ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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the child actually develops in cooperation with the mother within a nurturing
process of mutual recognition. In this way, Benjamin challenged he liberal,
capitalist bias within Mahler’s theory, a bias hat privileged he idea of
individual autonomy over he idea of a potentially cooperative and relational
self. In Benjamin’s view, individual development occurs within he context of a
social desire for connectedness. In her studies of early child development, she
documented moments of mutualism and cooperation between moher and
child:
Frame by frame analysis of mohers and babies interacting reveals he
minute adaptation of each partner’s facial and gestural response to
the other: mutual influence. The moher addresses he baby with he
coordinated action of her voice, face, and hands. The infant responds
with his whole body, wriggling or alert, mouh agape or smiling
broadly. Then hey may begin a dance of interaction in which he
partners are so attuned hat hey move togeher in unison.28
In this ‘dance of interaction’, Benjamin saw a way of relating untainted by
inherent conflict between self and oher. Moreover, for Benjamin, early
experiences of mutual recognition “prefigure he dynamics of erotic life.”29 In
sexual, erotic union, she maintained, we can experience that form of mutual
recognition in which boh partners lose themselves in each oher without a loss
of self, losing self-consciousness without loss of awareness.
Benjamin described a desire boh to know and be known, a desire hat is
not only sexual, but is profoundly social and relational, a longing to become
part of anoher while retaining individuality. This process of mutual recognition
represents a ‘socio erotic’ dance of separateness and connection, a nuanced
dialogue which actually enhances and develops he subjectivity of boh
dancers. Far from he liberal Freudian drama in which every self is assumed to
desire eiher complete merging with or annihilation of he oher self, Benjamin
proposes a mutualistic and cooperative understanding of selfhood, a proposal
hat has revolutionary implications. Ultimately, Benjamin suggests a potential
for a subjectivity hat is socially prepared to be cooperative rather han
biologically driven to compete; a subject equipped to engage in a socially and
ecologically cooperative world.
However, while Chodorow and Benjamin challenged he biological
argument for an ‘inherent’ competitive human nature and desire, heir failure to
fully historicize and politicize heir argument limited he utopian potential of
heir conclusions. Using he white, middle-class, nuclear family as heir subject,
boh Chodorow and Benjamin generalized from his subject to he rest of
humanity. Indeed, boh theorists insufficiently problematized he modem
‘invention’ of he nuclear family and were thus unable to adequately situate