Childhood Cognition, By Walter Benjamin - 2522 Words

In a series of reflections scattered throughout The Arcades Project and elsewhere, Walter Benjamin offers a view of childhood cognition as defined by an immediacy between perception and action; the inherently tactile relation between thought and world elicited by the child invokes a direct relationship of thought and action and so a capacity to transform the world.1 Rather than accept the given meaning of things, children are said to acquire knowledge by grabbing objects, analysing them in new ways, putting them to uses beyond those to which they were intended (think of the ubiquitous admission of the child s preference for the wrapping to the toy).2 Play thus has a redemptive quality. As an experimental and tactile engagement with the†¦show more content†¦Ã¢â‚¬Å"Children are Spinozists† they write in A Thousand Plateaus, their existence takes place on a generative level of affect unhinged from an autonomous and rational adult subject.6 When I Dance, I Put You in a Trance... In his book Noise, Jacques Attali articulates a similarly lapsarian trajectory to physiological and cognitive development but this time situated upon the terrain of sound itself. For Attali, music stands in for the very possibility of social order; its effects begin from the moment of birth, as when the lullaby re-transmits the child s cry in tidy and harmonic form.7 Might we locate something of the force of generative enchantment and imagination prior to its capture by the chloroform of the social in moments when the child s voice takes form in music? Suggestive of what I have in mind here is Makoto Kurita s first album as Magical Power Mako, recorded in 1973 partly with Keijo Hano when both were fifteen years old. The album s first song, Open the morning window, the sunshine comes in, the hope of today is a small bird singing , begins with a chorus of children gently chanting the song s absurdly long title repeatedly, first in Japanese then in English, upon which the melody begins to devolve into a chaotic patchwork of tape manipulations and field recordings, then a heavy rock guitar solo backed by a string section worthy of The Rolling Stones or one of