Bernadette Baker 2 2

j. curriculum studies, 2001, vol. 33, no.
3, 277±302
Moving on (part 2): power and the child in

curriculum history
BERNADETTE BAKER
This paper is the second in a two-part series that maps continuities and ruptures in
conceptions of power and traces their e ects in educational discourse on `the child’. It
delineates two post-Newtonian intellectual trajectories through which concepts of
`power’ arrived at the theorization of `the child’: the paradoxical bio-physical
inscriptions of human-ness that accompanied mechanistic worldviews and the
explanations for social motion in political philosophy. The intersection of pedagogical
theories with `the child’ and `power’ is further traced from the latter 1800s to the
present, where a Foucaultian analytics of power-as-e ects is reconsidered in regard to
histories of motion. The analysis culminates in an examination of post-Newtonian
(dis)continuities in the theorization of power, suggesting some productive paradoxes
that inhabit turn of the 21st-century conceptualizations of the social.
Introduction: power and pedagogy
The child has been written and rewritten in educational research through
the various bio-physical lenses deployed in social science from John Locke
(1632±1704) to Michel Foucault (1926±1984). In my ®rst paper, `Moving
on (part 1): the physics of power and curriculum history’ (Baker 2001), I
examined historically the availability of power as an analytical concept for
scienti®c/cosmological explanations up to Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642±1727)
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of
Natural Philosophy) (1687/1964). In this second paper, I delineate two
intellectual trajectories through which concepts of `power’ arrived more
centrally at the theorization of `the child’: the circa-Newtonian (and
paradoxical) bio-physical inscriptions of human-ness and the explanations
for social motion in political philosophy. The intersection of pedagogical
theories with `the child’ and `power’ is traced from the latter 1800s to the
present, where a Foucaultian analytics of power-as-e ects is reconsidered
in regard to histories of motion. The analysis culminates in an examination
of post-Newtonian (dis)continuities in the theorization of power, suggest-
ing some productive paradoxes that inhabit late 20th-century conceptua-
lizations of the social.
Bernadette Baker is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction,

University of Wisconsin-Madison, Teacher Education Bldg., 225 N. Mills St., Madison WI
53706, USA (e-mail: bbaker@education.wisc.edu). Her interests are curriculum history,
curriculum theory, historiography, philosophy, and `post’-literatures.
Journal of Curriculum Studies ISSN 0022±0272 print/ISSN 1366±5839 online # 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
278 b. baker
The biologized Newtonian body
In the ®rst paper, Newtonian physics was described as being centrally

concerned with power-as-force, where force was posited as a more overtly
discrete cause of change in an object’s status. This inscription of power was
to play out amid a view of objects or bodies as independent entities. For
Newton (1964), the e ects observed had to be replicable, and the same
movement in independent entities, the same e ect, had to be produced by
the same cause. Human bodies and physical objects, like spinning globes,
were not distinguishable from one another in terms of the laws of motion.
What is crucial to the social sciences in terms of the theories of power that
were deployed in post-Newtonian and, especially, present views that
`bodies’ become `disciplined’ through movement and gazing (e.g. Fou-
cault’s (1979) Discipline and Punish), was an idea of the human body as a
distinguishable entity (albeit invested with Newton’s laws of motion) and,
hence, as a site upon which e ects could be noted.
The naming of `the body’ as a key analytical concept in work such as
Foucault’s (1979) Discipline and Punish, and more generally in his explica-
tion of genealogy (1977) was made possible as the following discussion
suggests, through biological discourse which produced `the human body’ as
an amorphous object of study (mechanical) and yet as unique (biological).
That is, at the moment of homogenization of bodies through physics arises
a moment of di erentiation of bodies-as-beings through disciplines now
called biology, anatomy and physiology.
From the latter 1600s to the early 1900s, mechanical philosophies
`moved’ into the theorization of human `body’ and `mind’. One of the
most obvious expressions of Newton’s laws in relation to `human body’
occurs in the emergence of a ®eld called biomechanics. Newton’s method-
ology of prescribing laws that successfully predicted movement was
attempted in relation to `biological’ subject matter (Matthen and Ware
1994). The laws of motion, which were subsequently modi®ed to formulae
for measuring force (e.g. f ˆ ma), were translated into studies of the body in
movement in what is now called both biomechanics and kinesiology by the
latter half of the 1800s (Rasch and Burke 1978). The ®eld of biomechanics,
sometimes referred to as the `fringe’ of biology, was made possible by the
use of Newton’s laws of motion to explain animal (including human)
movement (Pennycuick 1992). In biomechanics, power measured in watts
and force measured in newtons became stable concepts for explaining how
humans, for example, got from point A to point B or caused something else,
like a projectile, to do so.
Power in biomechanics was articulated in a general formula as `work
over time’ (p ˆ w/t) (Enoka 1994). What constituted power was the capacity
of a body to move mass over a distance quickly (work). The more mass and
the faster it could be moved across a set distance (with a constant force of
gravity), the more power a body was said to have. In what is by now
familiar, the biomechanical inscription of power into a concept of `the
body’ was predicated on the ability to move (or resist movement) and on
the potential or capacity to move other bodies quickly.
power and the children in curriculum history 279
In the human body, this `power’ became equated with musculature and
masculinity in particular, suggesting the ways in which perceptions of
greater male strength were culturally produced through de®nitions of
`power’ and `work’ in ®elds such as biomechanics and physiology. The
òbjectivity’ of Newtonian physics as applied to biologized subject matter is
brought into question in the human realm through realization of the visions
to which it was articulated. In the early 1970s in biomechanics and exercise
physiology the view that the same-sized surface area of `female’ and `male’
muscular tissue exerted the same contractile force was announced and
passed on as a surprising ®nding. This can be understood as a legacy of the
contradictions inherent to theorizing bodies as blank objects in motion via
appeal to Newtonian physics and thinking the body simultaneously as
`biological’ and di erentiated in relation to `gender’ and the cultural
baggage that that implied.
As an object for study by the late 1800s, the biologized Newtonian body
acquired certain other `physical’ properties that were presumed objective
®ndings. The human body now stored energy, it had a capacity to propel, it
could be propelled itself, and it could, thus, become a site for examining
cause and e ect, because it had the potential to move and to be moved by
other forces or bodies. The human body in Newton’s timespace, however,
was being given other special properties (biological and physiological)
which were tied to the `culture of dissection’ that had emerged with the
lifting of the ban on dissecting human cadavers (Sawday 1995). The
exploration of human bodies, of knowing interiors indirectly through the
representation of the dead, enabled the positing of a distinctively `human’
being, in new biological and physiological terms. In one way, the re-
characterization of human-ness departed from Newton’s homogenization
of objects/bodies in motion and in another it drew on mechanical explana-
tions for depicting that uniqueness.
The interior of the human body, previously dark, frightening and
prohibited, had been opened outwards in the great European anatomy
theatres of the Renaissance. Although Mondino dei Liuzzi performed the
®rst authorized public dissection of a human cadaver in 1315 in Italy
(Oliver 1997), it was not until the latter half of the 1600s that human
dissection began to achieve a status as a `clean’ realm of study. Prior to the
biomechanical positioning of the human body as a machine, bodies or
objects were categorized depending primarily on external phenotypic
features (Thagard 1992). What was initially inscribed as the unique
interiority of the human body was portrayed as chaotic, complex, and
almost unfathomable. Anatomical study was depicted as something akin to
the exploration and conquest of colonial lands, especially as akin to
exploring America. Dissectors left their names on internal body parts like
seafarers touching down in lands they had not previously seen (Sawday
1995).
A new conceptual schema was required to make sense of the chaos
inside. Newtonian mechanics provided not only a means for explaining how
humans got from point A to point B, but the dissemination of the laws and
machine-based imagery during the formalization of anatomy enabled a
rewriting of the human interior as machine-like. It was a complex rewrit-
280 b. baker
ing, however, that would signal both the uniqueness of humanity because of
the ìnsides’ and a homogeneity because of an appeal to machine-like systems
with set laws of operation.
The practice of human dissection and the new languages built around it
were to prove crucial in an inscription of the young as having interiors
a ected by exteriors, in giving èducational discourse’ a `home’ (i.e. the
interior/exterior problematic). Without an interior/exterior problematic, a
concept of curriculum, or the writing of curriculum, history itself would
not make sense. The existence of an ìnner’ realm that could be impacted by
an òuter’ realm was the conceptual sca olding necessary for the increased
debate over child-rearing and the nature and order of studies from the late
1600s onwards.
The culture of dissection was a pivotal point in conjoining di erence
and sameness in regard to human being, in being able to speak of `children’
as a recognizable (homogeneous) group who were also available for indi-
viduation, based on interiorities that constantly threatened to deviate from
norms for human-ness. Interestingly, the mechanisms that enabled
humans to claim distinction from other life forms that could move (like
ànimals’) were also the mechanisms that enabled distinctions to be
drawn between `di erent kinds’ of humans (e.g. child/adult, `races’,
`sexes’, etc.).
The preservation of humanity as a unique and distinct species and the
inscription of adulthood as its most ful®lled form did not obviously have its
origins in the culture of dissection or Newtonian mechanics. The Cartesian
relationship between mind and body was the culmination of a long Judeo-
Christian moment in which a (shifting) concept of `mind’ could be deployed
as the marker of human existence, as a distinguishing factor. ReneÂ Descartes
(1596±1650) gave the body a specialÐthe processes of the Cartesian
cogitoÐwhich had to have an awareness of the body before it could own
it (Sawday 1995). Under Descartes, it was the mind’s perceived capacity to
`move’ beyond the èrring’ of `childhood’s’ association of bodily sensation
with truth that provided the grounds for identifying humans as a separate
and superior category of beings (Descartes 1983).
`The mind’, its `visibility’ through the production of speech and
literature, and its ability to travel, in a sense, beyond the `limits’ of the
body to `know’, was used to distinguish human-ness from `living things’.1
Although Descartes attributed `local motion’ to the body and not the mind,
it was the potential of the mind to `move’ metaphorically beyond the
immediacy of sensory perception that enabled human-ness to be posited
not just as di erent in terms of interior biologized `mechanisms’ (i.e.
anatomy and physiology of the body), but as superior to other life forms
in terms of `mental’ potential. The Faculty Psychology and empiricist
notion of how humans acquired ideas that John Locke (1975) was to
deploy in contradistinction to Descartes subjected mind fully to laws of
motion, placing the body as a conduit of external facts. The di erent
`faculties’ were de®ned as `powers’ of mind, cementing mechanical philo-
sophy explicitly as the explanatory matrix for `mind’ and `body’, for ìnner’
and òuter’ realms across which power-as-force ¯owed.
The subsequent social science `space’ called `psychology’, which was
not strictly possible under Descartes, therefore, was opened in part because
`consciousness’ was theorized as an awareness of the movement of ideas
within, of how `simple’ exterior sensations moved into being `complex’
interior ideas that could be retrieved and re¯ected on according to set laws.
Both body and mind, `biology’ and `psychology’ were eventually to stand
on their own without necessary recourse to each other or the soul for
explanation and to explain the events of their relative locales through
appeal to the word `power’. The advent of mechanical philosophies and
their inscription in multiple forms into human existence thereby secured
the possibility of asking questions about relationships between ìnner’ and
òuter’ realms, about the forces that crossed them, the `movements’ that
indicated it, the awareness of this potential-to-move within, in short, the
`thought’ or consciousness of being human and superior. Post-Newton,
body and mind became subjected to analyses based on the composition of
forces and resolution back to that which was already composed.
The privileging of mind in new biological constructions of life, despite
the emphasis on external phenotypic/physical markers for categorization, is
what made Darwin’s (1909) thesis so shocking in the mid-1800s. Charles
Darwin (1809±1882) placed history into categorization, suggested that it
was randomness that determined what did and did not survive, and brought
humans out of the protection of a separate category, by linking humanity to
the occurrence of other beings in the past (Thagard 1992).
After Darwin, the evolutionary, biologized body did not protect `the
mind’ from the privilege it enjoyed under Descartes. Although Darwin was
di erentially received, the negative reactions to his thesis stemmed from
the attachment of humans to other living things. Darwin historicized
humanity and sequenced it as a development. The formalization of a
discipline called `psychology’ in the decades following the publication of
The Origins of Species (Darwin 1859), might, thus, be located as a means of
protecting `the mind’ as a concept for making distinctions between beings,
and, hence, to reinscribing (adult) humanity’s superiority in relation to
other living things.2 Amid the physical and biomechanical trends to
(geometrically) decentre humans as just another body or object-in-
motion, which one might argue began with Ptolemy’s (numerical) decen-
tring of earth in the cosmos, psychology emerged as a ®eld which would
reassert the uniqueness of human life in `view’ of human `mind’.
The paradoxical trends of trying to maintain human privilege while
studying humans as machine-like objects in motion held portent for
educational discourse on the child that was to emanate more noticeably
from Newton’s timespace onwards. It is in this awkward nexus where
body/mind dualism met the re-categorization of living things that `power’
was well able to be deployed as an explanatory device for multiple
occurrences across multiple sciences. As will be discussed below, the
presumption of objectivity surrounding theorization of bodies and minds
was articulated to pre-existing systems of inclusion and exclusion in
educational discourse, constituting `the child’ anew through appeal to
`powers’ or the lack thereof. The perceived presence of motion in mind
and body, and the reading of that motion through language, gesture or
282 b. baker
physical appearance, was to implicate `power’ as a cause in any analysis of a
child’s rest, movement or lookÐan implication that has been maintained to
the present. One site through which the conjoining of bio-physical con-
ceptions of the body to power-as-force and as potential took place was in
political theoretical explanations for `society’ that emanated from Newton’s
timespace onwards.
Explaining social motion through power
In theorizing power, political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes (1588±

