Vibrancy of Childhood Things

Introduction

In this article, we explore the “vibrancy of matter” and of “things” in early childhood education, and desires and engagements that, like the lightning in Barad’s opening quote, drive imaginations and bodies and things in early childhood settings. We examine the “animate and inanimate” and how they dip “sometimes here and sometimes there on either side of the divide” (Barad, 2015, p. 390)? We use Bennett’s (2010) and other philosophers’ ideas (e.g., Braidotti, 2013; Latour, 2004, 2011) on the political ecology of place and connectedness in a philosophical examination of vibrant entanglements of “things,” “thing-hoods,” and childhoods. The vibrancy of things shifts the center of attention to the non- and more-than-human world, where things speak to children through their agency that is both political and ethical in nature. We examine vibrant things and thing-hoods, agency, and childhoods and explore them in a theoretical re-reading, in a sense a deterritorialization, of Foucauldian thought through new materialist philosophies. We offer an alternative reading of conceptions of power, discourse, and matter, aiming toward further openings and becomings in the forms of fresh entanglements of experiences, relationships, commitments, and responses by conceptualizing them through particular materialities of childhood experiences.

Re-reading Foucault offers an opportunity for a reorientation toward his work that has been extensively utilized in education in the past decades and has become seminal in understanding and analyzing notions of discourse and the constitution of subjects, power, and subjectivities in educational settings. Re-examining what a turn back to Foucault may mean is both at the heart of this article and of our own turn to new materialist openings, particularly in relation to childhood and to education. Re-reading or deterritorializing Foucault builds on numerous shifts in educational discourse over the years: Many “from” and “to” paradigm turns and theoretical frameworks have been applied in the search for an “ideal” or “good” fit. Every so often “elevated,” approved research paradigms and theoretical frameworks come into fashion and then move on again, making way for the next fashion. In this sense, Foucauldian thought in education has been in fashion for some time, and he has been elevated as an essential thinker on the embodiment and performance of the ascendency of his antisciences to discursive and political power. The research field of early years education and pedagogy, in turn, has shifted from a developmental Piagetian perspective through humanism, Vygotskyian thought, and constructivism to the uplifting—as tangibly demonstrated in Aotearoa New Zealand—of a socio-cultural framework as a preferred curriculum-making theory (Ministry of Education, 1996).

In this article, we follow St. Pierre (2014a, 2014b) in abandoning the desire to follow a particular method and immerse ourselves instead in the understandings at stake. We take from Jackson and Mazzei (2013) the notion of plugging one text into another, thereby transgressing boundaries of text, philosophy, and being, to shift between post-structural and post-humanist theory into thinking the un/imaginable: a shift from think-power to a post-humanist and Foucauldian thing-power. Koro-Ljungberg and her colleagues’ (Koro-Ljungberg, Carlson, Tesar, & Anderson, 2015) disruption of philosophy as a method toward conceptions of qualitative inquiry that moves beyond—beyond qualitative, beyond “horizons, limits, borders, or boundaries” (p. 4), and beyond the colonization of research, drives our attempt at de-colonizing the thought that might otherwise banish these connections. From St. Pierre’s, Jackson’s, and Mazzei’s thinking, we take the decentering of meaning-making as our purpose in this attempt to shift and ask questions as Duhn (2015) urges, to de- and reterritorialize being and becoming matter, vibrancy, and meaning through things and thing-hoods.

In a certain sense, we undertake such a deterritorialization following what Patton (2009) describes as Deleuze’s ontology of assemblages as an ethics of becoming or an ethics and politics of deterritorialization, as “[a] movement or process by which something escapes or departs from a given territory” (p. 190) or system. Reterritorialization, then, is the combination of the deterritorialized elements with others to constitute new assemblages. In this sense, this article attempts to expand possibilities for reterritorializations and fresh becomings as theoretical–actual assemblages connecting early childhood settings, children, and things in a virtual-actual realm. Cautioned by Barad’s (2003) claim that “language has been granted too much power” (p. 801) and her urge for a turn to the matter of matter, we use this article to move with Foucault beyond Foucault, beyond language, through Foucauldian notions of power to the matter of matter and an increasing recognition of non-human embodiments in forces, energies, and thing-hoods.

