, which consistently gets more views than any other drama on television. Children play a very important role in The Walking Dead. There is an episode, which is especially poignant on film, when a girl of about 12 years of age is bitten by a zombie, and she is going to turn into a zombie pretty quickly. What do you do about her? The logical thing to do is kill her before she turns into a zombie, but at that point, she is still a child, a human being. When you read or watch something, you want to become the author. You can imagine what the characters do, and you are pleased and gratified when the author does what you would like the character to do. Marshall McLuhan talks about hot and cool media, and we covered a lot of that in our last conversation (Levinson & Jandri´c, 2016; Jandri´c, 2017). With a hot medium, everything washes over you; with a cool medium, things are not so much there, so you need to insert own ideas and interpretations. Interactive computer games are the ultimately cool presentation, because you have to put in your own interpretation and make the moves. I think that is a whole new way of storytelling. As president of the Science Fiction Writers of America between 1998 and 2001, I wanted to include writers of computer games as full-fledged members. At that time, I was unable to convince my board, but recently they were finally accepted. PJ: Can you develop a McLuhanist take on children and science fiction, media and (de)schooling? PL: McLuhan was first and foremost an educator, and therefore interested in children. McLuhan’s last co-authored book is called City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media (McLuhan, Hutchon, & McLuhan, 1977), and it talks about what he thought the best classroom would be. Although I don’t think the book explicitly mentions deschooling, this is closely related, because McLuhan was a firm believer in Mark Twain famously saying “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education”—McLuhan believed that life out there is a classroom in itself.

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With the child, it is so crystal clear that the medium is the message—the child does not really care about content, she just wants to go through the actions. Children are quintessentially cool, because they want to be a part of everything. Babies don’t want to watch things, they want to get involved in things—as all parents know, the first way that children understand things is by putting them in their mouth. Indeed, my daughter Molly Vozick-Levinson (now director of the Children’s Learning Center in Manhattan) and I are writing a book, McLuhan for Babies, in which we will explore those points. Regarding mouthfuls of knowledge, in Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972), Popper puts in as a throwaway line that the most profound interaction that we have through the world is through eating, because when we eat something, we are taking a part of the outside world and making it a part of us. That is exactly what McLuhan was talking about regarding cool media, and I think that has enormous consequences for education. PJ: A lot of science fiction, such as Ender’s Game (Card, 1985) and Borrowed Tides (Levinson, 2001), and also fantasy, such as Tarzan of the Apes (Burroughs, 1914), features children born into radically different worlds. What can we learn from this type of fiction? PL: The key is in entirely different worlds. If you write something about the world that exists, it is hard to write as originally as you might want, because you need to work out how the character relates to our real world. That is a very difficult problem to overcome… In Borrowed Tides, or Tarzan, or Ender’s Game, the children are isolated from the real world, and therefore, writers are able to focus on what is going on in the children’s heads. In Borrowed Tides, Noah is not encumbered by the world around him. He has the opportunity to think, and reach his own conclusions, and as he gets older, he gets increasingly confident in his own conclusions. Ender is also isolated from everything that is going on, but he has a much clearer path. The same is true with Carl in The Walking Dead (2010–present)—he is not living in a normal world, he is not going to school, he is not watching television… His world is much more a tableau that he can fill in, more than our real world could ever be to any child. In the Lord of the Flies (Golding, 1954/2001) the children have no adult supervision, so the older ones quickly start acting like adults. But in these stories, children can blossom in ways unimaginable in everyday life. In regular fiction, you have to work much harder to have an interesting and a powerful child, because the child has to deal with so many different things in our real world. Is there a child that plays a major role in any of Shakespeare’s plays? I don’t think so. I just want to mention the book Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life by Ariès (1962). Ariès was an art historian, who discovered that up to the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, children were always portrayed as shrunken adults. When the printing press was invented, books started pouring out and the society began to realise that we need to teach our kids how to read, so public education became important. As I elaborated in The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution (Levinson, 1997), what is the point of having books if no one can read them? Ariès argues, and my colleague Joshua Meyrowitz (1987) and my Ph.D. mentor Postman (1982/1994) build on this