1679) and Locke employed similar metaphors, despite the substantial
di erences between the content of their arguments. Mechanical models
or machine-based imagery are the devices deployed to communicate, to
bring to visibility, how societies were `moving’ and how `power’ is or
should operate amid the shu‚e.
The grappling with social motion coheres around the co-ordination of
moving parts, like a clock in Hobbes (1928), or like billiard balls rolling
along a table and impacting each other’s position in Locke (1957). Societies
moved, were in ¯ux, and yet conformed to an order in movement, e.g. from
pre-civil or primitive states to civil ones. Like machines or animals in
motion, societies’ movements were given a linear, temporal direction and
an absolute space (i.e. an all-encompassing historical narrative) against
which relations between parts could be gauged.
In the machine of `society’, power acquired an existence, an ontology
predicated on universal mechanics. If metaphors are to render visible the
nebulous, to pin down that which is not always agreed upon or unan-
imously obvious, then the machine and capacity metaphors deployed to
theorize societal movement did the job of making `power’ real, of bringing
it in from the (now non-existent) ether, and tying it to a ®xed origin as the
eternal unmoved mover of `society’, eventually in the absence of God. Law,
a ruling class, a contractual agreementÐthese are the sites where power’s
origins, its cleverness, its eternal ability to move could now be viewed in
`the social’. The cleverness of God, of breathing things into motion that
might seem to come from nowhere, could now also be attributed in social
terms to `power’ through the operation of a mechanical metaphor in
political theory.
Law, ruling class, contractÐthese terms were the social science
mechanical universals that assumed the existence of objects (`bodies’ or
now `subjects’), of space, and of relations between them. They became the
points from which movement issued and which generated shifts in the
minds and bodies of the `patients’ (an Aristotelian term) who either
`resisted’ power’s external impression or had their direction altered by it.
On this point, Hobbes, Locke and even Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712±
1778) surprisingly agreeÐthere is a phenomenon called power and it is
implicated in the movement of bodies, minds or wills in one way or
another.
Power-as-force ¯ows in the early political philosophy that emanated
from Hobbes onwards. It ¯ows across space to explain the chasm between
whatever is constituted as the visible and invisible. `Power’ is not con-
sidered from the point of view of whether it exists, but of how ìt’ operates
and moves things in the Mechanical Republic. Power-as-force to move
minds, people’s bodies, wills, and societies is the dominant kind of power to
inhere in the political theories surrounding the timespace of Newton.
Power’s ontology, its identi®ability, drew from its Christian inscription
as a Godly possession and from the mechanical laws that sought to justify
physical/theological ruminations on the origins of motion’s motion.
For Hobbes (1968), power was `that mortal God’, the means to
obtaining some future apparent good. It was a capacity to pursue, to
chase one’s will, and, hence, achieve a goal or produce an e ect. For
Locke (1975), power as a capacity becomes simultaneously power as a right
to pursue what the capacity or potential invites. He attributes the owner-
ship of power to the inside of all human bodies via `natural law’, generating
the grounds on which a contract can be formulated to negotiate the
anticipated intersection of such multiple forces. This is not the result of
what Hindess (1996) calls a slippage between capacity and right, then, but
the mechanical expression of pre-existing physical ideas of power in a world
composed of particles (individuals) and the forces that act on them. Power
as a capacity and a force, as an individualized potential to become or
mobilize, and as a possession of an eternal unmoved mover now inhabited
what was thinkable as a human, as a relation and as theology.
In the `social’ realm, therefore, political philosophy inscribes power
newly as a secular and humanistic mechanical prime mover. It exists
because of the ways in which the ìnvisible’ is read as the `visible’: wills,
desires, goals, rightsÐterms which are only brought to the surface through
a particular kind of movement, a movement that is subsequently described
as the visible e ect of invisible causes that are in an individual’s or group’s
possession. Power-as-force, as dominatio, thus, perdures in spiritual and
quanti®able terms via political philosophy. Depending on the philosopher,
it can still be God’s possession or it can now be a solely human and social
force, where force cannot be understood outside of the fact that forces are
relational.
Power-as-force, as dominatio, is the central depiction of power that also
subsequently opens up all of the interpretations that run from Karl Marx,
despite the lack of its spiritual inscription. It is an external imbalance; it is a
capacity to move which can be resisted; it can be measured/observed in
speci®c sites; it can be applied to things beyond the sites in which it is
located; and it is conceptually dependent on motion (action/inaction,
decision-making/non-decision-making, mobilization of bias/informed re-
sistance) and a visible/invisible binary. Power, under universal mechanics,
can claim space as the origins of mobility, as the new God of a terrestrial
cosmos called `society’, and it can be the new GodÐeven in societies where
religion is castigated as `the opiate of the people’.
This centring of power as the new God of social motion also opens up
the interpretation of Foucault. Power, as the new God, is visible every-
where, especially in places that may seem invisible (e.g. discursive or
epistemological space). Power, as the new God, may or may not plan and
guide motion and change once in process, but ìt’ is always there, always
284 b. baker
implicated in what it is possible to `see’. Power dominates, but no longer in
a top-down way (Foucault 1980). Power works in mysterious ways and it is
only through pinning it down, not to the order of a machine, but to disorder
that it is now brought into view. The disorder of ¯uid movements
juxtaposed against everyday routines, of horizontal circulation juxtaposed
against ascending pathways, of techniques, local strategies, tactics, and the
speci®c juxtaposed against the order of things, systems of knowledge, and
regimes of truthÐit is this appeal to disorder which now names `power’ as
the organizational force that lies behind the visible, the visibility of
discursive movement and subjectivity. The invisible hand of power is,
for Foucault, viewed after the fact, it is an e ect, and it is in this a posteriori
viewing of power that we know ìt’ has somehow been at work, either
helping (productive e ect), hindering (repressive e ect), or shaping move-
ment of thought and `body’.
Varieties of power in conceptualizations of the child and

