DRAFT – under construction!
Prodigious performances, posthuman subjectivities: young children performing
on YouTube
Maggie MacLure
Keynote presentation to the 4th Summer Institute in Qualitative Research
6-10 July 2015
I want to talk about posthuman subjectivities. Or let’s call them more-than-human
capacities and affinities. The paper is part of the new materialist or new empiricist
‘turn’ that we have heard a lot about this week. The new materialisms challenge the
prerogative of the supposedly self-contained, coherent human subject, equipped to
subdue the world with an armory of discursive and intellectual weapons – rationality,
consciousness, creativity, intentionality, and language. From a posthuman orientation,
it’s not that these capacities are fictions, or that they are in some sense ‘wrong’ and
should be abandoned. It’s that they have traditionally been elevated or inflated to a
status that occludes other capacities and connections, and diminishes the significance
of human entanglements with matter. Posthuman thought challenges the notion of the
world as a stage or background for the Big Human Adventure, and traces the many
dire consequences of our chronic disregard for the agential and affective potential of
matter. Not least of these consequences is the threat of human extinction.
In the face of these weighty issues, I am going to explore the question of posthuman
subjectivities in what looks like a rather frivolous domain – that of young children
imitating popular singers and musicians. I think there’s something more than, or
deeply other than ‘imitation’ at play in these performances. Or at least, that we need
to re-think the degraded status of imitation, which within a humanist world-view is
generally seen as a primitive or lower-order ability, in contrast to the generative force
of creativity. I will suggest that these child-performances offer glimpses of affective
forces or intensities that exceed and thwart the centered, signifying subject of
humanism.
This paper is an expanded version of one that was included in a symposium this year
at the American Educational Research Association. The symposium was convened by
Margaret Somerville, and it was entitled: ‘Writing the post-human ‘I’: the problem of
the human subject in the more-than-human world’.
The examples I’ll be looking at are online Youtube clips, some of which have gone
viral, attracting huge numbers of hits by viewers. These clips are of interest precisely
because of the powerful affects that they both elicit and exhibit. The performances
provoke strong affective responses from viewers (and researchers), variously
expressed as delight, disapproval, fascination, anxiety, or unease. Just to give you an
idea of these responses, here is a very short selection from the many hundreds of
responses to one of the child performances we’re going to look at later:
SLIDE – YOUTUBE COMMENTS
looks unnatural
she only repeated after the conductor ..... nothing special.....
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creepy...looks like someone is inside..
Am i the only one that finds this extremely creepy? :P
Next Mozart
Now I believe in reencarnation. Karajan is back in this kid.
She was feeling it, not just mimicking someone else. You can't fake that
expression on her face
I don't think she feels the music, I think she is acting, which is equaly
awesome for her age. That's a prodigy kid right there, in either music or
acting.
Amazing. She is either the reincarnation of a musical conductor OR she is a
musical genius. EITHER WAY SHE IS THE MOST PRECIOUS BABY I
HAVE EVER SEEN.
Some friends insist this isn't real, that it's fake animation, maybe cgi. It seems
impossible that they're right. Anybody got a take on that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE9r1LkRCV0
More importantly, as well as provoking recognizable, if diverse, affects, I think these
performances testify to other, stranger affects and intensities, that exceed our ability
to capture and name them.
The performances also demonstrate a prodigious capacity to be affected: to allow the
gestures, sounds and affects of others to inhabit or ‘infect’ the child body to a degree
that seems to exceed the bounds of imitation, becoming something more like
contagion, or shamanistic possession, or Spinozist ‘passion’.
It might seem strange to look for the posthuman in these emphatically human
performances. But, taking my cue from Deleuze and Guattari, I want to argue that
there is something inhuman that takes place inside and alongside the human. Indeed
Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 190) wrote:
In truth, there are only inhumanities, humans are made exclusively of
inhumanities, but very different ones, of very different natures and speeds.
Deleuze and Guattari looked at children as artisans of inhuman becomings. Referring
to the work of the psychologists Scherer & Hoquenghem, they remarked:
it is as though, independent of the evolution carrying them toward adulthood,
there were room in the child for other becomings … that are not regressions
but creative involutions bearing witness to "an inhumanity immediately
experienced in the body as such," unnatural nuptials "outside the programmed
body (1987: 273).
