j. curriculum studies, 2001, vol. 33, no.

2, 157–177

Moving on (part 1): the physics of power and

curriculum history

BERNADETTE BAKER

This is the Ž rst of two papers that map (dis)continuities in notions of power from
Aristotle to Newton to Foucault. They trace the ways in which bio-physical
conceptions of power became paraphrased in social science and deployed in educa-
tional discourse on the child and curriculum from post-Newtonian times to the
present. The analyses suggest that, amid ruptures in the deŽ nition, role, location and
meaning given ‘power’ historically in various ‘physical’ and ‘social’ cosmologies, the
naming of ‘power’ has been dependent on ‘physics’ , on the theorization of motion
across ‘Western’ sciences. This Ž rst paper examines some (dis)continuities in regard
to histories of motion and power from Aristotelian ‘natural science’ to Newtonian
mechanics.

We need to cut oå the King’ s head: in political theory that has still to be done
(Foucault 1980: 121).
How are we to know, in any given case, whether a concept is or is not
essential to our picture of the world? (Christensen 1993: 30).

Introduction: power’ s ubiquity

In the production of educational pictures of the world, the curriculum,

whether in overt, hidden or null terms, has become a central site of study.
What seems essential to an understanding of curriculum history is that it is
diæ cult to conceive of curricula at all without an already operating notion
of ‘the child’ . There is a noticeable research pattern that sustains the
conceptual interpenetration: ‘power’ is often the point of appeal which
brings ‘the child’ and curricula into relation. The appeal to ‘power’ has
helped make curriculum history thinkable by underwriting the theorization
of a (reversible) cause–eå ect relation between epistemology and ontology.
Without the assumption of this relation, it would be more diæ cult to claim
the relevance of curricular debate. On what grounds, for instance, would
the form/values of curricula matter if the child were immune to ‘in uence’
and if there was no such thing as ‘power’ ?1
The central and uniŽ catory (analytical) function of ‘power’ in narratives
of ‘the social’ is an indication of power’ s ubiquity, but not of ‘its’ unity.
Power in social science is not a unitary concept, in that there are diå erent

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 centre on 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
158 b. baker

notions of power thought to have implications for how one categorizes the
world and names events. Diå erent authors have carved up the history of
power’ s theories diå erently. Michel Foucault (1980) saw, for example, two
predominant inscriptions of power preceding his own time, the contractual
and the economic-functionalist, drawing these classiŽ cations primarily
from European political philosophy and the sociology of Marx. Others,
like Clegg (1989), in examining political science, have delineated classical,
modern and post-modern conceptions of power with many more subdivi-
sions and nuances within each.2 The tracing of power in social science
terms has been written diå erently, then, depending on the disciplinary
Ž elds in which the reviews have been undertaken.
Foucault’ s concern to reformulate an analysis of power, evident in the
epigraph to this paper, further signals the variability of ‘power’ . Foucault
(1980) made the comment of cutting oå the King’ s head in the context of
departing from Marxist and sovereign conceptions of power where power
was inscribed as propertied, static, possessed, and uniformly held in a
single leader or dominant group. He suggested cutting oå the King’ s head
in order to view power in local and speciŽ c sites, in everyday institutional
practices, and in/as techniques, strategies and tactics that simultaneously
enabled productive and repressive moments and pointed to power’ s circu-
lation as a series of eå ects.
Curriculum studies’ uptake of diå erent notions of power, including
Foucaultian ones, is well-known (Doll 1993). There is a history to the
deployment of power that has already been well documented in education
(Popkewitz 1997). It is now possible to write curriculum history, for
instance, from Marxist, neo-Marxist, multicultural, feminist, Afrocentric,
post-colonial and post-structural lenses (and their blends), suggesting the
extent to which power, under diå ering conceptualizations, has become
available for the making of educational narratives.
This paper and its sequel (Baker in press) take as their springboard the
prevalence and varieties of ‘power’ as technologies for seeing in educational
work. The two papers emerge from a question that draws its ambiguity
from the juxtaposition of the opening quotes and from Foucault’ s own
predilection to ask what matters. To that end, the key question that frames
the overall analysis is: ‘What does it matter whether Foucault cut oå the
King’ s head’ ?3 The question asks, in eå ect, what it matters how power is
theorized, and in exploring the question of power the analysis necessarily
deploys the very Foucaultianisms that have given access to the question in
the Ž rst place.4
The legacy within and against which Foucault was writing an analytics
of power cannot be understood only in relation to the history of political
theory or only in relation to an arbitrary structural/post-structural dichot-
omy.5 Power is an ubiquitous term that has pervaded the history of the
sciences that are now called theology, physical science, biological science,
and social science. To understand the ways in which power’ s theorization
has played out, one has to move out of present-day social science. The
dominant co-ordinates of ‘the State’ , ‘governance’ , ‘government’ and
‘governmentality’ that frequently guide political theory’ s excursions into
power’ s history need to be suspended.
the physics of power and curriculum history 159
My two papers posit, instead, that it is possible to read (dis)continuities
in (social science) ‘power’ through a history of what can loosely be called
‘physics’ . As such, they suggest that there is a striking continuity that
grounds a Foucaultian analytics of power in a long ‘European’ legacy and
that that continuity is a fascination with and dependency on theorizing
motion.6 The papers collectively map how ruptures in power’ s inscription
have occurred in the history of sciences in ‘the West’ where views of power,
whether theological, physical, biological or sociological in their naming and
framing, have been persistently delineated and rendered visible in relation
to concepts of motion.7
This Ž rst paper historicizes the present availability of ‘power’ in social
science work. The second paper, ‘Moving on (part 2): power and the child
in curriculum history’ (Baker 2001) delineates the ways in which diå erent
concepts of power in physical and biological science became paraphrased in
educational discourse on the child after the popularization of Sir Isaac
Newton’ s (1642–1727) mechanical philosophy.8 The papers culminate in an
examination of some post-Newtonian (dis)continuities, foreclosures and
limits in inscriptions of power which undermine the notion of a structural/
post-structural dichotomy in turn of the 21st century social science and
which are indications of the extremities of ‘power’ s’ reach as an explanatory
concept.

Power and motion

How can the child presently be read as ‘an eå ect of power’ ? How can
curricular reforms suggest the ‘empowering’ of children? How can chil-
dren’ s futures be thought of in terms of ‘structures of power’ ? How can
curricula be understood historically through a ‘power/knowledge’ dialectic?
How can curricula be perceived as sites inscribing children’ s bodies with
‘power relations’ ? In short, what has enabled the encentrement of ‘power’
as an analytical concept for understanding ‘curriculum’ and ‘the child’ ?
Two factors suggest Aristotle’ s ruminations as a signiŽ cant and arbi-
trary point from which to understand the present ubiquity of ‘power’ as a
technology for seeing across sciences. First, Aristotle (1970, 1983) is
renowned for oå ering a schema that, in retrospect, seems to have suggested
disciplinary boundaries between sciences predicated on ‘subject matter’ .9
The nature/art distinction which Aristotle deployed to carve out Ž elds of
study has posited within it an idea of ‘power’ as an explanatory device for
what can be argued or observed in the sciences. Secondly, if one is seeking
to locate a noticeable point at which ‘power’ becomes articulated to the
positing of Being, to the reading of the ‘visible’ , the ‘sensory’ and the
‘bodily’ , then this, too, logically suggests Aristotle’ s work.

