The Myth of the Primitive
Babies, it has been said, are nearer to God, but I’m like, what baby gives a damn about God? Babies, clearly, are nearer to the earth; the earth with its psychic entities, its mineral dreams, its polymorphous skin-envelope, all maternal fluids and oceanic non-organization. So baby grows up into mediation, growing away from earth; and thence into a fantasy, and then into a midlife crisis, and here’s God again, promising eternal life—if you would only buy a gun and vote for the apocalypse.
Children get a bad rap. Grow up! We tell them. Act your age! Don’t be such a baby. How sad to force our children to grow up into our failed world—and no wonder the teens are so depressed. And yet there are many times when “being such a baby” is just what is needed—at any age. Like, for example, when falling to sleep; when learning, being naive (not being a-know-it-all), smiling and flirting, a willingness to complain, and to enjoy, sensitivity to feelings and, in general, their fine sense of helplessness. The baby is awash in an experience we cannot imagine; we need more of that experience, not less (if only we could get it).
The indigenous, the schizophrenic and the baby have been traditionally categorized under the sign of the primitive. Where primitive was, there modern shall be. The savage child (or illiterate native) will, verily I say unto you, become by-and-by the modern tax-paying adult and contributor to the war effort. The savage and primitive is made cynosure and scapegoat for the development of modernity, a superstitious avatar against which we may index all our high achievements: our science, rationality, algorithms, social media and know-it-all-A.I; the invention of the air conditioner, the sport utility vehicle, and the lawnmower! plastics, forever chemicals and the opioid crisis, the housing crisis, the gun crisis, deforestation, mass species extinction, record breaking heat, multiple world wars, enough nuclear bombs to turn the surface of the earth to ash 100 times over, industrial genocide, the ad industry, the beauty industry, the U.S. munitions industry, the prison industrial complex, and many other industries besides! Okay fine, so not the greatest set of accomplishments but at least we aren’t running around naked in the jungle. Look, ye heathans, just how far we have advanced.
Like Christianity, capitalist modernity, despite its manifest flaws, wants us to believe it is the only world—and then charges us rent for it. Any other world is a misbegotten and irrational world of magic and delusion. All the better to rob and destroy it, to enslave its people. In as much as the “civilized” achievement of modern society—its art museums, string quartets, its haute couture and Met Galas—is an ideological fantasy that allows a wealthy elite to continue, in good conscience, to rob the planet of a future, then we may assume that the primitive—be they psychotic, native or child—does not actually exist.
If the primitive is revealed to be a fantasy that modernity has about itself, then so to the illusory nature of conventional stories of development begin to flicker—both of society and the individual. “Progress” becomes highly dubious, if not an outright illusion on its own, (perhaps the transcendental illusion of our era). The up-and-to-the-right trend of human development falls into a snarl. Or a borromean knot rather—Lacan, of all the psychoanalysts, with his contempt for science and linear time, seems to have eluded the myth of the primitive. An impressive feat for it is a myth baked into Freud’s whole theory (excepting the drive) and that nearly all of psychoanalysis (and psychology) seems to be still stuck inside of, with its old and stale theories of primitive mental states and its goals of maturation—demeaning to the baby and the indigenous at once; as if psychoanalysis wanted to foist modernity upon the patient.
And yet it cannot be denied that children are unusual, possessing what we will call, for lack of a better word, magical capacities. Indeed, it seems as if children were the alien inhabitants of another world. A world from which the teenager wakes, as if from a dream. What is this unimaginable world that children inhabit? Does this world live inside of us, or do we live inside of it? Both and? If this magic and alien world no longer belongs to the primitive past, to where then does it belong? Could it be somehow a world out of time? A generic world indifferent to modernity and to history?
The Vivian Girls, Henry Darger