We begin this recognition with a Baradian elevation of matter, things, and new materialist thought before engaging Foucault’s concept of power. In particular, Barad (2003) offers an in-depth analysis of power in relation to materialist theories of the body, critiquing the heavy reliance on the social and human body—and she calls for increasing engagements with the “materialisation of all bodies—‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’” (p. 810). We explore the concept of matter and its vibrancy, considering its unexpected realms within and beyond the discursive through exemplars from early childhood education, where Foucault’s thought and new materialisms intersect. We attempt to deterritorialize Foucault’s thought in an assemblage of his legacy of power with the materialism of matter–thing-hood. Vignettes from early years settings illustrate this intersection through the stories of Pinocchio and Little Otik and their embodiment of discursive–material assemblages.

Why Foucault?

Foucault’s work owes its depth to influential texts by Heidegger, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Althusser, to name a few, on notions of genealogy, technology, and the unmasking of power. In his short life, Foucault became emblematic for generations of intellectuals of the embodiment of the most pressing intellectual issues of his time (Peters, Tesar, & Locke, 2014). The importance of Foucault’s thought and its application in education remains and has been eloquently explored and argued by key thinkers in recent decades (e.g., Ball, 1990; Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2015; Marshall, 1996; Peters & Besley, 2007; Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998) and also by Barad (2003). His most utilized concept and that most associated with him is power or power relations. He is less concerned with dominant structures and government, dominant social class, or the notion of the powerful and powerless, than with performing the genealogical work of “power relations” or “relations of power.” In Foucault’s later years, analyzing this concept became central to his writing and lectures; in particular, he examined the relations of subjects as they interact with power. He argued through his genealogical method that power is productive and that it functions and operates within complex systems of discourses, actions, thoughts, and things. As Foucault (1988) claimed,

[o]ne needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular society. (p. 93)

In Foucault’s thinking, power is not simply oppressive or liberating in its nature—it penetrates everything. For Foucault, power cannot be seen as separate from knowledge (hence his power–knowledge assemblage), and it legitimates and produces knowledge in many new, unexpected forms. He plays with the tension between discursive bodies of knowledges and non-discursive ways of being, for example, in the ways subjects in educational settings themselves are constituted by a sense of performance. Whether these are performances of “development” or “test results” in formal education, they can be seen as dangerous and invasive entanglements in the construction of subjects and subject positions. Similar to ideas that formed modernity, ideas in education perpetuate the exclusion of difference and possibilities, further legitimating dominant discourses and positions and rendering as illegitimate those who are different, marginalized, or unthinkable. However, it is in these spaces that opportunities that enable subjugated discourses resurface as resistance. Even more importantly, such positions create possibilities for the emergence of the im/possible to elevate performances and positions—in assemblages of matter, energies, forces, or things—beyond the discursive and beyond the human. These cracks lead us into an elaboration of the thing-hoods and new materialisms for which they make space.

“Thing-Hood”: Giving the Force of Things More Due

New materialism is about relationships between subjects and objects, and thinking about “new metaphysics” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 13) as represented by the work of scholars such as Bruno Latour, Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda, Karen Barad, Quentin Meillassoux, Donna Haraway, and Jane Bennett. Their thinking is not homogeneous; however, the connections across their work projects a rewriting and traversing of uncharted territory, challenging dualistic Cartesian thinking and, of particular interest in this article, rethinking “matter” and what Bennett (2010) calls “thing-hood” (p. 4). In the center of this thinking is Barad’s (2007) articulation which, in the sense of Haraway’s earlier work, introduces what she called “agential realism,” the challenge to a metaphysics based on the individual that turns to the constitution of objects through “intra-action.” For Barad, matter is both discursive and material, and everything in the world can be perceived as an “onto-ethico-epistomology,” as ontological, epistemological, and ethical (so also political) at the same time. Everything then, subject and matter, is in constant entanglement denying any separate entity. Barad’s agential realism sees that “matter and meaning are not separate elements . . . [they] cannot be dissociated” (p. 3). Elevating the performative further challenges the “too substantialising” (Barad, 2003, p. 802) reliance on the power of words, as emphasized earlier.