curriculum
It is movement of thought and body that has so frequently concerned

curriculum studies, for, without the anticipation of either, why would
curricula exist? With what would curricula have to work and how could
their e ects be known? The conceptual dependencies that such an ordinary
line of questioning brings into view suggest the extraordinary extent to
which the historically speci®c conjunctures outlined above have permeated
the `common sense’ of daily educational discourse.
From Newton’s timespace onward one gains a sense of how educational
discourse was well-placed to become the derivative mix that it is. Physical
and biological conceptions of power were paraphrased into political philo-
sophy where explanations for social motion drew bodies as objects with
certain properties and capacities that had implications for educational
strategies. The co-ordinates of space, time, change, cause, e ect and
bodies were recon®gured, rewriting the child/adult distinction and produ-
cing children as objects upon which to design and trace change through
curricula reform.
Locke (1989), for example, amid his political ideas on authority and
human understanding, established very speci®c educational prescriptions
for the production of rational citizens via the rearing of the young Clarke
boy, whereas an author such as Rousseau (1968, 1979), publishing both his
EÂmile and The Social Contract in 1762, wrote cures for a pathologized
industrialized Europe through the private tutoring of the child.
The placement of the child into broader questions of òrder’ or
`disorder’ was not a new moment, however. From Aristotle’s De Gener-
atione et Corruptione [On Generation and Corruption] (1982), the child was
given possession of an internal disposition toward upward movement that
came to be theorized amid wider questions of the origins of motion and its
signi®cance to cosmological (or now sociological) order. It is the later 1800s
in particular, however, in both the US and Europe, that bear out debate
over the ordering of the child. The contemporaneous centring of power-as-
potential, as capacity, and as force, enabled the centring of the child’s being
as a political site on which to pursue preferences for future order.
Power-as-potential and the child
The theorization of power surrounded the post-Newtonian upsurge in

child-rearing debates, and it was `power’s’ depiction as potential and as
capacity (often via mechanical imagery) that wrote the early theories of
childhood. For instance, theories of power as capacity to move or become
wrote the (varying) 18th-century child as a being with inner, invisible,
`powers’ or `faculties’ to unfold. For Locke (1989), in Some Thoughts
Concerning Education, the (male) child is endowed with particular limits,
in that capacity or power for being able to discern between those impulses
that it would be gentlemanly to honour and those that it would not. Hence
its willpower must be bent toward the adult’s until the power for reason has
emerged. For Rousseau, the child has will but not power in his sense of the
word. Hence it is the avoidance of learning the wrong kind of power at the
wrong time to which his pedagogy is pitched in the EÂmile. The child has a
capacity or potential for natural innocence that establishes the grounds on
which civilization should seek its `savage’ roots and return to its state of
nature, but not without the realization of the `power’ of the faculty of
reason.
The advent of public schooling, initially in Germany, required a
depiction of the young with a potential or capacity that was weak, vulner-
able, and, hence, in need of rescue (Baker 1998a). Recommendations for
more formal, moral and widespread educational institutions sprang dis-
cursively from the attribution of power-as-capacity in a lesser form to a
child’s body. Children, and the reading of their upward physical movement
as `growth’, seemed the appropriate object on which to ground the prob-
lems of theorizing power, where power was conceived as locomotive,
generative and causative of change in sensible appearances (Baker 1998b).
The motion, movement and ¯ux of which so much is written con-
cerning industrialization, urbanization, imperialist travel to the colonies,
and the intersection of traders from once-distant lands, ®nds its place in the
child that travels from Europe to the USA. The external visibility of
movement becomes translated to seeking the laws of motion inside the
child, but the European child becomes tied far more strongly to the doctor
and medical professions for its form and matter than does the child of US
psychological discourse. Thus, while the invisibility of the child’s insides is
rendered visible in Europe and the USA through the new visions of power,
like power as capacity, it is through local depiction of a child as a vessel
holding `contents’ in the `mind’ that a di erent kind of ìnside’ is given to
US children based on their òutsides’ (Hall 1888).
That is, despite the European coinage of ideas such as ìntelligence’ and
èugenics’, a North American inscription of capacity located the child’s
body-mind di erently. In views of power as capacity-to-become, genetic
determinism is given the ground to operate, and provides the discursive
basis for the exclusion of African-American and Native-American children
286 b. baker
and children with `disabilities’ from `publicly’ funded systems of schooling
generally before the Civil War and persistently in the south afterwards.
The `savagery’ that Rousseau’s texts required as both noble and unreason-
able was to be written into the subjectivity of phenotypically di erentiated
children in a much reduced way. By the late 19th century, `savagery’, under
the speci®c auspices of evolutionary developmentalism and movements like
child-study, was not, as in Europe, the curse of distant lands. It was
perceived as being right at home and on the doorstep, and, hence, a
permanent and immediate feature that the construction of `whiteness’ as
`civilized’ and àble to’ required (Baker 1998a). The well-intended for-
mulation of the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) by Binet in France had been
given a hereditary and racialized inscription elsewhere (Gould 1981).
Gregor Mendel’s study of inheritance in peas, long after his experi-
ments, was eventually able to be heard. What prepared the ear for the
hearing of genes as a concept had little to do with Mendel’s peas and much,
as the above suggests, to do with his vision. The invisibility of power
attributed to the child’s insides was rendered visible through the concept of
the eugenic gene as applied to human bodies and written into cellular
activity and the working of the mind’s faculties. Debates between func-
tional and vitalist cell theorists, for example, i.e. the view that cells
contained all the `powers’ they needed for growth and development
within their make up versus the view that those powers came from some-
where else initially, inhabited educational discourse on the child’s growth
and development.
How these lines of heredity and growth along which all the many thousand
species, extant and extinct, these viatica of the holy spirit of life, the
consumate products of millennia of the slow travail of evolution, have been
unfolded, we know scarcely more than we do what has been the impelling
force, or will to live, which seems so inexhaustible and insistent. Certain it is
that the [mechanist] cellular theory needs to be supplemented by assuming,
both in the organism as a whole and in the species, powers that can not be
derived from the cells. Probably, too, the original cause of phylogenetic
evolution was no inherent and speci®c nisus, but, as we know it, was due to a
struggle for survival forced upon organisms by their environment (Hall 1911:
2±3).
In G. Stanley Hall’s version of child-study, the debates about the source of

