Programming Plasticity as Embodied in Childhood: A Critical Genealogy of The Biology of Adversity and Resilience

Abstract

The Biology of Adversity and Resilience coheres around the claim that early childhood experiences of stress and adversity get ‘under the skin’ and become ‘biologically embedded’, increasing the risk of negative health and behavioural outcomes later in life. Taking a genealogical approach to biosocial plasticity, this article situates The Biology of Adversity and Resilience within the arc of an apparatus of power/knowledge that emerged in tandem with liberal governmentality and which assumes childhood as a means of programming the future. The argument is that The Biology of Adversity and Resilience is a normative fiction: a socially scripted story that figures the ‘resilient’ child in a way that potentially sustains extant inequalities by prefiguring a future that is in step with the neoliberal present.

NEAR science ¹ (Neuroscience, Epigenetics, Adverse childhood experiences, and Resilience) coheres around the claim that early life experiences get ‘under the skin’ and become ‘biologically embedded’ (Boyce et al., 2012; Essex et al., 2013; Shonkoff et al., 2017). In the case of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) relating to abuse and neglect (Felitti et al., 1998), this is said to increase the risk of a whole spectrum of negative ‘outcomes’ later in life, including smoking, suicide, depression, obesity, illicit drug use, alcoholism, and teen pregnancy (Essex et al., 2013: 58), which in turn impacts employability, increasing the likelihood of welfare dependency and criminal behaviour (CDC, 2019).

This article aims to trouble what will be presented as a ‘normative fiction’ derived from the science of early life adversity (see Ryan, 2020: 2–6, 15–16). I will not be engaging with the science of histone modification, DNA methylation, and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal responses to stress (see Lloyd and Larivée, 2020; Meloni, 2014; Meloni et al., 2018; Richardson and Stevens, 2015). Instead, the objective is to examine how, in the Anglophone world at least, the science is being fashioned into a story that gives narrative form to a biosocial mode of power that attempts to programme the future by acting through and upon plasticity as embodied in childhood.

The normative fiction in question is called The Biology of Adversity and Resilience. The Biology of Adversity and Resilience is anchored in a growing body of research findings, which gives it empirical robustness, and yet the story reaches beyond the facts. As a normative fiction, The Biology of Adversity and Resilience is a powerful story that has been gathering momentum and gaining traction in the realm of practice – academic research, school programmes, social work, and community health initiatives – and in the mould of many good stories, it offers scope for heroes to appear and act on behalf of innocent victims. The victims in this story are children coping with adversity. As for the heroes, this is potentially anyone who gets behind the story and acts on the basis of its axioms. The desire to help is by no means misplaced, and the many forms of adversity that figure in this story are without doubt cause for concern. Nevertheless, to subscribe to this story as though it is unquestionable truth is to view the world through a specific lens that, as with any device that shapes perception, brings a particular way of apprehending into being. As thinkers such as Butler (2009) and Honnig (1993) have argued, the framing of perception is a process of enclosure that bounds the field through a constitutive process of inclusion and exclusion. Insofar as this normative fiction is brought to bear on minds and bodies (though in the case of The Biology of Adversity and Resilience, it would be more accurate to say brains and bodies), whether through educational programmes or family supports and interventions, it contributes to scripting a future that potentially sustains the deepening inequalities that characterise the present. Otherwise put, The Biology of Adversity and Resilience generates a normative childhood that is imbricated in neoliberal norms to the extent that the ‘resilient’ child is primed to become a subject who can live with adversity (see Joseph, 2013; O’Malley, 2010). As will be discussed below in the sections following ‘From Philosophy to Science: Applied Experiments in Biosocial Plasticity’, this is something we have seen before, and the historical record serves as a cautionary tale of what can happen when normative fictions that derive their authority from science are translated into practices that target population groups at the coalface of inequality.

Mise-en-Scène: Charlie’s Story and The Biology of Adversity and Resilience

Shot in greyscale and produced by the Begin Before Birth Foundation, Charlie’s Story is a short video that opens with a close-up shot of a young man, unshaven and wearing a hoodie, standing on a footpath with a holdall on the ground beside his feet. ² As he takes a pull on a cigarette, we hear Charlie speak, though his words are not enunciated by the figure on the screen. It is as though Charlie is narrating his life from a distance, and his story is told in reverse, starting with where he is right now – 19 years old and fresh out of prison – before moving to the question of how he got here. Charlie’s part in telling his story is brief. Once he admits to being imprisoned for looting during ‘the riots’, a second voice takes over, explaining that Charlie has previous convictions for theft and is ‘known’ (to whom we are not told) for his aggressive behaviour. It takes only 30 seconds to evoke this stereotypical portrait of the young male offender, which then serves as a foil for the pedagogical purpose of the story: what if Charlie’s problems stretch all the way back to the womb? From this point forward, the viewer is tutored in the basics of the science informing the story, with the narrator explaining that Charlie’s life has been shaped by maternal stress during pregnancy and a lack of supportive relationships, leading to learning difficulties at school, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and truancy, and culminating in criminal behaviour. The punch line to this online resource is the message that ‘what happens in the womb can last a lifetime’.

