Brexit, “child as method,” and the pedagogy of failure: How discourses of childhood structure the resistance of racist discourse to analysis

The categories “child” and “children” are not equivalent so their elision involves generalization of an abstract ideal (child) that suppresses the diversity and specificities of particular children’s contexts and lives (see Burman Citation2008, Citation2013).

Although I focus on the discursive aspects of racism, this is to emphasize its contingent, socially structured character as well as the specific cultural, media text analyzed here. Nevertheless, the social psychoanalytic arguments mobilized here presume close connections between the intrapsychic and social structuring of subjectivity.

Bremain—the opposite of Brexit, voting to remain in the European Union, formulated at the time of the Referendum.

The three passions that Lacan proposed comprise not only love and work, but also ignorance.

Subsequent online commentary disputed its status as representative of the deprived North East, because the area was identified as having unusually high numbers of migrants dispersed there, somehow presumed to ‘warrant’ the concerns expressed.

United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) is a small right wing one-issue party that emerged during the 2015 electoral campaign but had disproportionate impact on the political scene generally, in part because of the media coverage they received. Although since the Brexit vote, UKIP has now collapsed (its rationale of leaving Europe now having been fulfilled), Widfeldt and Brandenberg (Citation2017) note “with increasing success, UKIP has establishing itself as the only viable electoral option for British extreme right voters while also making serious inroads into more traditional conservative circles, who are Eurosceptic but not extreme.”

This and following quotations are all my transcriptions from the online record of the radio program (http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-37306646).

Under current UK law, people in the process of seeking asylum status are unable to engage in paid work.

In Burman (Citation2018b) I discuss further relevant intersections between class and racialisation, including also the performative class effects mobilized by the (middle class) narrative of the radio program.

“We have more or less implicitly accepted a rather dubious notion of development: the idea, for example, that people once believed in magic, that ontogenesis repeats phylogenesis, and therefore that children … and so on. But nothing warrants regarding magical thinking as infantile; as children, in their ‘ignorance’, can serve as a support for the disavowed beliefs of adults” (Mannoni Citation1969/2003, 87; ellipsis in the original).

Freud’s work on jokes offers a particularly clear example highlighting the social character of unconscious processes, but—arguably—the same logic applies to all psychoanalysis. An additional literature from group analysis also takes this further with the notion of the social unconscious (Hopper Citation2003), some of which has been specifically applied to the analysis of processes of racialization (e.g., Dalal Citation2002).

This reading of Mannoni’s text could be understood as minor (Katz Citation1996), or awry from its original focus and indeed reception, which is more concerned with questions of the links between sexual perversion and ideology (see e.g., Žižek Citation1991).

Mannoni was Professor of Philosophy in Madagascar but he also served as Chief of Information and editor of a (French) propaganda magazine.

Fanon’s critical engagement with Mannoni also should be situated in relation to their closer connections. In the 1920s Mannoni taught in Martinique at the school, the Lycée Schoelcher, that Aimée Césaire attended and in turn taught at, there also teaching the young Fanon (see also Macey Citation2012).

This acknowledgement of his own situatedness can be contrasted with Mannoni, who in his earlier (Citation1950/1964) text Prospero and Caliban, celebrated as central to western subjectivity “the experimental spirit” (the title of the penultimate chapter), albeit that, in his analysis, this “spirit” also ushers in the western condition of having an inferiority complex.

As I discuss in more depth in Burman (Citation2018b), this event as narrated by the author, Talayesva, is not accorded particular significance. It appears that it is Mannoni who has selected this (from many other highly traumatic events) on which to build this analysis. Beyond underscoring the relevance of a postcolonial reading of why and how a Hopi ritual should anchor a universal claim about adult relations with (and deception of) children, this disjunction between Talayesva’s (Citation2013) own text and Mannoni’s does not invalidate Mannoni’s argument but rather invites further questions.

Note that Mannoni’s wife, Maud’s, psychoanalytic practice created radically new practices and services around children and families (see Mannoni, Citation1970/1987, Citation1963/1973).

It is worth recalling that when Wulf Sachs attempted to psychoanalyze a Black man in 1930s South Africa, not only did he offer this free of charge but also became involved in forms of economic support for him and his family, extending also to political engagement (Sachs Citation1937/1996), whereas the class associations of psychoanalysis should also be read in relation to migration/refugee trajectories from Europe to the United States, that ended its earlier practice in free clinics (Danto Citation2005).

Because other Brexit Street interviewees were reported as having jobs that relied on the single market and open borders, such as truck driving across Europe, but nevertheless still espoused such views.

This key trope of current British anti-radicalization and counter-terrorism education policies was published in November 2014 (see https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/380595/SMSC_Guidance_Maintained_Schools.pdf and focuses on organizations working with young people including schools, colleges, and universities as well as community groups. Specifically, according to Ofsted, “fundamental British values” comprise democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect for and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs and for those without faith (see http://www.citizenshipfoundation.org.uk/main/page.php?465).

A further reading of this ‘ignorance’ could attend to its northern English double meaning: as both unknowing and angry—with the links between these confirming the analysis of the affective basis of access to (self)knowledge outlined here.

Probably a mistranslation of a an intentional allusion to Lenin’s “What is to be done.”