Immanence, Sublimity, Infants: More Notes on Fatherhood

It’s been just over a year since I became a father, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve been waylaid by people who want to admire the lovely little Lila Archambeau. Generally, I’m happy when this happens, even when it’s at the grocery store and I’m in a hurry: paternal pride is a powerful force. But there’s one expression, intended as praise, that I’ve always rankled at a bit. This is the statement — usually delivered as a kind of conclusion of after some questions about Lila’s age, name, and the like — that “she’s a miracle.” Maybe it’s the all of the religious freight the word carries that irks my cold, dark, atheist’s heart. I always want to pull out some medical records and point out that the kid is the product of some serious science, not an act of divine intervention. But the more I think about it, the more I find my reaction every bit as unthinking, and probably shallower, than the statement that the baby-admirer was actually making. Because I have been professorized beyond any help or hope of repair, and because I can do nothing without a text, I’m afraid I can only explain what I mean with reference to some passages of Gilles Deleuze and Immanuel Kant.

I haven’t read Deleuze’s “Immanence: A Life,” for a long time, but Johannes Göransson recently reminded me of it when he posted some choice quotes to his blog. My favorite is one where Deleuze gives an example of the difference between the idea of a life and someone’s particular life:

A life…No one has described what a life is better than Charles Dickens, if we take the indefinite article as an index of the transcendental. A disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love for his slightest sign of life. Everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma, this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him. But to the degrees that he comes back to life, his saviors turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death. The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what happens…

This is interesting stuff! I mean, Deleuze really gets at the way a life is different from life in general and someone’s particular life. Life in general — what’s that? Something general, like “wildlife,” or all creatures? Or maybe some abstract notion of the life-force itself, like you get when you read D.H. Lawrence. That’s hard to connect to emotionally, because of how general or abstract it is. And particular people’s lives — well, you can love or hate a particular person for his or her personal qualities (or, more likely, you can feel ambivalent or indifferent). But there is a very real phenomenon that Deleuze is getting at here — the widespread reverence of the single life that is not particularized by personal qualities or a particular subjectivity — not "all life," not "Dave's life" but "a life." Think about it: those characters gathered around Dickens’ dying rogue don’t really care for the man. His personal qualities, the things that make him into a particular human, are odious. The people don’t admire him as an individual, still less do the love him for who he is. But when he starts to fade out, he loses those personal qualities, and what they see is not the guy who was cruel to them — they see one little life, at the verge of disappearing (“Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death”). Individual qualities like greediness, pettiness, and a general propensity to be a selfish asshat suddenly lack relevance, and all that’s left is the essential fact that there is a life in front of us. This life is “an impersonal and yet singular” because, in this state of near-death, no personal qualities come into play — but at the same time, this is not all life, or an abstract life force. It’s a singular life.

The way we feel about infants is, I think, very much the same as these characters from Dickens felt about the dying rogue. Deleuze felt this way, too. Here’s what he says:

It even seems that a singular life might do without any individuality, without any other concomitant that individualizes it. For example, very small children all resemble one another and have hardly any individuality, but they have singularities: a smile, a gesture, a funny face — not subjective qualities…

It’s true: infants have qualities that make them singular (no one else looks quite the same, no one else has quite the same smile or wave or way of sitting), but to have these qualities is not the same as having a full-blown individual subjectivity. Very small infants haven’t had the experiences to form themselves into individuals in the sense we normally mean by that word. They’re singular, but they’re not quite personalities. Before, say 18 or 24 months, they haven’t yet learned about autonomy and shame. When they start saying “no” and throwing tantrums, you know a sense of self is starting to develop, and the kid’s on his or her way to being someone in particular. But before that, we’re dealing with a singular life that isn’t yet a fully individuated subjectivity (I’m bracing myself for people telling me I’m wrong, and that little 9 month old Egbert is fully individuated, but what I’m saying here is pretty standard-issue developmental psychology, so I refer your outrage to the nearest department of psychology).

With infants we’re dealing with the presence of a life, not someone in particular. This in itself goes a long way to explaining why strangers come up and admire babies. I mean, we don’t come up to adults (who are, after all, infants who’ve been around a while) and praise or adore them: it wouldn’t be appropriate, because we don’t know that person’s individual qualities. We don’t know if he or she is a decent person or a complete shit. But with infants, personal qualities aren’t the issue: the fact of a little, particular life is what’s important, and we tend to react well to these little, particular lives. We even call them “miracles.”

But what, you ask, is up with that? Why this awe at the fact of the infant as a life? I think Kant can take us to something like an explanation with his discussion, in Critique of Judgment, of the sublime. Sublimity has been a topic of discussion for literary theorists at least since Longinus, but guys like Longinus and Edmund Burke (the other heavy-hitter in the field of sublimity) had concentrated for the most part on the properties of sublime pieces of writing, or sublime art objects, or sublime scenes in nature (largeness, awe-inspiringness, grandeur, and all that). Kant took the discussion away from the properties of objects in the world and toward a discussion of what happens in our minds when we experience the sublime. Long story short, he felt that there were two main components to the experience of sublimity:

1. We apprehend something awe-inspiringly vast in space, in time, or at a more abstract level —a glacial seems ice-sheet seems sublime when we see it, or the idea of the rise and fall of civilizations seems sublime when we contemplate it (perhaps in the presence of some suitably grand ruins), the vastness of space seems sublime when we’re aware of it, and even the concept of mathematical infinity, when it hits us square in the forehead, feels sublime.

