Our long childhood and dependence on parental care seem to leave no doubt about it: we are not born as humans, we become human.

I want to highlight a particularly tempting metaphor for this process of “becoming human” – the metaphor of:

  • “Order out of chaos.”

According to this metaphor, human infancy is abundantly rich in possibilities; so abundant, in fact, that it is a formless chaos – a “blooming, buzzing confusion,” as William James characterized the infant’s experience of being alive.

To acquire recognizable human form, the child’s inner chaos must be tamed through the disciplining efforts of parents and society at large (the metaphor suggests). The child’s formlessly rich inner life must me narrowed down, hardened, made boring… until, finally, it becomes another obedient member of society.

Society does not acknowledge a real human subject until the norms of “being human” are confidently repeated: as if the child easily would slip back into its more original state of blooming, buzzing confusion, the moment the reiteration of the social norms of humanity terminates.

The “order out of chaos” metaphor makes life and growth look like death and atrophy. To become human means aborting limitless possibilities and gradually turning into that tragic effect of social forces that we know as “the mature adult.”

Perhaps the intriguing topic of the “deconstruction of the subject” is nothing but rigorous faithfulness to the logic of this tempting metaphor? If becoming human is anything like what the metaphor presents it as, then “no one” becomes human, strictly speaking, for before the disciplined human is formed, there is nameless chaos and no recognizable human subject.

But how can the proto-human chaos – I mean, the child – be so responsive to its non-chaotic parents that it reduces its inner chaos and becomes… human? Isn’t that responsiveness already a form of life, a way of being human?

Dare we entertain the hypothesis that the newborn already is active, and that her metamorphoses throughout life require her own creative participation?

I believe we need another understanding of human becoming than that of “order out of chaos.” – Or is human life really a form of colonization of the child?

Pär Segerdahl

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