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argument, that the world did not begin thinking of children in a contemporary way, until public education became so important. Since then, adults work and children go to school. To this very day, however, fiction writers adopt to some extent what Philipe Ariès was talking about in those paintings from the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance—they treat children as miniature adults. I guess it takes science fiction and fantasy, with their new environments, to provide children with a context where they can fully express themselves. As another example, some of the great portrayals of children in science fiction can be found in the Dune trilogy (Herbert, 1965). PJ: We typically mark the transition from children to adults through rituals and rites of passage such as graduation, prom, compulsory military service and marriage—one wakes up in the morning as a child, and goes to bed in the evening as an adult. However, growing up is obviously a continuous process… What is the importance of these rites of passage, and how can science fiction help us to understand them? PL: I’m glad I mentioned Dune (Herbert, 1965), because it is probably the best example for this answer. The book features a religious sisterhood called the Bene Gesserit, which plays several crucial roles, one of which is to distinguish between human adults and animals. They put a person’s hand in a box, and make them think there is a horrible snake in the box—but the subjects do not know that there is no snake in the box, so this creates a conflict: how long can they keep in their hand? The Bene Gesserit believe that the longer a person can keep a hand in the box, the more adult and fully human they are. In a way, this ceremony is a commentary on the cruelty of our own rites of passage. People grow up naturally, they don’t mature at the same rate, they don’t become adults at the same age, and even the distinction between a child and an adult is somewhat incorrect and false. Therefore, I think that the rites of passage are a very primitive, unhelpful and unhealthy way of distinguishing between a child and an adult. I get that there is a distinction between biological maturity and adulthood, but I don’t think there is such a clear distinction in terms of mentality and cognition. PJ: Based on Ariès’ work, Julie Reshe claims that we see children as beings of plasticity, as malleable beings, while we see adulthood as a state of completeness (Reshe, 2017). Please explore the dichotomy between plasticity and completeness. PL: First, I’m an adult and I’m not complete. I don’t speak a word of Croatian, or a word of most languages. Also, I don’t know many other things in the world—if my life depended on it, I could probably not mix some kinds of chemical compound or even fix a car. The nature of a child is a fundamental philosophical question: Is a child a tabula rasa? Locke (1690), in effect a behavioural psychologist, would say that a child comes with no innate knowledge, and you must mould a child, and fill the child up with knowledge. Descartes (1641) goes a bit too far in terms of what innate knowledge is, but I think that Kant’s ideas (1781) that we have innate categories, which we might today call innate cognitive structures, are very much on the right track. Children are born with ways to understand, so my grandson innately gets the difference between a subject and an object. Nobody taught him that. This gets back to Noam Chomsky’s linguistics in Syntactic Structures (1957). My grandson is able to make a distinction between a subject and an object because he hears adults talking in that way, and this clicks into the cognitive structure that he already has in his brain.

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I’ll explain this using a metaphor. My grandson arrives with the powder of instant coffee, and what he hears, these experiences, are adding hot water—the result makes coffee, i.e. language. The more coffee we have (or the more actualized structures we have), the more that we are developed. That gives us the illusion of completeness, but we are not complete, because we continue to develop new structures, learn new things and act in new ways throughout our lives. PJ: In Lord of the Flies (Golding, 1954/2001), a group of children ends up stranded on an uninhabited island and miserably fails to organise their community. In Vorkosigan Saga (McMaster Bujold, 1986), Miles Naismith Vorkosigan is disabled by birth and his body is packed with all kinds of medical remedies. Science fiction and fantasy open many questions pertaining to human nature—from looking at what happens when people get exposed to extreme situations, to extrapolations of all kinds of cyborgs. Which lessons from these stories can we take into the rapidly growing field of posthumanism? PL: As the Nobel laureate biologist Sir Peter Medawar says, “What’s human about man is our technology” (1973). When we invent things, be it algorithms or any kind of technological aid, that is an expression of our humanity. It is no different from a beaver using wood to build a dam, or a bee constructing a hive with its wax secretion. All these actions require reorganising things in the material world to further the organism’s interests, which are in our case obviously human interests, and therefore the technologies are all human. I could talk for a million years about the inadequacy, foolishness, myopia and blindness of critics who somehow worry that technology is demeaning our humanity—when, in fact, it is crystal clear that it is enabling our humanity. In the natural world, our lifespans are 35 or 40 years, and we get hungry and cold at all ages… The natural world is a beautiful place, but we should never forget that the greatest killers of human beings are natural events. Science fiction stories such as The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien, 1954) are declarations that it takes more than just human beings to create any kind of a decent society. Because of that, children in hypothetical science fiction situations teach us a very important lesson about our own world—that children cannot be taken out of the technological world. PJ: In our previous conversation (Levinson & Jandri´c, 2016; Jandri´c, 2017) you gave a detailed description of the public perception of science fiction. What is the public perception of children’s fantasy? PL: The public perception of fantasy for children is by and large better than the general perception of fantasy for adults. Most people think that fantasy is good for kids; in many respects, they probably think that fantasy is better for kids than a reallife crime story or something like that. If you’re going to have a story about a farmer, it is much more interesting if the farmer can interact and talk with the animals, than if the farmer has a problem because he has fallen off his tractor, broken his leg and is in pain—which is a realistic image. This attitude towards fantasy for children is unfortunate, because it basically devalues fantasy for adults. PJ: For the publishing and media industries, children’s science fiction and fantasy is an opportunity to raise a new generation of consumers; for critical educators, it is an opportunity for developing critical consciousness and emancipation. Please