Aristotle

In the Physics, Aristotle (1970) suggested that motion existed and that it
was real, a view of motion that from the present seems obvious. He
160 b. baker

contended, against the Eleatic monists, that motion was not an illusion or a
trick. Motion existed in objects or bodies and was observable in natural
beings whose ‘naturalness’ or nature was deŽ ned by their potential to
generate motion from within.
This was itself a signiŽ cant ‘move’ . For Aristotle to build his arguments
around the assumption that things moved he had to be able to identify a
‘thing’ as a discrete entity (as a ‘body’ or ‘object’ ) and he had to be able to
argue that there were moments that would announce that movement had
occurred and that would also announce that a ‘thing’ existed. Thus, there
had to be, at some level, a lack of continuity between the ‘existence’ of
‘things’ (separate bodies could be identiŽ ed and could come-to-be and pass
away) and there also had to be an understanding that things could be
separate but interrelated if things moved each other (an extension of the
Platonic view). One had to be able to break the universe down into
component parts (non-Monist), to see rupture or discreteness between
entities, as part of positing the very belief that things moved.
Aristotle’ s method of argumentation, as much as the substantive
content of his argument, has implications for how ‘power’ has been, and
still is, theorized in social science. In positing motion as real, rather than as
an appearance or illusory, Aristotle had to establish Ž rst an ever-presence of
motion and then understand it in terms of the principles that authored it.
Aristotle’ s method necessitated a deŽ nition of terms at the outset, not by
providing a deŽ nition in the form of a single sentence but by indicating the
reality of his concepts’ referent (Buckley 1971). The naming of terms such
as motion and nature, like ‘power’ in the present, was subsequent to the
assertion of their existence in the subjects to which they became applied.
Thus, the proper subject of Aristotle’ s inquiries was what and where nature
and motion were, not whether they were. The existence of motion was not
strictly a ‘scientiŽ c’ question for Aristotle, because movement was pre-
supposed by the sciences that studied or employed it. Aristotle posited
nature as the internal principle of motion, as given and present in all aspects
of life, somewhat like Foucault’ s concept of power.
In the Physics, Aristotle divided things that are into those that are by
nature and those that are through other causes, such as art. Since nature,
and the things that are by nature, constituted the proper subject of
‘physics’ , their deŽ nition is central to ‘natural philosophy’ . But Aristotle
in Physics 2.1 characterizes nature, and hence things that are by nature, in
two apparently diå erent ways. Nature is Ž rstly a source of motion and
stationariness, i.e. nature is a mover. Secondly, nature is a cause or source
of being moved and of being at rest, i.e. nature is not a mover but a
principle of being moved. In the medieval re-interpretation of Aristotelian
‘natural science’ , it is the Ž rst version that is taken up and reworked into the
concerns and diå erent schools of thought of the time (Lang 1992).
What can be drawn from this seemingly ‘contradictory’ deŽ nition,
however, is that Aristotle posited nature as the internal principle of
motion and that his methodology drew a diå erent kind of visibility into
reasoning and truth-claims. The reality of motion was argued from the
grounds of articulating motion to ‘the body’ or ‘the object’ . Thus, what was
foregrounded as ‘the visible’ was the movement of entities that at some
the physics of power and curriculum history 161
level had to be understood as discrete. Motion’ s ‘existence’ in everyday
activities and in the Heavens could be detailed only after accepting that
objects were visible because of their movement and that it was the move-
ment of an object which signalled its existence for viewing and deŽ ned it as
either living or non-living. ‘Seeing’ , for Aristotle (1983), then, could not
take place in blindness, in darkness. The privileging of the eye as the major
source of ‘seeing’ was articulated to an array of metaphors concerning light
and exteriority (Smith 1997). Episteme, which might be understood as the
highest form of knowing and questioning, came from what one ‘saw’ and
was predicated on movement-as-visible.
Aristotle’ s (1970) methodology was also noteworthy for positing truth
in the object itself, taking the object on its own terms, and suggesting that it
was in the object, in its features, that the proper techniques for its study
could be suggested. Methodology and content were intertwined, enabling
Aristotle to make a double move—the same double move seen in Foucault’ s
deployment of ‘power/knowledge’ . Aristotle assumed that motion and
nature existed and then proceeded to explain how they came about and
were related, which was subsequently used to posit the existence of nature
and motion.
The double move also freed Aristotle to classify and reclassify the
cosmos in contradistinction to the approaches of, for example, Plato.
Objects/bodies were continuously categorized, e.g. as either celestial or
terrestrial, and their kind of motion was further categorized as either
circular or rectilinear, depending on where they were located in the
cosmos (Aristotle 1939). Terrestrial bodies could exhibit either natural or
unnatural motion and the kind of motion suggested the kind of science
appropriate to their study. Again, like ‘power’ in a Foucaultian sense, the
assumption of motion’ s existence enabled more pronounced, detailed and
speciŽ c investigations into its operation and its kinds (e.g. disciplinary
power, biopower, power/knowledge).
Aristotle’ s tractates on motion and his depiction of ‘natural science’ as a
form of inquiry bound to motion led to what might be called today
theological questions concerning motion’ s origins. If things moved, then
what put motion in motion? Invisibility was constituted in relation to what
was perceived as the limits of human agency, generation or production.
The concept of invisibility arose, then, in questions like what moved things
that no human hand could be seen to be touching (e.g. the sun)? The
querying produced a line of thought dependent on a conception of power
that lay within some extra-natural source. Musings on the ceasing and
beginnings of motion were bound to depictions of an ‘eternal unmoved
mover’ ; a unitary, potent and singular source of the motion that could be
observed (Aristotle 1947a, b).
Aristotle (1947a, b) did not suggest, however, that the eternal unmoved
mover designed or guided the motion observed in natural beings. The
insertion of plan and of guidance into concepts of the unmoved mover was a
later, Christian invention that becomes noticeable in the Latin West
through Aquinas’ (1945, 1963) reading of Aristotle. Rather, Aristotle
theorized the Mover as the thing that set motion in motion, itself un-
movable. It was more potent than all potential forms of nature, but it did
162 b. baker

not govern the motion in nature. Thus, there is a prime mover, but it is not
responsible for how things play out once set in motion. The existence of the
eternal unmoved mover was demonstrated through the eå ects produced,
but Aristotle did not claim that the prime mover was the organizer of eå ects
in themselves. Naming an unmoved mover, as for Foucault’ s naming of
power, was the terminus of the noting of eå ects elsewhere.
In Aristotle’ s treatises, Metaphysics and Physics, ‘power’ (in the form of
‘potency’ and ‘potential’ ) slips into theological, philosophical and physical
analysis at two levels: Ž rst, as the inherent or internal ability/capacity of
natural bodies to generate movement and, secondly, as the invisible quality
of a God-like thing or prime mover which, as the Ž nal cause of movement,
must have set motion in motion.10 The causes of motion, which Aristotle is
often at pains to identify, are, thus, attributed to both nature and an extra-
natural source, and what inheres in both natural beings and the prime
mover is power, a potency or potential to move (Sorabji 1988).

