What Will We Tell the Children?

Inspired by The Skeleton Key, K-punk has posts about beliefs and disavowed beliefs here and here.

In the film, Caroline, a young woman with no interest in the supernatural, finds herself in the swamps of the American South. There hoodoo is practiced, which is presented as a kind of bad magic that only has an effect on those who believe in it. To help an old man who thinks he is under a spell, or at least Caroline thinks he thinks he is, she performs some of the rites and this makes her vulnerable to the magical rituals. By acting as if she believes, she has become a believer.

K-punk convincingly links this tension between the direct belief and the belief in the other's belief, between the believers and the people who will only perform the ritual practices if they are confident that they 'know they mean nothing', to commodity fetishism. But he also writes "that there is no 'naive consumer' who believes commodities are animate beings," and this made me wonder: aren't disavowed beliefs always articulated against the background of the naivety, the innocence of children? Perhaps it's no coincidence that in a key scene of the film - the primal scene, so to speak - parents are violently upset, not by a hoodoo ceremony taking place in their home, but by the fact that their son and daughter witness it.

Similarly, nobody worries for their own sake about violent computer games, pornographic images or news of depraved presidents. These concerns are formulated in relation to the point of view of children. And maybe the same is even true for commodity fetishism: while not many people think much of their own continuous exposure to advertisements, there is definitely something disturbing about marketing and publicity that is aimed at young kids.

The role of the child is crucial here, as Octave Mannoni wrote in the essay Je sais bien, mais quand même: "Many adults are ready to admit - though the absurdity of the thing sometimes makes them hesitate - that they are not religious for themselves, but for the children. And the important place children have in the organisation of beliefs cannot be explained only in relation to the care for their spiritual development." The same thing can be said about this particular commodity, the horror film, which after all is usually taboo for young audiences. Ratings not only exist to protect innocent souls against terrifying stories, but at the same time help to convince others that children will really believe those tales.

Comments

[Matt]

...religious for the sake of an idealized 'children', are you saying, as in the Christian prejudice: "Suffer the children"? Whereas shrewd advertising holds no such illusions?

I'm not sure that I buy it entirely, that 'belief' understood this way (as belief in the other's belief) can really be reduced to "commodity fetishism." I haven't followed the link yet but it sounds a bit like yet another polemically Zizekian-flavoured insight profitting off a poorly understood point of Derrida's (the "as-if" gesture-lite, if you will)...but then I tend to be the guy who says that about everything under the sun.

My guess is he's far too modest to mention it himself, but...this old post by YH doesn't get linked to nearly enough:

http://younghegelian.blogspot.com/2004/09/visible-and-invisible.html

For the umpteenth time in three days, very glad to have you with us, David.

[Matt]

Maybe I've misunderstood the point. It's an interesting post by K-Punk. In any case I'm happy to put on my tin hat for the comments about Zizek above.

[mark k-p]

don't think i said that belief in the other's belief is the same as commodity fetishism... rather that in both the Skeleton Key and commodity fetishism we have practice that is only undertaken because 'actual' belief is repudiated. 'Naturally I don't believe in hoodoo, but others do, and for their sake I'll perform these rituals.' 'Naturally, I don't believe that commodites are animate, but others do, so I'll act as if I do.'

Always been interested in this child thing actually --- similar thing goes for profanity --- since kids swear and parents know that they do, and kids know that they know, who is that doesn't know? Ah, the big other of course -- seems to me that there's a way in which 'family life' as such rests upon the Other who does not know...

I couldn't understand it. It just seemed to be an excuse to quote a bit of zizek