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describe the dynamics between these radically different goals. What are the distinct ethical challenges in regards to children science fiction and fantasy? PL: I don’t see a conflict between those two goals. Let’s go back to my high school librarian Mrs. Dayson (see more in Levinson & Jandri´c, 2016; Jandri´c, 2017). When I was 12 years old, she was convinced that science fiction was literally ruining my mind. She was willing to accept a little of science fiction, just like a little bit of candy and a little bit of cake, but a child’s reading list should consist of classics, she insisted, just like a child’s diet should consist of meat and vegetables. She was wrong, because no one knows what is going to stimulate a child, and no one can predict the results of that stimulation. Back in the day, Mrs. Dayson told me: “I am not letting you come to the library if you continue to read just science fiction”. Are you kidding? Nowadays, a librarian would be happy if a child read pornography, just as long as they are coming to the library! This gets back again to the nature of a child’s mind—you have to respect what a child wants. If the child, for whatever reason, is interested in reading sensationalist garbage, that’s fine—let the child read it, and get whatever benefit the child can get from that. That’s why I’m saying there is no real conflict in your question—we need to keep our children engaged, reading, thinking, whether by fantasy, science fiction or any other kind of narrative! Do you know about the famous cafeteria experiment (Davis, 1939)? During a certain period of time, researchers offered kids a cafeteria with all kinds of food—ice cream, cake, meat, vegetables…—and the kids could eat whatever they wanted. At first, kids would eat just cake, but eventually, they were choosing a fully balanced diet. The most amazing thing is that kids who had medical conditions were eating things that would benefit their medical conditions! This is one of many reasons why I have confidence in kids—I see no reason why the same would not happen with media.

The Pedagogical Message of Science Fiction and Fantasy PJ: A prominent theme in your work is time travel. Please discuss the relationship between time travel and children (in) science fiction and fantasy. PL: Time travel is different than a lot of science fiction because it is scientifically impossible. Children like to play around with time travel, because they are not concerned with scientific paradoxes, so they are among the best audiences for time travel science fiction. We, humans, are what we are, because of our DNA—a set of genetic instructions, which are created anew from the mother and father’s genetic constructions, each time a child is conceived. In a way, genes are a form of time travel. For physical beings such as you and me, time travel is impossible, but the DNA inside you and me has time travelled who knows how many thousands of times and years. Meanwhile, in science fiction and fantasy, children can play a crucial role in a time travel story, such as in the classic scenario of going back in time and meeting yourself as a child, and telling yourself what you need to do to later time