A new materialist perspective challenges the reduction of perceptions to linguistic and discursive interpretations and, therefore, urges the legitimation of other ways of seeing and being and other relationships. Whereas post-modern thought has been related to the linguistic turn, new materialism offers not its denial but yet another turn toward the material and matter and moves beyond the discursive. Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, and Spinoza form important reference points for Barad as points of familiarity, a canvas on which to re-interpret and trace the origins of this turn. Foucauldian thought, Hekman (2009) argues, has been here to pleasure and discipline us, and she reads Foucault as someone who has “new materialist” thought, writing, “I argue that Foucault, far from emphasizing discourse to the exclusion of the material or ‘reality’ is always acutely aware of the interaction between discourse and reality” (p. 438). Thus, reading the Foucauldian notion of power emphasizes the physical, visceral, and more-than-discursive aspects of his anatomy of power relations. Hekman (2009) further speaks of the “materiality of power” as she reads Foucault’s analytics of power as material:

Foucault’s understanding of power is very physical. He is concerned with how power affects us, and, particularly, our bodies. But this is not all there is to the story. Foucault’s understanding of power is also about the discourse of power. Indeed, his central thesis is that it was a significant change in the discourses of power that produced the unique form of power that characterizes the modern world. Foucault’s analysis is about the complex interaction between the discursive and the non-discursive in the constitution of power. The goal of his analysis is to examine and explain this interaction. (pp. 442-443)

Moving beyond the discursive, Bennett (2010) represents an intriguing element in new materialist thought. In arguing that matter is not passive but active and, therefore, productive in nature or as she argues vibrant, she elevates matter beyond something that can be humanly measured, evaluated, and molded. Bennett argues against dichotomizing things, matters, objects, and active, vibrant organisms and beings or actants (Latour, 2004). Latour’s actant (a de-anthropomorphized actor) is any thing that impacts and modifies another thing thereby changing its being or behavior. In Bennett’s thinking, she refers to this active process as “vital materiality” (p. vii). She builds upon Spinoza’s ethics and his concept “conatus,” which she explains through his work as

[e]ach thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being . . . The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing. (as cited in Dutton, 2006)

Spinoza believed “conatus” was essential to everyone and everything: Both subjects and matters have it, and it is a natural inclination of things to exist and enhance themselves. Drawing on notions of material vitalism in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) work in A Thousand Plateaus, Bennett (2010) adds that “matter-energy” [emphasis in the original] is “a-subjective,” and that such a vitality represents “pure immanence” (p. 52). Further examples can be found in Deleuze and Guattari’s work on intensities, becomings, and assemblages. Bennett’s aspiration, she writes, “is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due” (p. viii), and she asks “why did Foucault’s concern of ‘bodies and pleasures’ or Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in ‘machinic assemblages’ not count as materialist” (p. xvi)? Why, indeed? In the next section, we give the force of things more due, by elevating an epistemological and ontological commitment to things and matter (St. Pierre, 2014b) in examining human-thing-matter entanglements in the space of early childhood education.

Vibrant Matter, Things, and Political Ecologies

Bennett’s contribution to thinking about the inorganic reinforces our rejection of the subject/object binary. Bennett (2010) thus helps us to blur boundaries on the basis of, for example, what she sees as political agency. She uses Rancière to emphasize how the political is constituted as a uniquely human realm on the basis of skills, capabilities, and talents that only humans can perform. Furthermore, to differentiate between an ecosystem and a political system, she examines Dewey’s idea of “conjoint action,” where agency is a generative drive leading to a “public” and to the public’s agency to affect or produce effects on action. A public, then, is a human agency that arises in an intentional, collective response to certain ecologies.

