"Fugitive Rehearsals: The Ferality of Kaspar Hauser, Playground, Performances, and the...

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 62

4Fugitive Rehearsals: The Feralityof Kaspar Hauser, PlaygroundPerformances, and theTransversality of ChildrenBryan Reynolds & Donovan Sherman

Very brief analysis of childhood behavior shows that such combina-tions as histrionic play, bluff, playful threat, teasing play in responseto threat, histrionic threat, and so on form together a single totalcomplex of phenomena. And such adult phenomena as gamblingand playing with risk have their roots in the combination of threatand play.

Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (181)

The figure of the child, as paradigmatic trope of “child” or incarnationof “childhood,” poses an anxious contribution to theoretical discoursesof subjectivity. The child embodies aspects of alterity, thereby delimitingpossibilities with regard to sanctioned subjectivation. It also traces thepotential for subjective growth, allowing on explicit or subterranean lev-els the capacity for transformative processes of subjectivation to occur.Michel de Certeau describes this paradoxical situation of childhood as“to be other and to move toward the other” (110). In this formula, thecentral contradiction of the child’s classification within official culture’sdominant systems becomes a result of negative formulations: youth mustembody the non-subject while performing against the non-subject; it mustbe other while learning to create the other in its inception as human.As transversal theorists, we break away from the vagueness and nega-tivity implicit in the term “other” and instead recover the mechanics ofCerteau’s statement as enabling through its activation of unlimited oppor-tunity and definitional fluidity as both agential and positive processualqualities. In our considerations, the child embodies the conditions offugitivity, which is to say, elusive activity of resistance, change, and

162

10.1057/9780230239289 - Transversal Subjects, Bryan Reynolds

Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 163

Fugitive Rehearsals 163

adaptation, capable of happily defying authoritative structures andaltering established meanings and determinations. Our interventionis therefore to problematize the child’s societal entrapment as neces-sary transgression of and threat to the adult-dominating-child hierarchyfoundational to most of today’s official cultures and the state machinerycomprised of the cultures” sociopolitical conductors (familial, educa-tional, juridical, and government structures). In doing so, we hope togenerate spaces for subjunctive movements and transversal potential-ities that encourage critical reassessments of the logic underlying thelongstanding power structures integral to this pervasive paradigm.

Contemporary cultural representations of childhood often reveal fis-sures in the logic and assumptive frameworks they reciprocally attemptto support. These frequently surface as spaces of threatening transgres-sion; for instance, recent debates on children’s societal integration havetackled this problem with an array of appropriations, from bestsellingbooks, such as the Dangerous Book for Boys and its companion DaringBook for Girls, to thriving urban youth gang subcultures to the con-scription of children into Congolese tribal conflict. Without assumingan ethical position on children’s roles within this spectrum, we canobserve that the possibility of rupturing dominant social systems accom-panies the child’s cognitive, emotional, and physical development.However, simply put, every socially-sanctioned adult subject has atsome point experienced childhood. To function in society, then, onemust have spent time at least rehearsing, typically with much play,its possible unraveling. We want to argue that, rather than containingthis notion as a spatiotemporally closed-off space in which alterity isstripped and adult subjects are created, childhood’s condition as neces-sarily subversive – a fugitive rehearsal within official culture – traces aspace rich with alternative conceptions and fluctuations of subjectivity.Like in Gregory Bateson’s analogy between map-territory relations andchildren’s communication-play relations, we understand that this trac-ing, as when mapmaking, invokes the tenuous links and unfillable gapsbetween map and territory as signifiers and referents of the previousexperiences of an explorer/cartographer (see Chapter 3 for analysis ofthe cartographic process). This situation is especially evocative whenmodes of communication are less standardized in official terms asthey normally are in the cases of children, thereby further enhanc-ing the inaccessibility of their experiences and precipitating amplifiedinterpretive play for both participant and observer. Explorations ofchildhood, then, can prompt opportunities for affecting and enablingvarious conceptualizations of subjectivity vis-à-vis the amorphousness


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 164

164 Transversal Subjects

and permeability fugitively thriving in the interstices within programsfor and discourses on the subjectivation of children and their potentialto become civilized subjects.

In transversal terms, then, the practice of child development offersa complex network of practices that act orthogonally to traditionalnotions of subjectivity that restrict themselves to the binary oppo-sition between humanist/essentialist and post-humanist/constructivistidea-fields (see Chapter 1 on this division). As manifestations of poten-tial and performers of play, the child presents continual openings ofsubjunctive space, prompting “what-if” and “as-if” considerations; asliminal occupant of social acclimation, the child becomes a fugitivesubject that challenges cohesive individual formations; as representa-tion of epistemological gaps, the child gestures toward absent-spacesthat fracture the totalization of circulated knowledge. Crucially, child-hood’s capacities for transversal movements are in fact encouraged bythe very structures of teleology and state-machinery-sanctioned integra-tion that they apparently challenge, so long as such fugitivity occurswithin specifically bounded spaces. From the viewpoint of the statemachinery, children’s potential for transversality is thus contained andsupervised, always contextualized within the carefully monitored pas-sageway into adulthood. “Children” and “adults” become negativelydefined subjective formations, prompting tensions that become theatri-cal in their balances of observation and enactment. A specular gap installsitself between the authoritative structures that sculpt the experiencesof childhood and the actors that threaten to break out of their pre-scribed journeys. This comprises a modality of pressurized belongings,in which the entrance and subsequent inclusion and/or assimilationof differences, such as from an outside individual’s or group’s abstract(ideological, ideational) and physical properties, into subjective and offi-cial territories – in this case, the absorption of children into adulthood –leads to expulsions, reconfigurations, and/or expansions of the bordersof the effected territories. Hence, rather than remain inside a rigid modelof development, each party involved in the subjectifying, spatiotemporalnegotiation of childhood marks its complement as the apparatus of childdevelopment threatens constantly to break from its form. Instead of amechanism endeavoring to dissuade anti-subjugating movements, wehave pressurized belongings giving way to comings-to-be alternativesubjectivities. Childhood becomes haunted with fugitivity at its everymove. In addition, the carefully maintained otherness of developmentmay provoke transversal movements on the part of its witnesses, such asparents, caretakers, or other children.


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 165


This chapter focuses on historical sites of childhood that derail theprescribed course of official subjectivity’s calibrated theater and slipmercurially toward or into the unpredictable, metatheatrical realm oftransversality. To this end, we look at three phenomena: (1) the feralchild, as liminal and irritant to ontological and societal conceptionsof subjective selves, contextualized in a perverted playground; (2) thecommon, site-specific, purpose-built playground as theatrical manifes-tation of imposed subjective territories vis-à-vis the permeability of itsproscenium; and (3) the shopping mall as romanticized playground rep-resenting an alternative progression of the playground into modernity.In each site, we find within carefully constructed networks of subjec-tive development transversal movements that both challenge modalitiesof official conceptions of experience and initiate over-compensatoryresponses by state machinery. We hope to show that these cases under-score the entangled mechanics of the human condition’s constantarbitration.

The emergence of Kasparspace

And how long I had been playing I cannot describe because I did notknow what was an hour, or a day, or a week.

Kaspar Hauser, Autobiography (published in Masson 190)

The popular mythology surrounding Kaspar Hauser operates like Bibli-cal allegory: In May 1828, Kaspar, a pale, bedraggled sixteen-year oldboy, wandered into a town square in Nuremberg at dusk; malnourished,weak, and mumbling incomprehensible statements to himself – “I wantto be a rider, like my father was” – the emaciated and disturbed child fellinto the care of various town officials, notably Anselm von Feuerbach,a successful jurist and president of the Bavarian Court of Appeals. Ashe learned German, Kaspar utilized his newfound language to relatethe bizarre events of his background. Chained in a basement for years,given bread, water, and beaten by a mysterious stranger, he was set freewith only a note suggesting his royal lineage. Five years later he wasassassinated by a stranger whose identity remains a mystery to this day.

This abbreviated version of Kaspar’s story amalgamates the conflictedand oftentimes illogical apocrypha surrounding his life. This swarm ofnarratives constitutes an articulatory space, the aggregate of discursiveproperties that symbolize, inform, and encapsulate subjects, we call“Kasparspace.” Feuerbach himself contributed a prominent and influ-ential account to Kasparspace’s archive, entitled, with characteristic


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 166


flourish, “Kaspar Hauser: An Account of an Individual Kept in a Dun-geon, Separated From All Communication With the World, From EarlyChildhood to About the Age of Seventeen.” The document’s originalname, however, helps to situate Feuerbach’s writing within a larger andmore problematic telos of regimented subjective territory: “An Instanceof a Crime against the Life of the Soul (the Development of all its intel-lectual, moral, and immortal parts) of Man” (283). Appropriately, thetext incorporates this secondary title’s dual elements, acting as bothan observed account of concerned fascination and a passionate screedagainst perceived illegality. We find in Feuerbach’s writings a crucialtextual device that delimits and polices the articulatory space couchingthe notion of being a subjective individual in his contemporary socio-cultural context. Diverting from traditional dissective–cohesive modesof analysis, which seek to synthesize evidential findings into totaliz-ing interpretive packages, we embark here on an investigative–expansiveexploration of Feurbach’s account, which seeks to generate translucenteffects in Kasparspace as a means by which to chart its conflicting,imbricated codes and negotiated limits.

Midway through Feuerbach’s book an affective and personal styleabruptly takes over the narrative as the authorial voice changes fromstraightforward, if somewhat phlegmatic, storytelling to one of juridi-cal schematism. After relating Kaspar’s discovery and various efforts torehabilitate him, Feuerbach’s legal training emerges and the proceedingsshift from exploring the after-effects of Kaspar’s discovery to demand-ing accountability for his aberrance. We see this shift denoting a focuson Feuerbach’s dissective–cohesive mode of writing, which fits Kasparinto the extant official territory of law, an enclosed hermeneutical systemthat values and depends on causation and explicability. In this section,the jurist lists the crimes committed against Kaspar, outlining two majorareas of illegality, “imprisonment” and “exposure.” The passage relatingto imprisonment moves with clipped efficiency and delimits the pros-ecution along concrete lines, taking into account “the brutish den andcrippling position to which he was confined, and his coarse diet, whichwould scarcely have satisfied a dog” (310). In a similar vein, the sectionon exposure begins with a literal account of the corporeal harm under-gone by Hauser, relating that “his situation, both in respect to his mindand his body, exposed him evidently to the danger, either of falling intothe river Pzegnitz . . . or of being run down by carriages or horses” (310;italics in original). Thus far, Kaspar’s unseen and perhaps nonexistenttormenter faces culpability for incurring bodily damage and unlockingthe potential for further immolation. Thus, Kaspar’s condition can be


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 167


explained through commonplace dissective–cohesive sociopolitical sys-tems of logical deduction which rely on physical and corporeal notionsof “exposure” to danger.