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Deleuze and Guattari were referring in this passage to one particular form of
nonhuman ‘becoming’ that they called ‘becoming animal’. But I will argue that you
can glimpse similar ‘unnatural nuptials’, and an ‘inhumanity’ folded into the body in
the child performances.
Let’s have a look at one of these clips here by way of a taster, without saying too
much about it right now, before backtracking a bit to bring in some theory.
SLIDE/CLIP:
Sophie Grace/Nicki Minaj
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7hTAp6KrGY
Sophia Grace and Rosie are the biggest stars of all. This first video, uploaded in 2011,
now has nearly 49 million hits. They have made multiple guest appearances on Ellen
Degeneres’ show, including performing with Nicki Minaj. They have a slot on Ellen’s
show where they talk with celebrities such as Hugh Grant, Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus
and Taylor Swift. They have published two books and starred in a movie – it was
straight-to-DVD, but still…. As always, the internet has quickly moved to eating
itself: there are compilations of Sophia Grace and Rosie’s best moments; and parodies
of them by adult comedians. There are even Sophia Grace and Rosie dolls
SLIDE:
SOPHIA GRACE & ROSIE DOLLS
Notice that the dolls do not conform to the body shape of the two children.
Sophia Grace and Rosie have become a cultural phenomenon. But that is not what
interests me at this point, though I will come back to it later. I am more interested in
the affective quality of that that first, home-recorded video – prior to the ‘capture’ of
those affects, as Brian Massumi would put it, by discourse and culture.
I have called performances such as this one by Sophia Grace and Rosie ‘prodigious’,
because the word seems to carry something of the complexity and contradiction, the
positivity and the menace, that proliferates around performances such as these. While
I was writing this paper I checked out the dictionary definition of prodigious - in true
undergraduate essay-writer mode.
SLIDE:
prodigious (adj)
1. extraordinary in size, amount, extent, degree, force etc
2. wonderful or marvelous
3. abnormal; monstrous
4. obsolete, ominous
I was gratified to find that the various senses of the word correspond nicely to the
mobile affective value that the prodigious carries – its tendency to slide or switch
from extraordinary, to marvelous, to monstrous, to ominous; and back again. And the
word also invokes the more conventional idea of the child prodigy as a monstrously
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talented artist – usually in the domain of classical music, literature or fine art.
Freya de Mink (2011), a musicologist, is interested in the notion of the musical child
prodigy. In an article entitled ‘The Next Mozart’? she writes of an encounter with one
particular young performer on Youtube. Here’s the clip that de Mink discusses – 8
year old Nuron Mukimiy, conductor and soloist in a performance of Mozart’s 20th
piano concerto.
SLIDE/CLIP:
‘ANOTHER MOZART’ - NURON MUKIMIY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EohHfW7ShcE
De Mink argues that the ‘powerful body’ of the prodigious child challenges the binary
architecture of humanist prerogative: adult and child, imagination and imitation,
original and copy, authentic and fake, and so on. As de Mink notes, the affective
power to conjure posthuman, if not inhuman, tendencies is evident in the anxious
responses that people often have to such performances. Just as the dictionary
definition suggests, the performances are often associated with the monstrous - with
animals and machines - parrots, puppets, automata. Parrotting rather than producing.
Just going through the motions.
De Mink is interested, as am I, in these responses that refer virtuoso performances by
children to automata, animals, puppets and monsters. She notes that the association of
child prodigies with the non-human, and particularly with mechanical reproduction
and musical automata, goes back at least to the late 18th and early 19th century, and
she argues that this reflects the challenge that the child prodigy posed to
“Enlightenment ideas of reason and the human subject, specifically the
human/machine and adult/child dichotomies’ (2011: 4).
SLIDE/CLIP:
AUTOMATON: CHILDREN PLAYING
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QKJpUdmiRY
Here is a clip of another child conductor – a little girl of unspecified age, conducting a
church choir in Kyrgystan:
SLIDE/CLIP:
LITTLE GIRL CONDUCTING CHOIR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE9r1LkRCV0
This is the performance that provoked the Youtube comments that we saw at the
outset. Here they are again:
SLIDE – YOUTUBE COMMENTS
looks unnatural
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she only repeated after the conductor ..... nothing special.....
creepy...looks like someone is inside..