Power-as-potential

‘Potency’ and ‘act’ were the concepts that Aristotle deployed to delineate
motion in bodies, and it was potency in particular that seemed to provide
the unwitting and unintended precedent to later educational depictions of
the child as possessing an internal power or capacity to move or grow and/
or potential to become. Potency was what something could become, its
potential to move away from privation into fulŽ lment, its inner predisposi-
tion to actualize as something which we might understand almost as its
opposite (Aristotle 1947a, b, 1983). Act and actualization could only be
viewed on arrival (Aristotle 1983). Act was what had become, it was the
‘already’ , whereas potency was the ‘not yet’ (Buckley 1971).
As the internal principle of nature, motion was a source of diå erence,
and so was the ‘power’ that was tied to it. Natural bodies, or more
speciŽ cally those with ‘souls’ , had a potential to generate movement from
within, whereas unnatural ones required something else, some push or pull,
to generate a change in place. The inscription of nature with a movement
criterion thus gave ‘power’ a particular weight in regard to ‘nature’ . Power
deŽ ned a natural being (because it enabled its movement) and power
enabled natural beings to grow and to locomote, which in turn suggested
their naturalness and their living status.
The uptake of power as a concept is also made possible by a binary of
vision. Power, in its Aristotelian sense, was produced between the idea of
motion as visible and real and assumptions of an invisible source. Power,
thus, gained an ontology because of ontology itself. If existence is reduced
to only that which is bodily visible, able to move, and in the present, then
‘power’ can exist as the concept that both enables existence and as the
source of the motion which signals it. This was less speciŽ cally Aristotelian,
however, and more an instance of a wider Greek view at the time—anything
that moved had to have a cause and those things that did move themselves
were endowed with ‘life’ by way of ‘soul’ .
the physics of power and curriculum history 163
The order of reasoning circularly secured the role of motion in truth
production, enabling the play of ‘power’ to become integral to Aristotelian
pictures of the world. The conditions under which power-as-potential was
brought into presence (e.g. in nature) were the same conditions which
‘power’ was thought to have initiated (e.g. the power of the unmoved
mover). The centrality of motion to Aristotle’ s classiŽ cation of cosmologi-
cal events (natural/unnatural, celestial/terrestrial, circular/rectilinear),
thereby, established the grounds on which he was able to argue power’ s
reality at ‘local’ and more ‘global’ levels, because, without the idea of
movement, change and the questioning of its source, there was little for
‘power’ to explain.
Aristotle drew upon several other conceptual co-ordinates for articulat-
ing his beliefs about motion’ s sources and kinds and these had further
implications for what could be said of ‘power’ . Time, change, place, void,
form, matter, body and cause were woven into the positing of motion and
potential as explanations for ‘the visible’ (Aristotle 1983). These co-
ordinates, as I suggest later, also became crucial to the construction of
various concepts of ‘power’ after Aristotle. It is worth exploring, then, how
Aristotle conŽ gured the co-ordinates in positing power as real and as a
source of motion.

Co-ordinating power: time, place, change and cause

The idea of power as a potential to move or come-into-being was intimately

tied to concepts of time and the positing of existence as that which is, not
that which was or might be (Aristotle 1983). This meant that ‘experience’
in an Aristotelian sense was construed as how things happen in ‘nature’ , not
as a statement of how something had happened on a particular occasion (Dear
1995: 4).
Furthermore, because motion could only be viewed in situ, as it were, in
the mobility of the mobile, it bore a particular relation to time that had
implications for how one judged change and classiŽ ed what constituted a
change. If motion was the measure of time and time was posited as
continuous, then identifying anything as a ‘change’ had to be articulated
to both movement and time (Aristotle 1983).
However, there was no way of gauging motion for Aristotle without
implicating allied concepts of place and void. Place is not a stable or unitary
concept across Aristotle’ s work. Place is inscribed in the Physics and
Metaphysics not so much as a three-dimensional extension called ‘space’ ,
but rather as the location of an object in the void (Aristotle avoided Plato’ s
conception of space as the receptacle by using ‘void’ (Algra 1995)). Motion,
in particular, was the central concept for theorizing place and time; without
the visibility of motion that Aristotle argued for, how could one determine
if time had passed, or if there were separate places, or if a void existed to be
traversed at all?
Aristotle did not assume, however, that the passing of time necessarily
indicated the occurrence of a change, and neither did he assume that if a
natural object passed from being in motion to a resting place that this
164 b. baker

constituted change. Change was not necessarily a product of viewing a ceasing

or beginning. For example, for Aristotle (1970, 1983), terrestrial bodies were
meant to be naturally at rest and, hence, their coming to rest after motion
was a fulŽ lment of their nature, not a change in their state. Change was
identiŽ ed in relation to motion to be sure, but it was not reducible to
observing movement or noticing a shift or rupture in an object’ s state.
(This is an important distinction in regards to latter concepts of change in
Newton and Foucault.)
The implication for power-as-potential, then, was that ‘its’ presence did
not always or necessarily cause ‘change’ or the lack thereof. Unlike
‘power’ s’ inscription in much present day social science, ‘power’ s’ presence
was not to be problematized as a repressive force. Power-as-potential was
an enabler; it was often at play in the fulŽ lment of an object’ s nature, in
the actualization of a pre-determined order. The conjoining of power-as-
potential-to-order, thus, made conceptions of ‘change’ in the present sense
of ‘rupture’ in some sense untenable. Any change was a change within that
which was already expected, based on the classiŽ cation and location of an
object or event in the broader worldview.
This complex relationship between power-as-potential and change
suggested a particular relationship between cause and eå ect that further
diå erentiated the arena of ‘power’ s’ play. Aristotle’ s conception of time and
motion did not suggest that the passage of linear time separated cause and
eå ect. The causes of movement were not one event and eå ect another. A
cause ended, or stopped moving, or could only be viewed when the eå ect
could no longer be noted (Aristotle 1970, 1983). Motion was a process
straddling potency and actualization, not the eå ect or outcome of a cause
wholly external and previous to the movement of a natural body.
The causes of change were posited primarily within an object’ s char-
acteristics (the characteristics being deŽ ned by the relationship between
matter and form). Although the Ž nal cause of movement was the eternal
unmoved mover which set motion in motion, cause beyond that was judged
depending on the object’ s features, from within its categorization as either
natural or unnatural (Aristotle 1947a, b). As noted above, an unnatural
object required something else to generate movement, whereas a natural
one produced movement from within (Aristotle 1970). The judgement of
cause, of why something moved, was thus tied to how a thing was
categorized, and this spoke in a diå erent way to the question of how
‘power’ s’ role could be conceived. Power-as-potential admitted of several
causes (e.g. Ž nal or ‘spiritual’ and material or ‘physical’ ), but seemingly
within the conŽ nes of understanding cause as in situ, as intrinsic to the
object’ s classiŽ cation itself, and as consistent with its place in the universe.