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travel, which creates the delicious paradox of where, then, did that knowledge come from in the first place? PJ: Most children cannot clearly distinguish between fantasy and reality—my 4-year-old son, for instance, sees no problem in Superman’s ability to fly. Should children’s science fiction cherish this fact, and leave children in their imaginary worlds until they grow up, or should it try and develop a more critical perspective to the relationship between fantasy and reality? PL: This gets back to what I said about Jean Piaget and the development of childhood—I think that adults cannot do anything to either speed up or slow down the child’s understanding of the difference between fantasy and reality. Consequently, I don’t think we need to worry about what we tell our children. They naturally go through a developmental process, and adults should just try and make that process as stimulating and enjoyable as possible. By the way, adults never completely lose this childhood belief in the reality of the unreal. That’s why we can watch a movie, or read a completely fictitious story, and cry. This is an important part of our humanity. PJ: In my opinion, hard science fiction (e.g. Isaac Asimov, Roger Zelazny…) clearly describes problems and insufficiencies pertaining to modern religions such as Christianity or Islam. In this vast universe, ruled by laws of physics, we do encounter many mysteries—but these mysteries cannot be explained by Earth-centric and human-centric projections of gods and saints. From logistic questions (where is this heaven where god(s) exist?) through logical questions (how to reconcile religion and natural processes such as evolution?) to epistemic questions (what is god; where does s/he reside?), I find a lot of science fiction—at least in its hard versions based on science—seems to be in direct tension with religion. How do you feel about this tension? PL: Basically, the questions that religion tries to answer are the exact same questions that got us out into space: finding out more about who we are, and what is our place in this cosmos. I recently co-edited a book, Touching the Face of the Cosmos: On the Intersection of Space Travel and Religion (Levinson & Waltemathe, 2015), which explains this in more depth; we touched upon some aspects of your question in our previous conversation (Levinson & Jandri´c, 2016; Jandri´c, 2017). In short, while I do not agree with religious answers to these questions—I do not believe in the specific gods claimed by religions—I do think there is a force beyond what our science and religion deal with. Who or what created the universe? The Big Bang? But what created the Big Bang? God? What then created God? God created Her/Himself? That only begs the question. This is where I see the alliance between science and religion. Flowing from that, I think that there is no conflict at all between hard science and religion in the context of science fiction—there might be a conflict elsewhere, as in existence created in six days versus billions of years, but not here. PJ: A lot of science fiction and fantasy written for children (and to a lesser extent, for adults) features protagonists with supernatural powers. What are the pedagogical and ideological messages of that? PL: This is a continuing theme arriving from the ancient Greeks and their bevy of gods, the Judaeo-Christian religions, etc. Unsurprisingly, science fiction has picked this up. I think that children naturally gravitate to protagonists with supernatural

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powers for a variety of reasons. First, if you are a child, and there’s a bully in your class, would you not want to be a Superman and stand up to the bully? Second, children can imagine far more than any human being can actually do. Arguably, in adults, that impulse makes us create technologies, which fulfil that impulse and make children’s imagination real. I think that is a very healthy part of the human enterprise. PJ: A prominent theme in children fantasy is children who do not want to grow up, such as Peter Pan (Barrie, 1904) and Pippi Longstocking (Lindgren, 1950). What are the pedagogical and ideological messages of that? PL: I find that sad, because an adult who does not want to grow up is not going to be particularly happy or fulfilled. In a way all adults are children, because we never grow up completely, but adults who feel that they’re not yet ready to embrace the world may need some assistance. I have an interest in positive fantasy, but I am also aware of the existence of dystopian fantasy, and that aspect of Peter Pan and Pippi Longstocking is definitely dystopian. The key to happiness and success as an adult, I believe, is to maintain the sense of wonder, curiosity, openness we have as children. All too often this is crushed by the boot heel of society, and the demands, real and perceived, that it puts on us. But the answer is not to reject all of adulthood, and strive to continue as an eternal child, like Peter and Pippi. An adult comprised only of childhood is as unfortunate as an adult with no traces of childhood at all. That’s why I find these fantasies, though of course enjoyable as adventures, disturbing and dystopian on the deeper philosophical level. PJ: As a teenager, reading Asimov’s Foundation Series (2016) and other intergalactic travel stories, I remember experiencing several important shifts in my perspective. Instead of looking at my own country or nation, I started to look at the Earth as a whole; I started to grasp its smallness and insignificance in the Universe; I started to realise fragility and shortness of human existence; I started to understand the vast improbability of the emergence of humanity. Similarly, reading and watching stories about various encounters with alien races, such as Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), I started to realise the unity of humankind and the nonsense of ethnic, racial and other petty divisions between various human populations. Finally, reading post-apocalyptic stories about nuclear wars such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963) and also reading stories of terraforming other planets such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy (Robinson, 1992, 1993, 1996), I started to realise the unity between the human race and the Earth. Many years later, when I encountered the “novel” concept of the Anthropocene in the scientific literature, it came to me naturally—well, of course, we are one with our planet! Please comment on the development of scientific concepts through science fiction. PL: I don’t think science fiction can effectively plan on having that impact, because I think that the impact of any story is unpredictable. But science fiction certainly can and has inspired real science and social science. Marvin Minsky (Minsky, 1986; see also Levinson, 1997, p. 206) said his interest in artificial intelligence came from reading Asimov’s robot stories, and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman (Krugman, 2012; see also Levinson, 2008) attributes his passion for national economic planning to Asimov’s Foundation Series . And the human-centred notion of the Earth inevitably comes from reading any kind of decent science fiction, certainly from reading the