power’s locale in the body was used to justify education as an exclusive
practice, `moving’ at the turn of the 20th century from raced, sexed and
abled di erences in the `power’ of `faculties’ and `cells’ to di erences in the
`power’ of genes for full development. Genes were thought to establish
capacity and direct growth. They became the internal markers of space for
movement, of capacity, of energy, of the inner force to grow, of the
potential to become.
Hence, children in educational discourse `become’ intellectually di er-
entiated, racialized, sexed and abled in new ways, in relation to how much
stored-up energy their genes were assumed to have, how much capacity for
unfolding, and how much physical power to keep moving toward a par-
ticularly narrow inscription of adulthood as a ®nal destination. The reading
of genes, based on bodily or phenotypic markers, was a mechanized
reworking of an Aristotelian moment that articulated motion to becoming,
queried where such possibilities arose from, and then attributed possibility
to an inner predisposition for actualization in a wider world-order.
Thus, in educational discourse, power as potential or capacity produced
the child between visible vacillations of rest and movement, stasis and
growth spurt, stagnation and `progress’, tying movement potential to other
phenomena like `genes’ and `cells’ and pre-existing hierarchies of being.
Power was not so much in or of the gaze. Rather, power was the concept used
to explain what gazing could notice. Without alternation between rest and
movement, how would we know that we were gazing? It was the noting of
rest and movement, of stasis and growth spurt, of bodies’ surfaces and their
moving parts, and the e orts to explain the `di erence’ in `spiritual’ and
`quanti®able’ mechanical terms that posited power as the likely source. The
conceptualization of genes as power-driven capacities enabled `power’s’
inscription at the minutest level of the interior, facilitating the articulation
of mechanical theories of power to judgments of bodily markers. The
`powers’ analytically attributed to the child’s body on its not-so-visible
insides were thereby rendered `visible’ by phenotypically based assess-
ments of the `potential’ to keep moving toward adulthood, by culturally
peculiar and speci®c renditions of `power’. The inscription of power-as-
capacity and as potential into the late 19th-century child was therefore
predicated on the presumption of `movement’s’ status as an òbjective’
grounds for truth, of `movement’ as that which suggested the `visibility’ of
a `change’ and a motivating source, and of movement-as-growth as a
symbol of coming-to-be something betterÐwhere `possible’. At the end
of the 19th century, it was not theories of power that could explain the
already existing systems of inclusion and exclusion as to what constituted
`better’ in early developmentalist logic, as theories of power might do now.
It was theories of power that were used to re-establish those systems and
pin them to `the developing child’.
Power-as-force and the child
A belief in power as a cause of movement in the child (i.e. growth and

