SUBJECTIVATION IN THE LITTLE PRINCE A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studie

135 Pages·2017·1.04 MB·English

VISIONS OF THE SEDANTARY “I”/EYE:
SUBJECTIVATION IN THE LITTLE PRINCE

A Thesis Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies
in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts
in the Faculty of Arts and Science

TRENT UNIVERSITY
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
© Copyright by YunQi (Isaac) Jiang 2017
Theory, Culture and Politics M.A. Graduate Program
January 2018
ABSTRACT

Visions of the Sedantary “I”/eye: Subjectivation in The Little Prince

YunQi (Isaac) Jiang

This thesis explores the seemingly innocuous call to “grow up,” which is never simply a
biological imperative. It is also a moral one. Demanding that one should “grow up” is
not demanding that one grow older, but that one transform into a specific kind of subject
– the “grown up.” In the reading advanced here, The Little Prince thermalizes the
suppleness of the figure of the grown up through a series of fantastic encounters. In
particular, perception and corporeality will be taken up as the two interlocking ways we
are often pushed towards an understanding of adulthood that is coextensive with an
Enlightenment conception of subjectivity. Perception, having emerged from a sedimented
economy of looking, produces norms and practices of attentiveness where much of our
perceptual field is consigned to infrastructural obliviousness. This intensification of
attention, in turn, coincides with a broader project of corporeal discipline that began with
the body’s sedation through the chair. The chair is itself an element of the disciplinary
machine that regulates attention, where the pedagogical injunction to “pay attention” is
often accompanied by the postural injunction to “settle down” and “sit up straight.” The
chair, then, not only individuates and renders those individuated bodies docile, but also
readies them for an entry into the world of grown-ups.
Keywords: attention; Enlightenment; modernity; maturity and maturation; growing up
(as moral mandate); attention; sedentariness; The Little Prince; Saint-Exupery;
subjectivity and subjectivation
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank my program, Theory, Culture and Politics, for providing the kind of
interdisciplinary research space which allows me to pursue this rather unorthodox project.
I am deeply thankful to Liam Mitchell, my supervisor and one of the most indisputable of
adults I know, whose provision of supervisory guidance, bountiful encouragements, and
at times, frustrations were all pivotal in carrying me through this process. As my entry
point into media studies, Liam’s brilliance and eloquence as an instructor also motivated
me to cultivate my appreciation for media theory in all its richness, without which this
project would not have been possible. I must also thank my program director and second
reader, David Holdsworth, whose guidance and belief in me had given me the courage to
pursue a voice that was distinctly mine. And a deep thanks to Kathryn Norlock, my
internal/external examiner, who, in spite the plague of her own deadlines, made the time
to engage with my work on a criminally short notice.

I am also particularly grateful to all those who had given me advice, support, inspirations,
and assistance along the way, including: Dean Feeney, Alexandra Draghici, Graeme
Bishop, Lee Campbell, Joe Yang, Kelly Egan, Liam Young, Eva Duarte Walsh, Victoria
Liao and Erica Barton-Muller.

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TABLE OF CONTENT

Abstract …………………………………………………..………………..………. ii

Acknowledgement ……………………………………………………......…….…. iii

Table of Content …………………………………………………………………... iv

List of Figures……………………………………………………………………… v

Introduction ………………………………………………………………………... 1

Chapter One: Specter of the Boa Constrictor …………..…………………………. 24

Chapter Two: The Accursed Chair ………….…………….…………………….… 49

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………. 118

Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………. 112

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LIST OF FIGURES

(Figure 1: First Drawing of the Boa Constrictor)

(Figure 2: Second Drawing of the Boa Constrictor)

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(Figure 3: The King)

vi
:
(Figure 4: The Businessman)

(Figure 5: The Geographer)

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(Figure 6: The Drunkard)
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INTRODUCTION
Growing up: a trajectory; a promise; a moral mandate. While it is partly construed
in biological terms, there is often some perceived difference between “growing up” and
simply “growing old,” one brokered by some criterion of cognitive and moral maturity.
The “child” is not yet seen as a subject in its own right, but a being whose physical
growth is meant to correspond with the developmental path culminating towards “proper”
subjecthood. That is to say, the achievement of growing up is not completed simply by
achieving an age of majority, but also through aligning oneself with some pre-existing
schemas of being. This is played out discursively when “grow up” is used as a retort –
often without any regard for the physical age of its recipient – whereby a dramatic failure
of maturity is projected as the basis for derision. In the 2017 political climate, one notable
usage of the phrase was by US Republican senator Mitch McConnell, telling the critics
demanding proper conflict of interest disclosure for cabinet nominees of their need to
“grow up.”1 What I am interested in is not McConnell’s flagrant display of hypocrisy or
of his shoddy salesman pitch for American neo-fascism, but in how the logic inhabiting
beneath the seemingly innocuous injunction to “grow up” lends itself to this kind of
authoritarian casuistry. Indeed, there is nothing at all remarkable about McConnell’s
usage of the phrase as a means to silence the opposition. The projection of developmental
deficiency is part of a longstanding tradition in delegitimizing the experience of the
marginalized; sometime manifesting as a rationale for colonial interventions or a
justification for gay conversion therapy. Achievement of the “grown-up” status can mean

1 “Mitch McConnell tells Senate democrats to ‘grow up’,” New York Post, January 8, 2017,
http://nypost.com/2017/01/08/mitch-mcconnell-tells-senate-democrats-to-grow-up.
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a plethora of different things: a level of linguistic fluency and articulateness, a proclivity
for prolonged attentiveness, an acceptable sexual orientation, a methodic work-life
balance, an idealized femininity, a willingness to abide by bourgeois etiquettes during
protests – the list goes on.
It is not my goal to define or clarify what it really means to “grow up” or to offer
a set of instructions on how it should be achieved. If anything, I am writing from a
position skeptical of attempts to systematize an answer to whether and how someone has
grown up. Instead, I am interested in how easily we can attribute the success or failure of
maturation to anything we desire, and how the suppleness of its usage spells out its role
as a powerful regulatory mechanism. Not unlike McConnell’s clumsy handling of the
expression, the appeal to “grow up” often encompasses a dream of mastery where others
are expected to live and act in accordance with our wishes. And to undergo such a
process means accepting the terms already established for whatever idiosyncratic vision
of “grown-up” that may be at issue and inheriting the values ascribed to that vision. That
is to say, to follow through on the demand to “grow up” is an act of coping, of “coming
to terms” with the ontological narratives espoused by these self-appointed “grown-ups.”
Sara Ahmed notes that “coming to terms” can also suggest a logic of “coming (into) the
terms of”2; whereby experiences are to be translated or, what she calls, re-termed under
existing regimes of articulation, such that the strange is rendered familiar, rearticulated in
a way that is amenable to the modes of being deemed to matter. The child’s unfolding out
of infancy and into fully grown adulthood is meant to embody this process of re-terming.
In so doing, Ahmed notes, that radical de-terming – the perpetuation of a loss – must also

2 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000), 58.
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