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Animal Magnetism and Curriculum History

BERNADETTE BAKER University of Wisconsin Madison, WI, USA

ABSTRACT
This article elaborates the impact that crises of authority provoked by animal magnetism, mesmerism, and hypnosis in the 19th century had for eld formation in American education. Four layers of analysis elucidate how curriculum historys repetitive focus on public school policy and classroom practice became possible. First, the article surveys external conditions of possibility for the enactment of compulsory public schooling. Second, internal conditions of possibility for the formation of educational objects (e.g., types of children) are documented via the processes of diffrance that were generated from within the experiences of connement. Third, the article maps how these were interpenetrated by animal magnetic debates that were lustered and planished in educations emerging eld, including impact upon behavior management practices, the contouring of expertise and authority, the role of Will in intelligence testing and child development theories, and the redenition of public and private. Last, the article examines implications for curriculum history, whether policy- or practice-oriented, especially around the question of inuence, the theorization of child mind, and philosophies of Being.

Curriculum histories published in the United States have inadvertently demonstrated how rewriting history in a democracy frequently seems to involve not the securing of assent, but the continuous organization of dissent. The recent exchange in Curriculum Inquiry regarding discontinuity and lineage captures well this tendency (Hlebowitsh, 2005a, 2005b; Westbury, 2005; Wright, 2005). As an organizational template, the limitations of a conict/consensus binary have already been questioned by leading curriculum historians in the eld who have departed from this interpretive framework in several respects. As Barry Franklin (2006) has observed,
Looking at the period after 1950 and paying attention to curriculum practice offers us a different picture of the history of the curriculum. There were clearly conicts among reformers of the day regarding such issues as the role of school subjects in the curriculum and the degree to which the curriculum should address the personal needs of youth. But there was also a large degree of commonality among what
2007 by The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto. Curriculum Inquiry 37:2 (2007) Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK

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seemed to be very different curricular orientations when those viewpoints were placed in the schools. In part, this was the result of the fact that efforts to put curriculum policies into effect in real school settings brought into play an array of mediating factors that acted to attenuate their differences.

Departing, then, from a conict/consensus template and its bedfellow, a struggle/submission framework, in policy- and practice-oriented curriculum histories opens onto new possibilities for rethinking the past. This article takes up the spirit of Franklins questioning in a different temporal direction to elaborate how a series of debates that preceded educations formalization in the academy helped to shape the elds domain at the turn of the 20th century and to inhabit the common sense of classroom practice, the sciences of consent and dissent, and the sciences of appearance. Specically, the debates attended to are those that erupted around the advent of animal magnetism, mesmerism, and hypnosis. The claim here is not that such debates constitute a new foundation for curriculum historical work or that there is an essence to such practices that now requires them to be centered over and above other approaches. More modestly, such debates acted directly and indirectly as incitement to discourse in ways that interpenetrated educations eld formation and that eventually helped shape the possibility for curriculum history. Animal magnetism, mesmerism, and hypnosis, reemerging in anglophone literature of the mid-19th-century decades and formalizing at the turn of the 20th century, are challenging to unpack given the complexity, profundity, and breadth of issues to which they were and still are in many instances tied. This includes quite notably at the time instability in discourses of vision, equivocation around the physiology of the eye, consideration of perception as something beyond the sensory, and argument over what constitutes the material, the spiritual, the mental, and the bodily. A compelling vignette drawn from an ofcial 19th-century investigation into animal magnetism is illustrative of such issues. In Paris in 1831, a Report of the Experiments on Animal Magnetism was presented by a committee of the medical section of the French Royal Academy of Sciences. Described in that report were tests conducted on one Pierre Cazot, a 20-year-old hatmaker described as a family man with character of high repute, a reliable worker, born of an epileptic mother and subjected for 10 years to ts which occurred ve or six times a week. Cazot was admitted into a Parisian hospital at the beginning of August 1827. While there, he was subjected to what was called synonymously animal magnetism or mesmerism. It appeared to induce a particular state now associated with hypnosis. Cazots reported ability to enunciate the exact date, time, and severity of his next t whilst in a somnambulic state was under question and observation. After being put into the proper condition, Cazot was asked to forecast his next t. On August 24, the committee recorded Cazots portrayal of his next two attacks.

