Innocence Commodified: The Figure of the Child in Neoliberal Capitalism

Innocence is an important cultural marker. As I and others have written elsewhere, it holds powerful significatory value as a contested and complicated sign which entangles richly with other forms of meaning (Wekker 2016, Kanjere 2019, Tuck and Yang 2012, Fellows and Razack 1998). Innocence both denies and renders the political, confers and delimits value, provokes imagination and emotion, and contains dissent.

The image of the child as an embodiment of innocence provides an avenue for examining a particular function of innocence. The child embodies actual – as well as imagined – vulnerability. In the contemporary moment, the child as a figure captures the unity of securitisation and precaritisation. In this context, the functions of reproduction and care which necessarily attach to the child become complex. Therefore, the figure of the child is in immediate and constant contact with questions of security.

This essay asks: what does a securitised world mean for the child? And what does the child mean for the securitised world?

Sharon Stephens, in her introduction to Children and the Politics of Culture, describes the figure of the child in globalised late capitalism:childhood was one of the key sites for the production of a newly emerging and widely contested liberal capitalist order… We are now witnessing a profound restructuring of the [figure of the] child within the context of a movement from state to global capitalism, modernity to postmodernity (1995, pp.18-22)

This paper seeks to examine a late capitalist figuration of the image of the child within the late modernity of neoliberalism and (in)security. In both its disturbance and its stabilization of the legitimacy of social, cultural, and economic phenomena, childhood here is imagined differently than the preparation for adulthood. Here, the child is used to answer questions about politics, the economy, the community, and morality.

I argue that the crucial role played by the figure of the child is embodying innocence as cultural commodity. Childhood provides avenues for our cultural imagination to invoke and reify the notion of innocence. At the same time, the vulnerability of the child contains and regulates the insecurity of precarious life under harsh neoliberal governance. Together with precarity and innocence, then, a certain notion of security thus frames and orients the deployment of childhood.

(In)security, Guilt and Childhood Innocence

The notion of innocence as a cultural and social commodity is relevant in the context of ‘neoliberal governmentalities’ and late capitalism. Precarity highlights cultural concerns with notions of vulnerability, security, and risk. Furthermore, the world is more chaotic and insecure than ever (Brandt 2002) – or so, at least, we are told (Hart 1989; Duffield 2007) – leaving all life more vulnerable than ever to the ripple effects of civil war, disease, famine, chronic insecurity, and financial instability. Within this context, both the vulnerability and the innocence of childhood and of the child assume a heightened importance for the justification of security as a regulatory force.

The freedom which is the special project of neoliberal governmentality is produced and defended by techniques of security. Security is the regulation of change: it is the production of the circumstances necessary to allow and regulate flows and interchanges (Foucault 2009). The response of a biopolitical form of governmentality to disruption is not to isolate and control, but to operate on populations and behavioural probabilities. Security expands in ever-wider circuits – rather than defining what is and is not permitted, it responds to, regulates, and nullifies that which occurs. It is this freedom which technologies of securitisation enable, as the militarized control of borders and hypersurveillance engaged by neoliberal governments work to protect and expand the ‘freedom of flows’ (Goldberg). Neoliberal governmentality is committed to securitisation: to expansion, regulation, measurement, and management.

The financial structure of neoliberal late capitalism draws profit from securitisation through monetising debt. The institution of debt, therefore, is integral to precarity and security. The sociality of neoliberalism prefigures a subjectivity which is, as Lazzarato argues, constituted by its relationship to debt (2011). The subjectivity that Lazzarato identifies as emerging from the neoliberal power relation, from debt money, is the ‘indebted man.’ This subject is produced by a constant and inescapable relationship with debt: consumption through credit cards, credit ratings applied to all individuals and institutions in many nations worldwide, and national debt, which imbricates each human being in debt regardless of personal financial status. Such debt creates an ethic in which personal maturity is constituted through the debt relation: the rite of passage of adulthood in most industrialised nations, for example, is now inextricably linked to the debt relation of student loans. Through the entwining of the processes of subjectification and finance, participation in the debt relation becomes obligatory. Credit agencies are unimpressed by those who have never borrowed: the only way to constitute oneself as a responsible subject worthy of trust or investment is to have taken on, managed, and repaid debt.