Power post-Aristotle

It was amid these Aristotelian reasonings that ‘power’ was inscribed as the
potential to come-into-being, as the internal quality of natural bodies that
could generate movement from within and as the quality of a prime mover.
Power, thus, entered into physical/theological discourse, with motion
the physics of power and curriculum history 165
constituting an explanatory tool in the ‘sciences’ and in propositions
concerning ontology. Post-Aristotle, bodies-in-motion similarly became
the means for demonstrating ‘points of view’ regarding cosmology. It is
not an exaggeration to note that motion becomes the ground of visibility on
which truth is contested and that motion’ s role in the production of truth
was subsequently sustained from Ptolemy (2nd century C.E.), Copernicus
(1473–1543) and Galileo Galilei (1654–1642), to shifting representations of
Gods and deities under Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
There emerges in the positing and debating of world views, then, a
noticeable appeal to concepts of motion as the documentary source that is
deployed to assert relations between what is constituted as the visible and
the invisible and to explain the origins and sustenance of universal ‘order’ .
The motivating and explanatory role ascribed to power under Aristotle
permeated subsequent investigations in Africa and the Middle East, but not
in any neat or direct fashion. Aristotle’ s ruminations on the unmoved
mover, power and motion were able to be subsequently (and some would
argue belatedly) taken up by European audiences in the Middle Ages
largely because of their African and Middle Eastern preservation and
rewriting. The advent of the medieval ‘Scholastic era’ in which Aristotle
was rediscovered (Cantor 1963: 401) did not undermine appeals to an
unmoved mover, power or motion-as-real, but reworked them as the
triangular points of truth-production among which various cosmologies
could be argued.
Aristotle’ s questions and problems were selectively chosen in the
Middle Ages, however, and given a Christian bent. Concepts of motion
still operated as grounds for proof in arguing over order, and movement
was taken for granted as real and visible, but used to evidence diå erent
things. Whereas the eternal unmoved mover was not the proper focus of
Aristotle’ s Physics and appears only in the last moment in resolution of an
objection i.e. as the cause required to establish eternal motion, medieval
appropriations of Aristotelian physics separated natural science from
theology and reworked ‘natural science’ as proof of God’ s existence, turn-
ing the eternal unmoved mover into a Christian God and making it the
central concern of the argument (Lang 1992). What such appropriations
demonstrate is not a lack of faithfulness to Aristotle’ s logos, but that a new
one had emerged in which he became redeployed. What they also demon-
strate, however, is that beyond the details of such appropriations, concepts
of motion and power were still required to explain order.
From this ‘view’ , the Copernican revolution was less a revolution and
more a continuation and announcement of how sciences might dance
between points of truth-production indebted to concepts of motion and
power. The Aristotelian co-ordinates of potency, act, change, time, place,
void, form, matter and bodies provided an unwitting plank from which not
only future ‘theologies’ but ‘sciences’ could start to (re)write existence in
relation to motion-as-visible and real, to posit an origin or source, and to
inveigh power-as-potential to move or become within the explanatory
matrix.
Aristotle’ s inscription of power-as-potential and the co-ordinates he
deployed to argue this were not static. The suggestion is not, therefore, that
166 b. baker

‘motion’ and ‘power’ meant the same thing every time the words were used
post-Aristotle. Rather, there were continuous appeals to concepts of motion
and power for making explanations and in future renditions there some-
times inhered traces of traditional meanings. For example, vestiges of the
Aristotelian co-ordinates persisted in later inscriptions of power. The Latin
posse (later potere), meaning ‘to be able’ , re ected the earlier Greek idea of
potency as potential to move or come into being, and it was largely through
Latin that Aristotle’ s theories were (re)announced to a continental scho-
lastic audience. There was after Aristotle’ s rediscovery and rewriting in
medieval work therefore a sustained eå ort to illustrate the presence of a
prime mover (now ‘God’ ) through analyses of ‘motion’ and to explain
‘change’ around a shifting complex of the visible and invisible that new
technologies for seeing continuously destabilized. Furthermore, the sub-
sequent emergence, separation and formalization of knowledges into dis-
ciplines from approximately 1600–1900 saw the deployment of a concept
(called ‘power’ in English) in Ž elds now referred to as physics, sociology,
theology and political philosophy. As the discussion below will suggest, at a
broad level ‘natural’ and ‘social’ sciences over this timespan indicated a
persistent reliance on concepts of motion for grounding local ‘disciplinary’
truths and for inveighing ‘power’ in the explanations for events.
The continuity, therefore, was to be the naming of power via a
relationship to motion and to a (shifting) visible/invisible binary. There
were ruptures, however, in power’ s conŽ guration, in the speciŽ city of ‘its’
texture, related to the weight, role, location and meaning ‘it’ was given in
post-Aristotelian descriptions of the universe. In a huge leap, I want to
‘move’ from Aristotle’ s new-found popularity in the scholastic ‘era’ into
Newton’ s timespace, to locate metamorphoses of power as a shifting but
normalizing concept for explaining existence, form, relations and change
through appeals to concepts of motion.

Newton

Newtonian physics were consummately concerned with motion. Newton’ s

four key concepts of inertia, mass, force and gravity were written into his
laws of motion and together contributed to the further collapse of the
Aristotelian binary between natural/unnatural movement that Galileo and
René Descartes (1596–1650) had begun. Newton’ s work posited a highly
uniŽ ed theory for motion that extended in some ways the Copernican
revolution that had undermined Ptolemy’ s cosmology. Newton’ s theories
also supplanted some aspects of Descartes’ work, such as the vortex theory
of gravity, while drawing simultaneously on Descartes’ concept of inertia.
What was available by the time of Newton was an intellectual ‘space’ for
curiosity about motion and a tradition for arguing over the invisible and the
visible in positing motion’ s kind and sources.
Newton’ s work was considered especially radical because it suggested a
diå erent ‘because’ from the ‘why do things appear the way they do?’
question that Aristotle had attempted to answer with his theories of
motion. In Aristotle’ s work, causes could be understood in a reduced
the physics of power and curriculum history 167
way as material (what something is made of), eæ cient (the energy expended
to produce the appearance), formal (the plan for its appearance), or Ž nal (its
source). In a much more uniŽ ed and less categorical system, Newton
suggested that all movement, all appearances, and all events were composed
of material particles and the forces imposed on them. That is, Newtonian
reality assumed that the events observed were composed of systems of
material objects, which were themselves composed of elementary particles
subject to force (Casti and Karlqvist 1989).
Newton’ s method was integral to his claims for reality. His studies,
especially through experimentation, solidiŽ ed a method for positing reality
and existence as that which was tied to visible movement outcomes of a
local trial.11 Experimental method and Newton’ s deployment of geometry
and mathematics to illustrate his universal mechanics were the tools for
natural philosophy, the means through which one argued for universal
realities from experiments in local sites.
The conjoining of mathematics to arguments over physical causes was
highly contested at the time and eå ectively ended the Aristotelian distinc-
tion between mathematics and natural philosophy as separate subject
matters. Newton’ s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Math-
ematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) (1964), Ž rst published in 1687,
was the culmination of ‘moves’ that took mathematics out of only quantify-
ing ‘physical’ phenomena and rewrote it as something to be deployed in a
perspectival construction of reality via physics. The once sharp disciplinary
boundary between mathematics and natural philosophy dissolved amid a
universal mechanics where mathematics was deployed to illustrate why
things moved or appeared in a particular way, not just to predict pathways
or calculate quantities (Dear 1995).
Newton’ s universal laws of motion further collapsed distinctions
between celestial and terrestrial bodies on which Aristotle had depended.
The collapsing of distinctions between bodies, including human bodies,
objects and planets suggested that all visible, physical things could be
subject to the same laws of motion. The lack of distinction was an
important shift in opening up space for the investigation of phenomena
which ‘moved’ humans and through which humans could move other
objects/bodies. In almost diametrical opposition to the social sciences of
the present, where the collapse of binaries is meant to render ‘complexity’
and announce multiple ‘diå erences’ , universalisms in Newton’ s natural
philosophy were understood as collapsing binaries and, hence, as rendering
‘simplicity’ and ‘unity’ . The conjuncture between experimental method,
mathematics and philosophy for which Newton is renowned provided a
diå erent frame for giving ‘power’ an ontology from that used by Aristotle.
In the preceding Books I have laid down the principles of philosophy;
principles not philosophical but mathematical; such, to wit, as we may
build our reasonings upon in philosophical inquiries. These principles are
the laws and conditions of certain motions, and powers or forces, which
chie y have respect to philosophy; but, lest they should have appeared
themselves dry and barren, I have illustrated them here and there with
some philosophical scholiums, giving an account of such things as are
of more general nature, and which philosophy seems chie y to be founded
168 b. baker
on; such as the density and the resistance of bodies, spaces void of all
bodies, and the motion of light and sounds. It remains that from the same
principles I now demonstrate the frame of the System of the World (Newton
1964: 323).

