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Abstract
Events in Australia have acted as provocations to thinking about the consequences of becoming a ‘package’ and then being processed. The image of the human, as prisoner, together with narratives about the child and the nonhuman animal as package, are used here in order to understand the world we share with others. These disparate elements are gathered together to form an uneasy assemblage. Thinking through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a posthuman performative methodology is used to create this assemblage with its flows, images and stories. Posthumanism presents a challenge that recognizes the possibility of being in the world in a connected/entangled/knotted way. The work of Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe and Karen Barad underpins the theoretical and methodological perspective. Drawing on evidence from the media, the internet, human and animal rights work and visual representations, this work considers what it means to be packaged, commodified and de-humanized/de-animalized. Once packaged certain experiences become normalized and the (re)packaging of people and animals proliferates and emerges in new iterations. This article argues that by following the flows that circulate around the packaged animal or human everything changes, and becoming part of the assemblage invites active engagement with the unease that emerges. In this process our response-ability is called into question along with aspects of a relational ethics.
Introduction
The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it outlines the prevalence and dangers in ‘packaging’ and the consequences of being ‘packaged’. We provide examples and specific instances of when this happens and how it changes perceptions of the human or animal involved. Images and constructed fictional narratives are used to form an uneasy assemblage whereby it is possible to introduce what Hekman (2010: 48) describes as ‘a multiplicity of flows’. Second, the article is an example of a posthumanist performative methodology (Barad, 2007; Jackson and Mazzei, 2012). We use this methodology in order to see different patterns that challenge us to think differently about the world we share with our human and animal Other. More importantly, it is about seeing our relations with the Other differently. In doing so, we become aware of our response-ability and of a relational ethics, becoming what Haraway (2008: 3) calls ‘worldly’. Becoming worldly involves going beyond response to action. Writing this article is an action that responds to ongoing events in Australia and to events that provoked discomfort over time.
Starting with a definition of packaging, this work presents three examples of posthuman packages through images and narratives. Narrative is always powerful and, as Haraway states, ‘living inside the world is about living inside stories’ (Haraway, 2000: 107). Alongside the stories, relevant Australian phrases are explained, for example, ‘boat people’, and ‘live export’. Once these descriptions have been given and various points made, the argument moves to a discussion of both becoming package and the discourse of live export, within the context of a posthuman performative analysis. The methodology here, the construction of the uneasy assemblage, is explained, and connections to early childhood education are suggested at the conclusion of the article. This conclusion reflects our academic positioning, as we are involved in education with a focus on the early years and this underpins the concerns and arguments outlined here.
The package
An iconic image of the packaged human (Figure 1) provoked thinking about packaging as a means of commodification and reductionism that begins to form a barrier between thinking about the living sentient being as anything other than an object or thing. The definitions of a package include:
A wrapped or boxed object; a parcel;
A container in which something is packed for storage or transportation;
a preassembled unit;
a commodity, such as food, uniformly processed and containerized;
A proposition or an offer composed of several items, each of which must be accepted.
tr.v. pack·aged, pack·ag·ing, pack·ag·es
To place into a package or make a package.
These definitions are important as they mention the literal aspect of the package as parcel or container (ready for transportation) and also that ‘to package’ implies making an offer that must be accepted. The notion of ease of transportation and ‘forced movement’ will be explored through the images and narratives presented below.
The prisoner
The image offered here is of a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, wrapped and being processed.
We bear the prisoner in mind because this image influenced our reflections about becoming package. It is not possible to tell the story of the packaged prisoner here although it hovers in the background. They have been packaged in special clothing, handcuffed and masked, to remove traces of their humanity. The packaging, of course, makes abuse easier. The phrase extraordinary rendition is used when the prisoner becomes the package. Extraordinary rendition is a strategy used by governments that have signed international treaties against certain forms of torture but then send people to other locations so that torture can still take place; meanwhile, the donor country can deny involvement (Satterthwaite, 2007). This ‘lawless practice’ (Satterthwaite, 2007: 1333), is an illustration of the way in which violations of human rights can be covered up. The practice of extraordinary rendition is a way of ‘washing the hands’ of responsibility. The atrocities committed are after all no longer on ‘our’ land or in ‘our’ backyard. Those concerned, some of whom were simply innocent people abducted on the street (see Satterthwaite (2007) for examples), are sent far away and, as the saying goes, ‘out of sight is out of mind’. Prisoners, or people who were subjected to this treatment, were bound and taped, effectively packaged to enable easy processing.
