In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 Introduction From Voicelessness to Voice Non enim eram infans qui non farer, sed iam puer loquens eram. I was no longer an infant who does not speak, but a speaking child. —Saint Augustine, Confessions THE IDEA OF INFANCY as an unspeaking state beyond the limits of language and pregnant with potentiality has captivated philosophers since the time of Saint Augustine (354–430 a.d.). In the First Book of Confessions, Saint Augustine describes his own transition from the state of the speechless infant to that of the speaking child who has gained the symbolic capacity of language. He meditates on the acquisition of simple signification and observes how it grants the possibility to utter one’s will and escape the helpless state of infancy.1 The twentieth-century philosopher of logic and language Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) uses this passage by Augustine as a starting point for his Philosophical Investigations, when he ruminates on the primitive language of children.2 He also explores the idea of the ‘unspoken’ earlier, in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, when he tests the limits of language and meaning and finds the boundaries of language where sense ends—in nonsense.3 The contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben furthers these ideas in Infancy and History (1993), where he argues that the “Ur-limit in language” that Wittgenstein seeks “is the very transcendental origin of language, nothing other than infancy.”4 Agamben concludes, “the limits of languages are to be found . . . in an experience of language as such, in its pure self-reference.”5 For these three philosophers the speechless infant , or “infans qui non farer,” in the state of becoming a speaking child, or “puer loquens,” inhabits language itself while acquiring the symbolic capacity inherent to signification. Whether approaching the state of infancy from the perspective of philosophy, linguistics, or psychoanalysis, thinkers continually find a source of the unspoken in the ‘infant/child.’ In this volume I explore how leading figures in the Russian avant-garde similarly employed a construct of the ‘infant/child’ in order to tap into the potentiality of infancy as a state beyond the limits of language. A study of infantilism in the literature, Introduction 4 art, and theory of the Russian avant-garde, this book traces a trajectory from the unspeaking child, or infans, to the child empowered with voice—puer loquens. The topics raised by philosophers like Augustine, Wittgenstein, and Agamben, including voicelessness and the unspoken, the limits of language and the boundaries of sense, and the pure experience of self-referential language, recur throughout this study of how the Russian avant-garde constructed the ‘infant/child’ in relation to language. I argue that significant leaders within the Russian avant-garde employed a construct of the ‘infant/child’ as an unspeaking subject precisely in order to confront the materiality of language and signification itself. In this study, which argues for the centrality of infantile primitivism and an infantile aesthetic within the theory and practice of the Russian avant-garde, I describe a phenomenon I identify in works of avant-garde art, literature, and theory by the artist Mikhail Larionov, the poet Aleksei Kruchenykh, the theorist Viktor Shklovsky, and the writer Daniil Kharms. At the same time, each of these figures serves as an exemplar for a broader movement among several closely interrelated movements within the Russian avant-garde. I find that the widespread concern with the infant/child amounts to a vital trend within the avant-garde movement, sometimes marking a key developmental stage, sometimes crucial in the poetics or thought of an individual, and sometimes marking an entire group’s aesthetic practice. I trace how an infantile primitivism , or the collection, exhibition, and imitation of children’s art and language by leading avant-garde figures, moves along a continuum toward an assertion of an infantilist aesthetic, a term I use to describe theory and practice that assert the independent value of the infantile perspective and the child’s own subjectivity. The meaning of these key terms hinges on the word ‘infant’ and its etymological, linguistic, and philosophical associations with the idea of the ‘unspeaking’ subject. Indeed, I would argue that it is the infant’s “preverbal” state and the child’s position before the conventions of verbal and visual representation that predetermine the avant-garde fascination for the borderline figure of the ‘infant/child.’ From a linguistic and psychological perspective, the unspeaking state of infancy represents the period that precedes language. Julia Kristeva develops the idea of the preverbal state before...

Share