Charlie’s Story is one example of how the science of early life adversity is publicly narrated, though not in fact representative of the field as a whole. One of the problems with this particular representation is that it invites mother blaming (Kenney and Müller, 2018; Richardson, 2015; Richardson et al., 2014; Ryan, 2021). Other versions of the story are less inclined to suggest a definitive causal relation between early life adversity and ‘negative outcomes’ such as criminal behaviour. A recent study by Müller and Kenney (2021), for example, uses the concept of ‘narrative choreography’ to demonstrate how the ‘epistemic authority’ of the science can be enrolled to facilitate restorative justice. Müller and Kenney are referring specifically to ACE Interface, a Georgia-based (US) initiative dedicated to ‘building self-healing communities’. ³ Claiming to be a spearhead ‘in the most important public health movement of our time – perhaps of all time’, ACE Interface offers training in the science of early life adversity, designed as a ‘Train the Master Trainer Programme’ ⁴ for community leaders and non-profit professionals, who ‘return to their regions equipped with training materials and are able to conduct their own trainings for local schools, agencies, businesses, and communities or anyone else who might be interested’ (Müller and Kenney, 2021: 1235).

These are very different representations and applications of the science of early life adversity, which invites the question of what, if anything, they have in common. What quilts the field together can be seen in the name of the above example from Müller and Kenney: ‘ACE’, derived from the CDC-Kaiser Adverse Childhood Experiences study, conducted between 1995 and 1997 (Felitti et al., 1998). The original study was based on seven categories of childhood exposure to abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. The list of categories has since been expanded to 10, and the study has been translated into a do-it-yourself quiz that can be accessed on numerous websites. To take the quiz is to arrive at an Adverse Childhood Experience score of 0 to 10, with the size of the number apparently an indicator of the magnitude of risk corresponding to health and behavioural problems later in life, including criminal behaviour, as cherry-picked in Charlie’s Story. It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of the ACE study, and I will have more to say about it below. Suffice for now to note that in practice it exhibits a problem identified by Bruer (1999) in his critical analysis of the initial phase of ‘the first three years’ movement, and more recently by researchers and associates from the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at Kent University in the United Kingdom (Macvarish, 2016; Macvarish et al., 2014), that is, the Adverse Childhood Experience instrument is often portrayed – and used – in ways that invite simplification and generalisation, with the result that individuals and families are expected to shoulder the burden of societal-structural problems – a point I return to later (see also Edwards et al., 2017; Winninghoff, 2020).

Something to consider given the current state of the field, as argued by Richardson (2017: 30, 48), is that the new biologies encapsulated by the science of early life adversity do not speak for themselves, and ‘the political imaginaries’ attached to the science ‘are plural and complex’ (see also Choudhury and Sanchez-Allred, 2014; Meloni, 2015). One attempt to engineer such a political imaginary can be seen in the efforts of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child (NSCDC), established in 2003, which has been curating and communicating the story of early life adversity in partnership with the FrameWorks Institute ⁵ (Shonkoff and Bales, 2011). As a first step towards staging a critical encounter with The Biology of Adversity and Resilience, I briefly examine how the science has been fashioned into a ‘core story’ through this partnership.

The science of early childhood development, which is the epistemic frame that anchors The Biology of Adversity and Resilience, is presented as a narrative structure in three parts: what develops, how development happens, and why development is ‘derailed’ (Shonkoff and Bales, 2011: 25–27). The railway metaphor is crucial given that it implies a normative developmental trajectory that is, to some extent, programmable, which marks the point where science and policy meet and intersect. This implicit telos evokes ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ developmental trajectories as contingent ‘outcomes’ that can be promoted or prevented through actions and decisions in the here and now.

Another metaphor of particular significance, corresponding to the question of why development is ‘derailed’, is ‘toxic stress’. ⁶ What exactly is toxic stress? This is how Shonkoff et al. (2021b: 2) present it in an article published in the Annual Review of Public Health:

Toxic stress [. . .] is the result of strong, frequent, or prolonged activation of stress response systems in the absence of the buffering protection of a supportive relationship. When these biological disruptions persist during sensitive periods of development (in the brain as well as in other biological systems) they can result in enduring structural changes and/or physiologic dysregulations that lead to problems in learning, behavior, and both physical and mental health.