Boat people
Refugees and asylum seekers, including unaccompanied minors (children), who arrive in Australia by sea, are collectively and colloquially known as ‘boat people’. Packed onto boats that are often unsafe and unseaworthy, these people leave places where they are conceptualized as being in a queue awaiting entry to Australia as part of the refugee programme. Phillips (2013) in a Parliamentary fact sheet notes that ‘the concept of an orderly queue does not accord with the reality of the asylum process’. Unable to work or provide for their families these displaced people, who may be suffering from the effects of trauma or torture, pay ‘people smugglers’ to get them onto boats and, once in Australia, they are de-identified, become ‘unlawful non-citizens’ (Phillips, 2013), and are given the derogatory label ‘boat people’. They are re-packaged as ‘illegals’ and put into detention centres.
At one time people were sent to detention centres on mainland Australia but now they are transported to off-shore islands, Christmas Island, Nauru and now Papua New Guinea. In this way ‘boat people’, who are perceived to be a problem, are shifted elsewhere, and this is known as the ‘solution’ (i.e. the Malaysian solution, the Papua New Guinea solution). The current solution of sending asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea is the most controversial as the Australian Government has stated that these people will never be able to settle in Australia. The policy states:
From 19 July 2013 if you travel to Australia by boat with no visa, you will not be settled here. You will be sent to Papua New Guinea for processing. If found to be a refugee, you’ll be settled in Papua New Guinea, or another participating regional state, not Australia. This includes women and children (http://www.immi.gov.au/visas/humanitarian/novisa/; webpage no longer available).
The asylum-seeking child
The following narrative is a composite from what is known about the experiences of asylum-seeking children. The child is unnamed because children who arrive in Australia as asylum seekers are not named in official communications.
This child does not know it but he has been offered a ‘package trip’ to Manus Island. It could have been Malaysia, but the destination has changed to this small island in the Pacific. This child may be hopeful or frightened, he may like reading, running or playing football but the Australian public does not know this as the people on boats who try to get into Australia are quickly made invisible. The seven-year-old who was unaccompanied on his journey to Australia is unnamed and anonymous. There is no ‘face’ for the Australian public to focus on. What is known is that he (usually he) left Afghanistan, his friends and family and made his way to a port. He then made the long arduous journey across the sea on a boat bound for Australia. Someone has paid for his journey and people smugglers have arranged the rest.
Once in Australia he will be repackaged and sent elsewhere. It is likely that his childhood will be spent in a detention camp without family or adequate education. The facility where the child is to be detained is overcrowded and conditions are unhygienic. In some instances, children are deliberately detained in harsh conditions or humiliated as a strategy to encourage them to leave and to return ‘home’. Once the child has been removed from Australia, it is assumed that he has been successfully processed.
In a similar attempt to form a sympathetic narrative about a child’s experience of leaving one unsafe place to end up in detention (jail) in another, Amnesty International (2010) published a story about Rajeed. Rajeed’s journey to Australia is told using words and pictures in five stages: leaving Afghanistan, staying in Pakistan, arriving in Malaysia, going to Indonesia, being detained in Australia. Although Amnesty International (2010) says that Rajeed is fictional but typical, by giving him a name they try to re-package him as someone deserving of a name and identity. The story that follows takes a similar approach.