Power under Newton was synonymous with force, and also a term for
an overarching capacity or potential to resist force. This dual positioning
enabled power to be theorized as both a producer of movement (power-as-
force) and as the potential to resist movement (power-as-capacity). Unlike
Aristotle, Newton did not place power within a natural/unnatural binary.
He theorized power as a capacity or potential to maintain a given line
(related particularly to a concept of mass) and as an external cause which
could change the course of an object.
Like Aristotle, however, Newton attributed the source of motion to a
Ž nal point that he called variously God, Lord God, and Deus. God, like
Foucaultian power, was brought into relation with time and space and was
ever-present and, also like Foucaultian power, God produced relations
between objects/bodies, often in ways of which we were not aware in
everyday life.

It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes a God; a true,

supreme, or imaginary dominion makes a true, supreme, or imaginary God.
And from his true dominion it follows that the true God is a living,
intelligent, and powerful Being; and from his other perfections, that he is
supreme, or most perfect. He is eternal and inŽ nite, omnipotent and
omniscient; that is his duration reaches from eternity to eternity; his presence
from inŽ nity to inŽ nity; he governs all things, and knows all things that are or
can be done. He is not eternity or inŽ nity, but eternal and inŽ nite; he is not
duration or space, but he endures and is present. He endures for ever, and is
everywhere present; and by existing always and everywhere, he constitutes
duration and space (Newton 1964: 445).

Power under Newton, therefore, is understood as the local cause of visible

movement (as force and capacity) and as a property of God (knowledge and
intelligence) which establishes more globally the local laws of motion that
natural philosophers detail.
The most signiŽ cant aspect of Newtonian physics in regard to social
science theories of power was the weight given to force as a cause of motion.
Although all three renderings of Newtonian power (capacity, force, posses-
sion) were to be paraphrased in political philosophies in and around
Newton’ s timespace, it was the conception of power-as-force in particular
that seemed to underwrite ideas of power in the ‘social’ realm and which
became articulated to what constituted a ‘change’ in social settings. It is,
therefore, worth pursuing Newton’ s ideas of force in some detail.

Power-as-force

Force entered scientiŽ c discourse before Newton, but Newton’ s laws of

motion and gravity gave it an existential ubiquity. Force had become real,
the physics of power and curriculum history 169
physical and measurable and was no longer akin to an extra-natural spirit
that breathed motion into motion.
In assuming the existence of ‘force’ , Newton identiŽ ed two predomi-
nant kinds, namely, ‘impressed’ and ‘centripetal’ . Unlike Aristotle, who
saw motion as being generated from within natural beings, that is, as an
internal quality, Newton (1964) attributed the visibility of all motion in all
objects to external and immediate sources that he called force or forces.
Force changed an object’ s status, e.g. from the state of being at rest to the
state of being in motion. It was an imbalance in external forces that
produced all changes in state under Newton. Crucially, calling something
a ‘change’ was dependent upon claiming imbalance and being able to
observe its movement eå ect. It seems ‘obvious’ from a present-day
perspective, but change could not be identiŽ ed in objects that maintained
their present course or did not ‘move’ from place to place through absolute
space. 12
An object’ s state of being was only observable, therefore, to the extent
that such a state could cease. Beginnings and cessations of motion, in
addition to a relocation in place, were central in being able to name
something as ‘change’ . In Newtonian physics, change was also identiŽ ed
in relation to speed and direction. Change or alteration meant that some
kind of external or impressed force imbalance had been introduced and that
it was this introduction that had caused the ceasing, beginning or redirec-
tion of an object’ s movement status. Judging ‘change’ as ‘movement’
through space, thus, was predicated on a direction, a speed (time and
distance), and the assumption of a transition in place (location).
Newton’ s idea of force was accompanied by an idea of inertia borrowed
from Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy (1983). Inertia was deŽ ned as ‘a
power of resisting, by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavours to
persevere in its present state, whether it be of rest, or of moving uniformly
forwards in a right line’ (Newton 1964: 13). The deŽ nition of inertia
incorporated a concept that became important to social science’ s uptake
and paraphrasing of ideas of power ever since—the concept of resistance. It
was the construction of resistance as the capacity (power) to withstand
(resist) an (external) attempt to change an object’ s state that newly
accompanied the theorization of power in latter 17th century political
philosophy that surrounded the publication of the Principia.
Force under Newton was brought into a particular relation to cause,
eå ect, and change that could not be viewed in Aristotle’ s work. That is, the
terminology of force, and the materiality attributed to it, signalled a ‘shift’
in the part that ‘power’ had to play in explanations for the visible. Under
Aristotle’ s idea of the internal ‘potency’ of natural bodies, power was
potential, the potential for coming-to-be and for movement. Under New-
tonian physics, power as ‘force’ , as a primarily external impression, became
the dominating cause of a discrete eå ect. Instead of being internal to an
object’ s nature or classiŽ cation, power now lay largely outside the object.
Power-as-force acted primarily on something else from somewhere else.
Power did not inhere in the very deŽ nition of something as an object, at
least not until Foucault’ s resurrection of the Aristotelian inscription of
power into the labelling of a category/object/subject itself.
170 b. baker