The basic narrative structure of The Biology of Adversity and Resilience can be distilled from this quote. One part of the story communicates the problem of exposure to toxic stress and the increased risk of negative outcomes that await in the future for children exposed to ACEs. The other part of the story is derived from what Richardson (2017: 30) describes as ‘plasticity-affirming biologies’. The Biology of Adversity and Resilience frames this as cause for hope, because children can be ‘buffered’ against adversity as a way of building ‘resilience’ (more on this shortly). What should not be overlooked, however, is that there are no guarantees in terms of what this hope invested in biosocial plasticity will generate in the field of policy and practice. One possibility is that the epigenetic strand of the science unravels the kind of essentialist thinking that sustains racism, sexism, and transphobia. Another is that the science is recruited in establishing new forms of biological determinism, and a crucial factor in both scenarios is how the science is translated for popular consumption ⁷ (see Mansfield, 2012; Meloni, 2015; Waggoner and Uller, 2015). Importantly, the second scenario need not stem from wilful intention or design, and might well follow the logic of what Foucault (1998: 94–95) once described as non-subjective intentionality, meaning apparatuses of power/knowledge that are constituted through a diffuse process that exceeds authorial control.

An example of how The Biology of Adversity and Resilience is communicated through the metaphor of ‘toxic stress’ is the 2016 KPJR film Resilience: The Biology of Stress and the Science of Hope. Jack Shonkoff, who is Chair of the NSCDC as mentioned above, appears in the film offering his expert opinion:

the child may not remember, but the body remembers [. . .] we have a whole new body of knowledge now, that could open up what we have [. . .] been seeing as intractable unsolvable problems [. . .] a defeatist attitude is completely disconnected from what twenty-first century science is telling us, and we should be going after that like a bear. ⁸

What does it mean to ‘go after that like a bear’? Is this evidence-based science in action or a passionate appeal to get behind the movement attached to the science? There is a risk here of conviction exceeding the constraints of evidence and of The Biology of Adversity and Resilience providing a warrant for interventions based more on belief than the scientific ideal of objectivity (see Scull, 2022). If that seems unduly speculative, then it should at least be noted that the level of certainty expressed in the above quote is not reflected in the primary literature, where Shonkoff and colleagues present the central scientific claims to peers as requiring ‘further elucidation’ and awaiting ‘empirical validation’ (Shonkoff, 2010: 359–360; Shonkoff et al., 2021a: 3, 2021b: 3).

As the science is translated into a normative fiction, tentative steps towards declarations concerning what we might be able to derive from the findings, or what this might mean in practical terms, give way to statements of certainty, culminating in a story of heroic efforts to prevent children from moving inexorably towards a dismal future. It is the metaphor of ‘toxic stress’ that does the heavy lifting (see Singh, 2012: 311–312), giving the complexity of ACEs a catchy name that can travel light and without the baggage of excessive detail. This can be seen in the press kit for Resilience, which includes a blurb headlined in capitals with Shonkoff’s words:

THE CHILD MAY NOT REMEMBER, BUT THE BODY REMEMBERS.

Researchers have recently discovered a dangerous biological syndrome caused by abuse and neglect during childhood. As the new documentary Resilience reveals, toxic stress can trigger hormones that wreak havoc on the brains and bodies of children, putting them at a greater risk for disease, homelessness, prison time, and early death. While the broader impacts of poverty worsen the risk, no segment of society is immune. Resilience, however, also chronicles the dawn of a movement that is determined to fight back. Trailblazers in pediatrics, education, and social welfare are using cutting-edge science and field-tested therapies to protect children from the insidious effects of toxic stress – and the dark legacy of a childhood that no child would choose. ⁹

The headline reads like a somatic version of the Freudian unconscious, with the biological effects of trauma bypassing the conscious mind as these act upon the development of brains and bodies marked by ‘toxic stress’ (see Leys, 2010). Unlike the talking cure of psychoanalysis, however, this effectively silences children and opens the way for suitably qualified adults to act in their name and on their behalf (see Scull, 2022: 378). In addition, reading like an appendix to the main message is the line that acknowledges ‘the broader impacts of poverty’. This sideways glance into the broader social context notwithstanding, the focus remains localised in the child’s living space, encompassing the family and extending to the surrounding environment of community/neighbourhood.

Looking beyond this specific example, it must be acknowledged that The Biology of Adversity and Resilience does – and increasingly – recognise the significance of racism, poverty, and disadvantage (Boyce et al., 2021; Shonkoff et al., 2021a, 2021b), and yet this remains a story centred on building resilience at the level of individuals, families, and communities. What then is ‘resilience’ according to The Biology of Adversity and Resilience? Resilience is defined by the NSCDC as an adaptive response that enables children to ‘avoid deleterious behavioural and physiological changes’ as a result of experiencing acute stress, trauma, and chronic adversity (NSCDC, 2015: 1). The question of whether resilience is innate or acquired is the focus of (former member of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child) W. Thomas Boyce’s (2019: 4) book titled The Orchid and the Dandelion, the central thesis of which is that

Most of our children can, like dandelions, thrive in all but the harshest [. . .] circumstances, but a minority of others, like orchids, either blossom beautifully or wane disappointingly, depending upon how we tend and spare and care for them.