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Foundation series and the Dune series (Herbert, 1965). When you read these stories, that talk about humanity in the galaxy, humanity writ large, humanity far in the future, it becomes crystal clear that the Earth as a whole is the birthplace of humanity. McLuhan (1974) made the point that the ecology movement started when we went off this planet and there was a picture of the whole earth, from the Moon, so people for the first time could see what the whole Earth looks like. PJ: This was in the heyday of the Whole Earth Catalog and later Wired magazine… In Learning in the Age of Digital Reason (Jandri´c, 2017), I talked a lot about these issues with Howard Rheingold, Fred Turner, McKenzie Wark, Richard Barbrook and others… PL: Yes. Also, children are naturally concerned with the environment. Children cherish flowers, they cherish living things, they have a natural affinity for the Earth and the things of the Earth, and I think that science fiction definitely helps rekindle that in adults.

Postscript: The Post-disciplinary Dialogue Between Science and Fiction PJ: In our previous dialogue, we already discussed the relationships between science fiction and research. Please allow me to reproduce your main points: PL: It is a very profound relationship that has been demonstrated over and over again. H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) can be seen as contributing to gene splicing and genetic engineering. Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon; and, Round the Moon (1865) can be seen as a motivation to actually get off this planet and go to the Moon. One of the great artificial intelligence researchers Marvin Minsky (who, sadly, died just a couple of months ago) is on record as saying that he was stimulated by Asimov’s robot stories to get into serious artificial intelligence (Dreifus, 1998). The Nobel laureate Paul Krugman (2012) said that the central idea of Asimov’s Foundation Series that you can gather information and predict the future got him interested in predictive economics. So I think that the relationship between science and science fiction has been really productive. That’s also why I take it as a compliment when people say that my science fiction is scholarly, because I think that the best science fiction is often science being thought about and played out in a gaming fashion. It allows us to imagine what would happen if we could invent this or that—and gaming those ideas in science fiction often stimulates scientists a few years later to actually see a way how they could do those things. So if you look at the history of science, you will find science fiction as its profound backdrop. This relationship is two directional, because science fiction inspires science and also has to be based on science—the interplay between science and science fiction is a trajectory of progress. (Jandri´c, 2017, pp. 285–286; see also Levinson & Jandri´c, 2016)

PJ: Positioned between science fiction and educational research, our approach in this chapter is dialogical both epistemically (it is a dialogue between the disciplines) and practically (it is a dialogue between two people). As an ancient form which defines Western science, dialogue is usually focused on one of the “two extremes (and anywhere in the between): (1) Quest for absolute agreement or truth (e.g.