The animal
Bill’s story
Bill was born in the Northern Territories of Australia and this story is about his journey to a distant place. Like his kin, Bill is a gentle Brahman bull, with fawn coat, long ears and inquiring but resigned eyes. None of this will save Bill. He is packed onto a boat and shipped overseas as part of the live export trade. He makes the long arduous journey across the sea and once there he is kept in a feed lot with millions of other cattle. He is then sent to an abattoir approved by Meat and Livestock Australia where no stunning mechanism is used. Instead he is put into an apparatus designed and supplied by Meat and Livestock Australia. This tips Bill on his side and once there and struggling, perhaps with a broken leg, disorientated and distressed, he is kicked in the face and hosed down before his throat is eventually cut. Death, in his case, is merciful. At this point Bill has been satisfactorily ‘processed’.
The Animals Australia strategy to encourage a sense of empathy for cattle involved in this trade was to individualize the cattle by naming them; and the cattle who feature on their website are named, hence Bill (Figure 2).
People were shocked by the footage of animals being treated horrifically in abattoirs abroad although, subsequently, similar mistreatment of conscious animals has been uncovered in Australia. Some members of the Australian public have subsidized advertisements, protested on the streets and contacted Members of Parliament to try and put an end to live export of animals. Calls for a conscience vote were refused despite intense lobbying. We draw your attention to the re-packaging of the animal not only onto the boats (i.e. out of any form of ‘natural’ environment where one might reasonably expect to see an animal) but to its re-packaging in a killing box. These boxes have been sent to places that slaughter animals; once the animal is trapped inside the box it is tipped over and the animal becomes disorientated and highly distressed. When asked to describe this apparatus of torture promoted by the Australian Meat and Livestock Authority and subsidized by the Australian taxpayer, Temple Grandin, an international authority on animal welfare before slaughter, said that it violated every humane standard in the world (Grandin, 2011). She expressed disbelief that Australia had invented and supplied such an ‘atrocious’ device to other countries.
Live export
Live export refers to the practice of transporting live cattle, goats and sheep from Australia (in this instance) to other countries. They are packed onto ships where great numbers suffer and die at sea and face death at the end of the journey. The debate about live export has been controversial in Australia since 2011. The European Union (EU) has introduced amendments to longstanding laws relating to animal transport and welfare and define a long journey as being over eight hours. In the EU the transport of very young animals or animals about to give birth is forbidden (Regulation (EC) No. 1/2005 (European Union, 2004)) .
The necessity for live export is a mystery to those who try to unravel it as a strategy. Economic rationalism and basic practicality do not support the live export of humans. For example, it is cheaper for an asylum seeker to be in the community rather than in detention, and there is evidence that shows the detention environment has a negative impact on children’s development (see Corlett et al., 2012, for an overview). It is also cheaper to process the animal into meat in Australia rather than sending live animal bodies overseas (for more detail and research see World Society for the Protection of Animals, 2012). An economic logic is not obvious here so it might just be easier if other people, and other countries, take care of activities perceived by many to be distasteful. The analysis of people and animals as a product is disturbing but necessary as this is how they are packaged. An Australian government fact sheet refers to ‘immigrant stock’ (Phillips, 2013) and the use of the same word ‘stock’ to refer to people and animals makes an obvious and disturbing connection in the context of official government communication. In their critique of capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari (2004) point out several consequences of the capitalist system. In relation to this analysis of forced movement and live export their view is relevant as they say that capitalism ‘permits increases and improvements at the centre, it displaces the harshest forms of exploitation from the centre to the periphery’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 408).
In order for live export to work, and for the movement of problems and bodies from the centre to the periphery, the entity involved (the prisoner, the child, the animal) must undergo a transformation. Therefore, although there is a literal dehumanization process for the prisoner that is visually obvious (see Figure 1), it is critical to remove any trace of human identity for certain things to take place (Carrabine, 2011: 23). With regard to the prisoner, Carrabine (2011) explains that once hooded and faceless, prisoners ‘became global icons but lose (lost) their individuality’. Packaging is essential when ‘the body is the raw material of naked domination’ (Carrabine, 2011: 23).
