Open Journal Montreal

Thanks to the folks at Mammalian Diving Reflex, I had the opportunity to indulge the animated, playful, and altogether purposive whims of a few young people tasked with the problem of cutting my hair under the rubric of “Haircuts By Kids”. I have to tell you: the only person who I let near my hair, or really have let near my hair, is my mother. She seems to be the only one who can take seriously the task of cutting each and every hair on my head the same length. This request always poses problems for the range of barbers and stylists I’ve engaged over the years. This is to say, yes, I have (and am united with all because of my) hair hang-ups, which means that I drag the same cultural baggage into this whole endeavour…

So, conceived as political performance with the social potential to force a reconsideration of how we tend to relegate and dismiss the contributions of children, the haircut project was part of the larger Harbourfront Centre-based Children’s Festival of the Arts. The haircut was a challenge to momentarily cease the reflection on the state of myself and enable an encounter. I wasn’t so much a sacrificial object as kind of motivator to realize this project, a body to be worked on. Here’s what MDR - in manifesto-like mode - had to say about the event:

“HAIRCUTS BY CHILDREN invites the consideration of children as creative and
competent individuals whose aesthetic choices can be trusted. The idea that
kids should be allowed to cut our hair evokes the same leap of faith, courage
and understanding required to grant children deeper citizenship rights. For
many it is actually less terrifying to contemplate allowing kids to vote! In the
future, every child will be given a pair of scissors and invited to shape our
destinies. In the future,every child will be granted full citizenship rights; invited
to vote, run for office and drive streetcars. In the future, children will teach and
adults will learn; a playground will be built on every battlefield; and candy will be
free. In the future, children will be powerful creatures able to cross the street
without looking both ways, and hold their breath underwater forever and ever
and ever. So, while HAIRCUTS BY CHILDREN is a performance for kids, it’s actually
for the benefit of who they will become; for the adults who have to deal with the
consequences of eighteen years of political disenfranchisement. HAIRCUTS BY
CHILDREN: a performance about the future.”

The vanguard-aspect of young children marching bravely into the future seemed almost cartoonish at the outset. Yet, the play of this image also suggests the possible ways we ought to cultivate and guide the emergence of creative, imaginative, and extraordinary avenues for children to articulate and posit themselves in the world. Thus: enfranchisement, and a recognition of the ways in which actually children participate in their suspiscion, thier skepticism, and their contempt for the habits and patterns we take for granted. The amount of trust involved is subtle and startling, with the agreement by both young cutter and (generally) older cuttee - transformed into a quasi-cosmetic subject - to both regard and disregard regimes of aesthetics and traditional relationships of authority in a joint effort to perform a temporary transformation.

We could be cynical and disregard these opportunities as merely conceptual, remaining suspicious of the performance extracted from these children, or we could celebrate the decision made by the young people to subject themselves to this process, consigning themselves to shaking off the kinds of relations the status quo imparts and projects upon them, realizing the process and its very outlandish implausibility. The haircuts become vehicles for inducing a reconceptualization of where our responsibilities to one another begin and end, where those horizons get hazy and blur, and, further, how those points of contact can be conceived as the political and ethical zones of our everyday lives.

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[ originally posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 11:16 am and is filed under Everything. ]