In short, although there is significant variation from child to child, resilience is not entirely innate and is thus a biosocial process of adaptation shaped by ‘the experiences we provide for children’ (NSCDC, 2019: 1, emphasis added). The experiential dimension is the significance of ‘buffering’, which looks to ‘discoveries in molecular biology, genomics and epigenetics’ to explain how supportive relationships can ‘scaffold’ and protect children from ‘developmental disruption’ caused by adversity (NSCDC, 2015: 1). I propose to take critical distance from this scaffolding conception of buffering in the next section. Before commencing that task, I end this section by reprising The Biology of Adversity and Resilience as a way of posing a question.

The Biology of Adversity and Resilience is a story of adversity derailing the ‘healthy’ (read as normal) development of children, while the normative (and normalising) strand tells us that children should be buffered (protected and supported), especially during the early years. Irrespective of the neurobiological rationale underpinning this story, it is hard to imagine anyone disagreeing with its basic tenets, whether parents, teachers, social workers, or health professionals. The argument is compelling, but let us not overlook the broader context or neglect the relevance of Foucault’s thoughts on intentionality. The Biology of Adversity and Resilience is a story of programmable plasticity embodied in childhood, and it has emerged within a more encompassing political imaginary that could well shape the field of practice in ways that the authors of this normative fiction neither desire nor intend. Might it be the case that the normative childhood fashioned from the science of early life adversity, which is swaddled by buffering with a view to nurturing resilience, prefigures a future that is in step with the neoliberal present? By this, I mean a social model not merely tensioned by the relation between political equality and economic inequality, which is a long-standing feature of liberal democracy (Marshall, 1992), but one that makes it incumbent on more and more people to endure the stress of precarity (see Dikeç, 2017; Standing, 2011). Moreover, this is a situation where public policy is being informed by the behavioural sciences and the ‘libertarian paternalist’ technique of ‘choice architecture’, which assumes that people struggling to cope rely on heuristic short-cuts and herd mentality as the basis of action, and therefore need to be ‘nudged’ in the direction of optimal choices as a means of reducing the cost of social supports (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008; Whitehead et al., 2018). To the extent that this circumvents dialogue while attempting to programme behaviour, nudge theory can be framed as the adult version of The Biology of Adversity and Resilience. With a view to exploring what is at stake here, the next section looks to the past as a way of taking up a critical vantage point on the science of early life adversity.

From Philosophy to Science: Applied Experiments in Biosocial Plasticity

This section begins with a brief reflection on genealogy as a method of critical inquiry, which arguably cannot escape the politics of decision, by which I mean the decision to make an insertion into the archive and to commence the process of inquiry from ‘here’ as opposed to ‘there’. It could be contended that this is a flaw in the method – that it invites subjective preference and dodges the rigour of other tried and tested methods in the social sciences. I can offer no ironclad defence against this criticism other than to propose that it is for the reader to judge whether the genealogy presented below succeeds in illuminating the present by providing a critical perspective on The Biology of Adversity and Resilience. There are several genealogical studies examining the biopolitics of childhood in the existing literature which are informed by Foucault’s writings, some looking to Rousseau and Locke as points of departure (Faulkner, 2011; Nadesan, 2010; Ryan, 2020; Smith, 2014). If this approach seems overly Eurocentric and ‘modernist’, then there are other ways of enacting the genealogical decision, such as Meloni’s (2019) Impressionable Biologies. Meloni (2019: 53–58) takes the reader back to the ancient Hellenic and Roman worlds, ¹⁰ and to forms of knowledge such as the ‘doctrine of maternal impressions’, the core assumption of which was that what a woman saw and experienced during pregnancy was impressed upon her foetus much like a stylus was then used to write on a wax tablet. This is a rich vein to tap in terms of exploring the issue of mother blaming as mentioned above (see Ryan, 2021), but there is no space here to do more than acknowledge the fecundity of this type of expansive genealogy.

For the purpose of the present discussion, and partly for reasons of textual limitations (this is an article and not a monograph), the focus is historically and geographically narrower than Meloni’s or what one reviewer of this article described as a partial account of ‘a larger archipelago of endeavours to govern malleable bodies and brains’. As noted in the introduction, the aim is to trouble a normative fiction derived from the science of early life adversity, and to this end focuses on how biosocial plasticity as embodied in childhood intersects with the emergence of liberal governmentality. This brings me back to the issue of genealogical decision. My point of departure is someone who, as noted already, is among the more Eurocentric and ‘modernist’ reference points in the literature on childhood, John Locke. Locke was by no means the first to perceive childhood as a malleable substance with political significance. In Northern Europe during the 1520s, for example, Erasmus wrote in his advice to fathers – with clear echoes of Plato’s Republic (see Archard, 1993: 178–183) – that ‘the child that nature has given you is nothing but a shapeless lump, but the material is still pliable, capable of assuming any form’ (in Cunningham, 2005: 43). Locke’s notion of childhood as a blank sheet of paper was hardly original, although – notwithstanding Erasmus’ thoughts on childhood as wax to be moulded while still soft – the prevailing views on biosocial plasticity were more likely to be derived from horticulture than from writing, as in soil to be tended, weeds to be plucked, and young shoots to be trained so that they would grow in the desired direction ¹¹ (Mintz, 2018). It is not that Locke was saying something radically new. Nevertheless, the perception of the young human as a resource to be harnessed to the goal of programming the future would begin to take on a new urgency in the wake of what would be known (retrospectively) as the Age of Reason and in the context of accelerating urbanisation and industrialisation. Otherwise put, Locke’s views on education coincide with an emergent conception of childhood that – as documented by Ariès (1962: 133, 264) – undertakes the ‘careful, gradual conditioning’ of the child with a view to cultivating ‘disciplined, rational manners’ in the future adult. In what follows, I track this from the field of philosophy to applied experiments in biosocial plasticity during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Biosocial Plasticity