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Nothing could awaken him [out of a somnambulic state]. We pressed him with questions. How long will your ts continue? For a yearDo you know whether they will follow close upon each other? NoWill you have any this month? I shall have one on Monday the 27th at twenty minutes from three oclockWill they be severe? Not half so severe as the one I had last.Upon what other day will you have another attack? After exhibiting some symptoms of impatience, he answered: Fifteen days hence, i.e. on the 7th of September.At what hour? At ten minutes before six in the morning. (Colquhoun, 1831/33, p. 171)

After being told by Cazots doctor that the rst t occurred as scheduled, the committee dutifully gathered just before six in the morning on September 7, 1827, to see if he would have the second, reporting:
In order to witness the second t, your committee met, at a quarter before six of the morning of the 7th of September, in the Salle St Michel of the hospital de la Charit. There we learnt that, upon the previous evening at eight oclock, Cazot has been seized with a pain in his head which had tormented him all night; that this pain had caused the sensation of ringing of bells, and that he had experienced shooting pains in the ears. At ten minutes to six, we witnessed the epileptic t, characterized by rigidity and contraction of the limbs, the repeated projection and jerking back of the head, the arched curvature of the body backwards, the convulsive closing of the eyelids, the retraction of the ball of the eye towards the upper part of the orbit . . . etc. (Colquhoun, 1831/33, p. 173)

Cazot was called upon repeatedly for nearly a year to project and fulll such prophecies, even after describing what could be done to prevent his next attack. The committee concluded that upon coming out of somnambulism, Cazot had no memory of the dates he named or his actual ts either.1 As proof, they tried to trick him by telling his doctor a wrong date. They wanted to see whether anyone was cheating by informing Cazot in advance when to turn on such massive convulsions for all and sundry to gather around and describe. Whether theorized today as suggestibility, imagination, intuition, precognition, or self-fullling prophesy, the committee reported that Cazot always had his ts right on timeexcept for one. After being kicked by a horse the following May, Cazot fell, hitting his head on the wheel of the wagon and dying from the blow. His prediction of his largest t ever in the upcoming August could subsequently not be veried. In the nal report, the committee theorized how he could miss foreseeing his death but not his ts. On the basis of this and other experiments, the Report subtly contested two earlier investigations from 1784, which had dismissed animal magnetism as a charlatan practice. Animal magnetism was a theory of a universal uid that linked all planetary, solar, animate, and inanimate things. Popularized via the physician Frantz Anton Mesmer in the 1780s, it provided a monistic depiction and correction of health problems: one uid, one disease, one cure. Under this etiology of the universe, the healer, rather than a mineral magnet, mobilized and concentrated existing uid

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(conceptualized roughly as energy rather than as wet) to get rid of whatever was blocking the uids travel through an object, thereby restoring harmony. The blockages were to be removed through making passes, movements of the hands over or on the body of a reclining patient. The reports of the 1780s put the controversial matter to rest or so it seemed, stating outright that a universal uid did not exist. These early ofcial investigations, headed in one case by Benjamin Franklin, did note that inexplicable effects were being produced in patients undergoing the mesmeric passes. In embarrassed and incredulous tones, the new report submitted in 1831 documents more diverse phenomena than simply Cazots performance, which the committee states it cannot and chooses not to explain and which it recommends for further investigation to the Royal Academy. It overtly refused to enter in upon the question of whether there really was a universal uid and repeatedly remind the academy of its initial mistrust and skepticism around such practices, reminding members also of its high moral standing, its experience with clinical procedures, and its very genuine concern for integrity at every stage. In the early 1830s, the report was translated into English, relaunching animal magnetism onto the eld of popular culture and scholarly debate, the distinction still somewhat latent, 60 years after it had rst fascinated continental Europeans and Scandinavians. In anglophone publications of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, mesmeric practices would come to notice, being wound into and out of existing belief systems in ways that held enormous implication for the formation of scientic elds and conditions of truth-production. This article suggests that century-long debates over the validity of animal magnetism, mesmerism, and hypnosis directly and indirectly shaped educations domain as a eld, infused the production of educational objects (e.g., labeling types of children such as special, delinquent, normal, and gifted), and interpenetrated the enactment and spread of compulsory attendance legislation and mental measurement. That is, the debates played an integral yet currently understudied part in the formation of pedagogical ideas-practices, which have become a central focus of curriculum history.2 Such debates eventually helped reorient the inscription of special and delinquent children from a moral structuralism framed by appeals to pauperism and poverty to a neurophysiological functionalism framed by appeals to genetico-national morbidity and problems of consciousness, volition, and suggestibility. In the process, the child genius is launched out of the tree of insanity and into an oppositional position in the eld. Amid the shift, compulsory public school attendance is enforced for some youth, while academic elds work out their respective and messy domains of obligation, roughly psychology to habit and belief; medicine to diagnosis and correction; education to imitation and emulation; and parapsychology to extraordinary phenomena and psychic energy.

