<i>Homo mimeticus, Wayward lives</i>, and <i>The biology of adversity and resilience</i>: Early life adversity and the politics of fabulation

At the heart of the science of early life adversity—past and present—is the discursive power of “age.” As a measure of time, age operates not only to separate childhood from adulthood but also to conjure fictions that anchor the temporality of Western modernity, meaning developmental time as the normative gauge of progress and improvement (Ibrahim, 2021, p. 30). The way that early life adversity is narrated today can help us to grasp the extent to which the present continues to move “in the wake” (Sharpe, 2016) of this temporality. As to the question of why this matters, I would simply add the word “still.” The approach to critical inquiry that Horkheimer and Adorno exemplify in their Dialectic of enlightenment (2002), for example, which is comparable to Foucault's archaeology of knowledge (2002, 1972), still matters. What these thinkers share is an attitude of refusal—a refusal to settle for the world as it is, hence the need to take up a critical relationship to the present and to ourselves. If we can grasp how we have come to be who and what we are as subjects, then it might be possible to be otherwise, thereby cracking open a new world from within the shell of the old. This is what Foucault had in mind when he characterized critique as a “historical ontology of ourselves,” meaning an “attitude” that engages critically with the present (1984, p. 49). It has to be said, however, that Horkheimer and Adorno's present was not quite the same as Foucault's, and his present is not ours. So, context changes, yet the questions that critical theory poses endure: What stands in the way of a transformative politics, and how might critical theory respond? As I aim to show in this article, the contemporary science of early life adversity runs the risk of sustaining the power relations that are entangled in the temporality of Western modernity (which is not to suggest that all associated researchers and practitioners are culpable; this is surely not the case)—power relations that traverse not just childhood and adulthood, but also class, gender, and racialized inequalities. Reading Nidesh Lawtoo's Homo mimeticus and Saidiya Hartman's Wayward lives together offers a critical response to this situation, but there is a “but,” and this concerns Lawtoo's way of figuring an “anti-mimetic” mode of resistant agency. In what follows I present a three-way dialogue (of sorts), by thinking between and across Lawtoo, Hartman, and the contemporary science of early life adversity, which will be presented as NEAR science, encompassing Neuroscience, Epigenetics, Adverse Childhood Experiences, and Resilience. I caution against the move that Lawtoo makes in aligning the figure of Homo mimeticus to NEAR science, arguing that Hartman's method of “critical fabulism” affords greater critical traction in teasing out of the radical potential of mimesis as a way of thinking a politics of refusal.1 By way of setting the scene and identifying what is at stake, I begin with an example of how early life adversity has been narrated in the past, and how science fashions a normative fiction from factual claims. This will in turn provide an initial approximation of what I mean by “the politics of fabulation.” In the preface to volume 1 of Adolescence, published in 1904, G. Stanley Hall—one of the pioneers of developmental psychology in America—introduces the crux of the matter at hand as “adaptive plasticity to new environments” (p. vii). Hall was a neo-Lamarckian, and he aligned Lamarck's theory concerning the inheritance of acquired characteristics through use and disuse (otherwise known as soft inheritance) with recapitulation theory, which is the idea that ontogeny (embryological development in the individual organism) replicates phylogeny (the evolutionary ancestry of the species) (Gould, 1977, p. 82). The environment in question—and this is where the past begins to illuminate the present—was one of accelerating social and cultural change. From the vantage point of Hall's project, this was generating conditions conducive to evolutionary “arrest and retardation in the individual and the race” (Hall, 1904, p. viii). Hence Hall's interest in childhood, which afforded the possibility of taking hold of life before the child's “adaptive plasticity” manifested as immorality, waywardness, and crime. In terms of what should be done to counteract the danger of developmental “arrest” and evolutionary “reversion,” Hall recommended “protection, physical care, moral and intellectual guidance” (1904, p. 47). Insofar as this suggests social support, in practice it was a mode of child protection backed up by coercive controls aimed at children and families inclined to resist or refuse the offer of help (see Garlock, 1979; Hicks, 2003). I will have more to say about that later. In terms of timing, Hall prioritized adolescence (hence the title of his book) because he believed that the adolescent stage of life was a developmental conjuncture where evolved adaptation was being surpassed by environmental pressures.2 To counteract the threat of developmental arrest and evolutionary reversion, “adaptive plasticity” would have to be guided and governed by the self-appointed architects of an envisioned normative future. In no psychic soil…does seed, bad as well as good, strike such deep root, grow so rankly, or bear fruit so quickly or so surely. (1904, pp. xviii–xix) This horticultural conception of childhood was by no means new (see Mintz, 2018), but this is not about originality. It is about scripting a compelling story that moves people to act. In the context in question, a range of actions spanning educational initiatives, scientific research, and social work coalesced as a child study movement (Siege & White, 1982; also Platt, 1969). Neither was Hall the first to claim that the causes of future crime and vice lay in early life experiences and environments (e.g., Carpenter, 1851; McCulloch, 1988). It turns out he would not be the last either. 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