Locke begins his Some Thoughts Concerning Education by explaining to the reader that

The little, or almost insensible, impressions on our tender infancies have very important and lasting consequences; and there it is, as in the fountains of some rivers, where a gentle application of the hand turns the flexible waters into channels, that make them take quite contrary courses; and by this little direction, given them at first, in the source, they receive different tendencies, and arrive at last at very remote and distant places [. . .] I imagine the minds of children, as easily turned, this or that way, as water itself [. . .] and though this be the principle part, and our main care should be about the inside, yet the clay cottage [of the body] is not to be neglected. (Locke, 2007 [1693]: 25–26)

There are three key words in this quote that merit close attention. First is ‘impressions’, relating to Locke’s (2017 [1689]) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. This is where he sets out his well-known ‘tabula rasa’ argument. Although Locke did not actually use that phrase, he was arguing against the notion of innate ideas and principles. The second and third key words are the first-person ‘I’ and ‘imagine’. Locke stakes out a claim to truth which is founded on an analogy between the fluidity of water which can be channelled and the plasticity of childhood – a thought that is grasped by an imagined synonymy that he conjures from his own mind (I imagine . . .), before submitting this to the reader as a shared normative concern (. . . our main care should be . . .). This would prove to be a compelling story, and once in circulation, was readily available for interpretation and transformation into something more substantial: pedagogical techniques that aim not only to impress ‘the minds of children’ but also to condition the ‘clay cottage’ of the body.

To follow Foucault’s (2007) work on governmentality, childhood is among the ways that ‘mentalities’ are organised into practical and technical endeavour. Locke’s (2017 [1689]) thoughts on education complement his Two Treatises of Government, where he presents his theory of the social contract. If, continuing on from the quote above, this philosophical tradition is also treated as an exercise of the imagination, then the story it tells is one of a passage from a fictional ‘state of nature’. Setting aside important differences among the best known representatives of this tradition (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau), the significance of the imagined transition is at least threefold: it depicts the triumph of reason over unrestrained passions and impulses; it marks the emergence of the properly human from a pre-political existence; and it conveys the possibility of remaking the world as it ought to be. All of this would be brought to bear on the plasticity of childhood. In short, childhood bridges the fictional state of nature and the normative fiction of the social contract, and in so doing gives substance to a biosocial mode of power tasked with programming the future (Ryan, 2020: 10–23).

In the above reflection can be glimpsed the rudiments of an apparatus of power/knowledge that would gradually acquire practical form. In what follows, I present a partial genealogy of this apparatus by following a thread that connects the double-fiction noted above (state of nature and social contract) to the science of childhood that emerged in the wake of Lamarckian and Darwinian theories of evolution. This thread comprises several strands that weave ‘animal/human’, ‘savage/civilised’, ‘impulse/reason’, and ‘instinct/intellect’ into what I have referred to as normative fiction. These dramatic dualities are simultaneously social-spatial relations and developmental trajectories, the contemporary correlate of which is ‘adversity/buffering/resilience’.

An example of the kind of practice I am referring to is Robert Owen’s Institute for the Formation of Character at New Lanark in Scotland, which was one of many novel pedagogical techniques emerging at that time (Stewart and McCann, 1967). Officially opened in January 1816, this was an applied experiment in engineering a ‘new society’ (in Owen’s words); in effect a prototype for a future society to be the founded on the principles of human happiness and cooperation, and intended to rectify the deficiencies of competitive self-interest ‘engendered by old society’ (Owen, 1991: 139, 141). For Owen (1991: 72), there was no immovable obstacle to fashioning a society without crime, without poverty, and conducive to the promotion of health and happiness. What stood in the way was merely ignorance and errors ‘impressed on the minds of the present generation by its predecessors’, and the greatest error of all was the belief that ‘individuals form their own characters’ (Owen, 1991: 49). New Lanark would correct this situation by ‘moulding’ the ‘universally plastic’ quality of ‘human nature’ (Owen, 1991: 32, 52).

New Lanark was not merely about creating the environmental conditions that would generate a productive and harmonious moral order as perceived by its architect (Owen); it was also about producing a subject that embodies that order in thought, feeling, and action. In this micro-utopian experiment in character formation is a technique that would be augmented by re-formatory education, which is what I turn to now, focusing on the work of Mary Carpenter in mid-19th century Britain.