Lazzarato draws on Nietzsche, who writes that the debt relation ethic relies on a notion of guilt – observing the similarity between the German words Schulden (debts) and Schuld (guilt). The logic of debt resituates the precarity of life under neoliberal late capitalism onto the fault of the individual, who is guilty of owing, guilty of spending beyond her means, guilty of insufficient flexibility to survive in the debt economy. Under this logic, risk is privatised as debt, and individualised as guilt. The globalised economic crises of the debt economy’s last decade are thus interpreted by ‘the signifying semiotics of guilt.’ Advertising’s call to ever-greater consumption, however, he proclaims to be ordered by ‘the symbolic semiotics of innocence’ (2011, p.170).

The figure of the child offers a convenient foil to communal guilt. It does not reject or even interrogate the moral logic of neoliberalism’s debt economy. The child signifies innocence implicitly, and its generalised cultural presence means that it is imaginatively available to all. Thus, the innocence of the figure of the child is a consolation: phantasmatic relief from the guilt ethic of the debt relation.

The vulnerability and innocence of childhood embodies a valuable, but unstable, cultural meaning. The innocence of the child is valuable and celebrated. Childhood is a privileged site, but also a source of great anxiety, for the innocence of childhood is irrevocably corroded by experience. The innocence of the child, writes Joanne Faulkner, is as vulnerable as the child itself (pp.203, 127). Therefore children ‘come to embody vulnerability, to the extent that liability to harm comes to be viewed as their proper state’ (pp.129). Lack of security becomes definitional to and constitutive of childhood – with the result that innocence must be ‘captured, domesticated, and surveilled’ (p.127) in order to secure it against change. This is to protect against the monstrous or abject child that is the result of the failure of innocence.

The autonomous child – that child who is not protected and therefore does not or cannot perform their vulnerability satisfactorily – threatens, rather than strengthens, the social fabric. The innocent child both embodies and conceals the anxieties of vulnerability. At the extremes of its vulnerability it has such destructive power that it constitutes a threat to which all society is vulnerable.

The fixation of innocence in the child is a way of regulating and managing insecurity. It is not itself secure, it is indeed constituted by its insecurity. But as a ‘protected vulnerability’ that is ‘sustained under controlled conditions,’ the innocence of childhood is a security apparatus: it is a way of constructing, surveilling and controlling uncertainty. Society’s fragility (enormous, terrifying, uncontrolled) is displaced into the vulnerability of childhood (contained, defined and benign). The activity of containment and regulation of uncertainty is an apparatus of security.

The Family and Childhood Vulnerability in Neoliberalism

Directly related to the role of the child under a neoliberal mode of governmentality is the question of the family. The relationship between a relentlessly atomised and individualising neoliberal paradigm and the family unit of trust, cohesion and mutual support is more complicated than a first glance may suggest. In one of those crucial paradoxes which are so often indispensable to the production and maintenance of an ideology, the neoliberal model of social reproduction is not, in fact, willing to abandon the notion of a mutually supportive and decidedly non-individualist family unit.

In Uncertain Lives: Culture, Race and Neoliberalism in Australia, Jon Stratton writes: ‘In neoliberal political philosophy where there is no society, individuals take precedence over the family.’ (Stratton 2011, p.65). On this reading, neoliberalism, with its free market-inspired individualism, finds no place for the stabilising influence of the family unit. But Stratton’s own account of neoliberalism suggests a more uncertain and less clearly defined relationship with the family. He quotes Thatcher in her famous ‘no such thing as society’ interview: and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations. (cited in ibid., p.58)

In this iconic declaration, Thatcher pronounces the irrelevance of society. She does not, however, at the same time declare the death of the family. On the contrary, it seems that the atomized units to which society is reduced are often families rather than individuals, so that when she says, ‘people look to themselves first,’ it is in fact unclear whether she means that in terms of the ‘individual men and women’ or the family – whether by this statement she is in fact offering her endorsement to the family as the primary site of help and support (Notice here that Thatcher also suggests approval of the notion of support even outside the family unit, although very much in a decentralized, non-obligatory sense – charity rather than social welfare.). Neoliberalism is not, in fact, willing to abandon the notion of a decidedly non-individualist family unit.