The body of the child
We asked ourselves, is this all too far from experiences that need to be discussed in relation to childhood? Of course, it depends which childhood and whose childhood is being considered. The Governor of Christmas Island Detention Centre, Jon Stanhope, was quoted as saying:
Now we have a one-year-old baby in our mortuary, the child of an asylum seeker family. And I wish we named them…
I wish we humanized them. I wish we gave them that respect in death, that we were prepared to name those that die. (Media Watch, 2013)
When (re)packaged as a refugee or asylum seeker the identity of the human is erased: the people who arrive illegally by boat are not allowed to speak, be photographed, interviewed or named, even in death (Media Watch, 2013). Part of our argument here is that because of this re-packaging the public is becoming desensitized to live export in all its forms. Is it an extension of the role of the package, the prisoner, animal or child, to ensure that this happens through their disappearance? There is also the process known as compassion fatigue (Moeller, 1999) of which to be aware. In connection with this, packaging, or being packaged, is effective as it ensures that the focus of protest is moved out of sight, new images replace old and within a week or two a new version of normality is resumed. This way of dealing with people and animals goes beyond their commodification because they disappear, they are erased. The only sign of their existence that remains is as a number or a statistic that will eventually contribute to a graph in an official report within the ‘spinning machine’ (Braidotti, 2013: 58) of advanced capitalism.
Braidotti (2013) highlights the danger of being different, being Other. She uses the word ‘branded’, and this word connects with the package that becomes a form of re-branding. In her opinion:
In so far as difference spells inferiority, it acquires both essentialist and lethal connotations for people who get branded as ‘others’. These are the sexualised, racialized, and naturalized others, who are reduced to the less than human status of disposable bodies. We are all humans, but some of us are just more mortal than others. (Braidotti, 2013: 15)
She writes of the ‘lethal exclusions and fatal disqualifications’ (Braidotti, 2013: 15) that arise as a result of Humanism and the imperialist idea that humanity means something preeminent and predetermined. Her account supports a turn toward posthumanism as a way of challenging this and making room for others, of becoming aware of ‘the alterity of the other’ (Wolfe, 2010: 122).
Being ‘processed’
News anchor on ABC, 5 August 2012 – ‘the asylum seekers have all been processed’
Posthuman theory recognizes the machine/human/Other than and more than human animal as interlinked and indissolubly connected. The ‘processing’ of animals to meat and the packaging of humans to become anonymous displaced persons is just another sign that this is so. It might be thought that processing reached its modernist apotheosis in the Holocaust, when the death of Jews in the camps was meticulously recorded and noted. Since then the packaging and processing of people and animals has continued for various purposes. People know instinctively that to be processed is to become part of a dehumanizing event. Even in terms of food, processing is seen as slightly suspect, and the eating of processed food is considered to be somehow not so good for you as eating ‘whole’ or organic food. One defence of live export as explained by various MPs (Bruce Billson, MP, personal communication) is that, apparently, Bill and his like are ‘grown’ in the Northern Territories and are only fit for mince, for fine processing. Cattle raised in the Southern states of Australia can be killed locally, with a stun gun if they are lucky, and then made into steaks. Somehow Bill’s flesh lacks this quality, and this lack is seen as Bill’s fault and his need for processing off shore is unfortunately something that many, including MPs and ministers in Australia, see as inevitable.
The processing of the human animal is also becoming commonplace. In airport security, for example, people are controlled in the kind of lines that are meant to reduce stress. They are not then sent to their deaths, instead they are a more fortunate form of live export, often travelling for business or holidays. However, if something did happen then the authenticity of the traveller, their seat on the plane, their meal order and passport number would all be known as they have been thoroughly processed. Softened up by these rituals to think that there is no longer anything unusual with being made into something on the production line, it is hard to see anything wrong with the phrase ‘off shore processing’ (The Australian, 2011) in relation to sending asylum seekers and refugees elsewhere. The phrase is used continually by both political parties in Australia. This means that people, including unaccompanied children, who arrive on boats will be sent elsewhere. Then a vital step will be in place and the final procedures to determine if the asylum seeker has refugee status will not occur in Australia (United Nations, 1951, 1967). So if someone disappears or makes trouble they are not in the system. This is despite the fact that as soon as they are on Australian territory then Article 22 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (United Nations, 1989) should be activated. It states that ‘Children have the right to special protection and help if they are refugees, if they have been forced to leave their home and live in another country, as well as all the rights in this Convention’. By sidestepping this in Australia by being processed elsewhere this special protection need not be granted, even to unaccompanied children.