Am i the only one that finds this extremely creepy? :P
Next Mozart
Now I believe in reencarnation. Karajan is back in this kid.
She was feeling it, not just mimicking someone else. You can't fake that
expression on her face
I don't think she feels the music, I think she is acting, which is equaly
awesome for her age. That's a prodigy kid right there, in either music or
acting.
Amazing. She is either the reincarnation of a musical conductor OR she is a
musical genius. EITHER WAY SHE IS THE MOST PRECIOUS BABY I
HAVE EVER SEEN.
Some friends insist this isn't real, that it's fake animation, maybe cgi. It seems
impossible that they're right. Anybody got a take on that?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE9r1LkRCV0
There were many more comments that expressed joy and amazement, calling the little
girl an angel and so on. But this selection shows the range of affective perplexities
that the prodigious child may provoke, and how swiftly these may swerve towards
apprehension of the inhuman, the non-human and the inauthentic. The responses
associate the prodigious child with death and the uncanny; with possession or
incarnation; with mechanical repetition; with mere mimickry, acting and fakery.
De Mink (2011) dwells on the degraded status of imitation within musical scholarship
and connoisseurship. She notes that Nuron’s performance is fenced in by critical
responses that lament the lack of the two supposedly genuine markers of creative
talent – composition and improvisation, as if these were timeless universals, rather
than the product of specific historical and aesthetic conditions in Enlightenment
Europe. As de Mink notes, there is an inescapable trap for prodigious children in the
encounter with the good and common sense of adults, and one that I will return to at
the end. Even when a child seems to be improvising, she may be judged merely to
have an extraordinary ability to learn to observe and imitate. Something that marks
the creative summit of human achievement must always be withheld from the
prodigious child if the evolutionary story of the linear and cumulative nature of the
path to adulthood is to stand.
De Mink (2011: 7) suggests that, instead, we should take imitative performances like
these as indications of the child’s capacity to be affected, and that the relationship
between imitation and creativity should be understood in a ‘non-hierarchical
relationship as modes of affective capacities of individual bodies’. In this way, she
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says, ‘imitation no longer has a purely passive, unauthentic or ‘inhuman’ connotation.
Let’s take a look at another one: this is 2 year old Vincent with Loreen, winner of the
Eurovision Song Contest in 2012.
SLIDE/CLIP:
VINCENT/LOREEN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADrGu6f79U8
For Deleuze, life has distinctly inhuman aspects. So by the time thought takes place,
let alone language, it is already informed by something ‘indiscernible’ – a power or a
tendency - that is utterly indifferent to the structures and the comforts of human
subjectivity, cognition and language; yet utterly necessary to them, because this
inhuman ‘indiscernibility’ is the precursor or the condition of the movements and
variation out of which structure emerges.
And as I have already noted, for Deleuze and Guattari, the child is a figure of these asignifying, non-representational, nonhuman tendencies. Children do not necessarily
observe the etiquette that gives precedence to linguistic over non-linguistic signs, or
indeed to humans over animals or objects. They do not always feel obliged to mine
words for meaning, since they know that words issue forth on the breath and the
vibrations of the body and are felt as rhythm, sound and noise. So children are able to
deploy words as sound-objects – in other words to unhook words from their
representational function. This was apparent in Vincent’s performance above, where
the words of Loreen’s performance become indiscernible, and operate instead as parts
of an affective assemblage made of gestures, speeds, momentum, blanket and the
vibrations of voice.
You can also see this in the 2 year old blues performer, entitled ‘Amazing Blues
Baby’ on Youtube.
SLIDE/CLIP:
‘AMAZING BLUES BABY’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL_S-T_pHzo
In these child performances, language is dislodged from its sovereign position, where
it rules over other semiotic systems – gestural, visual etc – to become, again, part of
the ‘material-discursive assemblage’ in Barad’s phrase. The voice is deterritorialized
– it’s no longer the property or expression of a particular woman or man.