Rather than simply finishing the catalogue of injury with this conclu-sion, however, Feuerbach departs from the dissective–cohesive tonalityand considers the metaphysical implications of Kaspar’s plight. He opensinstead an abstract understanding of crimes beyond the tangible, oreven articulatable. The theft of Kaspar’s “external liberty,” Feuerbachmaintains, has “no comparison with the injury done to his unhappybeing, by depriving him of the incalculable sum of inestimable benefitswhich can never be restored to him” (310). The mysterious antagonisthas bereft Kaspar of normal development, making him instead the prod-uct of a perverted playground unfit for the production of normal childrenwithin which Feuerbach locates infinite possibility: the corruption liter-ally “incalculable” and Kaspar’s chances of enjoying youth “miserablycrippled for the remainder of his life” (310). Adding theological and cog-nitive dimensions, the accusation moves beyond “the external corporealappearance of man” and considers the violation of “the inmost essenceof his spiritual being” and “the murderous robbery perpetrated uponthe very sanctuary of his rational nature” (311). In his struggle to eluci-date a dissective–cohesive metric for Kaspar’s loss, Feuerbach settles ontemporality; namely, the absence of childhood. In this maneuver, thetext encounters the paradoxical notion of changing “human destiny”while affirming that “nature overleaps nothing” (311). Anxiously caughtbetween breaking the course of predestination and obeying the axiomsof nature, the account settles on a lyrical solution: the imagistic inau-guration of Kaspar’s childhood as a ghost, an embodied nothingnessthat “follows him into his later years, not as a smiling genius, but asthe affrighted spectre, which is constantly intruding upon him at anunseasonable hour” (311). The poetic device deftly, if elliptically, movesFeuerbach’s trajectory between the implacability of the natural worldand the inhumanity of the crimes. Such a rhetorical maneuver echoesConstance, in Shakespeare’s King John, who laments her child’s absenceby making it corporeal and active:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,Remembers me of all his gracious parts,Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form. (3.4.93–7)


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 168


For both Constance and Feuerbach, inexplicability begets supernaturallyricism, which in turn attempts to make coherent and palatable theredefinition of subjective experience, in much the same way thattheology seeks to mitigate challenges precipitated by mystery.

The emergence of Kaspar’s ghost in Feuerbach’s narrative, like thebody of grief in Constance’s, belies the fragility of the very subjec-tive territory he wishes to maintain and preserve as official. But it alsoinvokes Kaspar’s inhabitation of more than one role in history, espe-cially as performed through his ghosting of future manifestations ofand within Kasparspace, as will be revealed when Kasparspace inter-sects with playgroundspace and shoppingmallspace later in this chapter.Feuerbach stumbles in his role as sociopolitical conductor, attempt-ing to cohere the dominant logics of his surrounding spacetime andreveals the urgency and effort needed for their upkeep. Conversely,Kaspar proves a distinct challenge to Feuerbach’s Enlightenment-era dis-cursive production. The account ends with the jurist acknowledgingKaspar’s paradoxical dimensions. Seemingly aware of his desperate toneand rhetorical circularity, Feuerbach asks the reader to consider Kaspar’ssingularity and illogical effrontery as evidence of his tragedy:

No other being than one who has experienced and suffered whatKaspar has, can be what Kaspar is; and he whose being indicates whatKaspar does, must have lived in a state such as that in which Kasparsays that he lived. . . . whoever should doubt Kaspar’s narration, mustdoubt Kaspar’s person. (313–14)

Kaspar’s very being acts as proof of the crimes committed against him.Feuerbach becomes enmeshed in hermeneutically circular reasoning: theonly recourse to articulation that can be engaged and trusted as real evi-dence could only originate from Kaspar himself, yet to understand thearticulation one would need to have “experienced and suffered whatKaspar has.” Moreover, as such, Kaspar would have to learn languagein order to articulate the experience he has, apparently, never had, butthat haunts him, awaiting an exorcism through inclusion into civiliza-tion. Crucially, Kaspar’s possible transversality – his disruptive capacity toalter the perceptual boundaries of Feuerbach’s subjective territory – is notdestroyed but limned, noted and encircled by the sociopolitical conduc-tion of Feuerbach’s discourse, an Iserian attempt at filling in the blanksand gaps in Kaspar’s developing narrative as interactive means by whichto internalize Kaspar’s experience and further constitute Feuerbach’sown subject position (see Chapter 1 for elaboration on Wolfgang Iser’s


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 169


reception theory). In effect, through his alterity, the child is made theexception to enveloping apparatuses of coherence within the dominantsystemic structure of German society, a force of transversality adrift insociopolitical conduction.

The purpose of what follows is to locate Feuerbach’s anxiety, whichencircles and suffuses his story of Kaspar, as a site where this formula-tion becomes realized. The chapter establishes a framework in the debatesbetween extant dominant discourses on subjectivity, the “realist” and“epistemic relativist” philosophies, specifically addressing the problem-atic notion of reducible subjectivity that rests between these theoreticalpoles. However, rather than pitch Kasparspace as a negotiable subjectof analysis on these axes, we then move to abandon the course towardattaining sum Kasparspace and consider the impossibility of encounter-ing Kaspar within such discourse. His subjectivities elude contemplationinasmuch as the articulatory space of “Kaspar” as text reveals not a lucidand tangible sentience at its center but a fluctuating engine of sociopo-litical conduction. Instead of seeking cohesion to Kaspar’s subjectivity,we are interested in the fugitive implications of Feuerbach’s rhetoricalmaneuverings of Kaspar’s “recovery” into civilization as he infers thecommunicability of the child’s consciousness while at the same timedenying possible threats to empirical and ontological bases of humanity.

What is it like to be yourself?: Kaspar asepistemic conundrum

In his book Fear of Knowledge, Paul Boghossian critiques various modesof reality-constructivism. He pays particular attention to epistemic rela-tivism, the Foucauldian notion of knowledge production as determinantof the boundaries of discursive spaces. As an appropriator of Foucault’sideas, Richard Rorty interprets the emblematic historical account ofGalileo’s confrontation with Cardinal Bellarmine. The anecdote personi-fies Rorty’s relativist position in his attempts to illuminate contemporaryepistemic limits by unpacking the seeming obviousness of Galileo’s cor-rectness. Bellarmine (in)famously declined to peer through Galileo’stelescope to observe the facticity of space, preferring instead to acceptthe reality of his holy scripture. Rather than be labeled “incorrect,” Rortyclaims, Bellarmine simply occupies a different system of knowledge.According to Rorty, for us, today, to “proclaim our loyalty to these dis-tinctions is not to say there are “objective” and “rational” standards foradopting them” (Boghossian 60) but instead to mark a shift in the struc-tures of our beliefs. Boghossian responds to Rorty’s claims by redefining


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 170


the problem. Bellarmine does not embody an entirely separate epistemicsystem, but rather selectively decides what properties of that system heaccepts as true. After all, inquires Boghossian, must the Cardinal “usehis eyes to note that the sun is shining, or that the moon is half full,or that the clear night-time Roman sky is littered with stars” (105)? ForBoghossian, the Bellarmine incident, canonized as dialectic of differ-ent views, in fact represents a single epistemic system filtered throughone character’s obstinate myopia. We can view this allegorical modeltransversally as one of competing articulatory formations of the subjec-tive and official territories that mutually support them. Galileospace andBellarminespace create friction in their overlap and refusal to coincideor capitulate to the other.

Boghossian sidesteps an examination of competing epistemic frame-works in his response to Rorty, though implicit in his criticism is theimpossibility of such conflicts existing in totality. Boghossian assertsthat an imbrication of system-values and perception must occur on somelevel. Both theorists, then, demonstrate a reluctance to admit to thepossibility of translucent effects occurring, in which the infinite codesof Galileospace and Bellarminespace diaphanously overlap with similar-ity, contradiction, and play within the same spacetime. Thomas Nagelposes a possible gesture towards this notion: remove the overlap ofspecies while retaining the subjunctive possibility of consciousness. In“What is it like to be a Bat?,” Nagel equates conscious experience asmeaning “there is something it is like to be that organism” (435). Theanswer to the titular question would have to find a reductive form ofsubjective experience capable of objective understanding.1 In such a for-mulation, “the phenomenological features must themselves be given aphysical account.” However, the irreducibility of a bat’s conscious experi-ence, given the currently available powers of observation and deployablevocabulary, seemingly displaces the solution to the realm of the impossi-ble, unless we had an “objective phenomenology” able to describe “thesubjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beingsincapable of having those experiences” (449). While Nagel grants phylo-genetic similarities between bats and humans, he also identifies bats as“a fundamentally alien form of life” (437). In locating an epistemicconflict rooted in the alterity that Rorty presupposed of Galileo andBellarmine, Nagel has created the process of its own undoing. If bats couldrelate their experiences, they would cease to be bats, and their proximityto human consciousness avoids the issue. The trick would be to find ablurring of the animal and human, other and self, in a brief momentof communicability before bat-ness became person-ness – a transversal


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 171


movement of becomings-bat, prompted by “what-if” considerations thatflourished into actions against dominant subjective borders. We focuson this act, whereby categorical subjectivities become confounded inrelation to agential movements that implicitly and explicitly offer para-doxical challenges to dominant systems, as central to this chapter’sconcerns.

Feuerbach’s account presents an analogue to Nagel’s bat in Kaspar, anorganism with human, mammalian form – allowing for identificationto occur in analogizing the “common denominator” of human-ness –yet possessing a different mode of experience and consciousness. Thuswe may view Feuerbach’s narrative as a potential response to Nagel’sparadox. Determining the exact parameters of Kaspar’s alterior con-sciousness presents a challenge, as the boy’s taxonomic status resistsa simple conflation of the animal and human. Kaspar was not raisedby animals; he was rather not raised by humans. The epistemic systemsseem to be more temporal than zoological, not between “human” and“animal” but between “human” and “human without normative pre-human experience.” “Always locked up in a prison,” where he “neversaw another person,” and had only “two wooden horses and a [toy]dog” with which he “always played” (Hauser cited in Masson 188; ourinsertion of “toy” follows Masson). Kaspar’s playtime can only havebeen, at best, a perversion of normalcy for which Feuerbach longs in theghostly dissolve of his relationship with Kaspar. Such definition throughboth subtraction and otherness explains the popularity of Kaspar as anexus of interpretive frameworks, a veritable tabula rasa for “what-if”considerations of ideologies and aesthetics. M. Read attributes this “cul-tural survival as legend” to Kaspar’s “applicability as proof of whateverpreconceived notion one has about the nature of the human mind,consciousness, and the relationship between the individual and the nat-ural and social world” (126). Kasparspace’s status as cultural-subjunctiveRorschach may have reached an apotheosis in Jeffrey Moussaieff Mas-son’s Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser, which attemptsboth to recover Kaspar’s experience as a case of sexual abuse and privilegethat story above other discourses. He asserts that “regardless of who hereally was, here is somebody who was abused” (54). The persistent blank-ness of “Kaspar” himself, and the historical record he has left, challengesstrategies of solidifying his subjective territory.2 Feuerbach wrestled withmany conflicting methods of knowing what it was like to be Kaspar,finally admitting to Nagel’s paradox: Kaspar’s conscious experience wasof not experiencing, at least not in a manner comprehensible throughnormative evaluative paradigms.


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 172


For Feuerbach, an answer for his dilemma finally surfaced. Althoughit resides in a kind of compulsory self-reflexivity and contained subjunc-tivity rather than attempts at intersubjectivity, it anticipates the theoriesof later phenomenologists like Hans-Georg Gadamer and Iser for whomintersubjectivity is an objective and symptom of effective hermeneutics(see Chapter 1). About his phenomenological-hermeneutic method,Gadamer writes,

Our starting point was that understanding is inseparable from lan-guage and that language is related to reason of every kind, and we cannow see how the whole of our investigation is subsumed under thisrubric . . . language is a medium where I and world meet or, rather,manifest their original belonging together. . . . For man’s relation tothe world is absolutely and fundamentally verbal in nature, and henceintelligible.3 (474–6)

Along these lines, Feuerbach deduced that Kaspar needed to learn lan-guage and articulate his own experience so that he could learn what it islike to be himself. For Feuerbach, Kaspar had emulative authority, whenan iconic subject causes becomings and comings-to-be due to its investedattention, which he then turned, reflexively, upon itself, creating a ver-sion of Kaspar that the boy himself must feel compelled to emulate. Asa result, potential occurrences of intersubjectivity that could have man-ifested between Feuerbach and Kaspar become diverted, turned inwards,and entrapped within Kasparspace.