For Bennett (2010), a political act does not need to have been consciously planned or conceived as such. In other words, non-human actants—such as worms—might be equally as political in their acts as humans (and perhaps contribute in a greater sense to certain interdependencies and ecologies). Furthermore, matter or things, such as piles of rubbish on the street, also possess agency. Matter, objects, things, and humans become something different as a result of being connected in assemblages with each other. What may appear in a purely discursive, human-centric view to be “dead” thus has the potential to become “alive,” political, and agentic. The precise time, place, beginning, and end of the transformations arising through such entangled actant–actor, matter–thing–human–non-human assemblages are individually and collectively complex and unknowable. Bennett, then, targets micro-level rather than macro-level connections when she thinks about force and power. We move now into actant–actor entanglements in early childhood education.

Power, Things, Matter, and Energy in Early Childhood

Thing–matter–energy–child assemblages with power and forces arise in early childhood entanglements through toy-things and thing-stories. Things connect with children, teachers, parents, and other things through vibrant forces and matter that arouse life, vitality, imagination, and purpose. The stories of Pinocchio and Little Otik emphasize the ideas of matter and its vibrancy, relational practice and connectedness between things that can evoke emotions, desires, drives, and yearnings, and the subjects in the environment, children, teachers, perhaps parents, and other adults, in an early years setting. We begin with Pinocchio.

The story of Pinocchio stems from early 20th-century Italy (Collodi, 1911/2009). Pinocchio is a carved wooden puppet. This wooden puppet-thing evokes reactions through its presence as, already in carving it, Geppetto, the carpenter, is filled with desire that his creation turn into a real live boy, that this thing would somehow fulfill his dreams. As the story unfolds, the wooden puppet magically does come “alive,” he goes to school, runs away, disobeys Geppetto, and gets up to various kinds of mischief as if he were a “real” boy-child. Still maintaining the fantasy, Pinocchio’s wooden nose betrays this “reality” by growing longer and longer whenever he tells a lie. Pinocchio exists simultaneously within an imaginary–real as a wooden thing, while the emotional connections between the puppet and the readers–listeners draw this thing into humanly subjective behaviors to which children (and adults) are assumed to relate. The story bridges the human and the more-than-human. While challenging the norms of being and becoming, the puppet transgresses and reverts to what might be considered normal childhood activities—only to shatter that normality with his vibrantly material nose and body.

So it happens in the favorite old Czech folk tale, Little Otik. Little Otik is a tree stump found in the forest, that resembles (looks like, feels like, has the vibrancy of) a baby. Little Otik the tree stump, like Pinocchio, emanates forces that arouse desires, imagination, hope, and fulfillment as well as dread, fear, and concern. Once brought home and cleaned up, the stump is named Little Otik and is treated like a real baby (Erben, 2008). Both Pinocchio’s and Little Otik’s power and agency arise through the intersections of human and other non-human matter—Geppetto’s carving tools and his loving hands working to carve the puppet, Little Otik’s baby blanket, pacifier, baby bed, and bath, as matter impacts on matter, notwithstanding their powerful influence as matter–thing on and with the human subjects with whom they are entangled.

Pinocchio and Little Otik become the intersection. At once performing-being matter–thing and the im/possibility of the humanly performance of “babying” a tree stump or “fathering” a wooden puppet, they both are and create a complex assemblage. Through them, desires are aroused to care for, love, play with, and to feed, albeit with disastrous consequences—in Little Otik’s case, he eats his mother and father, and in Pinocchio’s case, he rebels, gets into trouble, and lies. Conatus, as a thing-power and resistance to destruction and alteration arises in and from these wood-thing-stories.

These wooden objects, formerly growing and alive, now fluctuating on a dead-alive “razor’s edge” (Barad, 2015, p. 390), play out Barad’s onto-ethico-epistemology. They transgress expectations of ethics and morality in a purely human realm to enact their own ethics: What lies can a wooden puppet-boy get away with? What is and what isn’t OK for a tree stump-baby to eat? The cracks of im/possibilities, like Barad’s lightening, electrify the imagination through the thinking but not really thinking, acting but not really acting, of these wooden thing-toy-stories.