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Socratic dialogue), or (2) Quest for relative agreement or consensus (e.g. Heideggerian dialogue)” (Jandri´c, 2017, p. 362). However, our dialogue is aimed beyond these extremes, and serves “as a building block for a larger project of collective research and collective intelligence”, where “(dis)agreement and consensus are (…) not ends in themselves”, but serve as a method of collective inquiry (see Jandri´c, 2016; Jandri´c et al., 2017; Peters & Jandri´c, 2017). For a moment, please take off your writer’s hat and put your academic researcher’s hat (I know you carry both with the same success!). What, in your opinion, are the main advantages and challenges pertaining to our research approach in this chapter? PL: The main advantage is this: the things we’ve been discussing—the inspiration of science fiction and its intrinsic connection to childhood, and to the questing spirit of the child that all adults have in one way or another—are implicitly understood by most people, but not generally acknowledged or investigated in the academic world. Part of this lack of attention is beneficial. As I think we discussed in our last interview, there’s an undercover, off-the-grid aspect of science fiction that is empowering and invigorating. But there’s also an advantage in making this profound connection more visible in the academic world. The challenge is doing that without robbing science fiction of any of its generative power.

References Ariès, P. (1962). Centuries of childhood: A social history of family life. New York, NY: Knopf. Asimov, I. (1959). The ugly little boy. In I. Asimov (Ed.), Nine tomorrows. New York, NY: Doubleday. Asimov, I. (2016). The complete Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series books 1-7 (Foundation, Foundation and empire, Second Foundation, Foundation’s edge, Foundation and Earth, Prelude to Foundation, Forward the Foundation). New York, NY: Bantam Spectra. Barrie, J. M. (1904). Peter Pan; Or, the boy who wouldn’t grow up. London, UK: Hodder & Stoughton. Bradbury, R. (1951). The last night of the world. In R. Bradbury (Ed.), The illustrated man. New York, NY: Doubleday. Burroughs, E. R. (1914). Tarzan of the apes. Chicago, IL: A. C. McClurg. Card, O. S. (1985). Ender’s game. New York, NY: Tor. Carpenter, J. (1995). Village of the damned [Motion picture]. Los Angeles: Universal Pictures. Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter. Davis, C. M. (1939). Results of the self-selection of diets by young children. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 41, 257–261. Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on first philosophy. Retrieved May 22, 2018 from http://selfpace. uconn.edu/class/percep/DescartesMeditations.pdf. Golding, W. (1954/2001). Lord of the flies. New York, NY: Penguin. Herbert, F. (1965). Dune. New York, NY: Chilton Books. Jandri´c, P. (2014). Deschooling virtuality. Open Review of Educational Research, 1(1), 84–98. Jandri´c, P. (2015). Deschooling virtuality 2.0. Concept, 6(2), 1–10. Jandri´c, P. (2016). The methodological challenge of networked learning: (Post)disciplinarity and critical emancipation. In T. Ryberg, C. Sinclair, S. Bayne & de Laat, M. (Eds.), Research, boundaries, and policy in networked learning (pp. 165–181). New York, NY: Springer. Jandri´c, P. (2017). Learning in the age of digital reason. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sense.

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Index

A Aesthetics, 2, 94, 98–101, 107, 120 Affect, 2, 11, 12, 55, 65, 96, 107, 111–115, 118–123, 125–127, 129, 130, 137, 145, 198 Akira, 11, 20, 31–33 Ariès, Philipe, 8, 30, 61 Artificial Intelligence (AI), 2, 4, 6, 20, 24, 25, 34–36, 159, 161–163, 165, 166, 213, 214, 222, 223 Asimov, Isaac Foundation Series, 222, 223 B Battle Royale, 13, 189–191, 195–206 Biesta, Gert, 21, 26, 29, 129, 156, 157, 163, 164, 166 Binti, 95, 103–105 Black Mirror, 11, 79, 80, 84, 85, 89, 90 Blackness, 94–97, 99–104, 160 C Carey, M.R. Girl with all the Gifts, The, 11, 41–43, 47, 52, 54 Ophiocordyceps, 41, 43, 44, 52, 53, 55 CHAPPiE, 6, 11, 19, 20, 28, 33–36 Childhood and agency, 3–5, 11, 57, 60, 61, 63, 68, 69, 71, 73, 79–83, 87, 91, 124, 151, 152, 156, 168, 179, 198, 204 and horror films, 62 and power, 2, 12, 21, 23, 29, 31, 32, 45, 48, 60, 63, 65, 73, 82, 83, 85, 95, 102, 107, 115, 119, 122, 136, 137, 140, 142, 144,