Thus, according to popular accounts, including his own, Kaspar pro-ceeded to learn German, lucidly detail the events of his upbringing, andauthor an account of his life, all within about five months of his discov-ery. The sheer rapidity of his inculcation rivals the assimilation itself interms of incredulity; if modern psychological data are any indication,this acclimation launches the story out of the trappings of fiction andinto the mythological. The language acquisition alone confounds psy-chological sense. For instance, cognitive neuroscientist Stephen Pinker’ssurvey of linguistic data on children indicates that “acquisition of anormal language is guaranteed for children up to the age of six, issteadily compromised from then until shortly after puberty, and is rarethereafter” (293). Beyond the mechanics of learning language, how-ever, Kaspar’s mythology defies a deeper, social pattern. PsychologistHarry Harlow’s seminal experiments on maternal deprivation in rhesusmonkeys examined the phenomenon of childhood isolation by divid-ing newborn monkey infants into “semisocial isolation living cages” and


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 173


“total social isolation chambers” for intervals of three, six, and twelvemonths, and then studied their social interaction in the “play room.”Many of the results reported in his findings, “Total Social Isolation inMonkeys,” match descriptions of Kaspar upon his discovery: monkeysin the three-month group suffered “emotional anorexia” and would noteat (92), just as Kaspar showed “marks of aversion” to food (Feuerbach284); monkeys in the twelve-month group had been “almost obliter-ated socially,” with no attempts to interact with other monkeys and atotal passivity (Harlow 94), just as Kaspar exhibited a “brutish dulness[sic] which either leaves external objects entirely unnoticed, or staresat them without thought” (Feuerbach 284). The infants were incapableof interaction, and in many cases were attacked by control-group mon-keys, yet they showed no differences in responding to learning-set anddelayed-response tasks. Prompted by these results, Harlow parses outsocial cognition from intellectual cognition, concluding that “the “intel-lectual mind” is far less crippled than the “social mind” by prolongedtotal social deprivation if adequate experience is provided subsequently”(95). Whereas Kaspar’s intellectual mind may have survived his appar-ent ordeals, what is truly remarkable about Feuerbach’s account, froma psychological standpoint, is Kaspar’s near-total recovery of not onlylanguage capacity but social intelligence.

We recall Pinker’s and Harlow’s work not to judge Feuerbach’s narrativeas “untrue,” and incur suspicion against one story or another. Rather,the rhesus monkey data indicate the speed by which Kaspar becamesocially adapted, learned proficiency in language, self-expression, andself narration – and furthermore applied these skills retroactively to hishitherto immanent life – after approximately twelve years in isolation.This seemingly impossible pace suggests a certain desperation in thestories orbiting and encapsulating Kaspar’s life to stress his suddenreintegration and avoidance of prolonged occupation within liminalsubjective spaces. A rapid recovery minimizes the temporal window inwhich Kaspar is both animal and man, both sides of Nagel’s incommu-nicable and/or incommensurable duality collapsed into one humanoidbody. In an age dominated by the inheritance of botanist/zoologist CarlLinnaeus’s taxonomical systems, one consciousness could not validly becategorized as within a state between species. Linnaeus himself unequiv-ocally did not allow for newness outside his rigid divisions. As he wrotein Systema Naturae, “each living being is propagated by an egg and thatevery egg produces an offspring closely resembling the parent. Henceno new species are produced nowadays” (18). In her study of feral chil-dren, Julia Douthwaite identifies speech as the sole medium through


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 174


which this categorical jump could occur, as “only through speech, peo-ple assumed, could the children learn to reason and to communicatetheir thoughts. Only through speech could they explain the mysteriesof their real past and move squarely into civilization” (19).4 In order toavoid attacking his organizing subjective principles, Kaspar had to startnarrating himself as close to instantaneously as possible to both createhis own official territory and subjective space and resist the brief perme-ability of Kasparspace’s sociocultural borders. Feuerbach’s narrativizingof Kasparspace demonstrates a delicate and precise act of sociopoliti-cal conduction: he allows for subjunctive space to flourish by givingKaspar the possibility of being human, yet he relegates the possibilitiesof transversal movements back to Kaspar, resisting challenges to his ownunderlying borders of subjectivity.

Underlining Linnaeus’s taxonomical concerns were issues of policinghierarchical control over other species; thus, if nomenclature becomesmalleable that control becomes threatened. In her essay engaging FrancisBacon and the concept of ferality, “Calling Creatures by their TrueNames,” Erica Fudge describes Bacon’s scientism, a critical influence onEnlightenment-era discourse, as an act of placing the other through ter-ritorial categorization accompanied by a complementary elevation ofthe observer and organizer. For Bacon, according to Fudge, the powerto name was the power “to call the creatures by their real names (asAdam did) is to understand – to “know” – them; to know the creaturesis to wield power over them; and to wield power over them is to removehumans from their “infantile” place” and position them at “their originalposition of superiority on earth” (92). In short, through a circular syllo-gism, “power, in Bacon’s terms, means exploitation, and exploitation isproof of humanity” (Fudge 92). To take up a complementary project ofde-naming creatures – of allowing subjunctive movement to deconstructtheir subjective spaces – would, as such, de-power the observing, humanclass (for more on the roles of naming in this respect, see Chapter 1).

Written nearly a century after Kaspar’s emergence, Dr A. F. Tredgold’sinfluential 1908 study entitled Mental Deficiency: Amentia articulated asimilar fear of transversal subjectivity along generational lines. Dedicat-ing the book to “All those Persons of Sound Mind, who are interested inthe welfare of their less-fortunate fellow-creatures,” Tredgold considersthe many environmental and hereditary factors of his subject matter.By subjecting children to such factors as “chronic alcoholism, tuber-culosis, mental worry and anxiety, and the hurry and scurry, with alltheir attendant excesses and dissipations, of modern life,” he main-tains that parents set the stage for transformation into a generationof the mentally deficient (362). In a startling turn of phrase, Tredgold


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 175


concludes, “the environment of today will become the heredity oftomorrow” (68). Elsewhere, a similar line of thinking leads to a moreeschatological prediction, in which, “as soon as the state is reached inwhich there is a preponderance of persons suffering from the dimin-ished moral, intellectual, and bodily vigour, the community is inevitablydoomed” (361). For both Bacon and Tredgold, the notion of a Nage-lesque reducible yet vocabulary-dependent subjectivity construes Kasparas merely a human without language; this in turn fashions humanityas merely Kaspar with language. In response to this potential subjec-tive threat, which proposes an exposure of subjectivity’s fluctuationand arbitration, Feuerbach’s text condenses the habilitation process withpreposterous speed, furiously acclimating Kaspar to the comprehensivearticulations of his sociocultural environment.

By examining the threat of epistemic violence along temporal lines,Tredgold identifies another possible terror in encountering feral children:the revelation of historical contingency. Ian Hacking locates contingencyas a fundamental “sticking point” of constructivist ethos, defining it as“the recognition that X is highly contingent, the product of social his-tory and forces,” while remaining “something we cannot, in our presentlives, avoid treating as part of the universe in which we interact withother people, the material world, and ourselves” (20). By missing an inte-gral part of childhood, Kaspar cannot simply be “human,” though thepossibility of human status cannot be abnegated. The resultant threatof historical contradiction extends beyond mere cognitive dissonanceand hints at a possible teleological reprisal of social reality, a revolutionthat John Searle equates with an “erosion of acceptance of large institu-tional structures” that can be “terrifying” in its reassessment of power(117). Feuerbach’s doubling of Kaspar into a spectral embodiment of lostyouth represents a necessary device to maintain the timeline of “natu-ral” progression and thus a shield against a categorical breakdown. Thethreat of contingency recalls Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s beliefthat “psychology always presupposes cosmology” (175). To accept Kas-par as a variation of “the human” would be to admit to the possibility ofan unrealized, alternate nature. Feuerbach constructs multiple Kasparsin order to preserve one singularity: the normative subject.

“The mere apparatus”: Peter of Hanover andthe subjective properties of language

In the present state of things a man abandoned to himself in themidst of other men from birth would be the most disfigured of all.Prejudices, authority, necessity, example, all the social institutions in


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 176


which we find ourselves submerged would stifle nature in him and putnothing in its place. Nature there would be like a shrub that chancehad caused to be born in the middle of a path and that the passers-bysoon cause to perish by bumping into it from all sides and bending itin every direction.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (37)

And herein lies the paradoxical move that most interests our inquiry.For Feuerbach and other caretakers, transversal subjects must becomecaged, encircled, and maintained yet not necessarily destroyed in orderto retain a sense of subjective territory for dominant culture-systems.Rather than present a model in which this subversion becomes con-tained within the official culture, we maintain that the transversalmovements provoked by Kasparspace add a certain threat, play, and fluc-tuation to environments it encompasses and through which it moves.No matter how closed-off from humanity Feuerbach attempts to makeKaspar, he must always allow for the threatening possibility of hisreturn to humanity – and humanity’s return to Kasparspace – by thepeculiar formulation of childhood, which, to rehearse Certeau’s claim,moves toward the other as it embodies it. We maintain that, ratherthan acquiring the label “other” the child becomes agential in its fugi-tive rehearsals, capable of exposing transversal possibilities. In responseto Kasparspace in this regard, Feuerbach’s account turns Kantian in itsrhetorical progression as it skirts between two equally threatening possi-bilities: total alterity or total empathy. The jurist demonstrates facilityin accepting the possibility of Kaspar’s integration while skirting theimplications of constructivist ideas to his worldview. Kaspar’s develop-mental rapidity avoids categorical blurring and hierarchical disabling,while his multiple role-playing avoids historical doubt. Simultaneously,though, Feuerbach must also explicate the actual process of Kaspar’semergent consciousness without troubling those same concerns. Byclaiming that Kaspar’s self-narration is tantamount to his subjectivity –“whoever should doubt Kaspar’s narration, must doubt Kaspar’sperson” – Feuerbach engages Immanuel Kant’s notion of understandingas determinant of human experience and, like many twentieth-centuryphenomenologists such as Gadamer and Iser, opens the possibility forconsciousness to develop in the act of writing. For Kant, the “pureconcept of understanding” unifies both presentations in judgment andpresentations in intuition (294). As an influential juncture in Kant’sconception of conscious processes, the pure concept of understandingprovides holistic form to both transcendental and empirical content


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 177


and limns intuition and judgment into experience. The pure conceptgrants the ability to cohere appearances in the world with internalconsciousness and provides, as Anthony Savile puts it, “our single expe-riences with their representational capacity” (42). By displacing theburden of narrative upon Kaspar, and denying that faculty to anyoneelse, Feuerbach allows for a Kantian inversion of experience: by learn-ing the ability to predicate and judge – to understand – the externalworld, Kaspar crystallizes his selfhood, instantiating consciousness as hedescribes it (for more on the notion of subjectivity emerging throughwriting, see Chapter 5). Such inaugurating processes of subjectivity recalltransversal theory’s concept of reflexive-consciousness, which operatesthrough ongoing subjunctive contemplations of the “as-ifs” and “what-ifs” that simultaneously situate and guide experiences in relation tospacetime.

As “representational capacity,” writing becomes a vehicle for reflexive-consciousness, creating slippery and inconstant subjective modalitiesthat adventurously travel between territorializations. With this in mind,we turn to Kaspar’s own writings, as they exist today: a fragmented nar-rative of several pages that begin with the declaration, “I will write thestory of Kaspar Hauser myself!” (Hauser in Masson 189). As constantiveact, this statement demonstrates the transference of Kaspar-as-third-person to Kaspar-as-first: the phenomenological synthesis of observationto consciousness. This segment of his writings, the longest of only threein existence, is dated, “Beginning of November 1828,” which places itwithin five months of his discovery in Nuremberg (187). Masson’s intro-duction to his translation emphasizes the original’s grammatical errorsand misspellings before his correction of them: “I have not attempted tomaintain the spelling errors, nor have I kept Kaspar Hauser’s exact punc-tuation, although it probably indicates something of the rhythm of histhinking, or at least the mental pauses he was making” (187). As sociopo-litical conductor and border patrol for Kasparspace, the act of translationseeks to fill Kaspar’s blankness with inferences as to mental processes,reenacting Feuerbach’s narrativization of Kaspar and elision of his sub-jectivity. We view Masson’s work not as conduit to an “original” Kasparmemoir; instead, we see it as a contribution to Kasparspace throughits performance of authenticity. Masson’s dissective–cohesive tendenciesreveal themselves in his introduction, whereupon he notes his “trans-lation of the complete preserved fragment” (189). The only notion of“completeness” apparent in his writing is his construction of it as such;yet the text persists as fragment and incompletion. The notion of a “com-plete fragment” illuminates the processes by which Kaspar’s account,


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 8


even in the critical theory of his time, becomes subjected to desires forcohesion and insularity.