The absent referent
Packaging is a way of ensuring the existence of the absent referent. Adams (2010) suggests that after being packaged into meat and otherwise disguised that the animal is an absent referent. We suggest that forms of packaging can make a human and an animal into the absent referent. Research is making humans increasingly aware that we share important traits with animals, and it is known that humans are not alone in feeling pain, having emotions, or using tools and language (Bone, 2008; Goodall, 2000; Haraway, 2008). Maintaining the division between the human and the other than human animal is perhaps a comfortable habit but a consequence is that it makes complacency about suffering possible.
Gradually, these divisions between people and between humans and animals are revealed to be a form of species-ism; it is this that makes it possible to separate one seven-year-old from another, one animal from another, one person from another; it means that injustice will continue and flow from cruelty to one species into another: see, for example, links between the mistreatment of animals and family violence (Adams, 1994). Instead of living with this discomfort, accepting that certain animals and humans will be packaged in order to be dealt with in certain aversive ways, it must be possible to accept, as Haraway (2008: 301) states, that ‘animals are everywhere full partners in worldling, in becoming with’.
Becoming posthuman (a posthuman performative methodology)
Through the creation of an uneasy assemblage a conglomeration of pieces are gathered together that support an exploration of new and not necessarily logical or straightforward ideas. A posthuman performative methodology is diffractive (Barad, 2007) rather than simply reflective. This means that the elements we ‘intra-act’ with (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012; Lenz-Taguchi, 2010) form something that disturbs the usual elements that contribute to the early childhood field. The inclusion of different images and narratives affirm the power of the ‘and… and… and…’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 25) and illustrate our entanglements in, and with, the world (Haraway, 2008).
In posthuman terms the animal is counted in and included in discussions about rights and responsibilities as the Other (Wolfe, 2010). From a posthuman perspective it is possible to think of the more than human animal and the human animal on a continuum rather than in opposition (Wolfe, 2003). Wolfe describes the inadequacy of current theory ‘for thinking about the ethics of the question of the human as well as the nonhuman animal’ (Wolfe, 2003: 192) (author’s italics) and suggests that posthuman theory presents new possibilities for inclusion. In this work we are not arguing that people need to care more about animals than for other humans. Our argument is that the way we treat the Other, including the animal or even especially the animal, very quickly escalates to encompass the most vulnerable members of society. Posthumanism is a theory that questions hierarchies. It enables a decentring of the human (Wolfe, 2010). According to Barad (2007) posthuman theorizing refuses the idea of a natural division between nature and culture and is interested in how this division came to be. From a posthuman perspective, Haraway (2008: 72) asks ‘what might a responsible “sharing of suffering” look like…?’ when:
we are in the midst of webbed existences, multiple beings in relationship, this animal, this sick child, this village, these herds, these labs, these neighbourhoods in a city, these industries and economies, these ecologies linking nature and culture without end. (Haraway, 2008: 72)
We are drawn to these perspectives and ways of thinking because they encourage us to see multiple links, relationships, and connections in the world and to see that we, too, are part of this world. Posthumanism creates a flow through the ways in which boundaries blur, morph and dissipate, as well as through multiple entanglements that (re)define and decentre the human. Theorized in this way, it is an inescapable fact that the blurred lines between human, the ‘other than’ and ‘more than’ human animal, materials, machinery and technology are irredeemably changing us as we interact within the ‘webbed existences’ described by Donna Haraway (2008: 72).
