DELEUZE

"We don't claim to have written a madman's book, just a book in which one no longer knows-and there is no reason to know- who exactly is speaking, a doctor, a patient, an untreated patient, a present, past of future patient. That's why we used so many writers and poets; who is to say if they are speaking as patients or doctors- patients or doctors of civilization. Now, strangely, if we have tried to go beyond this traditional duality, it's precisely because we were writing together. Neither of us was the madman, neither of us was the psychiatrist; there had to be two of us in order to find a process that was not reduced either to the psychiatrist or his madman, or to a madman and his psychiatrist. The process is what we call a flux. Now, once again, the flux is a notion that we wanted to remain ordinary and undefined. This could be a flux of words, ideas, shit, money, it could be a financial mechanism or a schizophrenic machine: it goes beyond all dualities. We dreamed of this book as a flux-book."
(from "In Flux" in Chaosophy. By Felix Guattari, Semiotext[e], NY, 1995.)

Deleuze and Guattari are a challenge. And I guess that is as it should be. In Guattari's quote above, he is explaining a core challenge of his work to our existing world order. How else could one challenge how we view the world, other than by "becoming" and creating in an unprecedented manner. If things are not as we understand them from our privileged and separated position, then we need to throw out all the rules and write, as in the best of literature, in a way that takes us out of our selves and our supposed relationship to the world.

Both Deleuze and Carroll challenge our rules, and discover entirely new universes down the rabbit hole. There approaches are so distinctive in fact, that I find myself struggling to discover order and explanation. But as I struggle to understand Deleuze, that effort seems in direct conflict with the author's own intent. Perhaps there are intensities and collectivities in our experience and our unconscious that are beyond structure and order, could these things simply be the things themselves? I do not know. I feel as if I can see the door that Deleuze and Guattari open into an alternative universe -- Carroll as well? -- but I am far from entering the flux and becoming.

One thing I must say relative to our readings here is how Deleuze and or Guattari relate that art and literature are forums for the "political" communication of the unconscious. To Deleuze, "literature is productive, not representative. Literature has the power to mobilize desire, to create new pre-personal investments, and enables thought and affects that extend beyond the human." Alice is about becoming and Deleuze's alternative reality is a world of becoming.

I so want order and explanation, but there is so much of art and literature that resists that order. The best of art and literature tap into something deeper of human experience that goes beyond the personal to the universal, yet unclassifiable. Does our bizarre Alice and her becoming somehow relate to Deleuze's concept of becoming-woman? Has our scientific desire for explanation and classification left us with gaps in our understanding of the human experience?

I can see how a deep dive into Deleuze could help us reach a key that opens a door into a secret garden. There is much to explore here, but the dislodging of dogma, order and structure is an uncomfortable process. Does the young girl of our attention have something to tell us here?

FYI -- CONTEMPORARY

LEWIS CARROLL READINGS

In a forward to the museum book, Dreaming in Pictures: The Photography of Lewis Carroll, Neal Benezra writes that one of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “…special strengths has been its willingness to investigate the origins of modern culture and modern life, broadly defined. Sometimes the best way to do this is to look at art that does not at first seem to fit our definition of modernity.”

I find this statement helpful, as I struggle to understand the significance or works like Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland and authors like J.M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll. It is rather easy to get lost in the obsessive speculation about the adult authors’ seemingly unhealthy level of interest in young girls. But if we look at Alice in Wonderland or Carroll’s photographs of children as a way to “investigate the origins of modern culture,” we can hopefully wind down a somewhat more productive road.

Carroll’s fantastical tale to the Liddell girls can be analyzed from hundreds of perspectives, given the richness and perversity and unexpected fantasticality of much of the narrative. My interest today will focus on what it has to say about our societal ideas of children. Mr. Hodgson (Carroll) made up a story to entertain the young girls, and in doing so, perhaps revealed some things about children and adult perceptions of childhood.

The nonsense language and dense imagination of Carroll’s work is an adult effort to recapture or grasp something of the imagination and innocence of youth. The writing of Carroll and others in this period seems to highlight a belief of the magical innocence of the child -- a kind of purity of imagination -- that we lose after entering adulthood. The perception of this adult-child gap seems to have filled both Barrie and Carroll with a longing for that more magical, natural state.

As we’ve seen from our readings, the image of the pure yet somehow sexualized young girl was used for advertising soap and many other commodities. Carroll/Hodgson was drawn to capturing this essence in his photography and his storytelling. There was obviously a desire there that was certainly more than prurient. The sweet, innocent child is truly a beautiful thing, and the photographer of Alice Liddell seems to have sought to capture both that reality and the inevitable transition to sexual maturity. The knowing eyes of Alice and Xie and many others in the Carroll collection demonstrate an arresting in-betweenness.