Understanding that Kaspar’s account, as presented by Masson, embod-ies the subjective processes of its translator, we view it still as a vital textthat demonstrates the persistent belief in writing as Kantian syntheticprocesses of becomings-consciousness. Such an optic highlights the con-cretizing syntax of the fragment, which roots itself in self-observationsof the tangible:

The length of the prison was 6 to 7 feet, and 4 feet in width. Therewere two small windows which were 8 to 9 inches in height . . . I willtell you what I always did, and what I always had to eat, and howI spent the long period, and what I did . . . the water and bread, alwayscome, when I woke up, the bread and water were there as they hadbeen before the man came to see me. . . . When we were in the city,he put a letter in my hand, and said I should remain standing thereuntil such a one as you will come, then you tell him he should takeyou to where this letter belongs. (Hauser in Masson 189–93)

We recognize the apparent contradiction in this passage. Kaspar couldnot have understood the man’s directive to “remain standing there”unless he comprehended its semiotic coding; at the same time, Kaspar’slack of literacy comprises a critical component of Feurbach’s narrativiza-tion. However, this seeming impossibility only further exemplifies themultiple subjectivities and transversal potential that Kasparspace con-tains, and highlights Feurbach’s need to emphasize Kaspar’s illiteracy inmaintaining his alterity. The passage thus creates a new version of Kaspar,one whose literacy extends into his recollection, retroactively civilizinghis own development. As it moves from description of his cell to out-line of his narration to recollection of his deliverance, the language ofKaspar’s autobiography acts as its own subject; Kaspar’s twinned beingdispels its mystery and fills its persistent blankness. The introduction ofthe second person (“such a one as you”) implicates the reader in its pro-cesses, the necessary audience that validates Kaspar’s existence throughanalogy. Kaspar’s ability to write laminates his selves with a societallubricant, easing his pressurized belonging into the environment.

Even with Kant’s synthetic notions in place, it was not enough forKaspar to possess the means to become subjectively transferable throughwriting; he had to desire to do so.5 The role of desire in relating con-scious experience recalls another celebrated feral child, Peter the “wildboy” of Hanover. The case of Peter, found in the woods near Hamelin in


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 179


1725, has prompted various stories and theories of his state and relationto humanity. However, it is widely accepted that he attained celebritystatus while living in the royal court, under the tutelage of Dr. JohnArbuthnot. Peter, who unlike Kaspar died without ever learning lan-guage, drew attention from many luminaries, including Daniel Defoeand Jonathan Swift. Defoe’s account of Peter’s life, the pamphlet MereNature Delineated, provides an example of the pre-Rousseauist idea of theferal child without desire. Defoe’s thesis is that Peter lacks a soul, andexhibits only the bare Cartesian mechanics of nature; his lack of languageprovides the continuance of this plight. In contemplating this, Defoeponders the precision with which facets of humanity must be balancedto construe the human. According to Defoe, Peter’s lack of speech

assists very much to keep him just in the same State of Nature, thathe was in when brought first among us. . . . This shews us, what astrange Machine the Body of a Man is, that any little Breach in thewhole Contexture, interrupts the whole Motion. . . . the least Disorderof the Parts, even of the mere Apparatus, as it may be called, madeby Nature for the Reception of a Soul, renders that Soul unhappilyuseless to itself. (qtd in Newton 202)

While not admitting that Peter has a soul, Defoe endeavors to keepopen a distant escape route from this imprisonment, marveling that any“little breach” or the “least disorder of the parts” may crowd out human-ity closer to “Mere Nature.” Michael Newton theorizes that, in Defoe’sconundrum, Peter “must possess a soul in order to reinstate again theessential difference of human beings from animals,” while “his soul mustactually be locked up, useless and unapparent, in order to maintain ourdifference from him” (207). In constructing a progression of nature tohuman, Defoe must incorporate essential blocks into the continuum soas not to infer the possibility of retrogression. Unlike Kaspar, the contain-ment of Peterspace becomes more tightly sealed within the official cul-ture surrounding it; Peter is an unhappy creature without the subjunctivecapacities of writing to allow the dangerous passageway to subjectivity,that is, the kind of passageway that provoked a translucent effect bothexciting and terrifying to Feuerbach (for more on literacy as criteria ofsubjectivity and Giorgio Agamben’s concept of exception, see Chapter 5).

Without the transcendental agent of desire, the feral child becomestrapped in Newton’s double bind, “on the borderline between the lin-guistic and non-linguistic experience of the world” with a distant view ofboth possibilities (Read 126). Philipp Schmidt von Lubeck’s 1831 essay,


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 180


“Uber Kaspar Hauser,” identifies this purgatorial situation in Kaspar, not-ing that he was initially “unable to give any explanations due to a lackof words or concepts,” but upon learning speech, the process remained“just as impossible due to a lack of pure and undistorted recollection”(qtd in Benzaquen 255). Feuerbach circumvents Lubeck’s conundrumby allowing desire into Kaspar’s consciousness; he accomplishes this byattributing Kaspar’s condition to a crime, implicitly absolving him of hisnatural state and vilifying the responsible party. Rather than Defoe’s frus-trated accusation of Peter as his own tormenter, Feuerbach’s recourse tolegality attributes the action to an unseen other. This allows Feuerbachto admire Kaspar’s untainted interest in learning language, his “thirstfor knowledge” and “inflexible perseverance with which he fixed hisattention to anything that he was determined to learn or comprehend,surpassed everything that can be conceived of them”; such desire vergeson the romantic, as Kaspar exhibits tenacity in constant improvement;when von Feuerbach admiringly observes that although in the boy’sdrawings “some improvements were distinctly visible,” Kaspar “was notsatisfied” (319). The subtext to Feuerbach’s glowing description proposesa social contract to Kaspar as he exhibits fragments of human behavior;totalizing inclusion into society looms closer. And as the fault lies notwith Kaspar but with his unknown tormenter, the child can retain a vir-ginal sense of alterity without standing accused of keeping himself there,thereby absolving the more omnipresent captors of his society’s ideology.

Throughout his text, Feuerbach makes Kaspar’s experience reducibleand transferable while retaining essential distances between him andthe constructivist notion of encroaching ferality. We maintain, how-ever, in viewing the situation transversally, that Feuerbach’s narrativeitself comprises an act of subjectivity-construction, a fashioning of ide-ology into a confluence of myth and history. The renewal of this storythrough generations indicates the potency of its apparent indexical-ity and condensation into officially territorialized fact, as, in Bergerand Luckmann’s formulation, “the unity of history and biography” isrestored through subsequent “explaining and justifying” (93). In each ofthese transferences and furtive reconstructions, “Kaspar,” as constructedand maintained by Feuerbach and his audiences, elides consideration ofKaspar, the actual boy who may or may not have enacted even a fractionof the actions that “Kaspar” has. By covering over this space, Feuerbach’stext lends a deeper understanding of the “crimes of exposure” commit-ted against Kaspar; they have “exposed” not only corporeal injury andlost possibility, but also a potential challenge to extant official bound-aries and sociopolitical conducting. Kaspar exposes the malleability of


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 181


the teleological narrative to which Feuerbach ascribes his experience;he effects a chronological and ontological rift in what Jacques Der-rida names “archeo-teleology”: the need to create a mythical placementof origin from which we have proceeded. In Of Grammatology, whilecommenting on Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, Derrida situ-ates this illusory process as the pull of chronological temptation withinsystems of writing:

As it is speech that has opened this endless movement ofsignification – thus constantly risking the loss of signification – itis tempting to return to an archeological moment, the first momentof a sign without speech, when passion, beyond need but short ofarticulation and difference, expresses itself in an unheard of way: animmediate sign. (234)

Derrida’s enumeration of this desire for immediacy stems from his cri-tique of Rousseau, who in Emile articulates modes of pedagogical reformthat, for Derrida, rest on believing wholesale this deceptive presence-immediacy as possibility. We see in Rousseau’s text an echo of thedelicate, passionate technique that Feuerbach employs, as the jurist trieseverything he can to leave Kaspar’s immediate sign intact and safelydistant, all the while pressured by his humanistic endeavor to recoverKaspar to society. We want to employ Derrida’s technique of analysisbut diverge on our conclusions: like Derrida, we see the seduction ofthe origin in Kasparspace, but unlike Derrida, we see multiplicities ofKaspars constantly fulfilling immediacy in their significations, fleeingboth Feuerbach’s and Derrida’s repressive systems of textual placement.Neither purely natural nor impossibly archeological, animal nor human,other nor self, the “real” Kaspars-as-subjects thrive in their possibilitiesdespite attempts of silencing and re-inscription as assimilated textualmeme for posterity.

Futile representations: Kaspar, Kaspar, and Kaspars

We close this consideration of Feuerbach’s narrative with a brief look atPeter Handke’s play Kaspar, a piece inspired by the Kaspar story, as a sitethat traces rather than defines the space of Kaspar’s subjectivity. In thissense, we see the theatricality of Handke as opening up transversal possi-bilities of Kaspar’s existence that Feuerbach’s re-narrativization attemptsto close; these manifest as the principle of translucency: when a socialor theatrical performances incorporate inconsistent and contradictory


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 182


codes that in effect present mixed or simultaneous messages that jar spec-tators from established parameters of reception, discourse, and reason.The play’s mise-en-scène makes explicit the processes of Feuerbach’stextual machinery, with “prompters” teaching human language andphysicality to the character of “Kaspar.” In the play’s beginning, Kasparcan only utter one line, a witty variant of Feuerbach’s account: “I want tobe a person like somebody else was once” (66). Kaspar’s costume includesa mask designed to look exactly like the actor’s face, so that “only at thesecond or third glance should the audience realize that his face is a mask”(63). This visual trope of sheer generality evokes the impossibility of sin-gular identity, an idea expressed more flamboyantly in the inclusionof five other Kaspars, all dressed alike, that enter near the close of thepiece. As the play progresses, Kaspar no. 1 becomes more articulate andversatile in handling the physical objects on stage, explaining that “eversince I can speak I can put everything in order” (78). The show endson a distressing note; as the curtain jerks towards the center, Kaspar’slanguage disintegrates, breaking semantic and phonetic patterns, as thefive other Kaspars create a cacophony of irritating sounds, “the kindthat drives one wild” (137). Suddenly, the sound cuts out, leaving onlyKaspar no. 1 speaking; with each jolt of the curtain closing, he repeats thephrase “goats and monkeys” until it shuts, and the play ends (139). Thisfinal line cites Othello’s curse upon learning of Desdemona’s infidelity,lending a libidinal dimension to Kaspar’s frustration; it also reintroducesanimality into Kaspar’s language, both in the words themselves and hisurgent, Ionescan insistence on repetition. Most critically to our concerns,by separating Kaspar from the audience, the line alienates the audience’ssympathies from a mimetic catharsis and interrupts their expectations forresolution. By distancing Kaspar from our own dominant discourses ofsubjectivity, and removing the possibility of singularized integration,Handke has perhaps paradoxically found an accurate mode of subjectiverepresentation in making tangible the futility of representation itself inthe perverted playground he stages.6

“Exuberant play”: transversal potential of playgroundreformation

For humans, play is also surprisingly active in the shaping of one’sown inner private narratives (actual sense of self), and thus is directlyrelated to mental health and elasticity. It is also the means by whichwe shape a model world.