The Penal Reformatory School as a Moral Hospital

Mary Carpenter found her way to reformatory education via the ragged school movement, establishing several such schools during the 1840s and 1850s, before taking an interest in prison reform (Gehring and Bowers, 2003). Carpenter has been described as ‘one of the century’s busiest platform speakers’, regularly reading papers before the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, and serving as expert witness to two parliamentary inquiries on juvenile delinquency (Schroeder, 2008: 150). Of interest to the present discussion is not her biography however, but how she figured the delinquent child with a view to capturing the public imagination.

In her 1851 book Reformatory Schools, Carpenter called attention to ‘the enormity and amount of juvenile depravity’, presenting statistical evidence of its ‘appalling progress’ which, she claimed, was fast becoming ‘the daily experience of our great cities’ (Carpenter, 1851: v). In terms of what was to be done to reverse the trend, Carpenter tapped into experiments in reformatory education in France, Germany, and Scotland. The Mettrai agricultural colony near Tours was the most frequently invoked model at that time (see Foucault, 1977), but the Rauhe Haus in Hamburg and the Industrial Feeding School in Aberdeen were also garnering attention among social reformers determined to ‘rescue’ children.

As for the practical task of winning support for the introduction of what Carpenter described as ‘penal reformatory schools’ in Britain (Carpenter, 1851: 311), there is a key passage in her Juvenile Delinquents (Carpenter, 1853) where she uses an ‘analogy’ between ‘physical disease’ and ‘moral disease’ to present her case that delinquency requires a ‘moral hospital’. If the penal reformatory school was perceived in this way, she reasons, then children who are ‘perishing’ due to parental ‘neglect’, and thus ‘dangerous to society’, could be understood as undergoing treatment at the hands of a ‘physician of souls’ (Carpenter, 1853: 15–16). The analogy is borrowed from a Draft Report on the Principles of Punishment, prepared by Matthew Davenport Hill, the Recorder of Birmingham (Hill, 1847), who was a personal acquaintance of Carpenter. The mode of treatment outlined in this text was in turn grafted to Carpenter’s theory of delinquency, derived in large part from her brother William’s (Carpenter, 1842) Principles of Human Physiology. ¹²

Carpenter’s analogy is an indication of how moral treatment in the field of mental medicine, pioneered by Phillipe Pinel at the Bicêtre hospital in Paris, was being extended to the field of penology at that time (see Foucault, 1965, 1977). The two texts noted above span legal and medical discourse, and the incorporation of both into a theory of delinquency and its treatment provided the key ingredients for a story that depicts a mission to subdue and tame an ‘animal spirit’ guided by ‘automatic impulses’:

. . . the childhood of the ‘perishing and dangerous classes’ exhibits features in every respect the reverse of those [. . .] described by the physiologist and the divine. The muscular powers, the organs of locomotion, are prematurely developed, and the child discovers in himself the capability as well as the necessity of taking an active and independent part in the world around him; the will early acquires an unnatural strength from being unchecked and unguided by authority or reason: and all these are far in advance of the ‘governing faculty of the mind’, for the intellectual powers have been exercised only in subservience to the gratification of animal desires. (Carpenter, 1853: 296–297, original emphasis)

The ‘reverse’ childhood described above is an animal in the guise of a human, and an adult in the body of a child, suggesting that the order of things ordained by God and ascertained by Reason has been inverted so that the state of nature is present in the midst of civilised society. Fusing religious convictions to the authority of medical science, the scene is thus set for legally circumscribed interventions aimed at governing plasticity as embodied in childhood.

Reformatory education is nature/nurture right the way through – the deleterious effects of parental neglect and morally corrupting circumstances (now known as ACEs) were to be counteracted by a mode of discipline targeting an unrestrained will and animal desires. In Carpenter’s (1853: 388) words, reformatory education would intervene to ‘induce in [the child] that true mastery over himself, which consists in such a regulation of his emotions and propensities, that his course of duty becomes the spontaneous expression of his own higher nature’. ¹³ As for the lever that was to enlist the child in the work of his or her own reformation, this was to be orchestrated through ‘love’ (Carpenter, 1853: 117, 162, 282).

It is worth making a comparison to Rousseau here, in that this discourse of delinquency partitions childhood by separating those who must, in the words of Rousseau (1994: 58), be ‘forced to be free’, to be accomplished by sequestering the children of the ‘perishing and dangerous classes’ (Carpenter, 1851) in residential schools coded as moral hospitals. What is crucially important to recognise here is that this way of figuring delinquency, which transforms morality into a technical problem that spans the school, the prison, and the hospital, is also a way of generating a normative childhood.

An additional point concerns the logic of practice, which exhibits features comparable to New Lanark. The thinking behind the penal reformatory school was translated into the day-to-day running of these institutions through the provision of industrial training, which was to equip poor children with the skills required to slot them into their designated place in the extant social order. Good intentions notwithstanding, reformatory education sustains the very environmental conditions that ensure a steady supply of children in need of rescuing.