Matter and meaning cannot be dissociated within these Pinocchio and Little Otik entanglements, but neither can they be explained through discursive logic. Nevertheless, Foucault’s productive power is evident, untraceable yet immanent. While Pinocchio and Little Otik are clearly not a public in Bennett’s sense, they do have agency. Intentionality, however, as that which makes acts political, is difficult to assess here as it teeters on the brink of the razor’s edge, of imaginary–real lightening strikes, to return again to Barad’s opening quote. These wooden actants affect things, being, beings, and humans, through their complex agency and vital materiality and, while not necessarily acting with political intention themselves, arousing what might be political through their evocative affective ability to do so (Bennett, 2010).

Pinocchio–Little Otik–child–early years setting entanglements should be taken seriously. Their complexity eludes simplistic explanations, in the actions and intra-actions that occur within and because of their vibrancy. They affect, in the sense that Bennett (2010) describes as “the capacity of any body for activity and responsiveness” (p. xii) and enact their materiality through their very thing-hood. In response to Barad’s (2003) earlier call, they are materialities that reach beyond human, social, or discursive concerns of bodies and also beyond concerns of language, knowledge, and power. They present an affective influence that inheres in the more-than-human, even while they present, on a surface level, well-loved children’s (and adults’) stories to be told at mat time or story time. They represent power in ways that emerge through what can be seen as forces or potentialities, as Duhn (2015) has explicated, differently arising in the diverse assemblages with what or whom they affect. They infuse their entanglements with the setting, with children, with the other things around them, and with uncertainties and unknowabilities without having themselves an intention. They introduce what Latour (2014) laments as people’s lack of an adequate “mental and emotional repertoire” (p. 1) to cope with such massive uncertainties and destruction playing out in the wider world.

These stories create a space, then, for what Massumi (2015) has recently elevated as the importance, from a Deleuzian perspective, of “mattering-on” and honoring the mattering process. They return us to Bennett (2010) and to the idea that the vibrancy and power of things and matter are in line with considerations of the “curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (p. 6). The process of matter and power can be seen as operating through these Pinocchio and Little Otik-things and their thing-hood as creative, motivating, inspirational forces that arouse not only desires, passion, and care but also abjection, resistance, and revolt.

From Think-Power to Thing-Power

Pinocchio and Little Otik help to interrupt common-sensical, linear expectations (Barad, 2003). They demonstrate how things “speak to us” because they have agency that is both political and ethical-moral in nature. Pinocchio’s and Little Otik’s thing-hood responds to Bennett’s (2010) argument for a shift from thinking solely about think-power to an elevation of the importance of thing-power and to take the call for and of things seriously. Things have a vitality and a capacity: There is no ontological hierarchy in Bennett’s thinking about matter and subjects, but there is an “urge to cultivate a more careful attentiveness to the out-side” (p. 17).

As wooden stumps, Pinocchio and Little Otik further demonstrate a certain subjectivity of matter through their inter-connectedness. They illustrate that matter does not exist on its own but rather is linked and connected to other matter. What all approaches, tentacles, and versions of these materialist philosophies have in common is their urge to move beyond simplified, absolute, and “objective” definitions and classifications of matter as unitary, passive, inactive, and dead. Bennett argues for an active, productive power-force that is harnessed by both matter and subjects. Matter has agency that behaves in non-predictable ways as material bodies are assemblages, aggregates of powers, forces, and thing-hoods, interacting with other forces and thing-hoods and impacting upon each other, shaping and molding, with an agency that plays out in non-predictable ways as with Pinocchio and Little Otik. The way actants operate is implicitly affirmed by Grosz (2008) in art, as “[a]rt enables matter to become expressive, to not just satisfy but also to intensify—to resonate and become more than itself” (p. 4). In other words objects, things, and matter, such as Pinocchio and Little Otik, “enliven the boundaries of life and death” (Barad, 2015) to not only become more than what they are but also invoke transgressions in the other objects, things, and matter with which they are entangled.