Neoliberal governmentalities depend upon an uneasy relation with a family unit that is co-opted yet disavowed. This may indicate a way to explain the often divided and contradictory account given of the role of the family within a neoliberal model of society. In her study of initiatives instigated and funded by that most neoliberalising of institutions, the World Bank, to strengthen family cohesion, Kate Bedford (2008, p.61) writes that ‘a range of other actors also argue that the family is in crisis because of neoliberal reform: I was told this by feminists, by NGOs expressing hostility to feminists, by community-based organizations, and by those associated with the Church.’ Wendy Larner, in her analysis of the public discussion document instigated in New Zealand by the right-wing government of the late 1990s, notes how the highly neoliberal document politicises the family as the appropriate site of self-support and self-regulation. She sees family as ‘replacing’ society and as the ‘anchor of the New Right’s anti-statism’ (2000). Rebecca Dingo (2004) suggests the term ‘familial individualism’ – arguing that the deconstruction of the once dichotomous relationship between family and individual is a keystone of neoliberal discourse – and Michael Brown (2004), writing on hospice labour in the United States, observes that organisation of hospice care can coincide with a conservative, ‘family values’ project as well as with neoliberal, privatising agendas.

These tensions reveal that the family unit is materially threatened and ideologically deified by neoliberal systems of power and government. Within this contradictory and politicised deployment of the notion of ‘family,’ the figure of the child is also mobilised, politicised and exploited. Under neoliberal late capitalism, the nuclear family is redefined as the atomised and individualised unit to which ‘society’ or ‘community’ is reduced. The family is a unit of mutual support, of redistribution of resource and of an absence of competition – all violations of neoliberalism’s doctrine of the free market as model for society (Dardot and Laval 2013). It is the commodification of the innocence of the child within the family that allows this family unit to survive into late modern neoliberal governmentalities. The extreme innocence of the child (innocence deriving, as Faulkner notes (2013, p.127), from inocere: the state of not being able to do harm, that is, of helplessness) – this celebrated and fetishised vulnerability justifies the mutual support and protectiveness of the family unit. Thus, the cultural significance of the family as social unit extends into late capitalist neoliberalism through an appeal to the commodified innocence of the figure of the child.

The Cultural Commodification of Innocence in International Aid

The preceding analysis offers a framing through which to embark on a critique of the late-modern phenomenon perhaps most dramatically aligned with the image of the child: aid. I argue that the child works to alleviate anxieties and resolve dilemmas of definition at the level of the collective both within the discourse of aid advertising and within the rubrics informing aid practice. In both deployments we can observe the two key drivers of the cultural commodification of the innocence of childhood: the precarity or insecurity of life under late capitalism, and the uneasy politicisation of the family unit in neoliberal discourse.

In the wake of decolonisation, aid maintains the neo-colonial linkage and financial dependence between the global North and South. Following Foucault, aid can be defined as an apparatus of security. Tina Wallace (2009) describes the aid industry as having ‘a focus on change as a logical process, controllable, measurable and accountable.’ Firoze Manji and Carl O’Coill (2002) characterise development as fundamentally about mapping, controlling and managing power, peoples, territories, environments and places. This work of measuring and regulating change is the foundational technique of security. Development is also a technology of securitisation, as it is enacted to contain the globalised threats of poverty, instability and disease. Securitisation has been mobilised in the support of further aid expenditure, for example in Tony Blair’s analysis of the necessity of development work in Africa in order to neutralise the various threats the instability and poverty of the continent could pose to the ‘developed’ world (cited in Abrahamsen 2005).