development) saw the announcement of various contested strategies to
harness that power. It is at this point that power ¯owers in educational
discourse; power as a capacity-to-become incites power as a force to propel
or resist that becoming. The child’s will, envisioned as the equivalent of a
Newtonian physical resistance, is embattled against adult desire. The
upshot is the production of mechanical, engineering, and game metaphors
that attempt child-management, most noticeably in debates in the late
1800s over pedagogical style, curricula content and how to handle or shape
a child’s `will’.
For example, the late 19th-century evolutionary developmentalism
described above extended and reworked the romantic focus on the unique-
ness of the child-as-becoming through engineering metaphors that
attempted to grasp the child’s movement and control the powers it had
288 b. baker
been attributed with (Hall 1895, 1901). The teaching strategies prescribed
for engineering the ideal child posited an order for growth, for learning, for
thinking, for doing in the curriculum, and reconstituted both the child’s
and the teacher’s comportment as coming-to-be-but-not-quite-there-yet
(Baker 1998b). `Growing up’ was constituted as a journey, a movement to a
di erent space, into a di erent body, and into a `new kind of being’Ða
perception of existential di erence that suggested the establishment of high
schools to house and engineer the newborn beings newly called àdoles-
cents’ (Hall 1911).
Machine metaphors operated similarly as the point of contact that
would communicate power-as-force. E orts to design the ideal school and
curriculum were much more overt attempts at `forcing’ a child in a
particular direction. The deployment of mechanical imagery operated far
more explicitly to organize a child, especially from the inside out. Mechan-
ical theories of power implied that the cause of motion, and, hence e ects,
had a particular order. It was the inscription of regularity and order into
theories of power that can be found in theories of child development that
emerged in the late 19th century. The child recapitulates the past in a set
sequence, the child passes through set stages of development, the child is
moving along a pre-determined path which suggests speci®c strategies and
content that need to be employed, and so on. The formal preparation of
pre-service teachers, which by the late 1800s had introduced child-study to
the curriculum, announced the operation of power-as-force through read-
ing `the child’ as an assembly line of events taking place in a particular
order, a reading sometimes `softened’ by metaphors of ¯owers unfolding in
the garden of life.
The mechanical and engineering metaphors that communicated power-
as-force played out in the prescriptions for the ideal school, the ideal
teacher-as-redeemer, in curriculum debate, and anywhere or in anything
that could be construed as environmental and, hence, a potential source of
impact on the child-as-future. The management of the child’s interior
powers was at issue and hence the in¯uence of èxterior’ arrangements
arises under the presumption of discrete outer and inner realms that are
presumed in a relation of force and in¯uence in regard to the child’s
powers. Signi®cantly, the outer realm or environment is sometimes thought
to e ect only those already considered to have a potential to develop. The
mechanical and engineering metaphors were the signi®cant modes of
expression constituting the limits of subjectivity that `di erent children’
could occupy.
There is one other metaphor which subtly signalled the discursive link
between the child’s power-as-capacity and the adult’s power-as-force, and
that was the metaphor of the game, a game where power-as-force hides in
the fun to be had. The child’s will was to be shaped, forced, through a
game; a very serious game where symbolic thought was united with social
action in movement and play. Games were, thus, meant to convey a
di erent kind of power-as-force, a subtle force where the child’s will
would become wedded to the teacher-as-nation through the formation of
pleasure in action.3
Hence, in education, the Froebelian and kindergarten movement gave
play in the child’s life a serious and profound status for the ®rst time. In
addition, the re-emergence of the Olympic Games in Athens in 1896
signalled a key role for organizing the physical in determining moral
comportment. The advent of the modern Olympics was accompanied for
the ®rst time by the training of teachers solely for physical educationÐ
where physical education was not to be distinguished from what one was to
do with `the body’ on or o the ®eld, during or after the dance.
The articulation of what games the body played to the production of
morality and to the broader shaping of will, desire and reason similarly
permeated the spread of a Victorian sporting ethos through the public and
grammar schools of England, and subsequently to the colonization of the
àntipodes’. The Victorian sporting ethos can be read in terms of how new
metaphors for harnessing power through a game began inhabiting and
ordering children’s bodies through the organization of children’s move-
ment. Manliness or femininity, Christianity, teamwork, courage, determi-
nation, humility in victory, and grace in defeat were the intended e ects of
the new sports movement that were to be internalized through physical
activity (Kirk and Twigg 1995).
Power as a game at this point lends such seriousness to what type of
adult one becomes that the late 19th-century students of Eton could barely
be made to read books (Mangan 1998). They were reluctant to leave the
playing ®elds, not simply because games might have been more fun than
classroom lessons, but because it would have been a move away from
movement, and, hence, from a dominant metaphor for rendering `power’
visible at the time.
The debates over and production of appropriate teaching strategies for
di erentiated children in the late 1800s were appeals to di erent metaphors
of power-as-force in mechanical, engineering and game terms, an appeal
rendered necessary through the idea of power as capacity-to-become-or-
move that was being attributed to the child and its divisions. It is at this
point, I believe, that formal educational discourse no longer accepted
power as a novelty, as a theory, or as an invented means to explain the
visual ®eld, but gave it the attributes of an essence. Harnessing the power
inside the child by arranging or debating what was outside the child, i.e. the
external, enabled the disremembering of power’s relatively new status as a
discrete cause.
Power slipped into debates over technique, into the child and into
arguments over how to organize education and the wider society as though
it had a life of its own. Foucault’s placement of power in and as techniques
is a continuation of this historical legacy, a legacy that grounds its truths on
concepts of motion and theorizes motion through `power’.
Foucault’s power-as-e ects and the post-modern(?) child
Theories of power were never unitary, and the child development theories
that intersected with theories of power were similarly variegated. However,
power, as an umbrella term through which particular phenomena were
290 b. baker
selected into the ®eld of vision, had become, by the turn of the 20th
century, a concept integral to educational work. In the early decades of the
20th century, power, in its òbjective’ yet `metaphorical’ yet `discrimi-
nating’ forms as capacity, mechanical, engineering, and a game, is
extended, re®ned and rejected.
The rejection of the older metaphors of power during the 20th century
was not a rejection of the grounds on which they were formulated. Power
maintains an ontology in the explanation of motion-as-change and `moves’
into new metaphors after World War II. Einstein’s early 20th-century
theories of relativity, particularly in relation to space-time, hit the social
sciences after World War II, but the implications of Einstein’s speci®c and
general theorems (and of quantum mechanics more broadly) can be taken
up only to a certain extent (Einstein and Infeld 1938, Einstein 1960). That
is, to take up some of the quantum theorems in toto would have required
giving up power as a concept through which to explain social relations,
because we may no longer see any such thing as a `relation’ at all (Stehle
1994).
The randomness of change and survival that Darwin wrote into biology
in the mid-1800s had permeated some aspects of physics, noticeably by the
1920s, but, for social science and for Foucault’s analytics of `power’, entire
randomness could not operate. A probability reasoning was maintained
because one could not speak social science without an indebtedness at some
point to theorizing change-as-motion and positing an explanation for
`di erence’.
Foucault’s e ort to deny cause or origins and to collapse power into
e ects fails its description as relativist, which has been a frequent charge
levelled at his work. Change is not random in genealogy and Foucault’s
work is not relativist because power, motion and relations between parts are
always present and privileged as the co-ordinates for explanation, including
explanations for change as discursive rupture.4 For example, the Aristote-
lian co-ordinates of existence (time, place, bodies, motion, etc.) are
recon®gured in Foucault to posit existence as the nexus between the
linguistic and the bodily. `Discourse’ unites the dichotomy between
doing and thinking and it is discourse-in-motion that signals when a
`change’ has occurred. Discursive ceasings, beginnings, redirections,
`noticeabilities’, are what constitute `continuity’ and `rupture’ and enable
the positing of `shifts’ in the conditions for truth that Foucault traces.5 In
an appeal to discourses-in-motion, time and space merge in what could be
called a discursive timespace and the terminus for change becomes an
è ect’, an e ect subsequently theorized as `power’ and implicated as both
the sign and the mover of change itself (i.e. the e ects of power produce
further e ects of power).
Change, for Foucault, then, is similar to change for Newton. It is
constituted by noting a ceasing, beginning or redirection, but instead of
being tied to a `physical’ object’s change in place, in genealogy change is
tied to language as the `physical’ object and as the prime vehicle through
which `practices’ or `the body’ are read. Change is, thus, tagged as a
movement or as shifts in what language renders visible. Like Newton,
Foucault requires a concept that explains the visibility of movement, a
concept that can be implicated in (discursive) change-as-motionÐand that
concept is power.
But, power is given productive energy in FoucaultÐa feature that
marks a rupture in power’s social conceptualization post-Newton. At
other times, however, power’s analysis legitimates repression as a negative
possibility, a limiting, a perniciousness, that involves a hierarchy for, as
Foucault (1980: 183) writes, Ìn reality, power means relations, a more-
or-less organized, hierarchical, co-ordinated cluster of relations’. Power
was not to be understood as democratically distributed: Ì do not believe
that power is the best distributed thing in the world, although in some
sense that is indeed so. We are not dealing with a sort of democratic or
anarchic distribution of power through bodies’ (Foucault 1980: 99). Power,
as always already present, meant `the relationship where one wishes to
direct the behaviour of another’, whether the relationship is love, institu-
tional, or economic (Foucault 1987: 11).
The relationship where one wishes to direct is a relationship of move-
ment, for if there were no concept of movement how might one know that
behaviour had been directed? Power, for Foucault, is ¯uid relationships
rendered visible in surfaces, in the ways of getting things done, in words, in
spatial arrangements and in bodily activities that are invested not necess-
arily as intentions or causes but already as e ects of power.
Despite Foucault’s rejection of power as an essence (Foucault 1980:
183), the depiction of power-as-e ects, as relational forces in networks,
suggests a continuation of power’s ontology as a `being’ to which all
phenomena would defer or through which all phenomena would be
explained. That is, the constitution of `power’ as e ects and relations,
ìts’ hiding in or being named as these other things was, paradoxically, to
secure power’s essence rather than dismantle it. `Power’ was now to be in
and be the alternative sites where one might `see’ it. Power was, thus,
dispersed ìn’ or `through’ other things (e.g. language, the production of
truth statements) and was the `things’ themselves (e.g. techniques, mechan-
isms). A continuity is announced, then, in this dual positioning of power.
Newton’s inscription of power as both God-power and power-
as-force at the local physical level and Aristotle’s positing of inherent
power in the eternal unmoved mover and in local natural bodies are the
residual reasonings that operate through Foucault’s re®guration of power-
as-e ects.
For Foucault, there may be multiple social and historical trajectories
intersecting in di erent points in di erent ways, rewriting systems of
thought, producing e ects without conscious intention or mobilization,
but `power’ in/as a variety of forms (disciplinary, bio, knowledge, dis-
course, techniques, systems of thought) still stabilizes analysis. Foucault
(1980) acknowledged the centrality of power to his histories, and it is
precisely this centrality which marks his reasonings as another in a long line
of European scienti®c work that is fascinated with explaining motion by
positing the existence of a special kind of mover, a mover posited now as an
e ect which produces other e ects rather than a cause which produces other
e ects.
292 b. baker
Foucault’s notion of power-as-e ects might, thus, be seen as something
less than the quantum shift it is sometimes assumed to be. In Foucault’s
(1980: 121) assertion that `We need to cut o the King’s head: in political
theory that has still to be done’ we see that in his conception of power as
something beyond simple top-down domination, he reawakened the social
sciences to centripetal force while simultaneously trying to undermine the
centreÐthe King’s head. Impressed force for Newton was the result of a
push or pull (the action of an agent), but it was only centripetal force (a
force by which bodies are drawn or impelled in any way towards a point
as to a centre) that was universal enough to constitute the order of the
universe and to author every change within it (Buckley 1971). Centripetal
force was de®ned in geometrical rather than physical terms. It was not a
description of pushing or pulling by an agent but a description of force by
the terminus of change.
Foucault’s power-as-e ects operates within a similar spatial metaphor
of spinning toward localized centres amid e orts to decentre structural
power, the King and `the subject’. Power, for Foucault, is judged by the
terminus of change, that is a posteriori and from how questions end up
being posed as they are posed in the present. Power can only be viewed as
`power’ after the fact, after one has already determined what constitutes an
e ect and what constitutes an e ect of power. Thus, while seeking to
dislocate power from the King’s head and from the centre to the periphery
Foucault re-instantiates force/power as geometrical, as in motion, as in situ,
and as part of a chain that arrives at a terminus of change called an e ect.
Just as power for Newton was not simply impressed, so for Foucault it
is not simply domination or repression. Foucault’s (1980: 99) notion of
powerÐa centripetal notion where local power is dispersed, disparate, at
extreme reaches, in practices at speci®c sites, and so onÐends up in a more
central point that he calls, in the chapter entitled `Two Lectures’, `more
general powers’ and èconomic interests’. The locus of these more general
powers is where what Foucault (1980) calls an àscending’ notion of power
congeals, the centripetal point at which one can identify, a posteriori, local
techniques now as techniques of power which have been appropriated or
spun into (presumably identi®able) more general or economic interests.
While Foucault’s analytics of power attempted to undermine power as
sovereign and possessed, its spatiality never enables it to depart from the
centre. There is a gravity at work in Foucault that enables him to speak of
elliptical movements through space and eccentric circulations of power, but
which, nonetheless, operates as a force that spins and draws the outcomes
towards a centreÐthe centre of power as a concept. Power may not be so
overtly located in the King or dominant group, but is now centred in itself.
It is the newly rede®ned God of motion and rest, continuity and rupture, in
short, of change and the history of changes upon which genealogy is
dependent for existence.
The extent to which Foucault requires power to write a genealogy of
various present practices is evident if we consider what one would be
looking at if power were taken out of genealogy. For Foucault, change,
movement, rupture, continuity cannot be theorized or identi®ed without an
appeal to `power’. Power is the source of the very `subject’ whose cyber-
presence Foucault requires in order to claim that there should be no a priori
subject in writing genealogy.6 Power, as a nuanced kind of Newtonian
force, is the central concept on which Foucault’s latter historical method-
ology hangs and informs all other categories for re-writing history, from
`the subject’, `space’ and `the body’ to `knowledge’, `discourse’ and `truth’.
`Power’ is the necessary explanatory device for positing history as simul-
taneously a lack of progress and as continuity/rupture. Power-as-force-as-
relational constitutes the visual lens through which discursive movement is
both identi®ed as `change’ and explained as an è ect’.
All of this is to suggest that power in social science terms at the turn of
the 21st century survived the quantum threat to its ontological status and
lived on, but in modi®ed form. It is no longer to be absolute, sovereign or
prohibitive, and not even necessarily external. Rather, power is still
observed in motion, like practices and techniques, in ¯uidity, in circulation,
in the extreme reaches of its destination or through networks, and all of that
movement is judged in relation to its immediate neighbourhood (Foucault
1980).
The ¯uid motion of power, i.e. of reversible power relationships, is
meant to be gauged in terms of relative space, not in terms of the absolute
space that once constituted the primary background for occurrences in the
universe. Space, however, is still assumed to exist and to be in®nitely
available for moving into (e.g. unanticipated possibilities). `Space’ is still
required to bring into relief the topography of other phenomena, not the
points from which an object moves but now the points from which a subject
is able to speak. Its conception `moves’ out of the idea of space as
geographic, material, economic and absolute as it is in Marx, and into
discursive, epistemological, historical and subjective space, as in Foucault.
It is in this rewriting of space, however, that power itself comes to
constitute the new absolute space; the irreducible element implicated in
all explanations for things social. Power at the turn of the 21st century
inheres in language games, in thought itself, in knowledge, in discourse, in
the body, in the rules for games before players even take the ®eld, and so
on. Power is still theorized as an explanatory device which mobilizes,
somewhere from both within and without, that which can be visibly
tracked.
Thus, in education, a noticeably new moment arises in discourse on the
child that seems not so new after all. `The child’s’ insides are still theorized
through power, not so much in the forms of cells and genes but in the form
of processes and mechanisms (e.g. curricula) that constitute its ìdentity’±
`power’ moves from the outside to the in, across outer and inner realms that
structure explanations for (dis)order. The child is posited as an e ect of
power and the means to further e ectsÐcomposition and resolution back to
that which is already composed, a move in which `power’ is conceptually
ensured and perduring, despite its di erent or shifting forms. The child is
also theorized as a `subject’, as both an object and a body that occupies a
`discursive space’ (Rose 1990). The child is now a mobile subject, socially
and historically produced in ways that can be traced across timespace
(Walkerdine 1984, Burman 1994, Baker 1998a). The child is now con-
stituted through what language makes visible, and ìt’ now has a `sub-
294 b. baker
jectivity’ inscribed with `power’ which will suggest the possibilities for
becoming (Walkerdine 1984). The child is a surface across and through
which `discourses’ ¯ow, a body whose relative position in discursive space
lends meaning to other bodies, like adults (Kincaid 1992). The child is a
subject produced through a visible/invisible binary between institutional
practices, movements and gazes, a subject who learns to move through the
surveillance and language of others, a subject who is disciplined, explained
and produced by everyday technologies and actions around them (Walk-
erdine 1984, 1993, Rose 1990, Burman 1994, Baker 1998b)Ðin short, a
subject inextricably bound to movement and power, yet again, as the
grounds on which to posit reality and form. Space, time, cause, e ect,
change, motion, the body, visibilityÐthe Aristotelian co-ordinates of
being, recon®gure to rewrite the `post-modern’ child, a child we might
now `see’ as more classico-mechanical than anything else.
(Dis)continuities in notions of power
Several (dis)continuities ride through the various analytics of power to the

