Conjunctures: Who Counts, What Circulates, and the Politics of Children

The preceding issue (January 2021) was completed in the spring of 2020 as a pandemic was disrupting every arena of social life. Even then, we aimed to see “the virus in the context of the planet” and not to succumb to “the temptation to see the planet solely through the lens of the virus.” (3) We've taken those words to heart. The present issue offers a somewhat dispersed set of articles about apps and air filters, shopping malls and circuses, urban majorities and children. Yet in the light of the current conditions, these topics reveal a set of conjunctural surprises. The essays in this issue remind us that the coronavirus spreads through particular contexts and that we should poise ourselves to observe and to notice what comes next.This issue opens with two essays about tracking majorities. In “Not Tracking: The Antipolitics of Contact-Tracing Applications,” Paula Kift analyzes efforts to contain the COVID-19 pandemic via contact-tracing apps. These apps promise to interrupt transmission by alerting users if they have been in proximity to someone with a confirmed case of COVID-19. Putting aside the question of technical feasibility, the very idea of contact tracing depends on creating a new fiction of community of those who might have had contact with sources of infection. However, those with greatest exposure to the virus are less likely to have smartphones, access to medical care, or the capacity to shelter in place. Attempting to manage an epidemiological crisis via consumer electronic devices creates a new category of social exclusion: those who are not counted, traced, or tracked. Apps that facilitate fast counting produce afflicted majorities who do not count but are nevertheless accountable as targets of blame. This new form of viral sociality leaves the weaker majority out of account.In “Counting the Uncountable” AbdouMaliq Simone and Vyjayanthi Rao turn our attention toward “urban majorities.” Like Kift, Simone and Rao are less concerned with counting as an enumerative device than with how technologies fail to take contexts into account. Urbanism coheres in the dense fluidity of relations that proximity and conjuncture afford. Spaces for work and for living, sites of production and consumption, and forms of movement and inhabitation blend, making social distancing nearly impossible and individuals’ distinct and separate trajectories hard to trace. There is a liquid sociality of dynamic relations among those who slip through the cracks of what the state can provide in terms of employment, security, and health. Urban majorities may be difficult to count but their presence and resilience are also difficult to ignore. Some of the most densely populated places in the world have more successfully controlled the spread of COVID-19 than have affluent zones in the global North. It is exactly those who are not counted and do not count who operate in the contingent, precarious, recombinant, and improvisational socialities of the new urban majorities.The second conjuncture occurs in two essays that offer rich portraits of Chinese capitalism at home and overseas. In “Filtered Life: Air Purification, Gender, and Cigarettes in the People's Republic of China,” Matthew Kohrman traces filtration discourse through a gendered set of expectations about tolerance for bodily risk. As air quality worsens, women wear masks in public, but “real men” don't fear air. The state has made efforts to intervene in this literally toxic masculinity by promoting filter-tipped cigarettes as signs of leisure and power.Air purifiers are supposed to mitigate the effects of pollution, but these consumer devices make more work for mother as the expectations that someone will protect the environment come home. At the end of the day, the purification of domestic air has revitalized the masculine practice of smoking at home. Kohrman's informants express frustrations that would be familiar to people enduring polluted environments, wildfires, a global pandemic, or even the conjuncture of all three. The filters and masks that keep us safe are constant reminders that there will be no adequate state response: “They just make me feel like a caged bird now. Am I to just stay home all the time? What solution is that? It just makes me so mad” (184).In Johannesburg, as described by Mingwei Huang in “The Chinese Century and the City of Gold: Rethinking Race and Capitalism,” Chinese shopkeepers, store guards, and workers extend and reconfigure old traditions of racialized capitalism that are rooted in the history of gold mining in the region. In Huang's sharply observed essay we see the conjuncture of two circuits of migration: entrepreneurs from Fujian and Guangdong, and undocumented workers from Malawi and Zimbabwe. The malls are typified commercial environments that bind these populations together in unequal interdependency. In the terrain of consumer capitalism, the interracial flow of ethnic stereotypes, hidden angers, and radical economic disparities are minimized and banalized. In this light, Huang argues, “The humble mall is a harbinger of the novel transformations, and dogged retrenchments, of capital, labor, and race that the ‘Chinese Century’ brings, while questioning what is even ‘new’ about this moment after all” (213). Together, Kohrman and Huang's articles help us think about circulations and body politics in the era of state-sponsored merchandising ventures.The third conjuncture occurs around the politics of children. Michael Ralph joins us as guest editor. We developed this theme well before the spread of COVID-19, but the pandemic has only confirmed the importance of the topic. What is it like to grow up when crises—economic, political, epidemiological, ecological—constitute the ground conditions of the global present?There are those who question the ethics of bringing children into a dying world. There are those who would reorient reproduction toward “making kin, not babies” (Haraway 2016: 102). Yet never have there been more children. Children are at once priceless and endlessly subject to political calculations. They are sites of immeasurable investment. Yet there are also record numbers detained in camps, orphaned by conflicts, and displaced as refugees. These vulnerable beings must be protected from radicalization, exploitation, and