145, 148, 151, 163, 173, 177, 181, 182, 185, 190, 192–194, 198, 200, 203–205, 213 and psychology, 4, 5, 139, 213 and sexuality, 11, 37, 79–84, 87, 106, 137, 142, 144, 175, 200, 201 and technology, 3, 6–8, 24, 35, 55, 80, 89, 96, 136, 142, 156, 159, 160, 162, 165–168, 180, 193, 198–201, 213, 219 and toys, 2, 11, 57, 59, 67, 71 as animal, 3, 43, 48–50, 53, 137, 151, 218, 219 as biology, 62, 106 as innocence, 11, 42, 43, 46, 47, 60–63, 68, 70, 71, 79–83, 87, 112, 122, 123, 202, 203 as machinic, 3, 179 as monster, 2, 5, 11, 19–21, 25–33, 35–38, 41, 45, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 59, 60, 62–64, 68, 72, 73, 88, 91, 111, 120, 123, 124, 130, 182–184, 191, 201 as other, 5, 8 as unknowable, 11, 44, 57, 59–62, 64–68, 70, 73, 86, 130, 162, 173 as victim, 11, 25, 42, 52, 62, 63, 79, 80, 85, 86, 89, 90, 205 as weapon, 28, 123, 158, 185, 190, 199, 200, 204 constructions of, 2, 3, 8, 11, 20, 41, 60, 62, 80–82, 95, 97, 99, 103, 213 Gothic notions of, 3, 5, 11, 61 Romantic notions of, 4, 5, 62, 63 Sigmund Freud on, 174 Child pornography, 11, 79, 80, 86–88 Children

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228 Children (cont.) and gender identity, 9, 37, 136, 200 and sexual abuse, 83, 86, 87 and the state, 3–5, 10, 12, 23, 37, 42, 43, 54, 80, 104, 136 as evil, 7, 11, 41, 42, 47, 48, 53–55, 59, 60, 64, 66, 68, 202 as incomplete, 216 as possessed, 23, 60, 66, 68–72, 173, 176 as sex offenders, 86–88, 90, 91 killing children, 60, 123, 124, 182, 184, 190, 196, 199, 202, 203, 205 Children of Men, 4 Child’s Play, 11, 57, 60, 71, 88, 89 Clave, 97, 98 Comic books and gender, 99 and sensation, 11, 12, 111–119, 121, 126, 127, 129, 130 and tension, 12, 97, 99, 100, 102, 107, 111, 113, 117, 119–121, 123–126, 130 and thingness, 117, 119 digital, 115, 116, 118 in print, 112, 116, 118 Cortical Knowledge Uploads (CKUs) and learning, 155–160, 162–167 as knowledge, 155–164 Curriculum, 3, 47, 49, 98, 99, 135, 141, 178, 192 D Defender, 24 Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix and State-philosophy, 171, 172, 177–180, 184, 185 on meaning, 177, 178, 180 Demonology, 60, 66, 67 Dune, 218, 223 Dystopia, 13, 215 E Education and theology, 180, 181, 184 Ender’s Game, 20, 28, 31, 32, 102, 217 Ethics, 2, 7, 24, 26, 42, 44, 47, 51, 54, 55, 95–99, 101, 102, 107, 114, 152, 200 F Fisher, Mark on the weird and the eerie, 2–5, 68 Foucault, Michel, 36, 137, 142, 144, 176, 177, 179, 191, 198 Frankenstein, 5, 20, 22–28, 30–33, 37, 41, 52, 62