2. We apprehend our own smallness and weakness in relation to this vast thing, and stand in awe not only of the big thing, but of our own ability (insignificant as we are) to exist in the presence of something this big and powerful, and to not be destroyed by it.

So: if you stand on the edge of the volcano, and see its huge force, you experience the sublime not merely by standing in awe of the power of the volcano, but by thinking “little me, I’m here, I’m seeing this thing compared to which I’m nothing, but I’m still here! I am not destroyed!." There’s a kind of awe in this, and a quickening of the senses, an appreciation of both our power and our fragility.

I think it’s this notion of our power and our fragility that comes into play when we see a life (as opposed to a particular life) — as we do when we see an infant.

Consider this: when we encounter another adult human going about his or her business, we get bogged down in the particulars of self-interest and social interaction (“is this guy trying to fuck with me?” “how can I get this chump to sign on the dotted line and buy my old Camaro?” “whoa — if I play my cards right here, I might get laid!” or whatever). But when we encounter an infant, we’re like those Dickens characters gathered around the dying rogue. We see one small life set against the vast darkness of the universe. We see this little thing that, somehow, in all of the gigantic void of space and all of the eons of lifeless time in the universe, opens a little window of being-and-becoming, of existing, of living. We don’t have to worry about all of the usual chickenshit of human interaction: we’re dealing with fundamentals here, with the small flame of life flickering against a darkness of non-life that extends out to the limits of space and backwards and forwards to the limits of time. And we get a sense both of that vast lifelessness and of the unvanquished, fragile, infinitely small reality of a life. It’s sublime

If that’s what people mean when they call the presence of my daughter a miracle (and I think at some deeply felt — if not deeply thought — level, they do mean this), I’m down with it.

Being, Becoming, and Fatherhood

[Warning: this post is much more about me and my life than my usual posts are. I don't blame you if you want to go read something else.]

Back when I was in grad school, I used to carpool from Chicago to my teaching gig at Notre Dame with a lanky guy who got his news from Fox, his opinions from Rush, and his general outlook from a hybrid of Nietzsche and Pentecostalism. It made for some interesting rides, as we argued our way through the post-industrial wasteland of northern Indiana, especially since he had little patience for the commute and an uncanny ability to talk his way out of speeding tickets, drawling long, slow explanations to the cops from behind his aviator shades. He was in his thirties, about a decade older than I was, and, when we would reach a particularly impassible point of fundamental disagreement, he'd sigh, lower those shades, look over at me from behind a speedometer that hovered up near the triple digits, and say "Well, Archambeau, you're young. You'll see it my way when that women is fool enough to marry you and you have kids." I've had to wait a long time to see for myself whether his dire prediction would come to pass, but nine months into this fatherhood gig I'm willing to crawl out on a limb and say he was just fucking wrong.

Generally, I've found the predictions about fatherhood to be kind of off-base. It hasn't been as hard as some people told me it would be. One colleague — a man predisposed by my bitching and moaning visits to his office to see of me as rather thin-skinned, or as something of a delicate orchid — was particularly stern in his warnings about the implications of having a child. "Look," he said, "right now you live in a pleasure dome, a palace of pleasant breezes, but when the little one comes, all that will change," here he would sigh, and look out the window in the general direction of his dilapidated Victorian house, his three kids, and a wife best described as "difficult." "When the little one comes," he'd continue, "the pleasure dome will be forever destroyed, and life becomes a desperate holding action, carried on against superior force." He wrote a lot about the literature of the Vietnam war, and I think it crept into his metaphors. Anyway, fatherhood hasn't felt that way for me, maybe because I'm now at a point when Valerie and I can afford to have some help raising the kid, and maybe because we got very, very lucky in the nanny-hiring lottery.

Other predictions have proven false, too. Apparently you can still go out to the movies, and you can still discover new music while doing the parent thing. Again, this may have something to do with not being a penniless twenty-something itinerant poetry teacher at this point in my life.

But there is one significant way that fatherhood has changed things for me. It's not just that I've had different experiences (a closer acquaintance with baby feces than had heretofore been the case, say, or a different relation to sleep, or a constant astonishment at the stream of firsts — waves, smiles, rollings-across-the-floor, etc.). I think there's a different orientation to experience. I don't mean that this is better or worse than my non-kid-having orientation to experience —I hate the smugness of some parents I've met, who seem to think that the only path to complete humanity lies through the raising of urchins. I thought that was wrong during my long childless period, and I think it's wrong now. But I do think that, at least for me, there's a different relation to the world now.

