The Well of Being: Childhood, Subjectivity, and Education

4. Childhood and the Intersubject

4 Childhood and the Intersubject The most highly developed earthly man . . . is the highest synthetic degree of the child. —Novalis1 Boundary Work Homo clausus fell slowly apart over the course of the twentieth century. The urges and tendencies that led to his deconstruction came from many quarters. The rise and ascendancy of evolutionary theory reformulated Western notions of personal/cultural development and change. The Freudian revolution coincided with the rise of multiple visions of selfhood through the findings of cultural anthropology, which in turn emerged from the ever-increasing intervisibility of cultures that followed the explosion of travel and communications technologies. That explosion has now resulted in a transformed information environment. The silent, logical cosmos of print—the cosmos of the discrete self—is rapidly giving way to the new electronic, digitized cosmos of binary code. The new information world is as dramatically new as was the world of the book for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is different because it is a more plural world—where digital and analogical (of both voice and picture and printed word) modes meet and mix, but above all where space and time are overcome in the simulacrum, the representation , or the “virtual.” Now the cultural experience of subjectivity and intersubjectivity is both immediate and removed: self is here and there, other is there and here. One is everywhere and nowhere. 105 The new information environment allows us to understand in a new way the extent to which subjectivity itself is a virtual reality— dependent on fantasy, projection and introjection of “unreal” contents, and hypothesis-testing—constructed as an ongoing project that travels across intersubjective boundaries, whose systemic properties include both self and other: an intersubject. As the modern, technologically mediated subject travels across boundaries of physical time and space with telephone and video and satellite and airplane and automobile, both cultural time and space and the internal, psychological time and space of the individual are in analogous situations of transgressive relations . The new time-space constructed by technology creates corresponding discourses of intersubjectivity and subjectivity. Although these discourses are generated by a certain class and economic group, their proliferation is a planetary phenomenon, for wherever this information environment touches, it creates a new situation of intervisibility. The effects of this latest technologically induced revolution in consciousness can be mapped in widening or narrowing concentric circles, depending on whether one starts with the macro or the micro level. If we start with the macro, the changes first appear on the geopolitical and macroeconomic levels, then on the national level and within its institutions, then in the subcultures within nations, then in the life of the community, in relationships within subgroups in the community, in the family, in relations between individuals in public and in private spheres, and in the individual’s understanding of herself and her relation to her immediate and far world, both in terms of possibilities for and constraints on individual thriving. The concern here is not so much to analyze these multiple levels, or the ways in which the new transcendent time-space created by the information revolution affects each, as to consider how the last two levels—the subjective and the intersubjective— are affected, and what is the role of childhood in culture and society in mediating whatever changes result. The factors contributing to the ongoing historical reconstruction of subjectivity are causally overdetermined. The self in any given historical period or culture is a product, not just of the information environment, but of a multiplicity of other discourses—including cultural, economic, sexual, familial, political, scientific, demographic, and educational. While the bases of subjectivity are given in lived experience—in the experience of the body, the phenomena of perception, the expression and the vicissitudes of genetic predispositions, and the coherent sedimentation of intersubjective experience—historically mediated processes determine which elements of lived subjectivity are emphasized and which are deemphasized by any given culture during any given period. 106 The Well of Being One major dimension of the cultural construction of subjectivity— and one that is particularly sensitive to changes in the information environment —has to do with the extent to which the structure and experience of self is implicitly understood as part of a field structure that includes other selves, or whether the subject is considered as an atom, or discrete unit. Once we loosen the modern Western middle-class notion of a discreet, clearly boundaried self and...