Index Frankenstein’s Creation, 28, 37, 52 Frankenstein, Victor, 11, 19–27, 29, 30, 32–38 Freire, Paulo, 156, 157, 163 Funk as null curriculum, 96, 98, 99 H Hamilton, Peter F. Commonwealth Saga, 12, 156, 159 Night’s Dawn Trilogy, 12, 156, 159, 160 Haraway, Donna, 93, 95 Hobbes, Thomas, 4, 61 Horror, 2–5, 11, 27, 30, 37, 41, 42, 44, 57, 59, 61–68, 71–73, 80, 85, 93, 98, 147, 171, 174, 181, 182, 184, 189, 203 Horror of philosophy, 65, 67 Hunger Games, The, 9, 13 Huxley, Aldous Brave New World, 12, 135–144, 146–149, 151, 152 Island, 12, 135–138, 146–149, 151, 152, 190, 195–197, 203, 219, 223 J Japan and American colonization of, 189, 200, 204 and childhood, 203 and education, 13, 189, 193, 194, 198, 200, 205 and juvenile murderers, 13, 41, 42, 46, 87, 88, 91, 120, 121, 183, 194, 195 Johnny Mnemonic, 156, 158 K Kant, Immanuel, 60, 64, 67, 176 Killer clowns, 57, 59, 64, 66, 70, 73 Killer dolls, 11, 57, 59, 60, 63, 64, 66, 67, 73 L Learning and pedagogy, 12, 13, 114, 119, 127, 129, 155, 211 discomfort of, 113, 120, 127, 130 Le Guin, Ursula, 1, 13 Locke, John, 3, 61, 218 Lord of the Flies, 190, 214, 217, 219 Lord of the Rings, 182, 219 M Machines, 1–4, 6, 7, 29–31, 34, 36, 42, 80, 141, 150, 151, 156–158, 161–163, 165–167, 172, 179, 180, 185, 199, 205, 206

Index Matrix, The, 156–158, 161, 165, 168 McLuhan, Marshall, 212, 216, 217, 223 Media studies, 13, 212 Monstress, 12, 96 N Neoliberalism, 167, 191, 194, 198 New materialism, 2, 12, 111, 113, 114 P Paper Girls, 12, 111–113, 115–130 Pedagogy, 2, 41, 42, 115, 119, 129, 136, 156, 178, 191, 212, 215 Pedophilia, 80, 86, 88 Piaget, Jean, 30, 139, 214, 221 Poltergeist, 5, 11, 57, 60, 63, 67 Post-apocalypse, 41, 42, 44, 48, 50–52, 54, 55, 222 Posthumanism, 13, 41, 44, 47, 54, 55, 137, 219 Q Queer theory, 11, 79, 80, 189 R Rancière, Jacques, 157, 164, 166 Relationship between adult and child, 36 between creator and creation, 11, 20, 27, 28, 36 between teacher and student, 11, 114, 129, 160, 176, 194 Robots as childlike, 5, 63, 117, 192 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3, 31, 36, 61 S Saga, 12, 95, 103, 105, 111–113, 115–125, 127, 128, 130, 219 Schopenhauer, Arthur nihil negativum, 60, 66, 71 on the occult, 57, 60, 67, 68, 71 Science and mad scientists, 19, 27, 34, 35 childhood as the subject of, 8, 11, 28, 30, 49, 125, 142, 164

229 Science fiction and children’s literature, 83, 136, 212 and fantasy, 22, 25, 41, 44, 53, 55, 86, 89, 212, 213, 215, 217–222 and feminism, 13, 95 and horror, 2, 3, 5, 41, 42, 53, 55, 62 and power, 20, 21, 24–26, 31, 32, 35, 42, 44, 55, 214, 221, 222, 224 and race, 11, 95 and religion, 174, 181, 221 and time travel, 116, 130, 213, 220, 221 as method, 2, 62 as pedagogy, 2, 10, 11, 54, 111, 112, 135 definitions of, 3 Sensation, 11, 12, 22, 111, 112, 114–117, 119, 121, 123, 125–127, 129, 130 Shaviro, Steven, 2, 7, 60, 62, 64, 65, 69, 72 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin), 5, 11, 19–25, 27, 28, 30, 33, 37, 41, 135 Sonic pedagogies, 12 Speculative realism, 2, 11, 57, 60, 64, 65, 73 Steven King’s It, 12, 171, 172, 182–186 Stranger Things, 12, 66, 171, 172, 180, 182–186 T Tales from the Crypt, 11, 57, 60, 68, 69 Thacker, Eugene, 60, 65–68, 70, 73, 181, 182, 184 Toy Story, 59 U Utopia, 36, 125, 161, 215 V Ventriloquist dummies, 57, 59, 60, 64, 66, 69, 71 W Walking Dead, The, 216, 217 Weber, Max, 171–175, 180, 181 Y Young adult literature, 94, 136