Michael Duffield draws a distinction between what he calls insured and uninsured life: those for whom protections, safety nets and contingencies are viewed as an indispensable and expected feature of life; and those for whom self-reliance is the expected norm, and any requirement of assistance is defined as ‘emergency’. Welfare is provided by the state (it is also, crucially, seen to be the ‘entitlement’ of taxpayers, who have ‘earned’ the right to their insurance through their contributions) and ‘emergency relief’ is provided by NGOs (rather than entitlement it is ‘charity’). Northern (predominantly white) nations have the welfare state, Southern nations (predominantly of colour) have aid; development literature also provides a host of examples of welfare provisions being replaced by aid spending – in particular for communities of colour. Sweden has begun to include its spending on asylum seeker residents of its nation in its official ‘aid’ budgets. Aid organizations in Australia offer the opportunity to donate to remote Indigenous communities in order to provide health and other essential services. ‘Migrant’ communities in the UK were targeted for services by NGOs offering language, childcare and other services originally provided by the state. On a more massive scale we can recall the deployment of NGOs in Latin America to replace the essential services cut by states under enforced austerity measures during ‘structural adjustment’. What we observe, then, is a dynamic in which those defined as white must be cared for by the state of which they are a citizen; whilst those defined as non-white must take their chances with the myriad of (crucially unaccountable) non-state actors. Those who are white have entitlements, those who are not have charity. Those who are white have security nets for foreseen vulnerabilities, those who are not have self-reliance which breaks down into emergency. Aid is global and neo-colonial. It is neoliberal and it is securitised. It fits comfortably into the late modern distributions and deployments of power. In its operations, the innocence of childhood as a securitising apparatus is visible.

(In)security and Vulnerability: Frailty and Containment in the Image of the Child

Aid is the charitable distribution of funds or other forms of assistance that flow from wealthier to less wealthy nations, either via the means of a bi- or multilateral state-based organisation or through non-state charities (referred to in this context almost unvaryingly as ‘NGOs’). Drawing on the preceding analysis of the figure of the child, I propose that aid advertising is a commodification of innocence. The use of the images of children have been found to be particularly powerful in generating emotional reactions, and to motivate the highest levels of donation (Burt and Strongman 2005). Erica Burman (1994b, p.1) observes that ‘the poor starving Black child is so central to the idiom of charity appeals that aid campaigns depart from this convention [of their portrayal in advertisements] only at the risk of prejudicing their income.’ The use of the image of the child in development advertising is widespread – indeed ubiquitous – and it is effective in extracting donations.

For the purposes of this essay, the extraction of donations from the pockets of the global North is most interesting for the ideological side effects that this process facilitates. This is in the construction and deployment of a certain image of the child and the implications of this figure for conceptualising precarity and security.

Aid advertising creates representations of the child that work to consume the vulnerability of the South in order to create feelings of security in its target Northern audience. The global South is often perceived as deeply precarious and this precarity is experienced by inhabitants of Northern nations as a potentially globalised, threatening instability. Disease, famine, civil war and chronic unrest, drugs, asylum seekers and financial volatility are all perceived as the menacing routes through which Southern insecurity is able to threaten the wealth and stability of the global North (Duffield 2008). Thus, the precarity of life in the global South can signify more to Northern audiences than their relative prosperity and comfort. In order for the menace of potentially circulating insecurity to be tamed into a digestible and unthreatening narrative, representations must show a vulnerability that is, or is able to be, contained.

The figure of the innocent child offers a technique through which notions of precarity, vulnerability and insecurity can be invoked, regulated and contained. This deployment of the child’s image is particularly relevant in aid advertising and appeals, since such appeals deal with extreme precarity. The innocence of the figure of the child acts to contain the insecurity of the world that it is deployed to represent. Areas stricken by famine, by civil unrest, by disease or by chronic poverty need to be represented in aid appeals in order to solicit concern and thus donations. Their representation, however, can also be menacing if they suggest the possibility of such precarity and chaos permeating the borders of the nations of the South in which it is located to threaten inhabitants of the North. The figure of the child, therefore, with its attendant notions of passivity and dependence, de-emphasises the possibility of the mobility of crisis and instability: allowing a representation of suffering and precarious life that can be physically contained. The child’s image also functions as a strategy of containment of insecurity in the sense that vulnerability of children can be understood, accepted, even celebrated. Thus, the image of the child’s vulnerability can be readily assimilated into previously established discourses of childhood, rather than representing the menace of a globalized insecurity that is divided between North and South only by degree.