Paraphrasing Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) account of becoming-animal, I would say
that in these performances, it’s not a matter of imitating Nicki. It’s not a question of
playing Loreen, or ‘identifying’ with her. It’s not even about singing ‘like’ the blues
musician whose rendition of ‘Dust my Broom’ entered into composition with the
body of the amazing blues baby. Instead, and in the words of Deleuze and Guattari,
‘It is a composition of speeds and affects involving entirely different individuals’. But
these individuals are in a relation of symbiosis or contagion: again paraphrasing
Deleuze and Guattari, Vincent cannot become Loreen without Loreen also becoming
something else, and we too, in the new, eventful assemblage of speeds and affects.
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According to Deleuze and Guattari, the child is not contained within the hierarchical
structures of ‘filiation and heredity’ that regulate the oedipal relation, the grammar of
conventional language, and ultimately the law. This means, in other words, that
children are not completely tied to the evolutionary path described and enforced by
developmental psychology, that leads to the single terminus of adulthood. Their
psychic life admits of those ‘unnatural nuptials’ and ‘demonic alliances’ – both
phrases are from Deleuze and Guattari – that are contracted outside the familial
relation of mummy, daddy and child posited by psychodynamic theory. Deleuze and
Guattari argue that children consort according to the logic of the pack, which
proliferates, in their words, by alliance, contagion and epidemic (1987: 241). To requote a passage that I referred to at the beginning, what we see in these child
performances are those potentials for:
other becomings … that are not regressions but creative involutions bearing
witness to “an inhumanity immediately experienced in the body as such”,
unnatural nuptials “outside the programmed body’ (1987: 273).
These becomings are a matter of ‘composing a body’ with another entity, of entering
a zone of intensity and proximity where boundaries become indiscernible. I think you
can glimpse this pack logic in the unnatural nuptials of these child performances, and
in our own affective encounter with these.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, these connivances with the more-than-human,
and these materially-engaged, a-signifying practices, do not disappear as the child
grows up. Rather, they persist as affective ‘blocks of becoming’ – becoming-child,
becoming-animal - which can befall us and carry us off in unforeseen trajectories at
any age (1987: 294). The child ‘knows’ what adults have by and large forgotten. That
nonsense is not the opposite, but the accomplice of sense. That there are more ways to
connect than through the exchanging of messages or the deciphering of meaning. That
words and sounds are bodies too, capable of being detached from their syntagmatic
and paradigmatic bonds and set in motion to draw a different line. That a capacity for
inhuman alliance lives and laughs mercilessly alongside and inside human relations.
I want to turn to one last clip, and I apologize to those who have been forced to watch
this clip before, possibly on more than one occasion. It’s another viral video that will
not seem to let go of me, but instead – like Massumi’s account of the example,
mentioned by Stephanie yesterday - holds the potential for movement, unfolding new
significances and provoking new thoughts. This video is not a musical performance.
But I think it also attests to blocks of becoming that run largely unnoticed alongside
and inside the dominant oedipal-linguistic story.
SLIDE/CLIP:
TWIN BABIES TALKING
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JmA2ClUvUY
(almost 122 million hits)
This clip ‘speaks’ – in non-representational modalities - of the necessity of
sense/nonsense; of the material, multi-modal and multi-sensory forces in language
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that are never mere accompaniments to the sovereignty of meaning. Imitation and
creativity are not separate and hierarchically arranged but seem to be unfolding in the
same space. There’s no clear demarcation of language, sound and dance.
However, it also needs to be remembered that the deterritorializations effected by
becoming-child are themselves liable to be subject to reterritorialization – to
reincorporation into familiar structures of meaning and feeling. You can see this in
reactions to the child prodigies – when Sophia Grace and Rosie, for instance, are seen
to represent something – premature sexualisation, or the contaminations of pop
culture. Or even when they are welcomed into its embrace.
Claire Colebrook (2014: 84)) might call this excessive affective euphoria an instance
of ‘hyper-hypo affective disorder’ – the contemporary tendency to seek and enjoy
stimulus without thought or attention. The craving for affective input actually causes a
diminution in the intensity of affect, she argues. Colebrook is also critical of
theoretical work that valorizes unmediated affective connectivity, in the vain hope
that this will somehow release us from the despotism of the signifier. She takes issue,
for instance, with Karen Barad for ‘an almost unquestioned attack on the detached
and disembodied nature of theory, in favor of theorizing that would take the form of
touch’ (2013: 1). Colebrook discusses this extract from an article by Barad:
SLIDE
Theorizing, a form of experimenting, is about being in touch. What keeps
theories alive and lively is being responsible and responsive to the world’s
patternings and murmurings. Doing theory requires being open to the world’s
aliveness, allowing oneself to be lured by curiosity, surprise and wonder.
