When Images Matter: Internet Child Pornography, Forms of Observation and an Ethics of the Virtual

The arrest of Pete Townshend, lead guitarist for The Who, for downloading and possessing Internet child pornography and the publicity surrounding the case provides an initial point of discussion concerning the emergence of an ethics of the image that is not predicated on the actual evidential status of that image but on more virtual forms of observation. The discussion in this article focuses on three substantive aspects of this event - legislation in the UK and the US, expert psychological discourse, and public discussion in the UK press - in order to present a particular and situated rendering of forms of virtual observation. The context to this discussion concerns the notion that digital imaging technology presages a need for new legislation, law enforcement and social analytical frameworks for understanding and tackling the production, distribution and consumption of images of child sexual abuse

Infancy and Experience: Voice, Politics, and Bare Life

This paper explores the question of the empirical in the context of its related notion of experience, inasmuch as the latter explicitly brings into play issues about subjectivity. The paper focuses directly on the ideas of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben concerning infancy and experience, voice and speech, and bare life and politics. In doing so, an argument is made that questions Agamben’s recourse to a particular form of linguistic model and makes evident the limitations that such a model poses for an understanding of significant transformations in modern forms of sovereignty regarding the socio-political articulation of highly domesticated voices. The paper intends to provide some sociological and social theoretical ground for a consideration of the voice of infancy in contemporary forms of biopolitical sovereignty. In doing so, the paper suggests that infancy is more than a figuration of experimentation, inasmuch as its voice (hovering between babble and the comprehensible) may resonate across an empirical domain, which is reconfigured through such a voice (or voices) heard, taken seriously and touching others

Mobile Signs: Matter, Medium, and Generation

In a discussion of the intellect in his 1911 work Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson refers fleetingly to mobility and semiosis: There must be a language whose signs – which cannot be infinite in number – are extensible to an infinity of things. This tendency of the sign to transfer itself from one object to another is characteristic of human language. It is observable in the little child as soon as he begins to speak. Immediately and naturally he extends the meaning of the word he learns, availing himself of the most accidental connection or the most distant analogy to detach and transfer elsewhere the sign that had been associated in his hearing with a particular object. “Anything can designate anything;” such is the latent principle of infantine language. (Bergson, 1911/1968: 158) Bergson makes this observation about human language in the context of thinking about the intellect and human social life and in contrast to the social life and language of insects. Signs are central to Bergson’s understanding of community as a common social life (‘By language community of action is made possible’ (157)), but there are striking differences between a colony of ants and human society. Insects are dependent on instinct and the form of their organs. The number of signs in their language is very limited and each sign ‘must remain invariably attached to a certain object or a certain operation’ (158). For humans, there is no preordination of person to structure and no necessary attachment of sign to object or operation. It is the finiteness of the number of signs and also the ubiquity of their use that, according to Bergson, makes possible the ‘liberation’ of the intellect from the material object: ‘[t]he word, made to pass from one thing to another, is, in fact, by nature transferable and free. It can therefore be extended, not only from one perceived thing to another, but even from a perceived thing to a recollection of that thing, from the precise recollection to a more fleeting image, and finally from an image fleeting, though still pictured, that is to say, to the idea’ (159). Thus, Bergson declares that ‘[t]he instinctive sign is adherent, the intelligent sign is mobile’ (158). That said, Bergson offers no further insight as to how a sign might be both intelligent and mobile

Infancy, Generation and Experience: Notes on the Sociological Empirical and Toward a Political Theory of Children’s Association

In some ways we have come a long way from Locke’s story of the Dutch ambassador’s account of weather so cold that it freezes water so hard that an elephant could stand on it [and upon hearing the story, the King of Siam responding: 'Hitherto I have believed the strange things you have told me, because I look upon you as a sober fair man; but now I am sure you lie' (1688/1978: 33)]1 or of similar stories, such as from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)2, of probability and reliable witnessing. Much recent theoretical labour, especially in the fields of science and technology studies and cultural theory and some sub-disciplines of anthropology, has shown how the empirical is far from settled in the site of the scientific observer, not only inasmuch as the scientist is fallible to social forces, but inasmuch as matter observed is agentic, motile and sticky. Matter under the microscope always affects the vision of the experimenter. Whether that matter is fixed or only known through the traces it leaves, the eye’s vision is always clouded. It is in this sense that writers working in these still relatively new fields talk about the confusion of epistemological and ontological tongues. Knowing is making and doing is being and the kiss of being is uncontained (cf. Callon, Latour, Haraway, Law, etc). In the middle of these translations across knowing and being, the human and technological, the natural and social, and the natural sciences and human sciences, any history of the modest masculine witness is put in its place in the past (Haraway, 1997; Shapin and Schaffer, 1985: Shapin, 1994). And yet I think that there is good reason to revisit that past not in order to resurrect old debates, but to re-form and in-form present ones. I want to offer a brief and cursory genealogical account of the emergence of a domain of children’s experience and frame that account in the context of a series of questions about the infancy or maturity of the subject of experience. In doing so, I want to say a few things about the subject of the empirical and its associational being

Child studies multiple – collaborative play for thinking through theories and methods

This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, “un-closure” , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a child or a researcher. The theoretical and methodological processes presented here offer an opportunity to shake the ground on which individual researchers stand by raising questions about scientific inspiration, theoretical and methodological productivity, and thinking through focusing on process, play, and collaboration. The effect of this is a questioning of the singular academic ‘I’ by exploring and showing what a plural ‘I’ can look like. It is about what the multiplicity of voice can offer research in a highly individualistic time. The article allows the reader to follow and watch the unconventional trial-and-error path of the ongoing-ness of exploring theories and methods together as a research community via methods of drama, palimpsest, and fictionary