Refiguring childhood: Encounters with biosocial power

List of figures

3.1 The uncovered schoolroom (from Stow 1854: 214). Courtesy of Pearson Education Ltd.

3.2 The covered schoolroom (from Stow 1854: 215). Courtesy of Pearson Education Ltd.

3.3 Group of children playing in playground sandbox, USA, circa 1920. Universal History Archive (reproduced under licence from Getty Images).

4.1 Lismore playground. © Kevin Ryan.

4.2 Play zone in a commercial play-centre. © Kevin Ryan.

4.3 Viewing gallery. © Kevin Ryan.

4.4 Viewing gallery from inside the play zone. © Kevin Ryan.

4.5 Double slide. © Kevin Ryan.

6.1 Childhood as networked governance. © Kevin Ryan.

7.1 ‘Forty-millionaire Carnegie in his great double role’. Saturday Globe, 9 July 1892. Archived by American Social History Project/Center for Media Learning (http://herb.ashp.cuny.edu).

Series editor's foreword

Bertrand Russell once argued that power is to social science what energy is to physics (Russell 1938: 10). While power is one of the most important concepts in the social sciences, it is also one of the most complex and elusive to research.

Weber's analysis of power and authority (1947, 1978) is one of the first social scientific discussions of power, and it influenced the US power debates which developed post-Second World War. In these debates Dahl's careful analysis stands out for its clarity in providing us with a conceptual vocabulary of power (Dahl 1957, 1968). This includes an agency-based, exercise and decision-making definition of power; conceptualised in terms of powerful actors (A) making subordinates (B) do something that they would not otherwise do. This exercise of power is distinct from resources (that may or may not be exercised) and it provides power-holders with power of specific scope. However, while providing a new set of conceptual tools to analyse power relations, Dahl's work was subject to sustained critique from Bachrach and Baratz and others, who argued that power is also exercised through structural biases that are not necessarily reducible to overt decision-making (Bachrach and Baratz 1962). Lukes followed this critique with his theorisation of the third dimension of power (Lukes 1974), which concerns the mobilisation of belief and ideology to legitimise power relations of domination. The three-dimensional model was applied in a richly textured empirical study of Appalachian mining communities (Gaventa 1982). Overall, as the three-dimensional power debates develop, the focus shifts from actions of the dominating actor A to the counter-intuitive and fascinating phenomenon that subordinate actors B often appear to actively acquiesce or participate in their own domination.

In a qualified critique of Lukes, Scott argued that appearances are often deceptive (Scott 1990). The relationship between public and private discourse renders the working of three-dimensional power more complex than any simplistic images of the oppressed willingly participating in their own domination, or internalising false-consciousness. In turn, Scott's work has inspired an ongoing power-literature on the complexities of resistance versus acquiescence.

In the 1980s, under the influence of the translation of Foucault's work (e.g. Foucault 1979 and 1982), the Anglophone power debates shifted towards more epistemic and ontological analysis, which resonated with the shift of emphasis from the powerful to the conditions of the oppressed. This gave rise to fascinating work on the relation between power and discourse; power and truth; the way power influences the ontological formation of social subjects through discipline; and how governmentality has changed systemic power relations (including Clegg 1989; Dean 2010; Flyvbjerg 1998; Hayward 2000; Laclau 2005). However, in critique many have argued that neo-Foucauldians tend to lose sight of the significance of individual agency (Lukes 2005).

Bridging the intellectual divide between those following the Dahl–Lukes trajectory and the neo-Foucauldians, another important thread to the power debates comes from Giddens (1984) and Bourdieu's (1989) conceptualisations of structure as a verb. This way of thinking provides us with conceptual tools for making sense of how agents both structure and are structured by relations of power.

In international relations, the shift from agency towards systemic, epistemic and ontological perceptions of power took the form of a gradual move from realist focus on resources to a more idealist emphasis upon soft power (Nye 1990, 2011). Similarly, in rational choice theory there emerged an emphasis upon the systemic situatedness of strategic choices (Dowding 2016).

