Prodigious Performances, Posthuman Subjectivities: Young Children Performing on YouTube

• In Event: 73.057 - Writing the Posthuman "I": The Problem of the Human Subject in the More-Than-Human World

Abstract

Objectives
The paper explores the question of post-human subjectivities through a focus on performances by young children that unsettle notions of human subjectivity and development. These performances offer glimpses of affective connections that exceed and confound the centered, signifying subject of humanism. I ask who/what speaks in and through these performances, and whether they might help answer the question that animates this symposium: how to “write/speak the post-human subject into being?”

Perspective
The paper is informed by ‘new materialist’ theorizing of the posthuman (Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 2006) and by Deleuzian conceptions of affect (Massumi, 2002). This work comprehends matter as productively haunted by the potentiality and chanciness of the virtual. It productively disorients conventional conceptualizations of subjectivity. No privilege is granted to the agency, consciousness, linguistic competence or affective capacity of the human subject; and entities - human and nonhuman, material and discursive, organic and inorganic - mix and ‘prehend’ one another at diverse scales from the microbiological to the societal.

Mode of inquiry and materials
This theoretical work is brought to bear on a selection of online YouTube videos of young children ‘imitating’ popular musicians and singers. These widely viewed clips are of interest for the powerful affects that they both elicit and exhibit. The performances provoke strong affective responses from viewers (and researchers), expressed as delight, disapproval, fascination, anxiety, unease. They also demonstrate a prodigious capacity to be affected: to allow the gestures, sounds and affects of others to ‘infect’ the child body to a degree that seems to exceed the bounds of imitation, becoming something more like shamanistic possession, or Spinozist ‘passion’. The ‘powerful body’ of the prodigious child (de Mink, 2011) challenges the binary architecture of humanist prerogative: adult/child, nature/culture, imitation/creativity, fake/authentic, originality/reproduction, innocence/corruption. The affective power to conjure posthuman subjectivities is evident in anxious responses that associate such performances with animals, machines and monsters - parrots, puppets, automata. Such responses point to the need for a posthuman ethics, to handle the jeopardy of exposing the more-than-human affinities that precede and accompany the ‘autonomous’ human subject.

Conclusion
These performances should be understood, not as mechanical reproductions but as ‘machinic assemblages’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987/2003 ) of polymorphous, desiring connections. In such a view, imitation is not a degraded, failed or ‘empty’ performance of the less-than-human, but the expression of affective capacities that are always already more-than-human.

Significance
By identifying a-signifying and distributed subjectivities in embodied child performances, the paper makes an important intervention in new materialist methodology, which has been troubled by the persistence of the phenomenological subject.

References
Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987/2003) A Thousand Plateaus. Continuum.
De Mink, F.M. (2011) ‘The next Mozart?’ Encounter with a musical child prodigy on Youtube. Paper presented at Performa ’11.
Haraway, D. (2006) When we have never been human, what is to be done? Theory, Culture & Society, 23:135-158
Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual. Duke.

Author

• Maggie Maclure, Manchester Metropolitan University