Re-co-ordinating power: change, cause, space and time

It is in the shift from ‘potency’ to ‘force’ that the redeŽ nition of ‘power’ s’
role in constituting and explaining ‘change’ can be traced. For Newton,
change occurred when an object’ s state shifted and, hence, when its location
shifted. For Aristotle, moving into a restful state and altering location did
not necessarily constitute the observation of a change. Things might move
and appearances might diå er, but that did not mean that one was necess-
arily observing a ‘change’ . Potency, or ‘power’ , certainly helped to deŽ ne
motion and enabled it, but the presence of power did not necessarily cause a
change.
In Newtonian physics, power-as-force caused a movement eå ect that
was observable through shifts in place or state, and this movement eå ect
newly constituted a ‘change’ . Physical bodies, like discourses in the present,
were the movement symbols through which beginnings and cessations were
argued. If something moved or ceased moving, one was looking at a
‘change’ in state and not a fulŽ lment of something’ s nature. One was
asking what had produced the ‘change’ , the eå ect (i.e. which forces), rather
than querying what category an object fell within.
For Newton, and for subsequent political philosophers like John Locke
(1632–1704), the rewriting of change suggested a new relationship between
the cause-and-e å ect co-ordinates for positing truth and for constructing
what was visible. Cause became one event, whereas eå ect was another, and
it was the passage of linear time that made them come into view as separate
but related events. The role of power in the announcement of ‘change’ had
now become purely causal.13
Force, as the noun that produced the eå ect and changed an object’ s
status, reinscribed concepts of motion as grounds for demonstrating
scientiŽ c reasoning. At the same time, however, Newton’ s rendition of
force adjusted the very deŽ nition of motion. The Aristotelian view of
motion was in ected by an object’ s being either natural or unnatural. 14 A
Newtonian view of motion posited motion as largely a product from outside
impressed or centripetal sources. Categorization as ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’
was irrelevant, and, hence, the inscription of motion was universalized
across all objects and simultaneously narrowed to generally mean ‘change-
in-place’ in regard to absolute space.
Space as a co-ordinate for positing existence and visibility was also
reconŽ gured under Newtonian physics, and this reworking of space is, in
part, what enabled the more causal inscription of power-as-force (Nerlich
1994). Newton’ s work fell within the Ž eld of natural philosophers who
believed that space existed and who subsequently debated the form that it
took (what might be called today a substantivalist, as opposed to anti-
substantivalist view (Christensen 1993)). In Newton’ s version of substan-
tivalism, absolute space provided the frame for viewing points from which
an object moved.
Newton’ s (1964) argument that absolute space was the reference point
for judging the relative position and motion of all objects enabled a thing to
be identiŽ ed as an ‘object’ occupying space in the Ž rst place. Space was said
to be absolute in that it was the irreducible element in the physical
the physics of power and curriculum history 171
description of matter and forces (Ray 1991). As such, it was the primacy of
absolute space against which all movement of objects could be explained. It
was with the assumption of absolute space that power-as-force could
operate as causal in generating an object’ s movement; without the irre-
ducibility of absolute space how would people know something had moved
from point to point and how could power-as-force be measured as its cause?
The foregrounding of absolute space as the background required in the
theorization of motion suggested a particular methodological relationship
among geometry, mathematics and mechanics that also rewrote ‘power’ .
Geometry and mathematics became subsumed within a universal
mechanics, because, without a universal mechanics predicated on absolute
space and its associated linear time, geometry and mathematics would, in
Newton’ s view, have nothing to demonstrate or no reference points. Space
and time could not be theorized or calculated outside of motion, and
objects/bodies and their relative relations could not be identiŽ ed unless
against a more stable and perduring backdrop of absolute space. An object
could not occupy a position or be noted as moving unless it was positioned
in relation to something and unless its movement or state could be
diå erentiated from that which surrounded it. Power-as-force was to be
understood as relational, because it was absolute space that brought such
relations into view.
Because the assertion of existence under universal mechanics termi-
nated in absolute space, motion and time, ‘power’ was to occupy a diå erent
role in a cosmology that did not carve the universe into celestial or
terrestrial bodies. For Newton, the underlying quantities did not constitute
another world. Humans lived in a single world and the real world was not
abstract or separate, but the ‘real’ admitted of distinctions (Buckley 1971).
Mechanics was to identify the deepest realities within the world, to provide
a model of/for the visible (Casti and Karlqvist 1989). It was the idea of
power-as-force that enabled the identiŽ cation of ‘deeper realities’ .
Within this construction of reality and visibility, this reŽ guration of co-
ordinates, Newton proposed power-as-force as the central concept that
maintained object relations, generated motion in absolute space, and
explained change. The centrality and primacy of force in Newton’ s work
is most strongly announced in his third law and is especially evident in
Book Three of his Principia. It is Book Three that seeks to render a
universalizing explanation for motion, that speaks to how the motion of
multiple objects interrelate through the interrelation of forces, as opposed
to the more individualistic object analyses that the Ž rst two laws and Books
One and Two signal.
Power-as-force was theorized amid a more discrete inscription of cause
and eå ect and this enabled force under Newton to become both the cause
and eå ect of itself as well as the comprehensive account of any change. That
is, like Foucault’ s power-as-eå ects, force was explained in terms of itself. A
single force could be resolved into further oblique forces that composed it,
or these oblique forces could be composed into a single resultant force.
Under this view, motion is reduced back to change in place, change is
identiŽ ed as beginnings, redirections and cessations, and is theorized
through an appeal to force (Newton 1964). Thus, motion could only be
172 b. baker

treated through a resolution back to the forces causative of its generation.

Impressed forces bore upon the origin of movements and, from the motion
already in progress, the antecedent causes were to be judged (Buckley
1971). A similar double movement in Foucaultian and Newtonian method
is evident—composition and resolution back to that which is already
composed.

God-power

A Ž nal (dis)continuity between Aristotelian and Newtonian ‘power’ is

worth noting. The methodological processes that wrote the Newtonian
inscription of power-as-force also secured the place of God-power as an
explanatory device. The Aristotelian idea that ‘moved’ from nature to a
non-natural cause of motion found its place in universal mechanics as well,
which proceeded from quantities of mass and momentum to a reality whose
attributes consisted of neither. Mechanical laws could not explain the
origin of the assemblage of the System of the World, although they could
describe its continual operation. For Newton, as the passages quoted above
indicate, astronomical systems demonstrated a non-mechanical origin.
However, God does not enter mechanics as ‘He’ does Aristotelian
physics. ‘He’ is not the moving or the Ž nal cause of endless movement
nor is He that which scientists reach when they discuss motion. He stands
at the origin of the system, specifying the quantities that will compose the
structures and placing them in the correct, mathematical relationship which
will insure the perdurance of their compositions (Buckley 1971).
God enters mechanics as a force with an almighty power to move, and a
knowledge of how movement works (Newton 1964). Just as force had
translated into gravity in astronomy, in mechanical theism it translates into
domination. The word Deus, used for God in the Principia, indicates a
relation; Deus is a relative word whose correlative is servi (servants or
slaves) (Buckley 1971). Thus, the essence of deity for Newton is dominatio.
It is the domination of God which suggests that God is God and, hence,
that God is the ultimate force, the mobilizer of diå erences in movement
that scientists now called ‘change’ . Possession of dominion is the key to
understanding how power-as-force operates at the level of God (origins);
possessing power over other powers that generate movement was God’ s
preserve. The comprehensiveness of force reaches its fullest exposition in
the nature of God, but God’ s dominion in the Principia is distinguished
from quantitative astronomical force as a spiritual domination (Buckley
1971).
Force, thus, constituted the unifying explanatory device in Newtonian
mechanics, perduring and omnipresent from its local ‘quantitative’ inscrip-
tion to its Ž nal ‘spiritual’ origin. As the capacity that suggested the ability to
impart movement or withstand it, power claimed ground as the overarching
measure of force itself. It was both synonymous with force at the local level
(cause of movement) and as that which God possessed to establish the
grounds on which the local level could be understood. Like the ever-
present, always already operating power-as-eå ects in Foucault, Newtonian
the physics of power and curriculum history 173
power-as-force surrounded all interactions, explained all movements, all
relations and all bodies, and could be deployed to describe everything from
a spinning top to the tides.