Theories are not mere metaphorical pronouncements on the world from some
presumed position of exteriority. Theories are living and breathing
reconfigurations of the world. The world theorizes as well as experiments with
itself.
(Barad, K, (2012) On touching: the inhuman that, therefore I am. differences:
A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 23(5), p. 207)
Colebrook (2014: 83) argues that we need a ‘far more nuanced’ understanding of
affect that would stop us from confusing it with affections – with the capture and
privatization of affect, as she calls it, when it is returned to our ‘habitual bodies’ as
feelings and emotions – joy, repulsion, horror. She insists that we need to think affect
outside of the structures of the lived, and recognize it as immanent, impersonal forces
that precede us and are indifferent to their potential capture by life. For Colebrook,
affects ‘stand alone, exist in themselves, and cannot be reduced to the lived’ (91). So
we need to try, with the child performances that I have discussed, to resist
recuperating the strange forces that move in them for the familiar affects of joy or
celebration. As Colebrook notes, this is difficult. It’s hard to avoid feeding affect
straight into the sensori-motor system.
There are ethical issues too, in the way we consume the intensities of prodigious
children. As Anna Hickey-Moody (2013, p. 276) points out, the Deleuzian child as a
‘vector of affect’ or deterritorialising force is a romantic and therefore a conservative
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notion, that risks diverting attention from the diverse and specific material conditions
of children’s lives. ‘The child’ (like ‘woman’) has been a pliant resource for thought
across many different theoretical traditions. Do we need to worry that we might be
fattening children up for theoretical consumption? Where might a methodological
fascination with prodigious childhoods lead, and at what cost to those that are living
them?
Carol Mavor (2011) documents in chilling detail the consumption and repudiation of
the child poet Minou Drouet by the French intelligentsia in the 1950s. Unable to
satisfy the incompatible appetites of her public for child-like innocence and artistic
genius, Minou was finally buffeted into silence by the frenzied disappointment of her
(predominantly male) critics. Roland Barthes was one of the chief among these.
Minou herself seems to have been aware of the danger of becoming an object of adult
fascination. Mavor writes, quoting from one of Minou’s poems:
“Through Minou’s own delectably violent words, we look at her with “greedy
eye like children’s eyes / who looking at pastries / undress the icing / from
cakes all crackly with frost / mouth which nibbles with no respite / this tragic
candy, time”.
Prodigious children, and ultimately all children, are at risk because of the threat they
pose to our human self-assurance – our need to distinguish imitation from creativity;
innocence from connivance; meaning from nonsense. They force us to face our fear
that our emotions, that seem so deeply ours, might come from outside us.
So, and in conclusion, do children need to be protected from our theoretical appetites
for the monstrous and the prodigious?
References
Barad, K, (2012) On touching: the inhuman that, therefore I am. differences: A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 23(5), 207.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987) A thousand plateaus (B. Massumi, Trans.). London:
Continuum.
Colebrook, C. (2013) HYPO-HYPER-HAPTO-NEURO-MYSTICISM. Parrhesia,
18, 1-10.
Colebrook, C. (2014) Death of the posthuman. Essays on extinction, vol. 1. Open
Humanities Press.
De Mink, F. (2011) “The Next Mozart?” Encounter with a musical child prodigy on
YouTube. Performa ’11 – Encontros de Investigação em Performance. Universidade
de Aveiro, Maio de 2011. Accessible online:
http://performa.web.ua.pt/pdf/actas2011/FreyaMink.pdf (Accessed 06.07.15)
Hickey-Moody, A.C. (2013). Deleuze’s children. Educational Philosophy and
Theory, 45(3), 272-286.
Mavor, C. (2010/11) Tragic candy, time. Cabinet, 40, Hair, Winter 2010/11
http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/40/mavor.php (Accessed 29.06.2015)
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