However, there is a troubled aspect of the commodification of innocence: the abject or monstrous child emerges when childhood innocence is lacking, absent or damaged. Representations of childhood tread a precarious line between vulnerability that is compelling and emotive, and helplessness or suffering that is horrifying or abject. Just as innocence is commodified in the representation of children in appeals, so is suffering (Manzo 2008). As Caroline Eayrs and Nick Ellis observe, the negative emotions of guilt, sympathy and pity trigger the highest level of donation in audiences. The representations that provoke such emotion, however, also serve to dehumanise the group represented (1990). Struggling with this tension, aid agencies must attempt to create advertising that depicts vulnerability in a way that shocks or draws attention without trespassing too deeply into the dignity of the child represented. The national director of Foster Parents Plan in Canada, Paula McTavish, commented in 1989 that ‘We try not to focus on dying, emaciated children but on children in need, with pictures of sad, wistful-looking children with big, gorgeous eyes who stir some emotion’ (cited in Coulter 1989). The emotional exploitation here is evident, but the shift away from more extreme images of degradation and suffering is clearly seen as progress by McTavish and other aid advertising insiders. The point is, as the United Nations Association’s advertising agency remarks, that ‘[t]he only thing that does it is guilt: you have to shock people’ (cited in Coulter 1989, p.11). Shifts in representation within aid advertising have necessarily been slow, with actual practice often lagging behind the industry’s self-imposed guidelines (Manzo 2008).

The commodification of the innocence of the aid-child is the commodification of their inocere – of their inability to do harm – which works to reassure us of our potency, our maturity and our agency. This deployment of the child’s image, however, reveals an inherent fragility in the conception of childhood’s pure and uncorrupted innocence.

Children, as Stuart Aitken puts it, can be regarded as ‘fragile creatures,’ as ‘animals of God’ or as ‘anarchistic and fundamentally evil’ (2001, p.121). Poised between infancy and adulthood, growing and constantly changing, they are by their very definition unstable. Sana Nakata writes of the case of James Bulger, who was killed at the age of two by two ten-year-old boys, that the very youth of the assailants was read as of proof of their freakishness and evil. The innocence of childhood is precarious, poised as it is between the twin sins of too much agency and too little. The child with too much agency bucks his or her obedience to the cult of innocence to the point of monstrous delinquency. Those with too little risk lapsing into irredeemable abjection.

Within the insecurity of the South represented in development appeals, the fragility of childhood innocence is further exacerbated. Children in situations of extreme need are not afforded the Northern ideal of protected childhood. Instead, the child is forced to confront the deprivations of the world around them. The child with too much agency becomes the child soldier, the street kid, the child sex worker or gang member. These are ‘dangerous children’: children as the new class of menace (Aitken 2001; Glauser 1990; Ingelby 1985). The child with too little agency is dehumanized by hunger or lack; the emaciated body, stalked by a vulture, of the infamous 1993 photograph. In this extremity of helplessness, the child’s vulnerability transmutes into a disquieting abjection which risks arousing ‘adult sadism’ (Burman 1996, p.176).

The commodification of the innocence of the child represented by aid advertising underscores the latent instability of the child’s innocence as cultural commodity: always already precarious, it is easily further destabilized by the troubled relationships of extreme need, pity and exploitation that the aid relationship implies. The insecure child threatens disobedience, thus destabilising its significatory relationship to the category of innocence which confers value. The child who is precarious in their material conditions is also unstable in terms of signification. 

Aid Imagery and the Construction of Family Roles

Aid discourses, in advertising imagery and development practice, offer a complex relationship between the child and the family. Advertisement images tend to show the aid-targeted child alone, with no hint of the existence of parents or kin. When families are depicted at all, they are usually families that depart in some way from a nuclear formation: separated or absent fathers, children raised by solitary grandparents or by other non-parent relatives, children themselves acting as care-takers. This tendency to erasure of the family in images promoting aid organizations is so marked that some groups have established guidelines for photographers which attempt to rectify this situation. Save the Children, for example, underline to their photographers the need to capture images of ‘children and their families’, however, advertising images frequently violate the organization’s own published guidelines (Manzo 2008; Burman 1994a).