The effect of interrogating the social contexts and social ontology of agents has caused many theorists to re-evaluate the nature of power normatively, moving away from the automatic equation between power and domination to a perception of power as a condition of possibility for agency, and thus freedom (Morriss 2002 and 2009). Thus, freedom and power move from being opposing categories to being mutually constitutive. Associated with this normative re-evaluation, power theorists distinguish between power-to, power-with and power-over (Allen 1998, 1999; Pansardi 2012). To begin with, power-over was considered a normative negative, suggesting oppression, while power-to and power-with were the positives. However, some theorists argue that power-over can also have emancipatory, as well as the more obvious dominating, aspects (Haugaard 2012).

Within these theoretical contexts Kevin Ryan's book, Refiguring childhood: Encounters with biosocial power, constitutes a rich genealogical account of the micro-physics of the creation of the social ontology of the modern child as a social subject. Central is Ryan's account of biosocial power, which he characterises as analogous to a process of choreography, where child development is orchestrated through an interweaving dance of normative fictions and dispositions, which fuse is and ought into a series of scripted parts along a trajectory of a present-flowing-into-future. This weaving dance is governed by a series of discursive frames that reflect wider neoliberal discourse formations.

Ryan's analysis brings us face to face with some of the complex dilemmas posed by crosscutting normative aspirations of empowerment and freedom. Using vivid examples, Ryan describes processes of biosocial power that are legitimised by social practitioners through the appeal to ‘empowerment’. The latter constitutes a normatively positively evaluative term, which renders these policies relatively immune to critique. In everyday life, social actors find it difficult to resist policies characterised as empowerment because such critique would be viewed as resistance to ‘a good thing’, and thus irrational. Ryan provides us with the conceptual tools to critique empowerment and freedom as ‘hurray’ words. Through nuanced analysis he demonstrates that the social construction of ‘empowerment’ is often a form of governmentality that facilitates certain freedoms while precluding others.

While practising critique, Ryan is acutely aware that there is no such thing as freedom in itself, or freedom from power or biopolitics. This awareness makes for a nuanced analysis of the present and, furthermore, of what the alternative to contemporary biosocial power might look like. By fusing a number of conceptual tools drawn from Arendt's account of natality, Deleuze and Guattari's idea of ‘becoming-child’ and Vatter's work on normatively desirable biopolitics, Ryan concludes on an upbeat note on how we might envision a biosocial power that transcends the idea of childhood as a prefigured trajectory of scripted parts.

In general, the book series, Social and Political Power seeks to build upon the plural traditions of power analysis, which currently make the study of social and political power one of the most vibrant fields in the social and political sciences. In this regard this book constitutes an exciting cutting-edge contribution to the series, which develops the tradition stemming from Foucault and governmentality theory.

The book series is open to any of the multiplicity of traditions of power analysis, and welcomes research that is theoretically oriented, as well as empirical research on power or practitioner-oriented applications.

Mark Haugaard

National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

References

Allen, A. (1998). Rethinking power. Hyptia, 13, 21–40.

Allen, A. (1999). The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity. Boulder: Westview Press.

Bachrach, P., and Baratz, M. S. (1962). The two faces of power. American Political Science Review, 56(4), 947–52.

Bourdieu, P. (1989). Social space and symbolic power. Sociological Theory, 1(7), 14–25.

Clegg, S. (1989). Frameworks of Power. London: Sage.

Dahl, R. A. (1957). The concept of power. Behavioural Science, 2(3), 201–15.

Dahl, R. A. (1968). Power. In David L. Shills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 12 (pp. 405–15). New York: Macmillan.

Dean, M. (2010). Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

Dowding, K. (2016). Power, Luck and Freedom: Collected Essays. Social and Political Power. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Flyvbjerg, B. (1998). Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. In H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (pp. 208–26). London: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Gaventa, J. (1982). Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Haugaard, M. (2012). Rethinking the four dimensions of power. Journal of Political Power, 5(1), 35–54.

Hayward, C. (2000). De-facing Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Laclau, E. (2005). On Populist Reason. London: Verso.

Lukes, S. (1974). Power: A Radical View. London: Macmillan.

Lukes, S. (2005). Power: A Radical View (2nd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Morriss, P. (2002). Power: A Philosophical Analysis (2nd ed.). Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Morriss, P. (2009). ‘Power and liberalism. In Stewart Clegg and Mark Haugaard (eds), The Sage Handbook of Power (pp. 54–69). London: Sage.