Stuart Brown, Director, National Institute for Play7


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 183


We move now to another location that troubles processes of sub-jectivity in the human child: the common, site-specific, purpose-builtplayground. At once theatrical space of negotiated identity and peda-gogical space of monitored and regulated behavior, the combination ofwhich is set against forces of ferality, the playground presents anxietiesof sociopolitical conduction. This is especially the case as it attemptsto construct the adult as civilized subject, both abiding inhabitant ofand affirming contributor to official culture. We maintain that, as withKasparspace, the “normal” playground articulates not an investigative–expansive yet nevertheless teleological ordering and narrativization ofthe subject, but ultimately elusiveness to subjectifying processes. Whendiscussed in light of Michel Foucault’s notions of reform in Disciplineand Punish, the ways by which the playground dynamically enables andaffects certain unpredictable variables despite its prescribed roles in theformation of subjective territories have extenuating implications for thesocieties it serves. Although traditionally read as proposing the futility ofsubjective resistance, we read Foucault’s genealogy of the chain gang asan emergence of possible subjective expansions and assertions beyonddisciplinary systems.8 Analyzing both the contemporary American play-ground and its roots in fin-de-siècle reforms, we locate an influentialjuncture of performativity and visibility in this brief but critical sectionof Foucault’s work that is suggestive of the transversal power operativewithin and through playgrounds. The playground is an articulatory spaceof reflection and performance that unsettles the rigorous strictures of itsreformatory design and initiates opportunities for transversal subjectswho, like Kaspar, are capable of confounding boundaries of subjectiveand official territories.

Playground reformers at the beginning of the twentieth century modu-lated their strategies between two concepts: (1) that the child should havea sense of free exploration; and (2) that his activities should be carefullystructured to shape development along a precise narrative arc. Freedomfrom immediate tactics of subjectivation, while pedagogically valuable,must paradoxically always structure itself along teleological lines; theurban reformer Everett Mero noted that “there is play that grows likea weed and never goes beyond the weed state” but also “play that hascareful cultivation so then it becomes a useful plant” (qtd in Lewis 184).Mero’s formulation rests on two illuminating assumptions. He impliesthat children, when left to their own devices, tend towards weed-likechaos, thus placing the role of the reformer-as-gardener as critical in disci-plining the playful body with “careful cultivation.” More overtly, he seesthe playground as a utilitarian training-ground for civilized subjects, with


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 184


the “weed-like” state constantly looming as a threatening, potentiallyiconoclastic Petri dish for non-productive members of the polity.

Joseph Lee, a key figure in the “playground movement,” similarly sawa division between the more “purposeful” version of play, in which achild learns modes of interaction with the environment, and what heglosses as “exuberant play,” which, while “not the most important kind”of activity, is nonetheless developmentally necessary (282). To sharehis belief that “child’s play should be to the individual spirit what theuninhibited sneeze is to the vocal chords,” Lee compares this abandonanecdotally to his observation of “some remnants of the Iroquois tribedoing a war dance.” Finding a purpose behind the alienating movementsof this foreign culture, Lee muses that apparently,

a psychological value of the experience consisted in somehowshrieking or agonizing out as near as might be the very ultimate egoof the man. Each was trying to body forth in one lucky spasm thecrude material of his personality. It is in this same service that it is thespecial business of the shouting, leaping, exuberant play of childrento perform. (283)

We are less concerned with the underpinnings of racism that markthis passage,9 and would like to focus instead on Lee’s use of theword “perform.” Indeed, both Lee and Mero, with differing conclu-sions, articulate a symptomatic theatricality arising concurrent to theirintended reforms, one that allows for potential slippages of personali-ties in the performances of the child. The language employed by Lee,with its “bodying” forth the “materiality” of the personality, finds aproto-Artaudian notion of theatrical metaphysics, an alchemical reac-tion of the spiritual and physical that strives to liberate itself from itsown structuring. This phenomenon acts as a cathartic and positive ver-sion of Mero’s weed-state, a frenzy of overactive release. In transversalterms, we find in the child’s kinetic excess the catalyzing processes ofMero’s becomings-other blurring into the processes of Lee’s comings-to-be. The differences in these processes accord with their sanctioning bystate machinery; if becomings are identified and normalized by a dom-inant force, then any change in them is becomings-other; alternatively,comings-to-be occur involuntarily when people lose control during pro-cesses of becomings-other and defy anticipated results; they may enterthe dangerous exuberance located by Lee. Playground reformers cali-brated the emerging subjectivity of the child in relation to enabled orsuppressed chaotic and wildly transformative behavior.


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 185


Both Lee and Mero thought childhood fundamentally incompre-hensible to adult systems of logic. The primary “obstacle,” for Lee,“in interpreting the child to grown people is that we have no wordwhich stands for the most important factor in the child’s life” (vii); hisobservations, then, are exactly that – observations, steeped in the visual.Lee finds himself an audience member to an anarchic theater of cru-elty marked with possible transgressions but always under the rubricof reformation, an overarching transformation punctuated with smallercharacter assumptions. In her essay, “The Afterlife of the Romantic Child:Rousseau and Kant meet Deleuze and Guattari,” Frances Ferguson readsLee’s concept of the playground as a space of isolation mediated withobservation, and locates the roots of this position in Rousseau’s devel-opmental philosophy. For Rousseau, according to Ferguson, childhood“became a space, and children came to have their own institutions andlive in a world apart from adults” (216, emphasis added). Thus, the play-ground, in Rousseau’s formulation, represents tangibly the ontologicaldifference extant in childhood, which limns youth as not only a sepa-rate chronological era but also a fundamentally different species; Mero’shorticultural analogy may be less figurative than at first blush. Indeed,in Emile, Rousseau expresses the distancing alterity of childhood in itsextreme realization as alienating even the child from himself:

The first developments of childhood occur almost all at once. Thechild learns to talk, to feed himself, to walk, at about the same time.This is, strictly speaking, the first period of his life. Before it he is noth-ing more than he was in his mother’s womb. He has no sentiment,no idea; hardly does he have sensations. He does not even sense hisown existence. Vivit, et est vitae nescius ipse suae. (“He lives, and doesnot know that he is alive.”) (74)

The theater of the playground becomes a spatialization of childhood; thechild becomes a condensation of the playground; the playground’s the-atrical distancing replicates itself within the child’s own perceptions.In other words, the child becomes his own audience. The playground’sdistance allows observation; it forges lines of perspective that permitthe adult and child audience to become spectators through time anddistance; they view the alienated beginnings of their own lives acrossphysical bounds.

The tension in the playground’s processes lies in the insistence ofrendering childhood practical while maintaining such fundamentalalienation; thus we have a process of dictating reform without empathic


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 186


connection to the reformed. Such a lack of understanding may explainthe omnipresence of the observational faculties during the playgroundreform movement. They insisted upon constantly monitoring even themost innocent seeming of activities. When the Massachusetts Emergencyand Hygiene Association opened “sand gardens” for youths in the BostonCommons in the 1880’s, it maintained that “children were permittedfree play on the swings and seesaws and in the sand pile, but volunteer“matrons” supervised singing games and exercised control as parentalsubstitutes” (Lewis 192). The state machinery monitors its articulatoryspaces, balancing mechanisms of subjectivization (ensuring pedagogicalprogress) with regulated attempts at fugitivity (the child’s often chaoticplay). Teleology attached itself to every action that the child undertook insuch an overheated space of surveillance; in the historian Robert Lewis’ssuccinct encapsulation, “even routine had its purpose” (192).

These proceedings become densely theatrical, as the children’s everymove becomes “purposed,” made indexical by the ideological pur-suits of their supervisors. In a gendered designation that seems morewish-fulfillment than reality given the noninterventionist nurturing ten-dencies characteristic of mothers at playgrounds, the “matrons” areexpected to act as audience and directors both, sculpting the natureof the activities while observing their execution. The outlined arenaof the stage provides a clear physical division of actor/audience; thisdynamic becomes cast in Brechtian alienation when combined withthe otherness of the performers. The transversal capacity of “exuber-ance” identified by Lee hovers over the playing area, threatening thescript with a comings-to-be mutation of character, the “chemical reac-tion” of play in which “the child’s nature leaps out toward its own andtakes possession” (Lee 4). While Lee, with relative liberalism, believesthese occurrences to fall within acceptable and necessary behavior asbecomings-other, he leaves out a consideration of its theatricality andsubsequent power to subvert his carefully plotted theoretical design ascomings-to be. Such potency gives a double meaning to his summationof early development: “The question is not of learning, nor yet of power,but of character” (3). By invoking tropes of theater in his methodology, heconsiders its transformative properties, but relegates these to the realmof rehearsal, a Platonic inferior to his ultimate telos, the creation of theadult, civilized subject. Lee sums up his arguments as a description of“the process by which I believe the great achieving instincts build up thechild,” naming “Man, the outcome of the process” as “the incarnation ofthese instincts” (480). “Man,” the intended subjective character that cul-minates from countless rehearsals of instincts, occupies vaunted status


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 187


as subject and participant in his society. We maintain the playgroundcreates its own performance of rehearsal, in which the potency of mime-sis is no less diluted. These “fugitive rehearsals” spark actual transversalmovements with capacities for perceptual, experiential, and subjectivetransformations to take place; they subvert the dominant systems thathope to contain such movements as re-inscriptions of state machinery.

The playground as orgy or Foucauldian theater

To find a source of such vital resistance to dominant culture, we turnto Foucault. The contradictory mediation of unreachable isolation, onthe one hand, and hyper-attentive observation, on the other, recalls thegenealogical project of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Foucault’s workcharts its titular arc in reverse, as explicit demonstrations of corporealpunishment give way, over time, to schematized systems of behavioraldiscipline; concomitant with this movement, the modes of performancechange their scale, with events of gratuitous violence dissolving intothe governance of the quotidian. The Rousseauian delimiting of space soclearly executed in public displays of torture and immolation becomesblurred; the constant surveillance of discipline acts to locate theater asall-present, de-spatialized. The theater, however, persists in an exchangeof its elements: in Aristotelian terms, the spectacle of punishment givesway to the character of discipline. The book’s famous opening sectiondetails the prolonged execution of Damiens, a regicide, in 1757 (for fur-ther discussion of his execution, see Chapter 5). The event seeks not toreform Damiens into a productive member of society, as both the play-ground reformers and later modes of penal reform attempted to do, butto present him as spectacle. His character bears no chance of alteration,unless it occurs in the afterlife; his identity as criminal is imprinted withmore force and boldness as the ritual continues. Even in this situation,mimesis lurks:

It was as if the punishment was thought to equal, if not to exceed, insavagery of the crime itself, to accustom the spectators to a ferocityfrom which one wished to divert them, to show them the frequency ofcrime, to make the executioner resemble a criminal, judges murderers,to reverse roles at the last moment, to make the tortured criminal anobject of pity or admiration. (5)

Foucault’s scene presents a heightened level of theatricality that makespossible fundamental changes in its underlying belief-system. Judges


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 188


become murderers; executioners become criminals; the tortured bodybecomes a vessel for emotional connection. The very mechanisms oftheater that seek to outline the execution as profoundly excluded fromits surrounding world only blur its lines of demarcation. With Dionysianloss of individuality, the performers resemble Lee’s pleasurable andvolatile “exuberance” with their savage “ferocity.” Foucault’s hallucina-tory negotiations of selfhood recalls Lee’s description of children playing,which notes that “it is only as he thrills and vibrates to the structure ofthe whole, as the life of the social organism flows through him and com-pels him to his task and to his place, that the full life of the individualcomes forth” (qtd in Lewis 195). For Lee, anticipating the philosophyof today’s National Institute for Play (run by a consortium of scholars,scientists, doctors, and advocates of play),10 play is always purposeful,adaptive, and pedagogical, an active nexus of personal development andsociopolitical conduction in which children and adults continuouslynegotiate subjective and official territories. Recall Bateson’s words thatbegin this chapter: “Very brief analysis of childhood behavior shows thatsuch combinations as histrionic play, bluff, playful threat, teasing playin response to threat, histrionic threat, and so on form together a sin-gle total complex of phenomena.” The integral role of threat in playthat Bateson elucidates, like in Lee’s comparison with the Iroquois wardance, connects with the threatening terror that Foucault identifies withthe spectacular, which he cites as one of the impetuses for public punish-ment’s disappearance. Exuberance and threat, or exuberance stimulatedby threat; in other words, following Lee and Bateson, the exhilaration,ecstasy, and ferocity that can accompany lingering on or crossing overthe brink to loss of control, comings-to-be, and transversality (potentialfor playground perversion), these all remain endemic to play’s naturaldesign.