By the end of the 19th century, reformatory education was incorporated into a more extensive system of child protection and juvenile justice (see Donzelot, 1979; Rose, 1990). The basic assumptions concerning the causes of criminal behaviour and the ameliorating potential of discipline and training were broadly compatible with the growing significance of Lamarckian theories of evolution, sometimes described as ‘soft’ inheritance, meaning the transmission of characteristics acquired through use and disuse. However, hard-hereditarianism was also on the march, such as Cesare Lombroso’s theory of ‘atavism’ – the idea that the criminal is a biological ‘throwback’ to an earlier savage and animalistic evolutionary stage (Lombroso, 2006 [1876]). An important marker in this history, as will be briefly discussed below, is August Weismann’s theory of the continuity of germ plasm. While this posed a significant challenge to soft inheritance, Lamarckism persisted (Gould, 1977), and in contrast to the ‘blind chance’ of Darwinian natural selection (Darwin, 1981 [1871]: 396), it afforded scope for biosocial experiments seeking to align organic evolution to moral progress (Meloni, 2016).

Recapitulation Theory and the Supervised Playground: Transforming the ‘Gang’ into a ‘Team’

Comparable to Britain as discussed above, and against the backdrop of growing concerns about moral decline, symptoms of which were identified as the proliferation of saloons, brothels, pool halls, and juvenile gangs (Boyer, 1992), progressive era America was characterised by novel practices aimed at bringing the urban poor under reformative influences. The settlement house movement, pioneered by activists such as Jane Addams, is one well-known attempt to orchestrate moral uplift through environmental reforms (Cavallo, 1981). Other innovations looked to biology and psychology as a means of staging interventions, including the Playground Association of America. Established in 1906, the Playground Association of America brought together a constellation of experiments originating in the larger cities in the United States since the 1880s and did so with the objective of organising a national system of supervised playgrounds under the management of professional administrators (Knapp and Hartsoe, 1979). As with the previous section, the focus here is not the history of the movement but the thinking behind the technique of supervised play and the way this harnesses science to a story of biosocial plasticity. The principle actors were Luther Gulick and Joseph Lee, both of whom served as presidents to the Playground Association of America, and among the sources they incorporated into their theory of play, two in particular stand out: G. Stanley Hall’s (1904) Adolescence and Karl Groos’ (1898) The Play of Animals.

A guiding assumption in this body of work, as articulated by Hall (1904: 57–58), is that the earlier stages of child development are ‘conformable to Weismannism’, while ‘the latter part of each individual life is more characterized by the evolution of acquired qualities’. What Hall was essentially saying – or rather doing – here was to graft aspects of Darwinism and Lamarckism together, and to this end incorporated Ernst Haeckel’s biogenetic law – the idea that ontogeny (embryological development in the individual organism) recapitulates phylogeny (the evolutionary ancestry of the species) (Gould, 1977: 82). August Weissman vehemently opposed Lamarckism, proclaiming the all-sufficiency of natural selection and explaining inheritance through his germ plasm theory (Bowler, 2003: 253–256). Among his opponents was Herbert Spencer, often portrayed as a staunch Darwinian, yet in fact a strong supporter of Lamarckism. In the midst of these disputes was the age-old riddle of nature versus nurture. What if it was both, and what if learned habits could become inherited instincts (Bowler, 2003: 289; Meloni, 2016: 2)? For the would-be engineers of the future, this held out the promise of bringing human evolution under conscious control.

For Hall (1904: 58), the relationship between germ plasm and ‘epigenetic elements’, which ‘are the effects of use [that] increase from birth onwards’, confirmed ‘what Locke inaugurated concerning innate ideas’. The balance thus tilts towards plasticity, and this – for Hall and the playground activists alike – was the significance of childhood in general and adolescence in particular. The central axiom of Hall’s theory is the claim that adolescence marks the point where accelerating environmental change – meaning urbanisation and industrialisation – surpasses inherited ‘instincts’ (Gulick, 1898, 1920; Lee, 1915). Within the frame of Hall’s recapitulation theory, the relationship between instincts, will, and intellect is hierarchical, mapping onto the notion of evolutionary ‘ascent’. For Groos, the play instinct performed a crucial function in preparing the child for adulthood. In the more general sense, instincts were understood to be inherited through the germ plasm, which was particularly insistent during the stage of ‘plastic infancy’ (Lee, 1915: 10). Only gradually did ‘the intellect’ acquire the strength to bring primitive impulses under control; hence, in terms of preventing ‘arrest’ in the child’s development and thereby also evolutionary ‘reversion’, it was crucial to provide the developing child with ‘protection, physical care, moral and intellectual guidance’ (Hall, 1904: 47).

