ABSTRACT
Spectatorship is inherently connected with time. This becomes apparent once we recognise the fundamental discontinuity that allows us to say that acts of spectatorship have occurred. Immemorial time has a profound link with an unremembered power/knowledge, which the infant spectator can only regain with the help of Little Thumb. It is no chance that this is the only identification available to them. Entirely immersed in a world pictured as a hungry and ravenous mouth, the infant subject is offered as a tactical embodiment, operating on the threshold of opacity to maintain an agency that is always vicarious and improvisational. The spectators socially appointed as children will learn to fear the adult world that is ready to swallow them, while never despairing of surviving it; those of us appointed as adults will begin to fear what we have become on behalf of the children whose lives we have never protected.