Nye, J. S. (1990). Soft power. Foreign Policy, (80), 153–72.

Nye, J. S. (2011). Power and foreign policy. Journal of Political Power, 4(1), 9–24.

Pansardi, P. (2012). Power to and power over: Two distinct concepts of power? Journal of Political Power, 5(1), 73–89.

Russell, B. (1938). Power: A New Social Analysis, London: George Allen & Unwin.

Scott, J. C. (1990). Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Weber, M. (1947). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Talcott Parsons (ed.). New York: Free Press.

Weber, M. (1978). Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (2 vols). G. Roth and C. Wittich (eds). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Acknowledgements

Producing a monograph is by no means a solitary endeavour, and although the people I would like to thank are too numerous to name individually, I wish to acknowledge colleagues from IPSA Research Committee 36 (Political Power), as well as students of Political Science and Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Galway, who in one way or another (conferences, workshops, seminars and lectures) were the first audiences for this book as it gradually acquired its present form. I thank you all (you know who you are) for your thoughts, comments and constructive criticisms. There are also a few people who warrant special mention: Mark Haugaard, Siniša Malešević, Kathy Powell, Liam Farrell and Jonathan Hannon, partly for keeping me on my toes when it comes to working with social and political theory, but also for many years of friendship in a working environment that is becoming increasingly brutal. For the opportunity to learn from their commitment to radical politics and emancipatory struggle, I am indebted to Mark Devenney and Clare Woodford, from the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at Brighton University.

Some of the chapters in this book draw from a body of work previously published as articles and chapters, and I wish to thank the publishers for permission to use this material, all of which has been substantially reworked, revised, expanded and updated here. Parts of chapters 1 and 9 draw from ‘Refiguring childhood: Hannah Arendt, natality, and prefigurative biopolitics’, Childhood 25 (3): 297–310 (2018). Sections of chapter 2 were originally published as ‘Childhood, biosocial power, and the Anthropological Machine: life as a governable process?’, Critical Horizons 15(3), 266–83 (2014), and ‘Governing the freedom to choose: Biosocial power and the playground as a school of conduct’, in Playgrounds and Battlefields: Critical Perspectives of Social Engagement, edited by F. Martínez and K. Slabina (pp. 85–108) (Talinn: Tallinn University Press, 2014). Sections of chapters 3 and 4 draw from ‘On power, habitus, and (in)civility: Foucault meets Elias meets Bauman in the playground’, Journal of Power 1(3), 251–74 (2008). An earlier version of chapter 5 was published as ‘Governing the future: Citizenship as technology, empowerment as technique’, Critical Sociology, 37(6), 763–78 (2011), and chapter 6 as ‘Governing the future: children's health and biosocial power’, in: Reframing Health and Health Policy in Ireland: A Governmental Analysis, edited by C. Edwards and E. Fernández (pp. 25–45) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

Abbreviations

1

Introduction: biosocial power and normative fictions

In 2018, Childhood: A Journal of Global Child Research marked its twenty-fifth anniversary by publishing a series of textual ‘conversations’, with participants discussing the state of the field of childhood studies. It makes for an interesting exercise to inhabit the space of these conversations as a way of taking up a critical perspective on the wider arena of academic research and inquiry. As argued by Joanne Faulkner and Magdalena Zolkos (2015: xii), childhood is often ‘hidden in plain sight’ amid the partitioning of academic disciplines and associated areas of inquiry. Disciplinary enclosures also discipline the scope and substance of inquiry; a problem which is particularly acute when it comes to examining childhood through the lens of social and political power. In the disciplines of sociology and political science for example, the ways in which social and political power relate to childhood are routinely subsumed by the concept of ‘socialisation’ (see for example Elias 2000: 153–4; Lukes 2005: 96–7; for critical discussion see Jenks 2005: 31–2), only to re-emerge when the issue of incomplete or inadequate socialisation is evoked in the form of ‘deviancy’, ‘juvenile delinquency’ or, more recently, through debates on so-called ‘anti-social behaviour’ (see Faulkner 2011a: 100–9).

