>On Tue, 11 Jul 2000 18:31:06 +1000 Rob Schaap <rws at comedu.canberra.edu.au>
>wrote:
> > But still can't see how you so confidently
>build this Lacanian fragmentation thesis on so modest a foundation. It still
>relies on the positing of a 'lost' something that was never there, for mine.
>
>That's exactly it. The "lost" object was never possessed. It is imagined.
Why don't we leave it at that? It is no "transhistorically human" characteristic to obsess over the object that gets retroactively posited as "lost" but was never there to begin with.
>Now consider "self-consciousness" or the proverbial "age of reason." Once
>achieved, there is a loss, a loss of innocence? A loss of childhood? A loss of
>being close to something? We've got countless movies and metaphors
>about this, that something, something that we never possessed,
>appears lost in retrospect.
For instance, the "loss of childhood innocence" trope is a post-Romantic business, not a transhistorical one. Ever read Phillipe Aries?
***** Phillipe Aries' contention that medieval society lacked the idea of childhood stimulated the historical study of children. Basing his conclusions especially on depictions of children in art, Aries argued in Centuries of Childhood that medieval society incorporated children into the adult world at a very early age. This gradually changed from the thirteenth century onward, first with a "coddling period" in which adults treated children as innocent sources of amusement, and then with a "moralistic period" (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) in which adults treated children as unruly creatures to be disciplined. Aries saw the differentiation of children from adults as part of a modern tendency to separate groups that used to mingle more freely, such as social classes. He did not regard this as necessarily good for children, warning that "the idea of childhood is not to be confused with affection for children" (quoted on p. 49). <http://www.familydiscussions.com/books/corsaro.htm> *****
Historicize The Thing!
Yoshie