Power in educational discourse on the child and

curriculum: a preface

One key inscription of Newtonian power-as-force was, as the above

suggests, its relational nature. Like Aristotelian power in some ways,
Newtonian power was formulated as an invisible ‘go-between’ that was
constructed via various techniques or reasonings that sought to explain the
‘visible’ . For Newton, the presence of power or forces was something that
could explain the diå erence between states of movement and rest, action
and inaction, propulsion and resistance.
Although Newton did not necessarily consider movement and rest to be
the kind of opposition that Descartes had, one consequence of ‘moving’
between such contraries was that the human body, like all other objects,
was positioned as a site or surface on which the operations of an external
power could be made visible, or which had internal to it a ‘power’ (capacity
or potential) for work, movement or resistance that could be drawn ‘out’ . It
is at this point that (biological) renderings of ‘the body’ become important
to understanding the subsequent deployment of mechanical ideas of
‘power’ in the social sciences and the unanticipated conjuncture of both
with the theorization of ‘the child’ in formalized educational discourse.
My second paper (Baker 2001) traces this unanticipated conjuncture
through two intellectual trajectories. It examines Ž rst the new biological
and physical rendering of humanness that accompanied Newton’ s theories
of motion, particularly the new knowledge that was to form around human
dissection. Secondly, it traces how bio-physical notions of power were
paraphrased in political philosophies concerned with ‘society’ and with
what might be called social motion, or now, discursive motion.
A crucial eå ect of this reworking of power in diå erent Ž elds of study
was that it enabled the theorization of power to arrive at ‘the child’ in the
form of faculties, cells, and then genes by the late 1800s. My second paper
(Baker 2001) will delineate how the solidiŽ cation of the child as a being
with an interior thought amenable to in uence by an exterior force
prepared a discursive space for curriculum studies in the 20th century
and opened the possibility for writing curriculum history in the present.
That is, it will trace the analytical grounds that have made it possible to
bring ‘the child’ and ‘curriculum’ into a relationship that matters through
the invocation of power. ‘The child’ and ‘the curriculum’ in an oblique way
were unwittingly to become similar phenomena, collapsing in on each other
in a Kantian blurring of the distinction between subject and object. As
nouns, objects or things around which a conglomeration of knowledge
could  ow, ‘the child’ and ‘the curriculum’ were to be well-suited to the
theorization of power in a Newtonian cause–eå ect analysis, where objects-
in-motion were thought to impact each other through relations of force or
in uence.
174 b. baker