The objective of this book is to bring the relationship between power and childhood into sharper focus, eschewing quasi-functionalist concepts such as socialisation and drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, Zygmunt Bauman and Norbert Elias (among others) to stage encounters with biosocial power. I will discuss biosocial power in detail in chapter 2; suffice for now to sketch an initial outline of its coordinates.¹ The first and perhaps most important thing to note is that biosocial power is not outside of/external to biopower. Instead, it demarcates a specific zone of intensity within the more encompassing arena of biopower and biopolitics – ways of administering life that span the disciplining of individual bodies and the regulation of populations (Foucault 1998: 139–40). Secondly, and borrowing from Agamben (1998), biosocial power operates at the threshold of zoē (bare life) and bios (properly political life), and affords a way of engaging critically with the nature/culture dualism as this applies to histories of childhood (see Lee 2001; Lee and Motzkau 2011; Prout 2005; Ryan 2012). Finally, examined in context biosocial power can be compared to choreography, as a spatially patterned process which is orchestrated through the interweaving of normative fictions (discourses that span the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ of childhood), and the scripting of parts, places and positions within the field of social relations. Deployed at the intersection of thought and practice, biosocial power attempts to bring envisioned futures into the present, taking hold of life in the form of childhood, thereby bridging being and becoming while also shaping the power relations that encapsulate the social and cultural world(s) of adults and children.

In terms of how biosocial power is configured, an important consideration concerns the discursive framing of childhood. Frames condition our affective and cognitive relation to what is framed, which of course may include ourselves to the extent that we perceive and act from within the frame (see Butler 2009: 1, 8–12; Goffman 1974). Frames can also be conceptualised as figurations of power/knowledge – they operate as filters to enclose ways of seeing, thinking and doing while foreclosing upon or subduing other frames, whether actual or possible. Perhaps most importantly in terms of grasping their political significance, frames are contingent – they can be shattered or enlarged, thereby bringing that which exceeds the frame, or that which is outside or excluded from the frame, into the politics of framing. Yet, in practice frames are often difficult to contest, particularly when they sediment in social practices as doxa, and thus acquire power over other (possible) ways of perceiving and apprehending. Otherwise put, frames carry the weight of common sense, which has a bearing on how childhood is figured in the form of normative fictions.

Fictional childhoods and normative fictions

Childhood has long been imbricated in normative fictions such as ‘Man’. I will have more to say about the figure of Man shortly (and in chapter 2), but first I want to reflect on a work of fiction that speaks to contemporary conceptions of childhood, and which calls attention to certain tensions and frictions in how childhood is currently framed, in particular the relation between liberty rights and welfare rights, which in turn relates to issues of agency and vulnerability. The fictional work in question is a movie called Captain Fantastic.² Captain Fantastic begins with a portrait of an unconventional family living in a remote forest in the US State of Washington. The father, Ben Cash, treats his children (irrespective of age or gender) as equals, tolerating nothing remotely childish in any of them. From the youngest to the oldest, the members of the Cash family relate to one another as peers, with each and all expected to strive for intellectual and physical excellence, whether through academic study, martial arts, athletic endeavour or domestic chores.

Daily life for the Cash family is regulated by a tightly organised schedule of work (e.g. a watering roster for the kitchen garden), with each day punctuated by ‘training’ – uphill running, rock-climbing, gymnastics and martial arts. There is also time devoted each day to book learning, and the children must demonstrate their analytical skills by being able to ‘discourse’ what they have been studying. Asked to comment on a novel she's reading for example, one of the children says ‘it's interesting’ and is called out by her siblings for using an ‘illegal word’. Ben explains – his tone suggesting that this is something the children have heard many times before – that ‘interesting is a non-word, you know you're supposed to avoid it; be more specific’. Eschewing established societal traditions, the family invent their own, celebrating annual ‘Noam Chomsky Day’. The Cash family hunt with knives and bows, they play musical instruments in the evening around the camp-fire and are skilled at navigating by the stars at night. Moreover, none of this is a means to some socially scripted end – the children do not study to acquire a degree or hone their skills to earn a wage. The knowledge and skills they are striving to acquire and perfect are about the pursuit of excellence as an end in itself, in the ancient Greek sense of arête.