The key to explaining and preventing crime (and by extension, moral decline) was nestled within the axiomatic supposition that the developing child recapitulates human evolution. As the ‘augmentation of instincts’ said to correspond to the adolescent stage of childhood, delinquency was simply ‘normal’ (Hall, 1904: 45). Nevertheless, according to Hall (1904: 45, 338–340), harsh conditions such as homelessness and want of adequate nutrition were the cause of children becoming ‘stuck’ in, or even ‘reverting’ to, a stage of evolution equivalent to ‘savage life’, which was the source of ‘criminality’. The problem of delinquency was thus viewed through a biosocial lens. In biological terms, delinquency was a normal phase of human development, but if left unchecked, it posed an imminent threat to social order as well as the future of the ‘race’ (see Gould, 1977: 121).

As noted above, it was taken as a given that novel environmental pressures were outpacing evolved adaptation in humans. Consequently, evolution could no longer be left to natural selection but was to be taken in hand by the architects and custodians of the future – and here we encounter eugenics in its environmental modality. This was the purpose of the supervised playground as a biosocial technology.

Lee (1915: 7, 29) (from Groos) fills out the detail of this way of orchestrating biosocial power by distinguishing the ‘ready-made’ non-human animal from the ‘play-built’ human animal. His point is that the play-built animal is neither ‘finished’ nor fully determined by the play instincts. In his own words, ‘nature’s decree as given in the play instincts is never in completed form . . . It is here that the great function of play comes in’ (Lee, 1915: 24). What this amounted to in practical terms was the idea that evolutionary adaptation could be engineered, and in a crucial remark that reveals much about the thinking at work here, Lee (1915: 25) adds that ‘The function of play in growth is . . . to realise the potential body, and to supplement the impulses which the major instincts give in general terms by habits and reflexes, making them efficient to specific ends’. What then is this ‘potential body’ that awaits to be actualised, and what are the ‘specific ends’ that summon this potentiality into being?

Earlier I suggested that the normative fictions examined in this article are replete with dramatic dualities such as savage/civilised, which are simultaneously social-spatial relations and developmental trajectories. In the story of recapitulation scripted by the Playground Association of America, the savage/civilised duality is transposed onto a contrast between delinquency – figured as a quasi-feral juvenile ‘gang’ – and its opposite in the form of a ‘team’ (Gulick, 1920: 89–92; Lee, 1915: 335–359). The latter represents a rule-governed mode of play that combines loyalty and rivalry, cooperation and competition, thus preparing children for life in a society tensioned between the inequalities generated by a capitalist economy and the formal equality of democratic citizenship. By adapting children to this unique (in evolutionary terms) environment, the Playground Association of America was in the business of fabricating a subject – figured as a team player – corresponding to social relations and conditions sustained by a normative fiction that anchors itself in the authority of science. Setting aside the racist and racialising assumptions of the science (savage/civilised), there are nevertheless features of this story that – as with the penal reformatory school – exhibit a family resemble with The Biology of Adversity and Resilience. Put simply, the arc connecting present to past is not merely the biosocial notion of programmable plasticity embodied in childhood; it is also the ongoing quest to adapt children living with adversity to the prevailing social conditions.

Concluding Reflection

No, it was not good to explain too much to the children . . . but the children already knew. . .Even before they had the language, they sensed the world was against them. . .The young were angry, disappointed, and in open rebellion. (Saidiya Hartman, 2019: 107)

By way of concluding, I want to revisit a point touched on earlier and reflect briefly on what is – in historical terms – a novel counterweight to the claim that ‘the child may not remember, but the body remembers’: children’s rights. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC, 1989) – which is the most widely ratified treaty on children’s rights (with the notable exception of the United States ¹⁴ ) – recognises the right of children to have a say in the decisions affecting their lives. In addition to ‘the right to express [their] views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child’ (Article 12.1), Article 13.1 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates that

The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.

An interesting juxtaposition thus appears. On the one hand is the rights-based focus on the voice and agency of children. On the other hand is a trend emerging in the field of NEAR science that silences children, not wilfully through censorship, but by prioritising a phase of the life-cycle (‘what happens in the womb can last a lifetime’) which is anterior to the time when children can express their thoughts through ‘language’ – whether orally or otherwise. If children cannot speak on their own behalf (and of course unborn children and babies cannot communicate in the register of logos), then someone else must do so on their behalf, and who better than the experts and ‘trailblazers’ equipped with the latest scientific knowledge? In this way, The Biology of Adversity and Resilience assumes authority by scripting a normative fiction that in turn provides a mandate for policy interventions that – potentially if not always actually – bypass the voice and views of those subject to whatever kind of ‘help’ is to be afforded in building ‘resilience’.

The thinking behind the movements discussed in this article – The Biology of Adversity and Resilience among them – tells a story of efforts to produce a future populated by healthy, industrious, and law-abiding citizens. It is as though the envisioned future is not also home to the inequalities that inhabit the present, many of which are a legacy of the past (see Hartman, 2019). To confront the causes as well as the consequences of adversity and inequality, a step in the right direction would be to actualise rather than neutralise the radical promise of children’s rights. If there is indeed a future to be scripted, then surely this necessitates a trans-generational dialogue whereby the science of early life adversity listens to and learns from those it claims to represent.