In the early years educational discourse, to work with these notions means asking, as Duhn (2012) does, how they play out in contemporary realities, what are “the forces and forms that make a place? How does ‘place’ work in current political and social economies?” and “What does it mean for early years’ pedagogy to take seriously the agency and vitality of matter that makes up places” (p. 100)? And further, as she argues, the concern is not to answer these questions but to continue to ask them “to stimulate thought regarding the entanglements of self, matter and place” (p. 100). In a Deleuzian sense, matter becomes the embodiment of sensations, affects, and aesthetics. It is something that Bennett (2010) is intrigued with in her call for a political ecology. She argues that the “cultural forms are themselves powerful, material assemblages with resistant force” (p. 1) and argues for “the active role of non-human material in public space” (p. 2). Is it important, then, to determine whether or not wooden thing-toys have intentionality and are thus political? Or perhaps, the political ethics of matter should be allowed to act on humans, to affect desires and respond in the critical ways Latour (2014) described, and to engage wider worldly crises through crucial vibrant encounters.

As-yet-unknown forces and variations must be re-affirmed, according to Massumi (2015). In support of this elevation of uncertainties, Duhn (2015) further argues that agency “is no longer the expression of sovereignty and of an autonomous, knowing self but a seeking of encounters with vibrant matter that force continual invention to maintain the relation between movement and rest” (p. 8). Working with Bennett’s notion of modes, Duhn emphasizes the importance of “complex organic organisms and nonorganic structures,” that overturn “the old hierarchy of mind-over-matter” (p. 8). Thus, the new materialist turn brings to early years settings an intricate, distinctive, and nuanced web of disciplines, thinking, being, and uncertainties that is political, ethical–epistemological, and ontological in nature.

Foucault’s Material Relations of Power

Where then does Foucault’s power work in relation to these new materialisms? Does it respond to the concern of power-force as relevant not only for “subjects” but also for “things” as in the stories of Pinocchio and Little Otik? In Foucault’s work, the physics of power is related to technologies of domination in such a way that disciplinary power is perceived through the disciplining of the body (Hekman 2009, 2010; Lemke, 2014). Foucault’s concern, on one hand, is with the conditions of discourses, technologies of domination, and how the subject impacts upon itself through technologies of the self. As Weedon (1997) interprets Foucault’s relations of power, they are

a dynamic of control and lack of control between discourses and the subjects, constituted by discourses, who are their agents. Power is exercised within discourses in the ways in which they constitute and govern individual subjects. (p. 113)

In this interpretation, the concern of and for things is not considered. Foucault’s argument is that power is integral to the relationship that the subject has with the subjectification process. In educational settings as Marshall (1996), for example, argues, power “permeates the educational scene . . . and turns us into governable subjects who will lead docile, useful and practical lives” (p. 115). Here, we argue that this power is relevant to matter and things in educational settings. This productive power is both pleasurable and oppressive and denies the traditional, top-down notion of power as it is manifested through subjects, matter, and objects.

Power and relations of power constitute the subject, matter, and objects as they manifest through discursive and material practices and agency, which impact upon all of them. Thus, as with Bennett’s blurring of boundaries above, we cannot speak of subjects and objects, or subjects and matter, but of complicated interconnections between them in relations of power that are discernable only on the basis of such interconnections. In rethinking Foucault, dynamic elements of power relations do not simply belong, become owned, or in any other way exercised by subjects alone but are relevant also to matter and its inter- and intra-actions with other matter and things. Power thus encompasses the all-inclusive embracing layers and complex ideas of all subjects, all matter, and all objects and the energy and forces surrounding them. So if power is not just oppressive but also productive and pleasurable, it constitutes the subject, objects, and matter in unexpected ways and not only within discursive practices. Perhaps power is a “set of actions upon other actions” (Dreyfus & Rabinow, 1983, p. 220), but in our thinking these multiple directions of power, reversibility, and mobilities intersect in ways that power weaves into and through them, and subjects, objects, and matter become on-goingly constituted by them.