I’ve attached an ad from my collection that is likely from the late 19th century which has some of the qualities of the childhood imagery we have considered to date. The cute little girl with the rabbit in the chocolate advertisement does have the sweetness of youth, and the rabbits obviously represent a kind of spring or rebirth, hence the Easter bunny. Perhaps Carroll and society’s obsession with images of childhood are enmeshed somehow with this idea of beginning or an unspoiled Eden, now forever lost to the adult audience.

We long for the simplicity and purity represented by the little smile on the face of our chocolate advertising girl. Yes, she’s cute, but there is something as satisfying as chocolate about her smile and stance. Carroll tried to photograph and write about this illusive quality of the child. Perhaps he wanted to revert to that state, whether real or imaginary.

Carroll is interesting for the success of his venture into this realm. We don’t know quite why, but it is an investigation into the magic of childhood that most certainly recognizes something of a loss for both Carroll and the world of the modern adult. Desire, loss and the positioning of the child in modernity – perhaps. At the very least, there is rich written and visual material here for our investigation into the origins of modern life and culture.

A POEM FROM "THE AMERICAN SPEAKER" PUBLISHED IN 1900

This poem is an interesting example of a turn of the century message about children. What did Americans at the time think of children? What did the publishers of the book think of children? The book, which reads rather as an instruction manual for both adults and children, seems to want to categorize children as special and precious. Something separate from the adult world. So sweet, so tender, so almost religiously pure.

I will bring in more things from this book and others that seem to have proliferated during this period of American history. The lessons are fascinating, and the very existence of these cheap volumes is evidence that children were garnering great attention in this era. I doubt it has always been so. The attention is almost fetishistic here. This book teaches both parents and children how to be, and the lessons are thought-provoking and enlightening. Perhaps, a book like "The American Speaker" can tell us more about attitudes relative to children than any of Hodgson's more arty english child photographs of his little friend, Alice.

A QUOTE FROM LEWIS CARROLL AND A PICTURE FROM 1950

Peter Pan Readings

"...Nana must go about her duties in a most ordinary manner, so that you know in your bones that she performs them just so every evening at ix, naturalness must be her passion; indeed, it should be the aim of every one in the play, for which she is now setting the pace. All the characters, whether grown-ups or babes , must wear a child's outlook on life as their only important adornment. If they cannot help being funny they are begged to go away..."
J.M. Barrie

In J. M. Barrie's self-amused dedication of the play, Peter Pan, to his childhood chums, I was most struck by the above revelatory stage instructions. Barrie's commitment to the pleasures and benefits of a "child's outlook on life," is obvious as he revels in the prepubescent creativity of the five. In struggling to understand the world's deeply-held affection for Peter Pan and the Darlings, my guess would have to rest with the above instructions. The world that welcomed Peter Pan must be a world that longs for the creative imagination of childhood. It is certainly a world lost to most adults, and I suspect to most children of modernity as well.

As for me, though I also miss the lost world of childhood and its magic, Tinkerbell and Peter Pan fail to return me to those simpler times. Perhaps too much time has past, or the English setting is too off-putting -- but no, that can't be it, for Mary Poppins retains its spark. But there is something overly precious about the story of Peter Pan to my mind, as there is with J.M. Barrie's cutesie dedication pages. But my liking a work or not is not significant in itself, rather I'm hoping it serves as a way into a better understanding of the story's mass appeal.

The fact that Barrie lost his brother at a young age must have sparked the idea of the child who could never grow up, but rather than focusing on the tragic, the story of Peter Pan seems to glory in the magic of staying in the special place of childhood. Grown ups end up losing their imaginations, and having to spend their entire lives slaving away at desks in depressing offices. Barrie's recreation of his own childhood in fiction is an effort to both define that magical time and rue its loss in the adult world.

What strikes me most personally about Barrie's conception of Peter Pan is the idea of the halcyon days of childhood, when everything was perfect and all appeared possible -- even the most fantastical ideas. In culture's attempts to understand childhood, we mustn't ignore this age of innocence and our appreciation for its inevitably lost advantages. I remember when the entire landscape of the world seemed like a big adventure waiting to happen. Days were filled with play and excitement, and there were no storm clouds on the horizon. I can see that innocence in my six-year-old's eyes today and it is a joy to behold. Likely Peter Pan taps into that mine of pleasure that remains when we think back upon that lost world.

I can't help but wonder if this longing for the lost world of childhood surfaces for a reason during this era in human development. As agrarian society shifted to a more urban industrialized age, perhaps the world was recognizing its increasing loss of innocence and simplicity. The huge smokestacks and industrial machinery of Barrie's British Isles were a dramatic change for human culture. Barrie's appreciation of and fictionalization of the magic of childhood can undobutedly be seen as a cultural longing for a simpler time.

Peter Pan is likely to stay with us as long as we miss the simplicity and joy of childhood and find it lacking in our modern adult world. In other words, Peter Pan is here to stay.

AMERICAN RUNESCAPES (CHILDSCAPES #3)

AMERICAN RUNESCAPES (CHILDSCAPES #2)

American Runescape (Childscape 1)

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
Rainer Maria Rilke