present. My use of the formulation `(dis)continuities’ is intended to suggest
that `ruptures’ (in a Foucaultian sense) can be illustrated (i.e. power as
potential, force and e ects), and that there is a continuity to the concep-
tualization (and appeal to) power in terms of ìts’ dependence on renditions
of motion for naming.
`Power’ as an English noun used to interpret ancient Greek, Latin and
French texts will always produce a sense of homogeneity or Wittgen-
steinian `family resemblances’ in the deployment and discussion of ideas
about `power’ across timespaces. What the preceding analysis has indicated
is the shifting de®nition, role, location and meaning of `power’ in various
cosmologies of (`physical’ and `social’) universes. It has illustrated at the
same time the presence of a persistent appeal to a concept (called `power’ in
English) which has been implicated in the `visibility’ of movement, in
`meta’-physics of being, and in explanations for order and disorder.
Identifying (dis)continuities in notions of power presumes that the
continuity part of (dis)continuity cannot be con¯ated with `progress’ in
evolutionary terms (i.e. identifying continuity does not equate with better
and better conceptions of power evolving over time). Nor does noting
continuities suggest a ùniting’, ùnifying’ or ùniversalizing’ e ect in an
analysis of `power’, or that, even if it did, this was necessarily `bad’. Rather,
(dis)continuities suggest the commonalities or historical vestiges amid the
ruptures and re®guration of an idea that is at one level recognizable and at
another unfamiliar in its historical variations. (Dis)continuities, thus, imply
that if one is claiming to observe a `break’ or `rupture’, then it is not
implausible to suggest that it is continuities (or their absence) which bring
`rupture’ into relief and which announce the noticeability of an historical
`break’.
The (dis)continuities which signal the persistent yet shifting presence
of power in social analyses (especially post-Newton) can be read as to their
ùsefulness’ in a variety of ways and are consequently perspectival. In this
®nal section, I am not concerned with the more familiar aspects of power’s
deployment that suggest what it has enabled in relation to understanding
inequality or injustice in the present. Rather, there are aspects to the
persistent centrality of power as an explanatory device that can be con-
sidered from a view of what `power’ may foreclose, or more accurately
inclose in the circularity of ìts’ reach.
Power, motion and visibility
First, the status of power post-Newton has stood in terms of correlating