abuse. Yet there are several places in the world where there are not enough adults to do the protecting, where more than half the population is under eighteen. When children are soldiers, activists, caregivers, and organizers at the forefront of social movements, the politics of possibility are perhaps most evident through the terms of those who come of age through transformations in social order.Can a phrase like “we the children” make sense, and if so, how? Are children the last hope for imagining community? In placing our hopes for the future in the hands of our children, do we abdicate our responsibilities and make children our laborers (once more)? Or might they be better able than we are to imagine a world in which equity, connection, and well-being can be thought of in a ludic, loving, and even fabulous manner? If politics is downstream of culture, there is perhaps no better place to attend to than the imaginations of those navigating childhood in the conditions of crisis and catastrophe. What comes after, if anything, will be lived out by those who are still young.In “The Childhood of Politics,” Faisal Devji centers the child as key to thinking about the limits of citizenship. Children, he observes, are simultaneously emblematic of the future and constitute the single category of person who “cannot consent to making the very future they are meant to represent.” Children are, categorically, prepolitical beings.When children such as Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai are moved to speak, or rather when their speech is heard, it is a sign that something is awry. The order of things has been upset when we find ourselves wondering, “Who is the adult in the room?” Children's political speech is exceptional. Unlike subjects who seek voice rights and independence, children speak up in order to preserve their protections from having to speak at all. Children's categorical exemption from politics means they cannot trade the present for some imagined future. Devji calls us to consider whether childhood could provide the basis for establishing a politics that prizes “virtuous means over desired ends.” This alternative political imagination may be essential to the very prospect of a future in which we and they can live.Chika Watanabe picks up the thread of children as guarantors that we can go on living. In “Playing through the Apocalypse: Preparing Children for Mass Disasters in Japan and Chile,” Watanabe analyzes neighborhood disaster-preparedness events where kids play games that teach them evacuation procedures and survival skills. This ludic arrangement is a tacit acknowledgment that disasters are in the future and the government will fail to adequately respond. Young people must be prepared to navigate the world, come what may. Children are playing at taking on the burden of being with disaster. They imagine possible futures by engaging in “as if” games. They explore terrifying possibilities through the ambiguity of serious play. We could not help but see a resonance with Kohrman's essay here, in that again the burden of mitigating the harms from environmental disasters are folded into the kinship relations that sustain heteronormative homes.Finally, Eléonore Rimbault takes us to the circus. In “Childhood Memories of Circus Children” Rimbault explores the lives of the “company girls” who lived and worked in Indian circuses before labor laws prohibited the employment of children. By eliciting childhood memories from group interviews with the women who once were company girls, Rimbault moves around the prohibitions that prevent studying children directly. The women's memories are filled with impressions and details from that time as well as evident omissions and oversights. Their recollections are generative acts in that they bring childhood experiences into the present such that memory plays a role in shaping the future self. Rimbault urges us to take seriously children's subjective assessment of the categories used to contain their discourses and to assess their capacities. Her informants are aware that life in the circus did not meet the ideal conditions of childhood. Yet they also recall how performing a contortion act was among the happiest moments in their lives.Paying attention to children's experiences during this pandemic is essential. These are world historical conditions in the formation of childhood and they will leave lasting and still unknown effects on social orders and political imaginations around the globe. In 2020 schools and daycares all over the world closed. Most children were at home. Stranger still, children escaped the worst effects of COVID-19. Their capacity to resist the virus is still a mystery.Children may be immune from the worst effects of this illness but they are not immune from the experience of life at home with anxious, overworked, scared, and confused adults. Given that the ordinary forms of growing up can already feel like a crisis, which features of this time will stand out? From a series of interviews conducted in the spring by Gillian Frank, we hear directly from a child about the first days of shut-down in the United States: GF: What do you wish the grown-ups in your life understood about what coronavirus is like for kids and what living through this is like for kids?Carter (age 6): I wish that they understanded that kids are not having any fun. . . . It's like my mom is being crazy now; she is making us do things crazy. When we get right in the door she's making us take off our clothes, put it on the ground, and run upstairs and take a bath. Even if it's three in the morning and you go to work, you have to come back and take off your clothes and put them on the ground and go upstairs and take a bath. Why are we putting our clothes where we are walking outside? We're putting all our shoe dirt on our clothes, making no sense. (Frank 2020; our transcription)There is little trace of children's voices in the records of academic journals. The citizens who will forge the public culture and the political futures of life in constant crisis are currently less than ten years old. Suffice it to say that the emergent politics of childhood and children turns out to have much to do with who counts, who speaks, and what we rely on our children to filter out and sometimes to mask.Public Culture welcomes a new editorial assistant, Anna Stielau.