The Sense of Space

CHAPTER 6 GROWING SPACE

CHAPTER 6 GROWING SPACE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN living in a house with a very young infant and living in a house with a toddler is astounding. It calls for nothing less than a transformation of the household, of attitudes towards things in the house, of ways of caring and playing. Simply put, in moving about, the toddler becomes a different, more independent participant in the moving activity of the household. The development of movement, from lying in place to turning over and squirming, to sitting up, crawling, and toddling, is correlative to the development of posture. In what follows I detect something crucial in the developmental shift from symmetrical to asymmetrical posture, which is also a shift from closed posture to open posture. As in the previous chapter, closed and open postures bear upon orientation and the individual’s concern for herself or himself. In this chapter, though, the link appears in development: the development of the asymmetrical posture is crucial to the infant’s ability to reach out from her or his own place into the social place of the household, and is crucial in the development of the infant’s orientation toward things and other people. Crucially, these developments are inflected by social relations, and by issues of concern, emotion, and anxiety. The sens contracted in our sense of space reflects social and emotional development, and thus takes us into the ethical. I arrive at this conclusion by studying recent results in developmental psychology, to gain an insight into what I call the topology of concern, a link between posture, concern, and emotion, over the course of development. METHODOLOGICAL AND CONCEPTUAL REMARKS (1) I use the term infant very generally to designate the very young child from birth to toddlerhood. 159 160 THE SENSE OF SPACE (2) I use the term family very generally to designate the adults taking care of the infant. Infants develop socially and learn to move by interacting with others. Developmental psychologists highlight this when they take the dyad, that is, an infant and adult couple, as their unit of study. When I speak of ‘family,’ I am not necessarily speaking of a traditional unit. The traditional unit of course varies across traditions , but in all traditions, the infant depends on an entourage of ‘familiars,’ some-bodies who take care of the infant. I use family to designate this care-taking group, whatever it might be. We must keep in mind that the family as site of care-taking can also be the site of neglect, or even violence. (3) Psychology depends on reports by subjects or interpretation of their behavior. This leads to deep and well-known problems about psychology as science—problems discussed by philosophers as diverse as Dennett and Sartre.1 The deep problem surfaces directly in developmental psychology, since infants cannot speak. Claims about the infant’s psychological states ultimately rely on the psychologist’s ingenuity in discovering and interpreting behavior that gives insight into the infant’s experience; for example, psychologists take startled behavior or preferential attention as signs of interest in something unusual, which leads to inferences about the infant’s usual conception of the world (see Fogel 1984). When it comes to the experience of basic spatial phenomena, such as up and down, or depth, there are further problems. Ghent, Bernstein, and Goldweber (1960) conducted experiments that tested whether the uprightness of pictured items is “preserved” when children look at pictures when bent over, and Gazjago and Day (1972) tested whether uprightness is preserved when children observe pictures inverted relative to one another. These experiments require the subject’s verbal ability to report on orientation; make assumptions about what counts as upright in a picture in the first place; and assume that the subject already knows the difference between the upright and the upside down. But infants cannot speak and do not follow instructions , and presumably we do not know whether infants know the difference between upright and upside down as we do, although some of them certainly find it quite funny to look at things upside down. An experiment can compensate for this by testing how infants smile at faces that are oriented at different angles (Watson, Hayes, Vietze, and Becker 1979). But this raises the following questions: (1) Do infants smile less at faces ninety degrees to their own because the faces are at ninety degrees, and therefore less familiar? Or (2) is the unfamiliarity of odd-looking faces the basis of one...