By using a posthuman performative methodology the power of both presence and absence becomes evident. For example, the ‘face’ is used in the animal story, but it is hidden for the prisoner: in this case, the ‘face’ can be read in the position of the body and the covering of the face. The story of the child is without an image because the ‘face’ of the child in detention is hidden from public view. This methodology gives issues breadth through the ways in which movement happens between molecular and molar states (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), and vice versa, while remaining connected. The events that lead to the production of stories and paying attention to certain images become both performative and posthuman. The posthuman stories might be considered what Deleuze and Guattari (1987) call the ‘in-between’ and it is here, in this space where the molecular, molar and social processes inter- and intra-act (Barad, 2007, 2008), that mutually transformative actions are initiated.
A posthuman performative methodology focuses on how difference produces, is produced, and may be made productive, in terms of new meanings and responses, especially in relation to power structures (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012), and law and justice. We draw from both Haraway (1991, 2008) and Barad’s (2007) work in feminist science studies where they take a posthumanist stance to raise questions about ontology, epistemology and ethics. For these scholars, difference is tied-up with responsibility. It is this notion that supports a questioning of response-ability and requires an orientation towards relational ethics. To return to the package, how and in what ways does packaging work, why is live export of concern, why do so-called ‘boat people’ matter, and how might this relate to the response-abilities of researchers, teachers, family members, communities or individuals in relation to those who are most vulnerable and who have the right to protection?
Response-ability
Response-ability, according to Haraway (2008: 88), involves ‘sharing suffering’. She says that it means realizing that ‘individual critters matter; they are mortal and fleshy knottings, not ultimate units of being’ (Haraway, 2008: 88). As events, the various ‘solutions’ applied to refugee and asylum seekers and the live export of Australian cattle have acted on the media and the Australian public since they originally surfaced in 2011. People blog, demonstrate, protest, ask questions, join groups and vote. Live export of Australian cattle was debated in Parliament and temporarily banned. Get Up! Action for Australia, in partnership with the child advocacy group ChilOut, brought attention to the conditions facing men, women and children living inside the Manus Island detention centre. They initiated the campaign called ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’, which includes an exclusive interview with a young woman inside the Manus Island detention centre and was viewed by over a million people when it aired on Australian television as an advertisement and on the Get Up! website (see Interview From the Inside at http://www.outofsight.org.au). Another television advertisement was developed that was created with drawings done by children detained on Manus Island and excerpts from telephone interviews with asylum seekers currently in detention (see Manus’ Children Speak at http://www.outofsight.org.au). Responses can be surprising and confronting. Politicians and supporters of the latest policy decisions are being asked if Australian political parties are in a competition to see who might be the ‘most cruel’ (Alberici, 2013).
When the initial events, or provocations to our thinking, in the form of the Malaysian Solution and the Four Corners documentary, ‘A Bloody Business’ (see http://www.abc.net.au/a4corners/special_eds/20110530/cattle), were first aired on Australian television in 2011 the level of the public’s response was unexpected. Lyn White, who heads the advocacy group Animals Australia and is one of the contributors to the programme ‘A Bloody Business’, described the response of the Australian people as ‘shocked and upset’. She then used this response to request action in order to achieve reform. For example, she wrote to members of Animals Australia, requesting that letters be sent to the minister, and points out that ‘during our meeting with the Minister he made it clear to us that public opinion would influence the government’s policy on live export so it is critical that he receives a constant flow of correspondence on this issue’ (Lyn White, personal correspondence). This isthe -ability that flows from response. While recognizing that these actions are a crucial step in effecting change, Haraway (2008) goes on to write, ‘imagining that reforms will settle the matter is a failure of affective and effective thinking and a denial of responsibility. New openings will appear because of changes in practices, and the open is about response’ (Haraway, 2008: 90). Her statement opens the way to dialogue in terms of whether reforms drive change or changes in practice drive reform. What is clear in Australia is that many people are having a change of heart about practices that lack compassion.