In actual development practices, the construction of the family unit shifts. Development literature readily acknowledges and indeed celebrates the mutually supportive and insuring properties of existent family structures in the Global South. Contemporary thinking from global NGOs, writes Duffield, constructs ‘underdeveloped populations’ as axiomatically self-reliant: that is, within such groups the extended family operates as an ‘informal social security scheme obviating the need for the urgent introduction of large-scale public pensions’ (2008, p.151). These extended family groupings are readily reified and exploited by the neoliberal logic of the aid industry as an extremely low-cost method of provision of social security to populations in the Global South.

Such conceptions of the family are far from the discrete and isolated unit that functions as an atomised block within the neoliberal governmentalities of the Global North. Instead, these are family and kinship groupings that are multiple, extended and communal. Furthermore, this conception of the family is not reliant on the commodification of childhood innocence for its legitimacy. On the contrary, the mutual support and insulation from the ravages of poverty that the extended family groupings of the global South offer are celebrated and advocated for by both development and relief NGOs. The extended kinship system of support and insurance extends to all – in contrast to the family ideal of the global North it is not dependent upon a conception of the family which has an innocent child at its centre.

The innocence of the aid-child is not located within its local, actual family. Instead, the aid-child situates within an imagined globalised surrogate family, with the Northern audience of its image acting in loco parentis. In this imagined family, the North acts as parent while the South is located in the position of the child. Thus, aid’s commodification of the innocence of the child rewrites the global inequalities of late capitalism simply as the embodied vulnerability of childhood. As childhood’s vulnerability is unquestioned – indeed desirable – so is this rewritten relationship a reinscribing of the global injustices of late capitalism into a palatable – even lauded – inequality. This use of the figure of the child situates childhood innocence in a hypothesised global family unit which encourages forgetting.

Rarely, if ever, do aid organisations invite us to reflect upon the fact of the existence of extreme poverty and starvation in a world with such material wealth available to many (the very naming of the problem of ‘food security’ suggesting that the cause of the insecurity lies in the food rather than in the politics and economics of its distribution). Even less often are we encouraged to ponder the roles that our behaviour and that of our governments play in the worldwide distribution of wealth and resources – which is a polite way of saying that we are encouraged not to think about our complicity in structures which condemn others to poverty, displacement and death (Kelly 2015). Instead, the deployment of the figure of the child in aid appeals encourages an acceptance of such need as perpetual, inevitable. In this way, the commodification of the innocence of the child works to refigure the injustices of globalized late capitalism in a way that both soothes the unease and flatters the agency of the audiences of the North.

Conclusion

This essay has set out to understand the cultural marker of innocence as it is embodied in the figure of the child. Reading the contributions of theorists from critical childhood studies against accounts of (in)security and governmentality, it develops an account of the function of the image of the child under late neoliberalism. Two major trajectories have been highlighted: a heightened perception of risk and precarity in a world increasingly perceived as transient, chaotic and insecure; and a tension that arises between the putatively individualising politics of neoliberal governance and the role of the family within this politics. Within this context, the child as a figure of innocence functions to contain and manage insecurity, counterposing and regulating the experiences of frailty and uncertainty that characterise late capitalist life.

Once proposed, this analysis is brought to bear upon the unique role played by the image of the child within global development, highlighting the function of the imagined innocence of the child in managing security and securitisation in this context. The dynamics of family and securitisation shift in this frame, with securitisation functioning more to contain the precarity of the global South and foreclose the possibility of insecurity proliferating to the North. The family’s role shifts here also, with its function as a unit of welfare becoming more pronounced. The innocence of the figure of the child is commodified in this setting to contain insecurity in a more geographical, rather than imaginative sense. The child produces a benign and perpetual form of vulnerability, one that naturalises inequalities into the normative relationships of need and power contained within the family unit. In each case, innocence functions as a profoundly political tool, which intervenes into political constructions at the same time that it serves to delimit and disavow the sphere of the political.