Nevertheless, Damiens’s punishment is not a wholly adequate paral-lel to the playground’s theatricality. And while discipline, the secondmajor modality of Discipline and Punish’s penal reform, introduces a crit-ical aspect of the playground’s operation, performativity, it loses a senseof the spectacular. Discipline’s performativity manifests itself within therhetoric of redemption; Foucault uncovers a “curious substitution” inthe penitentiary system that inserts an “other character” for the con-victed offender, namely, the “delinquent” (251). Constituted throughthe application and creation of knowledge by the state apparatus, thedelinquent serves as a diluted embodiment of Christian resurrection,attaining grace through the supple but ever-present determinations ofdiscipline rather than the gratuitous demonstrations of the crucifix. The


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 189


“curious substitution” of the playground outlines a different process thanFoucault’s offender-to-delinquent maneuver. In its place, playgroundreformers impose a microcosmic narrative of historical change; theyasserted that, “because of Puritan asceticism and the pressures of modernurban industrial life, traditional games had almost disappeared, and chil-dren did not know how to play” (Lewis 193). The playground operatesas a site of re-learning, fashioning metonyms of a wider problematic thatcuts diachronically from America’s supposed foundation to the ills of thepresent day.11 Curiously, this configuration situates playground reformas a process of both remembrance, in the face of urbanization’s newness,and amnesia, in reaction to the Puritan’s cultural austerity. This trans-formation would occur publicly, under observation but not partitioned,allowing – and in fact encouraging – interaction among its participants.In contrast, the disciplinary model of penality maintained invisibility;its “first principle,” according to Foucault, is “isolation of the convictfrom the external world, from everything that motivated the offence,from the complicities that facilitated it. The isolation of the prisonersfrom one another” (236).

Hence, the playground mixes both the mimetic capability to becomeanother person – Lee’s furtive economy of personalities “bodying” fromone child to another – and the constant surveillance from parental or“matronly” supervision that transforms it into spectacle. As such, we finda model for the playground reformers’ anxiety in Discipline and Punish’sbrief section on chain gangs, which Foucault identifies as the “transitionfrom the public execution, with its spectacular rituals, its art mingledwith the ceremony of pain, to the penalties of prisons buried in architec-tural masses and guarded by the secrecy of administrations” (257). Thephenomenon becomes positioned as neither discipline nor punishmentbut both, “combined in a single manifestation the two modes” operatingas “the way to detention unfolded as a ceremonial of torture” (257). Thechain gang becomes a penal fulcrum, both public in its spectacle and per-formative in its emphasis on reformation. It becomes a theoretical echoof the playground. Although active violence has been removed, and thebodies of the condemned preserved for penitence, the publicly visibleelement of punishment persists; it is transposed into publicly displayed,societally enforced play (this is playtime) under subjectifying parameters;conversely, whereas discipline’s isolation has been removed, its potentialfor performativity remains.

In Foucault’s genealogy, the results of this amalgamation provedvolatile. The implicit theatricality embedded in Damiens’s execution,which allowed for the capacity of the audience to imagine potentially


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 190


the performers” identities blurring together, was made explicit in thechain gang. Foucault recounts an emblematic situation where a con-demned priest, Delacollange, goes unrecognized in his prisoner garb; theaudience mistakes his nearby accomplice, François, for him. François inturn “entered into the spirit of the game and accepted the role,” per-forming a caricature of his peer, adding “prayers and broad gesturesof blessing directed at the jeering crowd” (260). Like the multiplica-tions of Kaspar, identities become parodically doubled as entertainment,prompting comings-to-be that serve as excursions from and violations ofthe overarching, state-machinery-sanctioned subjective transformationsfrom offender to delinquent. This flurry of identity reassignment, whichhighlights transversality’s libratory potential, may have prompted thechain gang’s short lifespan. Foucault notes that by 1837, the processionremained, albeit with a wall between the prisoners and public: a cur-tain lowered over the proscenium. This new device, the prison carriage,allowed only for distribution of food and internal surveillance (Foucault257–60). The theatricality of the chain gang, intended as the codifica-tion of the state machinery’s inscribed narrative, had instead scrambledits semiotic signals and forced its own cessation.

The playground provides a modern expression of the chain gang’s briefhistorical phenomenon. The performance enacted by Delacollange’sassistant, who sensed in the moment the capacity for becomings-otherand initiated comings-to-be, finds itself patterned in the behavior ofchildren at play. Jon Swain’s ethnography of contemporary Britishschoolchildren during recess locates emulation as a primary componentof self-presentation, observing that “it was the performance, rather thanthe result that counted: the taking part” (103). Swain finds theatri-cality in the ability for children to “have spent thousands of hours,almost in rehearsal, of trying to look like, and emulate, their professionalheroes” (101). Swain’s findings display emulative authority; relying onthe potency of a particular cluster of memes and affective presencesto alter subjective territories and potentially prompt becomings andcomings-to-be. In Swain’s case, we explicitly situate emulative author-ity’s efficacy within paradigms of cultural popularity. In the context ofthe playground, emulative authority presents Foucauldian visibility witha significant twist: rather than performing for the supervising powers, thechildren perform for each other.12 The guard tower, that central symbolicedifice to Foucault’s disciplinary prison, has collapsed; the Panopticonnow operates on the assumption of constant observation by peers in rela-tion to the ghosted presences of authoritative celebrities; the regulationof the body stems from lateralized pressure. The locus of visibilities of the


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 191


chain gang remain, but within the social group of the monitored, as thechildren’s “networks themselves were saturated by, as well as structuredthrough, divisions of power” that leave the group “policed by its ownself-regulation” (Foucault 99). The theater condenses its scope to theself performing itself (or its selves) for others while maintaining fluc-tuation of its imitative power. The drama of the self-realizing processesof becoming occupies the stage as the constant rehearsal of subjectivitysubstituting for its actualization.

But what of the adults? If the axes of observation and subjectiveterritorialization in Foucault’s prison are now turned inward, do thesupervisors experience, as if this is performed for them, properties ofwitness-functions? Do the playground’s theatrics implicate and chal-lenge subjectively its observers? The gaze of the guardians may in factelide the children altogether, contrary to their supposed purpose. HollyBlackford’s study of adult behavior at suburban playgrounds suggeststhat “the panoptic force” of the parental gaze “becomes a communitythat gazes at the children only to ultimately gaze at one another, see-ing reflected in the children the parenting abilities of one another”(228). According to Blackford, who seems – from our own experiencesat playgrounds – to exaggerate the intensity of evaluation and compe-tition, the performances of motherhood, divorced from their essentialties to child-rearing, are tautological, with children acting as both cipherand empirical measurement; the mothers’ “self-monitoring throughnarrative practice thinly veils a heated competition between mothersvis-à-vis their children’s abilities and achievements. The discourse pro-gresses to what a child can and cannot do, always measured againstdirect observation of the child” (238). As with the chain gang, the com-bination of visibility and mimesis unmoors reformatory structures andunleashes unintended perceptual consequences and becomings-other.The theatricality of penal systems is partitioned into two narcissisticengines of self-monitoring, with children watching children and adultswatching adults. The intended lines of sight, from the adults to the chil-dren, become refracted, upbraiding the state machinery’s teleology withwhich the playgrounds were initially constructed. The urban reformerHenry Curtis, in persuading fellow planners to instantiate strict sys-tems of surveillance in children’s recreational areas, inveighed againstthe prospect of unattended play, claiming that the playground super-visor “may do more than any other person in the city to determinethe social spirit and morals of the next generation” (qtd in Lewis 197).If Swain and Blackford’s accounts of contemporary playground behav-ior can be seen as a portion of Curtis’s legacy, his goals have been


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 192


subverted by the performativity of the space he helped to create. Thissame unhinging entropy dismantled the chain gang and erected its tan-gible barrier between its ever-changing stage and house; here, the curtainremains open.

If theater realigns and reshapes the performativities of the contempo-rary playground in transversal modes that betray the reforms that birthedit, it also allows for movements within its current milieu. The nature ofthe “play” that is, ostensibly, given “ground” or “grounded” in its bor-ders suggests that complex subversions and explorations of the taboooccur under the veneer of romanticized innocence. Returning to Lee, hisopus Play in Education begins by asserting: “if you watch a child playing,I think the first thing you will be struck by is his seriousness”; the ensu-ing chapters reinforce this image of studious work (1). His model of thechild falls squarely within the realm of necessary instinct, expressions ofbiological nature that serve as steps towards the ultimate goal of creat-ing a responsible, functional civilized subject within capitalist society. As“play-built animals,” every child possesses a “way of making good” andengages with playfulness, which consists of “activities through which heis to make and hold a place in the world’s competition” (9–10). Even thefervor of the play-like performances of the “Iroquois,” with spastic bodiesflinging personalities into materiality, receives a cool approval, as “thereis much virtue in abandonment” (Lee 283). Oddly, Lee’s evidence rests inrelating, “the orgy was a recognized feature of most early religions; andit still has its merits,” which leads him to the rather shocking conclusionthat “children’s exuberant play has the advantages of the orgy withoutits drawbacks; it does not as a rule become hysterical” (283). From hisRousseauian distance, Lee finds no discernable danger in play, regard-less of its apparent violence. His moral networks reveal their arbitration:children rehearse their processes of subjectivity in chaotic, sexualizedentanglements that avoid hysterics, that is, they remain contained andcoherent through theatricalization.

Headless kings: the subjunctivity of playground songs

“Hysterics,” though, may still lie encoded within a form of play seem-ingly more civilized: playground songs and rhymes. The semiotic anal-yses of playground poetry conducted by Joseph T. Thomas, Jr find asite of rehearsed fugitivity encoded within the framework of accept-able practice. When viewed as a mode of oral tradition, the poetry“vexed privileging notions of the individual, authorial genius, while sim-ilarly complementing the adult, largely literary, poetic traditions” (155).