There is a problem that haunts the family however, because the mother (Leslie Cash) is absent, and we learn that she is in a psychiatric hospital. When Ben makes a phone-call from the local village and learns that his wife has taken her own life, it precipitates a decision that resembles the philosophical tradition of the social contract. In other words, the Cash family leave their intentional state of nature in a bus fitted out as a camper-van, with the objective of retrieving Leslie's remains so that she can be cremated in the wild in accordance with her wishes.³ It is this journey that spells the end for the decade-long experimental life the family have been living because, as it transpires, there is no returning to the state of nature. The catalyst that brings the story to its climax is a clash of wills between Ben and the children's maternal grandparents, and there is a pivotal scene where the Grandfather accuses Ben of child abuse and threatens to have the children taken away from him.

This, I think, is the crucial question: is this a story of abuse? Is it abusive to dispense with the division that separates the worlds of adults and children; to give children real tools and weapons to use as opposed to toy replicas to play with, and to burden them with the freedoms and responsibilities we associate with adulthood? Or perhaps the underlying issue is the family's commitment to uniqueness, which the children are reminded of each time someone speaks their one-of-a-kind names – Bodevan, Vespyr, Kielyr, Rellion, Zaja and Kai – and which is enunciated in the form of a dogma the children have learnt to chant (as one): ‘Can unique be modified? … No!’ Has this become too unyielding, to the point of becoming a fundamentalist creed?

An issue that comes into sharper focus as the story develops is that the world the Cash family have created is a cage forged from a triple constraint. First, even if it didn't begin as such (the absent mother was a co-originator of the dream, after all), life in the woods has become a patriarchal mode of rule. Secondly, the future is prefigured by the present, and promises to be nothing other than repetition. Thirdly, highly competent though the children are within their own world, they are at a loss when it comes to relating to the wider world.

Even though the adult/child distinction is all but erased within the relational space of the family, the father nevertheless exercises patriarchal power by acting upon as well as with his children, claiming to know what is best for them and schooling them in accordance with a utopian vision created by his desire for a particular form of life. The Cash children may be peers in the unique world they inhabit, but they are living a story that has been scripted for them by its architect, and as they look ahead to the future all they can see is more of the same, denying to them the untrammelled possibilities that lie beyond the borders of their world. In short, this is a story of power relations, and it is an asymmetrical relation between the one and the many. As the architect of the world they share, the patriarch has taken it upon himself to govern the biosocial process known to us as childhood.

But this is not the end of the complicated rendering of adult–child relations as figured in Captain Fantastic. As a result of the misadventures that follow the family from the woods to the city, and faced with the prospect of losing his children, Ben begins to re-assess his life. His ideology becomes less certain and, in the words of William Connolly (1991: xxiii), the fundaments of his creed acquire a ‘stutter’. Certainty gives way to doubt. Most importantly – the issue of patriarchal power notwithstanding – Ben does not merely relate to his children as peers, censoring nothing, disguising nothing in order to protect their ‘innocence’; he also listens to them. What they say matters to the decisions that determine what happens next. In short, Ben is still learning, growing, changing, maturing – just as his children are. By exposing them to another form of life that serves to question social norms and conventions, his children are capable of independent thought, of questioning not only the wider world around them but also the micro-world they have created as an alternative.

With Captain Fantastic we have a portrait of childhood which is poised on the tightrope of children's rights. If we take the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) as a reading principle, using this to gauge the extent to which this fictional story resonates with lived experience, then what stands out is how the narrative structure of Captain Fantastic takes the liberty rights of children to their logical conclusion in order to summon – and problematise – children's rights to protection, thereby tensioning the relation between agency and vulnerability (on this issue see Archard 1993: 58–61). Perhaps this also serves to remind us that we all live this tension, however old or young we happen to be. Moreover, I think this particular work of fiction, whereby a utopian vision is thwarted by human plurality, speaks to Hannah Arendt's critique of ‘Man’, which is a very different type of fiction and is captured succinctly in The Human Condition when Arendt explains what she means by ‘action’:

Action … corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world … if we had a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and define it, and the