In presenting these events, in addition to the posthuman images and stories, we are endeavouring to remain open, to access ‘autre-mondialisation’ (Haraway, 2008: 1) as a way of being in the world ethically that involves being entangled with others as ordinary multispecies living on earth (Haraway, 2008: 1). For Haraway (2008), entanglements and boundary blurring are related to the responsibility one has to stay with unease. In early childhood, this unease might mean that some issues are not seen as connected to the field and therefore get shut out. In order to realize response-ability a different posthuman ethic may be required. This means that instead of dismissing issues as inappropriate or too hard, that we work with unease, and in so doing we become, and remain, entangled with the Other, even as conceptualizations of who and what is Other shift and change.
Relational ethics
A posthuman relational ethic implies an appreciation of the ways in which boundaries blur, morph and dissipate. It recognizes that multiple entanglements (re)define human and more-than-human lives. Theorized in this way, it is inescapable that the blurred lines between the animal and the human animal are irredeemably changing us as we connect within our ‘webbed existences’ (Haraway, 2008: 72). Relationality is not about bringing in multiple perspectives. Neither is it about focusing on the relationships between different elements, experiences or perspectives. Rather, it attends to inter- and intra-actions between and within. A posthuman perspective does not accept the separateness of species, things or elements. Instead, it encourages respect for difference. It is here, in the ways in which respecting and extending difference happen, that a major shift towards a relational ethic occurs. Recent work that speaks to this has been articulated by Taylor and Guigni (2012) who propose a pedagogy of ‘common worlds’ and question how, in Taylor’s words, children may be supported to ‘face the challenges of co-existing peacefully with others who are not necessarily like them’ (Taylor, 2013: 122).
For Barad (2008), posthumanism refuses the idea of a natural division between nature and culture and instead questions how this division came to be. She elaborates on this in an analysis of touch. She describes touch as giving ‘an infinity of others – other beings, other spaces, other times’ (Barad, 2012: 206). Barad ‘touches on’ the slight shift, from being in relationship with, to relationality. In relationality the intra- is counted in with the inter- (Lenz-Taguchi, 2010), or as Barad expresses it, one is also ‘touching the Stranger within’ (Barad, 2012: 214). Relationality disrupts the necessity for sameness, yet at the same time it recognizes the ‘ordinary beings-in-encounter’ (Haraway, 2008: 5) who are in the flow of relationality. Haraway (2008: 5) describes ‘ordinary knotted beings, they are also always meaning-making figures that gather up those who respond to them into unpredictable kinds of “we”’. This ‘we’ forms the uneasy assemblage presented here, and again a different image is used to drive the narrative about a preschool given below.
Prime cuts (Figure 3)
Yesterday on a visit to a preschool in Australia a parent was dealing with photographs of the children. These records of activity over the year were on the computer and would be transferred to DVDs for families. The results of intense documentation were present everywhere. Processing was happening but these children are the ‘steak’, the best cuts, entitled to be visible and used to the attention. They are used to being photographed for benign purposes. Like the best beef their provenance is known. It is a sign of sophistication in Australia to know where your meat comes from, which farm, where it was killed and how it arrived on the plate. This reassurance underlines the privilege of some over others. If only Bill was perceived to be a pet, or was a member of an endangered species. However, categorized as a farm animal, as ‘cattle’, he is expected like all his kind to give his life and to be processed without protest. The same sacrifice is expected of the asylum-seeking child, that he or she will just quietly go away and ensure that the status quo is maintained. What was witnessed in the preschool made it a place of hope, the hope that one day all children might be ‘processed’ in this way. The school considered issues of social justice, and children are actively involved in creating a more equitable future. These happy and confident children are a consolation. Children have no say in how they will be dealt with, whether or not they are considered to be a ‘prime cut’, the ‘crème de la crème’ or any other phrases that recognize that what happens in education (as in life) is basically a mix of luck and being in the right place at the right time.