Maybe I've spent too much time reading Hegel (in fact, scratch the "maybe" there) but I think the best way to get at the nature of this different way of experiencing the world is through the contrast between the idea of being and the idea of becoming. Here's the deal: by the time my daughter was born this past February, I'd pretty much reached a point of stability in my life. I mean, I'd finished grad school, landed a teaching job, made tenure, and been promoted to full professor. I'd found the one woman on earth capable of dealing with my bullshit in a loving and affirming way, married her, and we'd been together in wedded bliss for sixteen years. We were settled into a house, into our sets of friends, and our careers (she's the one with the Big Deal job, by the way). I'd had a book or two published, and felt about as professionally established as I'd care to feel. All that was done, and didn't loom before me with the kind of urgency I feel when I get emails from former students hungering for the dream job, the back yard, the right guy, or whatever. It didn't feel like a rut — it felt a lot like fulfillment. And there was always something new happening in terms of whatever I was intellectually engaged with. But I was more or less who I was going to become, and the texture of life from one season to the next, one year to the next, was sort of the same. It was easy, too, which is both good and bad, I suppose.

All this was a matter of being, not becoming. Think about it: the protagonists of folklore or mythology don't change: they are what they are, they have the traits they're going to have. They have new adventures, but they don't experience fundamental changes. It's true for modern folklore, too: whenever I try to explain this stuff to students, I say that James Bond is the a creature of pure being, rather than becoming. Sure, we often see him doing some training exercise at the beginning of the movies, but he's not striving to become something he's not: he's maintaining his general awesomeness. He is what he is: a hyper-resourceful adventurer and ladies' man. He couldn't be more different from, say, the protagonist of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman. The lead characters in those books are all about change and growth. The reason so many of those novels are named after the protagonist (Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn, etc.) is that the protagonist is where the action is: he or she will grow, evolve, and learn. By contrast, Bond movies are often named after villains (Dr. No) or love interests (Octopussy) or whatever. In the world of becoming, you don't have a stable, ordinary world that you venture out from to have your adventures (the way 007 had headquarters with M and Moneypenny, or the way pre-kid-havin' Archambeau had the comfortable little bubble from which he'd make forays into weird books of poetry and obscure works of theory). In the world of becoming, you don't have a stable place or a stable identity: you're on the road, in motion, and evolving all the time.

The thing about having a kid (and I imagine many of you know this better than I do) is that it throws you straight into the whirlwind of becoming. I mean, a kid is all change, all becoming, all the time: it seems Little Lila has a new paradigm of behavior and a new set of skills every week, a new emotional climate every two weeks, and a new wardrobe every month. And she's plugged directly into my life, so I'm always adapting to this, and becoming different along with her. I mean, take something as simple and straightforward as the way the house is arranged. Before Lila came along, the only real changes in the house came about for aesthetic purposes ("let's re-arrange the ceramics on the mantlepiece, or find a place for the new thingy we scored while antiquing, or let's figure a way to get that pile of books off the floor," that sort of thing). Now, the house is in a constant flux: bassinets and baby swings came and went, followed by bouncy-chairs and play-pens, which were followed in turn by a wholesale revamping of the sunroom into a colorful, rubber-tiled, toy-strewn Zone du Kid. It's not a house in a state of being, it's a house in a state of becoming. And that's just the surface: the three-character dynamic of mom, dad, and kid is in constant flux to accommodate Lila's ongoing miraculous transformations. It's different from the old two-character act, which we had down, people, down. Now it's more like improv comedy. All becoming, all the time.

But that doesn't catch everything about the nature of the change in how one relates to experience. There's something different, which we might be able to get at with Nietzsche rather than Hegel. Remember Wim Wenders' wonderful movie Wings of Desire? I always thought it had a lot to do with Nietzche's ideas of Apollonian and Dionysian experience. In the beginning, we follow some angels through Berlin: they look like regular people, but drift unseen through the city, standing near people and hearing their thoughts. There's a great scene where the angels do this in a library, walking past readers and hearing their reflections on what they're reading. The angels feel deeply, and understand, but have no other connection to the world or the people they see. They're distant, understanding and appreciating the world but not really being engaged with it. They have nothing at stake in the struggles of the world, no self-interest or group-interest to protect. This is Apollonian stuff, all self-possession and aesthetic distance. I think of my pre-Lila life like this. But when she was born, I felt like the angel in the Wenders film who chooses to become human, to enter the world of time and change and to lose the distance of the Apollonian, angelic perspective. Suddenly, the angel finds himself a part of what he had observed, with something at stake, with things to protect and with the urgent need to shelter those for whom he cared most. The collapse of Apollonian distance was complete, and he'd been absorbed into the world — a good portion of the Dionysian experience, really.

I don't mean to place one mode of experience above the other (Wenders doesn't, nor does Nietzsche, though Nietzsche did seem to think that the fusion of the two modes of experience in Greek tragedy was a higher form of experience). But I do think there's a sense of engagement that comes with having a kid that's different from the generally aesthetic, semi-disinterested way of experiencing things I had going on before. Maybe it was an awareness of this that made my old carpool partner think I'd change my politics when I became a father. Though how you could get from the world of becoming and the anti-Apollonian stance to Rush Limbaugh is as much beyond me as is the secret of making cops back off when they nab you for speeding.