Notes

1. The Ž nal question of this paragraph should not be interpreted as a valorization of

‘power’ s’ centrality to curriculum studies, including curriculum history, but as a
description of conceptual dependency. It is, therefore, an ‘open’ question. It is meant
to foreground the ideas on which debate in curriculum studies is implicitly dependent in
order for such debate to make sense. As such, it pushes into the realm of the almost
unimaginable: what would one do if these concepts were no longer operational? Can we
imagine it?
2. The carving up of power’ s history is also obviously dependent on the time of writing,
such as the 10-year diå erence between Foucault’ s review of ‘power’ and Clegg’ s (1989).
It is crucial to note as well that ‘history’ does not have one meaning. In speaking of
‘power’ s history’ , I am referring in a mundane sense to how a concept which in English
is called ‘power’ (and for which there are two expressions in French puissance—
authority, and pouvoir—to be able) has been written as having diå erent kinds of
analytical traditions. Thus, in deploying ‘curriculum history’ in the title, I am not
referring to a subŽ eld of education commonly known as ‘curriculum history’ but to the
availability of seeing the concept ‘curriculum’ (like the concept ‘power’ ) as having a
‘history’ at all.
3. In his conclusion to ‘What is an author?’ , Foucault (1984) asked ‘What does it matter
who spoke?’ or ‘What matter who’ s speaking?’ The multiple readings given in this
question suggest its open-endedness. My reading of the question sees Foucault as
encouraging his audience to re-consider the signiŽ cance that has been attached to an
authorial voice. It is in the same vein that I pose the question of cutting oå the King’ s
head.
4. This point indicates that I am not attempting to claim ‘outsideness’ from Foucault’ s
methodological suppositions in ‘mapping’ notions of power. At the same time, I am in
no way attempting a ‘faithful’ or ‘pure’ reproduction of Foucault’ s substantive content
or methodological processes, largely because it is not possible. Rather, as Foucault
suggested of his use of Nietzsche, I am making (my interpretation of) his ideas stretch,
groan and protest, ultimately to relocate Foucault by rethinking the available analytics
of power.
5. Foucault claimed that he was not engaged in the process of theory-building and,
therefore, the assumption often is that commentators on Foucault cannot describe his
work as oå ering a new ‘theory’ of power or anything else. Whether one calls the
‘methodological precautions’ he lays out in detail on his ideas about power, in Power/
Knowledge (1980) especially, a ‘concept’ , ‘analytics’ , ‘theory’ , ‘notion’ or ‘view’ of power
is somewhat arbitrary. Furthermore, I do not believe Foucault’ s analytics of power were
stable across his career. One may see a diå erent analytics of power in Madness and
Civilisation, for example, than in The History of Sexuality, V. 1. What I am focusing on
in regards to Foucault, therefore, is more speciŽ cally his re ections on his analytics of
power as expressed in Power/Knowledge where he speaks not just to how he has treated
‘power’ in relation to his historical projects up to the late 1970s, but where he also oå ers
a history of ‘power’ as a concept as a foil to his own analytics. Moreover, the
nomenclature to use when referring to Focault and power is further complicated
given that Foucault’ s notion of theory in continental social science may have diå ered
signiŽ cantly with how his ideas about power can be read elsewhere as functioning as a
‘theory’ of power in terms of their rhetorical deployment. Although avoiding reference
to Foucault’ s conception of power as a theory may appear ‘anthropologically correct’ ,
the question of what constitutes a ‘theory’ in diå erent analytical contexts is a much
more involved and currently contested idea than space allows me to explore here.
(French 1995 speaks to such speciŽ cities in notions of ‘theory’ and continental social
science.) As such, when referring to an array of diå erent ideas about power that have
emanated across timespaces, of which Foucault’ s ideas are but one example, I often
refer to the theorization of power or theories of power in the plural.
6. Two things need to be addressed in regard to terminology in this sentence. First, terms
like ‘the West’ , ‘Western’ and ‘Europe’ , which are deployed throughout these papers are
always problematic, especially given that the notion of ‘Europe’ has shifted historically,
the physics of power and curriculum history 175
is shifting and is relatively recent. ‘Europe’ is not so much geographical space here but
discursive space, i.e. ‘Europe’ is what is presently claimed/appropriated as ‘Europe’ in
the construction of the past. For example, even though ‘Europe’ was not in Aristotle’ s
vocabulary, Aristotelian thought has been woven into an understanding of ‘Europe’ as
embodying ‘classical’ Greece. This appropriation is highly contentious, of course, given
Afrocentric and postcolonial critiques of the history of ideas. That ‘Europe’ is a
problem, in more ways than one, is, thus, the point of the term’ s suspension in
quotation marks (which will be dropped for ease of reference herein). The quotation
marks are not a pejorative denotation, but a problematizing one. Even more recent is a
notion of ‘the West’ which, immediately after World War I, signiŽ ed those countries to
the west of Germany, then referred to an alliance called the Western Union after World
War II (those countries to the west of East Germany) and now, in the early 21st
century, includes all of Germany. Thus, ‘Western’ and ‘the West’ are similarly
problematic terms. Popkewitz (1997) provides a useful way for thinking about what is
meant by ‘Western science’ in a discursive sense. It is not simply understandable or
reducible to geographical boundaries but refers instead to traditions for reasoning that
have ended up being (problematically) classiŽ ed as ‘scientiŽ c’ and ‘rational’ . Second, the
history will illustrate how the fascination with and theorization of motion is not just a
‘modern’ preoccupation. The emphasis on concepts of motion therefore does not
constitute a ‘presentist’ overlay of current concerns onto my reading of classical
Greek ‘natural science’ , for instance, which I give in this Ž rst paper. If one reads
authors such as Aristotle for what they depended on to articulate their points as ‘true’ ,
what is brought into view is the importance of concepts of motion and power for
justifying ‘wider’ arguments.
7. It needs to be stated at the outset that this paper and its sequel (Baker 2001) in no way
attempt to ‘move’ out of the language of motion, spatiality and so forth as if that would
somehow make the points more valid. Rather, I am happy here just to be aware of and
play with the extent to which motion and Foucault’ s varying methodologies inform the
present analysis, language and reading of those methodologies. Further, ‘motion’ is not
a ‘stable’ concept itself in that whether it is considered ‘real’ and where it has been
‘viewed’ has shifted. The papers will go on to illustrate that there is a persistent
reference to ‘motion’ or ‘movement’ across cosmologies, but that does not mean that the
words always mean the same thing. What I will suggest, however, is that post-Newton
the idea of motion generally requires an idea of ‘change in place’ , ceasing, redirection,
and/or beginning, and absolute space to be conceptualized. Change in place may refer to
events like the growth of a plant or child, movement of a whole ‘object’ or in the case of
rotation on a Ž xed point, an object’ s parts, events like rain falling, changes in the tides,
planetary shifts, and eventually, changes and movement in ‘discourses’ . Diå erent
‘scientiŽ c’ cosmologies, like Aristotle’ s and Newton’ s, have given diå erent weight and
meanings to motion and the events assumed to represent it. The argument is not,
therefore, that ‘motion’ and ‘power’ have universal meaning, but that there has been at a
broad level a continuous reliance on appealing to concepts of motion in some form as a
ground for truth in making an argument and for naming power or making it
recognizable. This suggests further a play of language that makes it diæ cult to write
about the concepts’ histories. As I discuss later, ‘motion’ and ‘change’ have often been
brought into (diå erential) relation with each other in explaining and deŽ ning an ‘event’ .
It is virtually impossible to avoid the language problems that arise when one claims that
ideas of ‘change’ have changed, and this circularity similarly applies to discussion of
‘shifts’ in concepts of ‘movement’ or ‘motion’ (used synonymously throughout).
8. Paraphrasing emphasizes the modiŽ cation that concepts undergo in their deployment in
Ž elds outside of that in which they were coined. Paraphrasing operates through an
understanding that a ‘complete’ translation is not available and that the concept will be
somewhat transformed in its deployment elsewhere. I signal this in my second paper
through looking at education’ s modiŽ cation of bio-physical conceptions of power in
child development theories and also in examining the similarities in concepts of power
across sciences, to which the use of the term ‘paraphrasing’ is well suited.
9. At the risk of reading just about anything from the present into Aristotle’ s works, there
is a sense that (shifting) Ž elds currently referred to as ‘physics’ , ‘theology’ , ‘biome-
176 b. baker
chanics’ , ‘biology’ , ‘psychology’ , and so forth have indirect antecedents in what is now
called Aristotle’ s ‘natural science’ , and that these divisions were constituted on the same
grounds he used for deploying a concept of ‘power’ as an explanatory device.
10. See also animal locomotion in Aristotle (1961). For animals and humans, the mover
internal to the being, called ‘the soul’ , was considered the cause of movement by
desiring an object that the body then moved towards. One can read this as an antecedent
to the Hobbesian version of power as the desire to pursue a goal or a good. It is
impossible, however, to do justice to the complexities of Aristotle’ s thesis on motion in
limited ‘space’ . It is often inconsistent and is the subject of much debate (Furley 1989).
The general point is, therefore, that he depended on an appeal to motion as real to posit
a world-view and that this appeal provided a new intellectual space for the inscription of
power-as-potential.
11. There is much debate concerning when ‘experimental method’ became an accepted
means for the production of truth and obviously it depends on how it is deŽ ned. Dear
(1995: 6) suggests that ‘The ‘‘experiment’ ’ as a hallmark of modern experimental
science . . . is constituted linguistically as a historical account of a speciŽ c event that acts
as a warrant for the truth of a universal knowledge-claim’ , and hence asserts, fairly I
think, that ‘‘‘experiments’ ’ in this sense became part of a co-ordinated knowledge-
enterprise during the course of the 17th century’ .
12. This only appears as an obviousness from the present if it is assumed that ‘change’ and
what one calls a change or is able to identify as equalling a change has remained ‘static’
across timespaces. Central to my thesis here is that what Aristotle and Newton meant by
‘change’ were in some ways diå erent, in uencing how ‘visible movement’ was being
read and invoked in the explanation for events. This suggests diå erent matrices into
which power could enter as an explanatory device.
13. The languages of the social sciences subsequently deployed this notion of movement as
change, or change-as-movement, from the terminology of ‘revolution’ , to ‘curriculum
reform movements’ , to ‘rupture’ and ‘continuity’ under Foucault.
14. Animality seems a privileged category in Aristotle’ s writing, perhaps because its
‘visibility’ as a more mobile natural life form than plants suited the theories of
motion he was propounding.

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