Always implicated
The uneasy assemblage includes children, parents, teachers, the figure of the animal and the authors, the we/us who write this. Our unease concerns the distress that comes from being already implicated in the events described here. Some of our questions that have arisen while being involved in producing this work have concerned the possibility of accessing compassion in our interactions with others and to consider the extent of our concern for social justice. The idea of social justice is merely a slogan if our response-ability does not extend to our lives as teachers and researchers. There seems to be less reason, after being part of this uneasy assemblage, to leave certain things unspoken or unwritten. There is more reason to consider the nature of ethical relations that speak to our place in the world with others, human and more than human. The uneasy assemblage extends continually to include accumulating piles of evidence that speak to our awareness of what it might mean to become ‘package’: media reports, photographs and writings from a variety of sources, technology and stories, blog sites and documentaries. This will be the ‘stuff’ that extends the assemblage, keeps it transforming and in flow, ensuring that unease is maintained at a time when being complacent is, of itself, a source of discomfort. There is discomfort in feeling or acting on what Rose acknowledges is ‘crazy love’, she says that it takes this ‘to keep defending the lives of the persecuted, and over time it puts us in a place of witness to the apparently unstoppable and the increasingly unimaginable’ (Rose, 2013: 17).
Becoming together, becoming worldly, is to work with the idea that what happens to one happens to many and what happens in the world changes everything all the time. All teachers and researchers make important decisions to either shut the world out or to actively invite it in. If the world is invited in then there is an obligation to make sure that the world is in good shape and that there is not too much going on that gives rise to feelings of shame, anger and unease. But if these things also enter (as they must) then maybe something will be done. Barad reminds us that ‘there is no getting away from ethics’ (Barad, 2007: 396) and she asks, as we ask ourselves here, ‘can we simply follow our passion to know without getting our hands dirty?’ (Barad, 2007: 396) and this is a question that speaks directly to anyone involved with education.
Conclusions
A consideration of packaging and what it might mean to become ‘package’ is undertaken here; and the image of the prisoner, along with narratives of the asylum-seeking child and animal involved in live export are presented to build an uneasy assemblage. The methodology that supports this activity is a posthuman performative methodology. The works of Barad (2007) and Haraway (2008) are connected to this and are used as the basis for analysis and discussion. This approach supports a focus on different kinds of images than those usually seen in an article in an early childhood journal: the prisoner already packaged with face and ears covered; the child, kept behind locked doors, in detention, nameless and faceless, ready to be sent to an unknown destination; the animal, penned and in its turn imprisoned and packaged. It is worth noting that currently there is a government-imposed silence on any issues to do with asylum seekers who try to come to Australia by boat (Harmer, 2013).
The events that led to authorial involvement in this work are included in the discussion of response-ability and relational ethics. Finally, a reflection about the implications of ‘thinking through’ these events in an early childhood setting is presented in a final narrative that presents a troubled yet hopeful vignette about the uncertainty of childhood and the chasm that exists between being a child in a conventional early childhood setting in Australia and in a place of detention. This is conceptualized as the difference between being packaged as a ‘prime cut’ or not. These configurations of animal and human, the notion of how each is packaged and presented, contributes to unease, and finally the authors envisage themselves as being implicated in events that are currently playing out in Australia. We ask, with Butler (2011), which bodies matter and why, and extend this question to explore the implications of ‘packaging’ the human and more than human body.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
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Author biographies
Jane Bone is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University, Melbourne. She teaches in Australia and Singapore and has researched spirituality, values and ethics in research in New Zealand and Australia. She is currently interested in human–animal relationships and aspects of speciesism. She is a member of the Collaborative Research Network (CRN) (Monash, Queensland University of Technology and Charles Sturt University).
Mindy Blaise is a Professor of Early Childhood at Victoria University, Australia Melbourne and a founding member of the Common World Childhoods Research Collective (www.commonworlds.net). She has taught in the USA, Hong Kong, and Australia. While living and working in Hong Kong, Mindy conducted a three and a half year multi-species ethnography of dog, child and adult entanglements. She is currently thinking with ‘new’ feminist materialism to consider what emerges when Melbourne’s West, twenty-first century childhoods, and the more-than-human come together.