cause and e ect through the visibility of movement. It stands for that
which the eye cannot always detect in process, but which can be observed in
outcome. Power’s metamorphosis through metaphor speaks to this history
of invisibility and suggests the `dominance’ (a power term) of an ocular-
centric tradition. At the same time, it is the assumption of invisibility, of
power as a nebulous kind of mover, that has generated its theorization from
consciousness, agency, structure and intention to circulation, ¯uidity,
practice and e ect. The continuity lies in the impulse to write power into
view through positing it into movement or inertia, action or inaction,
revolution as change, or, into the tagging of rupture and continuity as
explanatory categories in history. Movement symbols from planets, to
projectiles, to tides, to classes, to the Word, have brought power, in its
di ering forms, into `view’ as an explanatory device.
It might be argued that it is this continuity, this impulse to theorize
power through motion, to explain `change’ in relation to `power’, that
speaks to `power’s’ presently very paradoxical position in Western social
science. On the one hand, power has become the new God, the breather of
social motion into motion. On the other hand, a faith in power as a secular
explanatory device that has wrestled `consciousness’ away from the heavens
and into human environmental control (`subjectivity’) is a pervasive belief.
It may seem that power, in claiming space as the new God, can tolerate
no other forms of explanation. Everything seems ultimately shaped by,
reducible to, made visible by, a will-to-know-power better. Every relation
is posited as a power relation, every interaction or body as an e ect of power,
every thought as what power has made possible.
What, then, is to be made of explanations that do not `defer’ to power as
an explanatory device? Explanations which can only be categorized by
Western sciences as magical, mystical, spiritual or marvellous, and which
cannot be translated by appeals to the word `power’, ®nd no place alongside
theories of power in political philosophies which pay homage to post-
Newtonian European legacies of reasoning. Power, as a sociological con-
cept, rules, and despite what might be argued are its theological òrigins’, it
presently rules out from its grounds for proof that which is not available for
understanding through `being’ a mechanized bodyÐor language-in-
motion.
One response to such a line of argument could be that `magical’ and
`mystical’ are, ironically, the marginalizing signi®ers of what power explan-
ations, as technologies for seeing, cannot `see’. The dismantling of colonial
296 b. baker
and neocolonial curricula in favour of post-colonial and indigenous recla-
mations of the school or educational research are mired in the di culty of
`moving’ between languages that speak Western inscriptions of power and
those that do not wish or need to (Bogitini 1998, Puamau 1998, Wah 1998).
Appeals to what power explanations exclude, like the observations above,
are inevitably a logocentric entrapment in power’s reach, however, and do
not shift the grounds for knowing. Thus, power explanations are no longer
simply the eyes through which the limits and socio-historical speci®cities of
`reason’ can be viewed. Power explanations are the limits of reason, the
telescope that currently constitutes reason-as-speci®c.
The continuity in power’s relationship to concepts of movement
suggests a truly circular reach. It suggests that the tentacles of power
have currently spread to devour every criticism of ìts’ centrality. Power-as-
potential to move has become the potential of power to take di erent forms,
to move into di erent con®gurations, to be rewritten as a new analytics.
The autopoietic potential of power enables its consistent `visibility’,
securing a perdurance in systems of reasoning that seem stuck in a loop
of noting its `historical speci®cities’ and `ruptures’ as the only point of
purchase from which to grasp its presumed ubiquity. To `map’ power, as I
have done here, is to sustain its centrality, paradoxically, amid its analytical
`potential’ to critique centres and margins.
Power and war
Secondly, and related, power has consistently been theorized in terms of

war and combat.5 Because theories of power post-Newton have implicitly
operated from a concept of resistance, whether in the physical sciences or
the social sciences, there has been a language of theorizing power that
signals it as war by another means (Foucault 1980). Late 19th-century
studies of children were frequently concerned with how to control and
understand a child’s `will’. Late 20th-century studies have sought to
understand why `white’ student teachers often will not change negative
attitudes about `minority’ students. They have also sought to study
how `we’ have constituted `the child’ historically. Whether the framework
of power is developmentally psychological, Marxist, or Foucaultian,
the impulse has been to explain and/or control `movement’ or its lack
in a particular direction, to defend, acquire or re®gure space, and to
call it `behaviour management’, `resistance/revolution’ or `rupture’,
respectively.
Under Marx, we gather that mass revolutionary war is what is at stake
in the theory of power. The bourgeois and the proletariat, the enemy and
the allies, the superordinate and the subordinateÐthe battle lines are clear
and the implosion inevitable. Under Foucault, the battle lines may seem
less discrete, but power as war by another means is still with us. The
guerrilla war that requires power as strategy, tactic, discipline, technique
and practice in local and speci®c sites in history which `can be made use of
tactically today’, pervades the language. Although the language is that of a
`happy optimist’ who can discern the productive aspects of power, it is a
language inoperable without `resistance’ and `repression’. Theorizing
power has taken place on a stage that gives ontology to force and to war
as its ultimate expulsion. It is impossible to speak of power, or map notions
of power as in here, without some indebtedness to a war mentality. It seems
appropriate to consider whether `new theories’ of power constitute a
`change’ or are simply another `movement’ within an ongoing language
of war.
The `-isms’ of power
This leads to a ®nal group of (dis)continuities, I wish to consider, that

concern the `-isms’ of theories of power. The `-isms’ suggest the relatively
recent extent to which power can be classi®ed, dissected and labelled in a
multitude of forms that are presently available in social science, and that
one can observe in multicultural education, feminist pedagogies, critical
pedagogies, and so forth. It is ironic that feminisms, post-colonialisms and
post-structuralisms, in all their overlapping forms, have provided lan-
guages for viewing theories of power as phallo-, ethno-, and logocentric.
We are, for example, not to understand power as simply an enormous thrust
of one person’s or group’s will onto another, but in the era of the post-, we
are to understand it as a more nuanced kind of phallos. Power subtly
penetrates our thoughts, it is seminal in our identity construction, it takes
space in and around our body, it stimulates responses and it produces
things. Without a will-to-know power better, to know it as ¯uid rather than
as static, the sex won’t be as good. Do post-theories of power represent an
inscription of a sensitive, new-age, heterosexism which understands the
many complex positions that the mobile phallos (power) can take across
time and space, but which does not want to do without the phallos (power)
altogether?
Similarly, the turn toward theorizing power-as-force and as cause at a
time of mass colonization by western European countries has provided
tools for viewing the limits of power as a `liberatory’ analytical concept.
The obsession with naming power in or as movement that has underwritten
conceptions of power was, as I noted earlier, a product of gazing at bodies
or objects. Rest and motion were distinguished in the visual ®eld, and later
in the science of cause and e ect. Nomadic bodies, bodies at rest on
unfarmed soil, bodies on the desired land, and the desiring of bodiesÐ
these were central images in the theorization of power amid colonialism.
To name power in post-colonial terms as the cause of cultural devasta-
tion may be to perpetuate the devastation. Power could not have been
named without the movements that lent meaning to removal, bodies, land
and space. It was partly these motions that gave `space’ to power as a
concept inherently attached to `movement’ and `removal’ of `bodies’.
Despite a long-standing depiction of power in the social sciences as being
military at some very basic level of ìts’ nudity, the very o ering of `power’
as an explanation for or description of colonialism itself is, at a di erent
level of nudity, a `logocentric’ entrapment in a metaphorical European
body.
298 b. baker
Cutting o the King’s head?
This brings me ®nally to the re-location of Foucault’s will-to-know power