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 193


Children render popular melodies, such as the popular hymn “Joy to theWorld,” by Isaac Watts and Lowell Mason, with scatology and violence:“Joy to the world/the teacher’s dead/I chopped right off his head.”13

This image of a student beheading an authoritative figure who may bestanding nearby nicely responds to an oft-quoted quandary posited byFoucault when discussing the possibility of resistance within his powernetworks: “What we need, however, is a political philosophy that isn’terected around the problem of sovereignty or, therefore, around theproblems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the king’s head”(“Truth and Power” 133). Thomas believes the practice of playgroundsong answers another theoretical question, that of Certeau, who, directlyengaging with Foucault’s disciplinary apparatus, asks “what popular pro-cedures (also “miniscule” and quotidian) manipulate the mechanism ofdiscipline and conform to them only in order to evade them?” (xiv).The simultaneous conformity and manipulation becomes evident inThomas’s reading of “Miss Suzie,” one of the most prevalent of play-ground rhymes. Recall the lyrics, but now as commonly altered on theplayground: “Miss Suzie had a steamboat / The steamboat had a bell /Ms. Suzie went to heaven and the steamboat went to / Hello operator,please give me number nine/and if you disconnect me I will chop offyour / Behind the refrigerator . . .”. According to Thomas, the disparateand irrational images in the song

vacillate between two topics, sex and punishment, sometimes suggest-ing sex is punishment. Formally, the poem foregrounds its awarenessof and begrudging respect for appropriateness, decorum. It takesits interest in sexuality and violence only so far, and then pullsback, testing the flexibility of rules, instead of flagrantly breakingthem. (171)

Resistance to emulative authority emerges within the channels of dom-inant culture’s structure, testing its systems of power without actuallybreaking the membrane of its containment; people rehearse but refrainfrom performing criminality.14 Playing in the playground gains a dou-ble meaning, as the children stage themselves in the subjunctive realmof theater with their behavior. The plays engage with subjunctive space;they trouble lines between being and becoming. We maintain that thisarea presents the hypothetical space of both “as-ifs” and “what-ifs,” cre-ating a space between subjective and transversal territory. Subjunctivespace, as theatrical process, allows subjects to constantly flirt with thepermeability of their imitation, both disguising and, perhaps, exorcising


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 194


a need to break their formal networks and enter “reality.” If violentplay could realize, to whatever degree, Antonin Artaud’s theater ofcruelty,15 could these songs realize a version of Augusto Boal’s rehearsalsfor revolution as proposed by his theater-of-the-oppressed movement?16

The playground project: dialectical seeing andthe resistance of nostalgia

We want to conclude this fugitive exploration of the playground’s anx-ious theatricality in terms of Walter Benjamin’s conception of “dialecticalseeing” and flânerie in his unfinished theoretical opus, The Arcades Project,a vast, rhizomatic locus of texts left posthumously and consigned toincompletion. In this work, Benjamin accesses a complicated set of the-ories, impressions, and observations centering on imagistic movementthrough the Parisian arcades. In this romanticized playground, whichis to say, a modern shopping mall, there was, according to Benjamin’stestimonies, spectacular demonstrations of capital’s excess, expressionsof bourgeois conventions denuding spaces of interiority, and potentialgrounds for phenomenological rebirth. In short, an intense ambiva-lence underlies Benjamin’s arcades: they could deconstruct the verystructures of capitalist reification that they apotheosize.17 We find inthis potential activity hints of transversal movement vis-à-vis processesof subjective territorialization. For Benjamin, the process of flânerieitself becomes a corporealized mode of Marxist critique, an embod-ied double of Benjamin’s own textual procedures that animate andreconfigure spacetime as vital ontological awakening, in effect breakingcapitalist codifications of subjective territory. This sense of awaken-ing, for Benjamin, uncovers a repressed, fundamental understanding ofchildhood:

The figure of the flâneur advances over the street of stone, with itsdouble ground, as though driven by a clockwork mechanism. Andwithin, where this mechanism is ensconced, a music box is palpitationlike some toy of long ago. It plays a tune: “From days of youth, / fromdays of youth, / a song is with me still.” By this melody he recognizeswhat is around him; it is not a past coming from his own youth, froma recent youth, but a childhood lived before then that speaks to him,and it is all the same to him whether it is the childhood of an ancestoror his own. (880)

The passage moves beyond sentimentality to an encounter with a pri-mal sense of shared origins, an earlier “childhood” not of the individual


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 195


flâneur but of humanity itself. Benjamin makes sonic and palpablethe pull of Derridean archeo-teleological desire, beckoning beyond thecommodified world and gesturing towards the immediate sign of child-hood regained. Critically, this desire awakens in a Proustian momentof epiphany, culled from the depths of shared experience by a seem-ingly quotidian catalyst, an old toy that has replaced the heart, that is, ahumanist gasp from an internalized graveyard of commodities. Thus thetrappings of capitalism undo themselves through the pull of their owninsistent song.

Susan Buck-Morss finds a “pedagogic” element to The Arcades Projectepitomized in such interaction, whereby, in Benjamin’s words, he seeks“to educate the image-creating medium within us to see dimensionally,stereoscopically, into the depths of the historical shade” (109). Benjaminnames the methodology of this education “dialectical seeing,” the praxisof critical ontological/historical theory.18 Max Pensky sees this activityas a kind of Brechtian surprise, “constituting a temporal shock of legi-bility” that “serves as a pinion around which present, past, fantasy andprehistory are collected into one focal point, one singularity” (115). Thischronological condensation produces its synthesis whereby it “suddenlycollapses, and the present, in a moment of awakening, presents itselfwith the graphic image of its own possibilities” (Pensky 115). The para-doxical “shock” of legibility has a reflexive motion that transversallyrenders the previously effable subject as dissonant and phantasmagoric.Yet, emphasizing positivity, the moment leads not to paralysis but toclarity and “possibility”: like a musical map still embodying spectraltraces of the longed-for experiences that produced it, the song fromone’s youth gestures nostalgically towards something vital and forgotten.Hence, dialectical seeing can become or come-to-be a mode of transver-sal praxis; the explorer moves outside of subjective territories and acrossspacetime to engage fugitive elements outside of prescribed, officializedtrajectories. For Benjamin, the dynamics of fugitivity inherent to dialec-tical seeing arise from capital’s excess but also from profound perceptualambivalence, prompted by ghosts haunting the ostensibly vacant. Whatchildless playground is not always already inhabited by images andsounds of children exuberantly at play? Likewise, for Benjamin, theParisian arcades imply “an ambiguity of space” that provokes, through itsweird metaphysics, reflexive-consciousness on the part of the consumersand consumed:

Nevertheless: though it [the arcades] may have many aspects, indeedinfinitely many, it remains – in the sense of mirror world – ambiguous,


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 196


double-edged. It blinks, is always just this one – and never nothing –out of which another immediately arises. The space that transformsitself does so in the bosom of nothingness. In its tarnished, dirtiedmirrors, things exchange a Kaspar–Hauser-look with the nothing: itis an utterly equivocal wink coming from nirvana. (878)

Characteristically replete with mirrors through which space closes ontothe reflexive gaze of the individual and expands beyond the materialityto structures, the shopping mall becomes simultaneously a conduit fornihilism, humanism, and transcendence. It is a playground where weare Kaspar Hausers uprooted and confronted with potential ironicallyfor both blankness and unlimited becomings.

Unlike Lee and his reformist peers, Benjamin accounts for the the-atricality of pedagogic experience in theorizing – and actively wishesfor – spatial practice. Theater generates new modes of perception andinteraction through becomings-other, comings-to-be, and fugitivity; itushers people into new – challenging or felicitous – phenomenological–hermeneutic processes and subjective reconfigurations. Rather than thetightened supervision of its inverted panopticon, the shopping mall, likethe playground and chain gang, may recognize its capacity to transformits subjects along their own flâneries that occur haphazardly and unex-pectedly. Benjamin urges his readers to “think of the arcade as a wateringplace” in which we “stumble upon an arcade myth, with a legendarysource at its center – an asphalt wellspring arising in the heart of Paris”(409). This mythology, implied by the confusion of the arcade’s specta-cle, provides not only a glimpse of the possible past but also a gatewaywithin the present, as “the extent which healing is a rite de passage, atransition experience, becomes vividly clear in those classical corridors”(409). Benjamin’s shopping mall, like the individual subject enmeshedwithin it, is one of constant fluctuation. The result of its theatricalityand transversality, through dialectical seeing and fugitive explorations,is a paradoxical self-realization not prescribed by the environment andauthored by the individual. Benjamin finds a model for this alteration inCharles Baudelaire, who prized his capacity to remain mercurial throughmimesis. Baudelaire declares his desire to “return to the dioramas, whosebrutal and enormous magic has the power to impose on me a useful illu-sion” and “go to the theatre and feast my eyes on the scenery, in whichI find my dearest dreams artistically expressed,” concluding that thesesensations, “because they are false, are infinitely closer to the truth” (qtdin Benjamin 536). The converse of Baudelaire’s declaration is that thesupposed “reality” against which these illusions are pitched are, in fact,


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 197


merely more reinforced illusions. Baudelaire and Benjamin, like KasparHauser, discover self-realization and subjective inauguration as a para-doxical impossibility, arising from the conditions that attempt to containand police it. This phenomenon seems more understandable to the chil-dren flâneurs of the normal playground, who welcome comings-to-beand becomings, than to the adults who, like Feuerbach, created it withthe intention of making static and readable the individual subject.

If Benjamin gives us a shopping mall as romanticized playground, theplayground may become the shopping mall (or city it represents) inminiature, in other words, Baudelaire’s theater as pedagogic planning.We find in this site of unfolding realities a persistent contradiction leftover from Rousseau’s writings and their resurrection at the dawn of thetwentieth century: If children are alien to adult experience, how canadults be so firm in their theories of childhood? The proscenium archmust cut both ways, rendering the audience and actor both as ineffa-ble other. Far more terrifying, though potentially transformative, is thatthere is no proscenium; that the children who occupy the playgroundbear the same capacities as their supervisors, grappling with the same per-meability of reality, operating on the same systems of logic. Recall thefantastical conjurations of the chain gang that, like the games of the play-ground, take stock of themselves, part by part, in a rush of self-definition,living always on the border of ontological and subjective affirmation andcancellation. Benjamin cites the critic Gustave Geffroy’s encapsulationof this fluidity as art, the troubling agent that persists in overthrowingthe determinations of both state and individual, that is, the “representedthings which give to the viewer the possibility of dreaming them” (qtdin Benjamin 434). We propose this subjunctive opportunity for subjectsas a means through which they can achieve the agency necessary tonegotiate their own playground activities.

Notes

1. For more on Nagel’s non-dualist approach to the mind/body problem, see hisbook Concealment and Exposure and Other Essays (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2002), especially ch. 18, “The Psychophysical Nexus.” This latter chap-ter comprised a contribution to New Essays on the A Priori, Paul Boghossianand Christopher Peacocke, eds, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001),which supplies a good overview of the problematic of multiple objectivitiesengaged here.

2. In addition to Masson’s assertion, various critical analyses of Kasparabound, as he remains a fascinating subject across multiple interdisciplinary


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 198


discourses. Among the many works that deal with Kaspar, see, for a psycho-analytic reading, Kaja Silverman, “Kaspar Hauser’s “Terrible Fall” into Narra-tive,” New German Critique 24/25 (Autumn 1981–Winter 1982): 73–93; for adissective–cohesive attempt to uncover the “real story” behind Kaspar, see JanBondeson, The Great Pretenders: The True Stories Behind Famous Historical Mys-teries (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), esp. ch. 2; for an intriguing attempt atreconstructing Kaspar’s lineage through DNA analysis, see G.M. Weichhold,J.E. Bark, W. Korte, W. Eisenmenger and K.M. Sullivan, “DNA analysis inthe case of Kaspar Hauser,” International Journal of Legal Medicine 111 (1998):287–91. Also, two popular vehicles for Kasparspace’s integration into pop-ular culture is Werner Herzog’s acclaimed film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser(1974) and Peter Sehr’s film, Kaspar Hauser (1993), which one the GermanFilm Awards for best picture, best director, and best actor. For more on Her-zog’s cinematic take, see Silverman, “Kaspar Hauser’s “Terrible Fall” intoNarrative”; for a discussion of different filmic representations, includingHerzog’s, see Ruth Perlmutter’s interview with Hungarian director Janos Szaz,“Ghosts of Germany: Kaspar Hauser and Woyzeck,” Literature/ Film Quarterly25.3 (1997): 236–40; for a look at Herzog’s imbrication of Kasparspace withGerman Romanticism, see Matthew Gandy, “Visions of Darkness: The Rep-resentations of Nature in the Films of Werner Herzog,” Cultural Geographies3.1 (1996): 1–21.