A further concern, in Bennett’s sense, is whether power also disciplines “matter” in the sense of inorganic “thing-hood” such as a wooden toy or a tree stump? If so, does the matter–thing-hood embody the power–knowledge assemblage in the same or in a similar way as does a subject? This concern raises the question of “control” of the material, of the “thing-hood.” From a discursive perspective, power produces certain discourses that provide and promote particular versions of truth and knowledge. The relationality of power–knowledge determines that knowledge does not exist on its own: Perhaps this operates similarly to knowledge about matter? Power relations of how we understand knowledge about matter are embodied in what we include and exclude, and this act of masking and unmasking may force the knowledge–matter assemblage to become subversive and resistant. Matter and thing-hood are disciplined, classified, placed into a particular space and place, and within a certain time through the methods and new materialist paradigms.

Foucault wanted to unmask power and the way it is exercised over the subject through disciplinary power. Can this lead to a reterritorialization of “matter” as also governed, subjected, and docile? If so, technologies of domination not only discipline, classify, and objectify to produce subjects, but in a similar way they then also discipline, classify, and objectify matter. The paradoxical subject position of docile and productive, yet self-governable, leads to Foucault’s concept of the conduct of conduct (Dean, 1999). A mechanism of control is in place and disciplines as “a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology” (Foucault, 1979, p. 215). This could also be seen as essential for understanding “matter”: the way power penetrates spatiality and time and impacts upon the conceptions and capacities of matter; as it impacts upon subjects, as subjects impact upon matter; and, finally, as matter impacts upon other matter, as illustrated by Pinocchio and Little Otik.

Foucault’s thinking about bio-politics draws in a reterritorialization of Foucauldian power in relation to matter. It traces notions related to the political, the social, the biological, and to thing-hoods within a framework that Lemke (2014) has eloquently analyzed in his work on the government of things, stating

The art of government determines what is defined as subject and object, as human and non-human. It establishes and enacts the boundaries between socially relevant and politically recognized existence and “pure matter,” something that does not possess legal-moral protection and is “reduced” to “things.” (p. 7)

So what if we suggest that Foucauldian relations of power operate in ways that also affect matter and that they strengthen ways in which matter matters? The individual, the subject, through being acted upon alters and modifies his or her behavior to become normalized and subjected toward a particular truth. However, what happens with matter? Is matter also affected by this process? Does matter take “matter positions”? Does the inorganic also change its behavior, and does it, in the new materialist sense, become vibrant matter within the system? If matter is also subjected to such disciplinary power, does it become similarly normalized and at the same time individualized? Power might then become the productive force that structures and shapes the subject and the matter—thing-hoods alike—then matter could become accepted as a part of these complex anatomies and structures of power relations. Foucauldian disciplining technologies in which discourses contain and conceal power would then constitute the subject and matter alike. They would themselves form openings to move beyond the linguistic and discursive and affirm the im/possibility of differentiating between what is a subject and what is matter in such (possibly) political, ethical, epistemological, and ontological performances of reciprocal entanglements in early years settings.

Concluding Comments

We have worked with Foucault to move beyond Foucault (Massumi, 2009). Indeed, as a great deal of Foucault’s work remains unpublished and new translations into and editions in English are still being unearthed, this move beyond is itself full of uncertainty. His ideas still have a strong current of freshness, his thinking is still challenging, and he still surprises on many levels. Accordingly, we argue, scholars need to resist “plugging and locking” into Foucault’s work as discursively oriented within a human-centric realm. We have attempted to move beyond this positioning in our analysis, pointing to cluttered and unclean assemblages of subject–thing-hood and power–matter entanglements in early years settings through the stories of Pinocchio and Little Otik.

This article suggests what might be a “positively monstrous” (Patton, 2009, p. 191) shift into an im/perceptible space. As a philosophical de- and reterritorialization of Foucauldian–post-humanist entanglements within early childhood spaces and being, it is merely a foray into seeing, feeling, and being matter, energy, forces, and things differently. Foucault claims that he does not offer a theory of power but, rather, an “analytics of power,” and we have argued that new materialism unsettles his assertion to include also power in relation to matter, forces, energy, and things. Through the vibrant materiality of thing-hoods, we think and perceive a critical shift in early years settings, from “think-power” to “thing-power.”