di erently and his call to cut o the King’s head. What Foucault’s analytics
of power tried to achieve was an Einsteinian collapse of cause and e ect.
Explicitly, causal explanations are denied, while implicitly, shifts, ruptures,
continuitiesÐall the language of movementÐare attributed to power-as-
e ects. Thus, Foucault’s notion of power did not undermine causal
explanation but united cause and e ect through reworking power.
Foucault is able to achieve this through avoiding an explicit de®nition
of power. We know in Foucault where power is and how it operates, but
what it is has to be `drawn’ out from the texts. The nebulous `de®nition’ of
power enabled Foucault to bypass the limitation of ®xity and to play with
power in motion, in ¯ux, and, hence, in contrast to what he called the static
and the inert in Marxist conceptions (Foucault 1979, 1980). Power in
Foucault is posited in terms of relative space, one reads of local and speci®c
sites and practices as the important points of observing how power works,
how ìt’ operates. We also read of power as productive and repressive
e ectsÐe ects that implicitly require some a priori knowledge of what
constitutes repression and production, otherwise how could such e ects be
labelled or separated? Further, Foucault (1980) acknowledged that one
could not identify power without a concept of resistance. If there was no
such thing as resistance, then how could one `see’ power? What would
power have to exert itself against, why would it even be named and how
could it even be invoked in any description or explanation?
Alongside his acknowledgment of resistance, Foucault strove to dis-
articulate his idea of power from liberationist stances that assumed freedom
was a pure state that could be achieved outside of power’s e ects (Taylor
1984). The di culty of invoking power in relation to resistance and
repression and then claiming that it is not articulated to a liberationist
mentality is obvious in Foucault’s later work. The will-to-know power
better, or even just di erently, belies the attachment of power to beliefs in
some kind of liberatory truths where `liberation’ is rede®ned as new `spaces’
for `movement’, for di erent actions in or understandings of the present,
which are sought through greater `visibility’ of how `power’ has operated
both to produce things generally (descriptive deployment of `power’) and as
a producer and a repressor (normative deployment of `power’). Otherwise,
why bother naming `power’ in an explanation or rewriting it at all? Why
bother to name it as an e ect or identify it in the motor of history in local
and speci®c sites? Why bother noting that power can, in fact, be productive
as well?
Thus, two dominant traditions for theorizing power are maintained in
Foucault, both of which rely on concepts of movement for expression and
on inscriptions of power in almost spiritual and quanti®able terms. For
Foucault, power is still a God, centred in itself, and somewhat like the God
of a medieval Christian theology: a God that produces and who/which can
generate, enable, make available, make possible, allow into being, things
(broadly conceived to include thoughts) which are sometimes bene®ts and
that should not be feared (productive e ects) and things which might be
seen as punishing, withholding, limiting or pernicious (repressive e ects),
the distinctions depending on the rules for reading the context of the
phenomenon under study. However, the productive/repressive dichotomy
surrounding power in Foucault is not always so simplistic or clear-cut. It is
in its ambiguous rendition, however, that medieval theology is revisited.
Under medieval theology, God and the transcendent Heaven were never
fully knowable in life. A clarity of their picture would not be secured until
death. God and the transcendent Heaven were nebulous ideas, things that
humans strove to imitate in building paradise on earth. But, like freedom
for Foucault, Heaven was not able to be made through human hands. Like
power in Foucault, God’s body, His de®nition proved elusive, and it was
only through acts that He was thought to have mobilized or in which He
was subsequently implicated in that God could be known or named at all.
Power-as-e ects represents an e ort to understand the failure of achieving
Heaven on earth, not via appeals to a transcendent Utopian lens, but
through appeals to an anti-foundational one. The ®nal e ect of power in
Foucaultian terms might be understood then as the continuing sacralization
of the mundane, as the not-so-new encentrement of a secular Mover or
Enabler.
Power does not lose `sight’ of its physical movement basis either. For
Foucault, power is still some kind of invisible force that explains the
motion of physical objects in the form of words or systems of thoughts.
Power is made visible through naming ìt’ in or as technique, practice,
strategy, tactic, routine, discourseÐthe new language rendering the visi-
bility of power’s energy as productive or repressive e ects and its capacity
to move and shape or enable. Power is still implicitly a thing, a force, a
relation (all three inscriptions in Foucault), which is implicated in the
visibility of discursive motion, change, or the lack thereof. The (dis)conti-
nuities I have outlined in power’s relationship to motion, to visibility, to
naming change, to speaking of war through another means, and to the
problem of Eurocentrism in the very naming of Eurocentrism repositions
Foucaultian power as a not so distinctive rupture or conceptual reorganiza-
tion of a scienti®c tradition obsessed with concepts of movement.
In the end, what di erence does it make if power is conceived in
absolute or relative space, argued in absolute or relative terms, posited as
cause or e ect? If we cannot see ourselves or describe a phenomenon
outside of power, whatever that may be, then what is the point of power’s
onto-epistomological status? The fear, the danger and the vacuum that
appears if one were to suggest that there is no such thing as `power’ is
indicative of the extent of ìts’ reach in the visual and explanatory ®elds of
the social sciences. One might argue, then, that there is no such thing as
power, except now there is. And therein lies the dilemma and the terms for
posing the question: What does it matter whether Foucault cut o the
King’s head?
300 b. baker
Notes
1. The appeal to `mind’ as a distinguishing factor between life forms was not a new
moment. Descartes’ depiction of mind as internal (where the body was posited as the
horizon between inner and outer) and as, by necessity, requiring bodily sensation from
which to depart enabled the inscription of space, time and distance into the constitution
of reason. Although Descartes did not recognize his cogito as subject to laws of motion as
these could only apply to extensions in space such as body, his Principles of Philosophy is
an excellent example of the implicit conjoining of `reason’ to the presumptions of
`physics’ in the delimitation of humanity. Descartes’ cause-e ect mechanics relied on a
mind-body dualism in which the material world was kept uncluttered for the purposes of
mechanistic physics, enabling intrinsic intentionality or objective sensation to be expelled
from the body and restricted to the mind. The appeal to distance, space and time, e.g.
mind as distance from bodily sensation as truth, spatially inner and outer realms around
personhood, time that is required to reconsider bodily perceptions all converge, however,
in the temporal and epistemological criterion he places between childhood and adult-
hood. This speaks to the availability of mechanical concepts of movement-as-change-in-
place (i.e. having to move metaphorically away from negative signi®ers like bodily
sensation) to the constitution of the child/adult dichotomy and, by association, to the
production of reason as a uniquely `human’ trait.
2. For the broader consequences of this in relation to race, its construction and its
scientization, see Gould (1981), and for its e ects in public schooling in the US, see
Baker (1998a).
3. Rousseau is a well-known proponent of this view and his EÂmile, or On Education (1979) is
a key text in articulating the child’s will to that of a broader group via the pedagogue’s
strategic problem-setting. The (in)famous gardening scene is particularly instructive
here.
4. I am thinking here of the grounds for truth that Foucault required in both Discipline and
Punish (1979) and The History of Sexuality (1985) to argue that a change had occurred in
systems of punishment and relations to the self respectively. Even though Foucault traces
discursive continuity and rupture in Madness and Civilization (1988), The Order of
Things (1994b), and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1982), it is not until the latter half of
the 1970s that he describes these e orts as trying to come to a new analytics of power that
he was able to express in subsequent histories.
5. This is particularly evident in The Birth of the Clinic (1994a) in which Foucault explains
how in a 40-year period in medical discourse the description of illness and disease
`moves’ or `shifts’ from a language that appears poetical to a language that appears more
scienti®cally rational, as that which contains a measured tread, new words, and new
forms of expression.
6. It is interesting to consider whether Foucault could have written the volumes of The
History of Sexuality (1985) without referring to `males’ and `females’ or without breaking
his narrative up into what Greek men did with Greek boys and what Greek women did in
the household relative to Greek men and so on. It seems ridiculous to consider a history
of sexuality that does not ¯ow around such categories, yet this might have been a more
radical kind of history and probably one that Foucault’s audience was not ready to hear.
The ridiculousness of suggesting a history of sexuality without reference to men, women,
boys and girls indicates, however, the required presence of a cyber-subject whose ghostly
presen(t)ce rides back to the reading of past documents and prevents a securing of the
view that a priori subjects do not exist in genealogy.
7. It is interesting that some, but not all, of Aristotle’s ruminations on unnatural motion,
especially that of projectiles, and subsequent critiques of this, such as those by
Philoponus, were deployed through examples from warfare.
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j. curriculum studies, 2001, vol. 33, no.

Moving on (part 2): power and the child in

Introduction: power and pedagogy

Bernadette Baker is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction,

In the ®rst paper, Newtonian physics was described as being centrally

Explaining social motion through power

In theorizing power, political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes (1588±

Varieties of power in conceptualizations of the child and

It is movement of thought and body that has so frequently concerned

Power-as-potential and the child

The theorization of power surrounded the post-Newtonian upsurge in

In G. Stanley Hall’s version of child-study, the debates about the source of

Power-as-force and the child

A belief in power as a cause of movement in the child (i.e. growth and

Foucault’s power-as-e ects and the post-modern(?) child

(Dis)continuities in notions of power

Several (dis)continuities ride through the various analytics of power to the

Power, motion and visibility

First, the status of power post-Newton has stood in terms of correlating

Power and war

Secondly, and related, power has consistently been theorized in terms of

The `-isms’ of power

This leads to a ®nal group of (dis)continuities, I wish to consider, that

This brings me ®nally to the re-location of Foucault’s will-to-know power

ARISTOTLE (1982) De Generatione et Corruptione, trans. C. J. F. Williams (Oxford:

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