3. In addition to Truth and Method, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Phenomeno-logical Movement (1963),” in Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1976): 130–81.

4. A resurgence of sorts in feral children studies seems to have occurred in theearly 2000s. In addition to the works of Douthwaite, Benzaquen, and Fudgeet al., see Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly,Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2003), Michael Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A Historyof Feral Children (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2002), and RichardNash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the EighteenthCentury (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2003). Fora review of Fudge et al., Nash, Newton and Nussbaum, see James Steintrager,“Humanity Gone Wild,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38.4 (2005): 681–9.

5. The role of desire in ontological determination is complicated; the influentialeighteenth-century naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon suggeststhat animals and humans are separated fundamentally by their modality ofdesire, not the mere existence of it at all: according to Buffon, animals possess“only one mode for acquiring pleasure, the exercise of their sensations to grat-ify their desires . . .” whereas humans “are endowed with another source ofpleasure, the exercise of the mind, the appetite of which is the desire of knowl-edge” (1:295). See Buffon, A Natural History, General and Particular, Containingthe History and Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, the Brute Creation,Vegetables, Minerals, &C, &C; Translated from the French by William Smellie,(London: Printed for T. Kelly, 1862). For more on the figuration of desirewith regard to Hegel, see Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflectionsin Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

6. Handke’s play knowingly demonstrates a facility with many linguistic theo-ries; for an in-depth analysis of this engagement and citationality, see Jeffrey


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 199


Herrick, “Peter Handke’s Kaspar: A Study of Linguistic Theory in ModernDrama,” Philological Quarterly 63:2 (Spring 1984): 205–221.

7. About the National Institute for Play, see its website: http://www.nifplay.org/about_us.html.

8. Many theorists have appended, subverted, attacked, or otherwise engagedwith Foucault’s controversial notions of the subject’s problematization withinpenal reform. For a contemporary critique of Discipline and Punish’s genealog-ical maneuverings, from the perspective of performance studies and criticallegal studies, see Dwight Conquergood, “Lethal Theatre: Performance, Pun-ishment, and the Death Penalty,” Theatre Journal 54.3 (2002): 339–67. WhileConquergood’s essay poses challenges to reading Foucault in a contemporaryAmerican culture that partially insists upon the death penalty, it also echoesFoucault’s notions of character and identities becoming negotiated or dou-bled in the public act of penal enforcement: reading the transcripts of thetrial of Esther Rogers, a confessed murderer in early eighteenth-century NewEngland, Conquergood asks, “Was she a walking palimpsest, the imprint ofher harlot past shadowing and alternating with her Christian image?” (350).In a contemporary cybernetic age we can argue that Foucault’s genealogyhas been complicated by unforeseen complexities in engines of surveillanceand the resultant reconfiguration of the very notion of the subject. For aprovocative prompt in thinking of such issues through and beyond Foucault’stheoretical apparatus, see Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Con-trol,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 3–7. Deleuze identifies a third stage of“control” after the phases of discipline and punish that mark Foucault’s text,asserting that “We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environ-ments of enclosure,” thus interrogating the very notions of visibility andinteriority upon which Foucault’s shift rests (3–4). For a feminist and culturalmaterialist reading of Foucault’s theories of the Panopticon, see B. V. Olguín,“Mothers, Daughters, and Deities: Judy Lucero’s Gynocritical Prison Poeticsand Materialist Chicana Politics,” Frontiers 22.2 (2001): 63–86. Olguín notesthe burgeoning masculine symbolism of the central edifice to Bentham’sprison, the “phallic resonance of the panoptic penitentiary tower” (65).

9. Such an “ethnographic” comparison was common in psychological tracts atthe time; see Lilla Estelle Appleton, A Comparitive Study of the Play Activitiesof Adult Savages and Civilized Chilldren (New York: Arno Press, 1910).

10. This consortium includes such luminaries as primatologist Jane Goodall andJoan Abrahamson, president of the Jonas Salk Foundation.

11. For a brief consideration of the linguistic repercussions of playground activi-ties, see Laurie Bauer and Ingrid Bauer, “Word Formation on the Playground,”American Speech 71.1 (Spring 1996): 111–12.

12. For a study of the mimesis of playground games in relation to gender differ-ences, see Anthony Pellegrini, Kentaro Kato, Peter Blatchford, and Ed Baines,“A Short-term Longitudinal Study of Playground Games Across the First Yearof School: Implications for Social Competence and Adjustment to School,”American Educational Research Journal 39.4 (Winter 2002): 991–1015; for a his-torical account of playground reform, embodiment, and gender, see ElizabethA. Gagen, “An example to us all: child development and identity construc-tion in early 20th-century playground,” Environment and Planning A 32 (2000):599–616.


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 200


13. Other variations of this rhyme include: “Joy to the world, the school burneddown/And all the teachers died/The principal is dead/We shot him in thehead / The janitor is gone/We flushed him down the john/And heeeeaven,the school burned down” and “Joy to the world, the school burned down/Andall the teachers died/Where is the principal?/He’s on the flag pole,/Swingingby his underwear,/Swinging by his underwear,/Swi-ing-ing by-y-y his un-der-wear.” Motifs that echo throughout these and other variations includedecapitation, references to toilets, and specific bodily harm to the figure ofthe principal as school sovereign.

14. Foucault himself deals later with the problem of the subject’s resistanceand reformulation against systems of discipline, a critique, as noted, oftenrehearsed in reading his work. See Hermeneutics of the Subject, trans. GrahamBurchell, eds Frederic Gros (New York: Picador, 2001) for a careful readingof Platonic philosophy with regard to the famous tenet of “know thyself”;when read against the Hellenic notion of “master thyself” Foucault uncoversa phenomenological turn in the conception of the Western subject that per-haps opens a space of individuation and resistance in the face of disciplinarynetworks. In this work Foucault identifies in Hellenistic philosophy multiple“researches, practices, and experiences, which may be purifications, asceticexercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modifications of existence,etc., which are, not for knowledge but for the subject, for the subject’s verybeing, the price to be paid for access to the truth” (15). Such a notion of self-mastery and the coalescence of the subject against external forces of subjectformation echo the problems of the playground, especially in regard to theiremphasis on performativity. For a recovery of the subject’s emergence in rela-tion to Foucault’s conception of “biopower” specifically with regard to childdevelopment, see James Wong, “Sapere Aude: Critical Ontology and the Caseof Child Development,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 37.4 (December2004): 863–82.

15. See Antonin Artaud, Theater and its Double (New York: Grove Weidenfeld,1958).

16. See http://www.theatreoftheoppressed.org, in addition to Augusto Boal,Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Theatre Communications Group,1985) and Legislative Theatre: Using Performance to Make Politics (New York:Routledge, 1998).

17. For a reading of the concept of “space” – material, epistemological, political –within The Arcades Project, see Henry Sussman, “Between the Registers: TheAllegory of Space in Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project” boundary 2 30.1(Spring 2003): 169–90.

18. For a critical engagement of The Arcades Projects that develops the idea of“dialectical seeing” with regard to the semiotics of reading and “modes ofsignifying,” see Samuel Weber, “‘Streets, Squares, Theaters’: A City on theMove-Walter Benjamin’s Paris,” boundary 2 30.1 (Spring 2003): 17–30.

Works cited

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and KevinMcLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1999.


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 201


Benzaquen, Adrianna. Encounters with Wild Children: Temptation and Disappoint-ment in the Study of Human Nature. Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press,2006.

Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. New York:Anchor Books, 1967.

Blackford, Holly. “Playground Panopticism: Ring Around the Children, a Pocket-ful of Women.” Childhood 11.2. (2004), 227–49.

Boghossian, Paul. Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism.New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Brown, Stewart. Interview with Touch the Future: http://ttfuture.org/services/visionaries/Sbrown/index.html

Buck-Moross, Susan. “The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politicsof Loitering.” New German Critique 39 (Autumn 1986), 99–140.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley:University of California Press, 1984.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

Douthwaite, Julia. The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: DangerousExperiments in the Age of Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,2002.

Feuerbach, Anselm von. “Kaspar Hauser.” Wolf-Children and Feral Man. eds Rev.J. A. L. Singh. New York: Archon Books, 1966.

Ferguson, Frances. “The Afterlife of the Romantic Child: Rousseau and Kant meetDeleuze and Guattari.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 102.1 (Winter 2003).

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. AlanSheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

——. “Truth and Power.” The Essential Foucault. eds Paul Rabinow and NikolasRose. New York: The New Press, 2003.

Fudge, Erica. “Calling Creatures by their True Names.” eds Erica Fudge, RuthGilbert, and Susan Wiseman. At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies, andNatural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period. New York: St. Martin’s Press,1999.

Gadamer, Hans Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.Marshall. New York: Crossroad Publishing Corporation, 1989.

Hacking, Ian. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1999.

Handke, Peter. “Kaspar.” Kaspar and Other Plays. Trans. Michael Roloff. New York:Hill and Wang, 1969.

Harlow, Harry, Robert Dodsworth, and Margaret Harlow. “Total Social Isolation inMonkeys.” Procedures of the National Academy of Science, U.S.A. 54.1 ( July 1965),90–7.

Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1977.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis:Hackett Publishing Company, 1996.

Lee, Joseph. Play in Education. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1915.Lewis, Robert. “‘Well-Directed Play’: Urban Recreation and Progressive Reform.”

Impressions of a Gilded Age: The American Fin-de-siècle. eds Marc Chenetier andRob Kroes. Amsterdam: Amerika Instituut, 1983.


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

9780230_008298_05_cha04.tex 17/3/2009 10: 38 Page 202


Linnaeus, Carl. Systema Naturae, facsimile of the first edition. Trans. M. S. J. Engel-Ledeboer and H. Engel. Nieuwkoop, The Netherlands: B. de Graaf, 1964.

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kaspar Hauser.New York: The Free Press, 1996.

Nagel, Thomas. “What is it like to be a bat?” The Philosophical Review, 133.4(October 1974).

Newton, Michael. “Bodies Without Souls.” eds Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, andSusan Wiseman. At the Borders of the Human: Beast, Bodies, and Natural Philosophyin the Early Modern Period. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.

Pinker, Stephen. The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow and Company,1994.

Pinsky, Max. “Geheimmittel: Advertising and Dialectical Images in Benjamin’sArcades Project.” Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. eds Beatrice Hanssen.New York: Continuum, 2006.

Read, M. “Peter Handke’s “Kaspar” and the Power of Negative Thinking.” Forumfor Modern Language Studies 29.2 (April 1993), 126–48.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile, or on Education. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York:Basic Books, Inc., 1979.

Savile, Anthony. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Malden: Blackwell Publishing,2005.

Searle, John. The Construction of Social Reality New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.Shakespeare, William. King John. eds E. A. J. Honigmann. London: Arden, 1967.Swain, Jon. “‘The Money’s Good, the Fame’s Good, the Girls are Good’: The Role of

Playground Football in the Construction of Young Boys’ Masculinity in a JuniorSchool.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 27.1 (February 2006), 95–101.

Thomas, Joseph T., Jr “Child Poets and the Poetry of the Playground.” Children’sLiterature 32 (2004), 152–77.

Tredgold, A.F. Mental Deficiency (Amentia) London: Balliere, Tindall and Cox,1908.


Co

pyr

igh

t m

ater

ial f

rom

ww

w.p

alg

rave

con

nec

t.co

m -

lice

nse

d t

o F

eng

Ch

ia U

niv

ersi

ty -

Pal

gra

veC

on

nec

t -

2011

-03-

31

"Fugitive Rehearsals: The Ferality of Kaspar Hauser, Playground, Performances, and the...

Documents

Transcript of "Fugitive Rehearsals: The Ferality of Kaspar Hauser, Playground, Performances, and the...