Observing the Infant

I recently went to a very engaging and memorable day organised by the excellent Chiara Alfano, where parents, artists and researchers (at least one of us, Rebecca Baillie, was all three, you can take a look at her work here) met to talk about babies, little children and how they are looked at and thought about. My own starting points were, first an immense but quite small and ordinary experience I had in my early 20s, sitting in the back of a car with a baby of perhaps 11 months. He touched my hand, to summon my attention. I spoke a lot more about him and what that touch meant, and did, at the symposium. It feels as if there were hundreds, maybe thousands of words gathering quietly around that surprising infant touch.The other inspiration, quite closely related, came from some observations made by Derrida in an amazing conversation he had with Hélène Cixous in the early 2000s. They suggest that in general, no matter who we are or how old we are, our relation to the other – that is to something or someone else, outside us or in us – has something infant-like about it. He insists that ‘the other is he or she before whom I am vulnerable, whom I can not even deny.’ That was certainly the case for me when I was touched on the hand: it was as if I had no idea such a thing was possible. 'What was that?' and 'What is happening to me?' came even before 'Who is there?' and 'What do they want?' A little later on in the conversation with Cixous, Derrida suggests that this relation to the other is not an absence of desire or forcefulness: ‘It’s not a powerlessness of simple resignation, of weakness, but rather an abandonment.' Cixous comments: 'You arrive (to yourself) where you were not expecting (yourself)' They seem to be talking about an inner action of loosening or removing an internal constraint. At the same time as the arrival of someone or something outside us, in the same scene of visitation,  there is an opening of the self, a transfiguration, reconfiguration or conversion. And in language something is already at work, silently generating effects. the words ‘infancy’ and ‘abandonment’ are related,  they share the same Indo-European root bhā-, to speak. A 'ban' in Old English was a commandment or prohibition. Infancy might be the name for a state before 'thou shalt' and 'thou shalt not.' It would be before learned reactions, before conscience and the Freudian superego formed by the action of parents' words in their children. It would be the inventive abandon of the writer, the artist, the ordinary human at play. Derrida talks about an openness or abandonment in which 'I can not say that I open the doors, that I invite the other: the other is already there. That is unconditional hospitality (foreign to politics and law and even to the ethical in the narrow sense).' Such a state or possibility is extraordinarily interesting and inspiring to observe or watch over.  More, it needs to be guarded from debasement and exploitation. It must not be forgotten or lost. The symposium was convened for the purpose of 'Observing the Infant' and there is something vigilant and wary about observation . The root of 'observe' means to protect. Observing the infant, one goes in front or before (I’m thinking of the ob-of ‘observation’), to watch or pay heed to, to look after the young child who is vulnerable, precious and by definition unable to speak for him or herself. One might take this care for the infant further, to the point of a practice. Such a practice would observe infancy itself—not in the sense of one or more humans looking at smaller, younger humans, but as one might keep up a tradition. (Isn't infancy a tradition? Shouldn't we learn to keep it, as Scrooge learns to keep Christmas?) Might we learn to honour and respect infancy itself as a certain way of being, to be taken up and practiced, kept as one keeps the ceremonies of a religion or the customs of a culture? Never to be reduced to the infantile, not to be idealised-denigrated, nor left to run the show: in other words, to be thought? In this sense, the infant would take the lead and show us the way. We who observe the infant give ourselves over or abandon ourselves to the infant and find ourselves taken beyond languages.One thinks of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, that take up infant joy and sorrow very closely and intimately in songs or poems that could be said to correspond with the kind of intimately strange and nameless being they are about, so that as Derrida puts it in ‘Khora’: ‘the quality of the discourse depends primarily on the quality of the being of whom it speaks.’  Dependency here is not necessarily simple or reducible to the complementarity of form and content. It is what makes it possible to speak about something, some being, in a way that responds to the truth of that being.I may add, thinking of the strangeness of being in fans, that one can also observe, watch, survey or study suspiciously, guardedly, in order to protect oneself. We saw this especially in some of the filmed and photographic research by psychologists and ethnographers shown to us by Katie Joice. From what would one want to protect oneself, in this case? Perhaps from the otherness of the other – but this is impossible: the other is already there. The infant is there, in us and in front of us. Perhaps from the weakness of being unable to speak? But isn't that the very place from which true speech, speech truly able to respond to the quality of what it speaks about, might come?