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In the United States, practices of phrenomesmerism constitute a crossover point in these shifting inscriptions, a mid-century moment in which faith-based initiatives, scientic methods, and antireligious spiritualisms were not distinct and where demarcations between this-worldly and otherworldly and spirit and esh were up for grabs. The pivotal role of animal magnetic debates in inciting such crises of authority have been attended to in histories of anthropology (Stocking, 1986; Wallace, 1983), law (Laurence & Perry, 1988), literary criticism (Mills, 2006; Richardson, 2001), medicine (Pattie, 1994; Thornton, 1976), parapsychology (Berloff, 1997; Dingwall, 1967), philosophy (Darnton, 1968), psychiatry (Ellenberger, 1970), psychology and psychotherapy (Chertok & Stengers, 1992; Gauld, 1992; Hale, 1971; Tinterow, 1970), science (Watereld, 2003; Winter, 1998), sociology (Gilman, 1993), and theology (Fuller, 1982), but signicantly, not in anglophone histories of education or in curriculum history. This article, thus, elaborates the parameters and intertwining of apparently disparate academic and institutional events in ways that remember the effects of such discourses for curriculum history, that is, in ways that link the very possibility of a wider eld called curriculum studies, in part, to the many attempts to write monistic explanatory scripts over and against perceptions of unruly multiplicity, excess, or uidity. To this end, the analysis is not focused on already-available explanations of educational systems that elevate politico-economic forces as master causes, nor is it concerned to over-dramatize the role of certain groups or gures. It lays out how debates over animal magnetism, mesmerism, and hypnosis interpenetrated the formulation of ideas-practices that circulated within state and national education and how these ideas-practices both comported and traveled to education in ways that exceed theses of unidirectional or singular causality. In particular, the article suggests that how major concepts and categories of education achieved their ontological status cannot be derived from the presumption of inherent meaning. The meanings of intelligence at the turn of the 20th century, for example, relied on the insertion of Will and the experimental evidence on suggestibility, with the discourse of appropriate classroom discipline able to be traced to such experimental evidence as well. Such connections were made by way of culturally legitimized images and as such were not independent of each other. The analysis maps, then, how such ideas-practices were discernibly structured and endowed with a nite range of possibilities, enabling assimilations of mesmerism to contribute to the logics of classications and categories of education. This necessarily includes at a broader level, too, the classications of citizenship and nation building. Debates over animal magnetism, mesmerism, and hypnosis did not simply appear as a brief and bizarre moment in the history of psychoanalytics, then, but incited the eruption of meaning systems that were necessary to, and in turn transformed by, mass compulsory education and nervous nationalisms.3

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To underscore the signicance of such perception of instability, excess, interpenetration, and forms of temporary association rather than of pure or direct causality and to explore this playfully in like terms, the article offers an approach called a glancing history, giving indication of its deployment around primary documents that have helped shape new understandings of curriculum history.4 The following sections thus constitute four layers of analysis that sidle up to animal magnetisms incitement to discourse, collectively elaborating the dimensions of a glancing history. First, I survey external conditions of possibility for the enactment of compulsory public schooling, which at rst glance bear no relation to animal magnetic debates. Second, I examine internal conditions of possibility for the formation of educational objects (e.g., types of children), the processes of diffrance that were generated from within the experiences of connement and that also seem to bear no relation to animal magnetism. Third, I survey how animal magnetic debates were lustered and planished in educations eld formation, including its interpenetration of behavior management practices, the contouring of expertise and authority, the role of Will in intelligence testing and child development theories, and the redenition of public and private. And last, I examine implications for curriculum history, whether policy- or practice-oriented, especially around the theorization of inuence.

REWRITING CURRICULUM HISTORYS LINES OF SIGHT: ANIMAL MAGNETISM AND THE DIMENSIONS OF A GLANCING HISTORY The study of what might cheekily be called practices of memory-loss poses particularly interesting and quirky challenges, probably homologous to those faced by intrepid historians who try to record oral histories of the hangover. The methodological approach I have developed to engage rather than distance such seeming dilemmas is called a glancing history. It embodies four different plays on the polyvalence of glance, which act as gurative devices that structure the narrative and draw particular aspects of the documents out of their previous somnambulic state. A glancing history views and fails to capture the complex intertwining of entities produced, circulated, forgotten, and remembered in common schoolings formation. Glance as noun and verb is To look askance To deect or bounce off, a swift oblique movement or impact, to glide off an object struck, to strike obliquely upon and turn aside Luster and shine: as in glance-orea variety of ore having a luster which indicates its metallic nature. It is also a reference to a sudden movement producing a ash or gleam of light, such as the glance of a sword and can refer to the ash or gleam itself

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Planishing: to glance metal-ware is to planish it, to atten and reduce in thickness and to condense, for example, with blows of a smoothfaced hammer, by rubbing between rollers, or by rubbing a at-ended tool over the surface.5 Through these dimensions of glancing, examples of how attention to animal magnetisms popularity rewrites curriculum historys lines of sight can be elaborated.

Glance as Looking Askance Looking askance both glimpses and fails to capture the idea of an incomplete and deliberately deforming historiography. A glance is a sideways look in which one is never sure to have gained a full picture. The eetingness of a glance does not imply lack of rigor or less time with documents. It suggests instead a temporary, shifting, and horizontal relation to the interpretation offered. Because a full picture can never be gained, because narration is an act of forming and deforming the documents encountered, this aspect of glancing problematizes the assumed relationship between seeing directly, knowing completely, and uttering with condence. Downcast eyes are not necessarily closed, ickering up as more furtive forms of ocularcentrism operate in the midst of problematizing and historicizing them. This aspect of glancing is well-suited to such a furtive double-take. In a glancing history of animal magnetism and its shaping effects upon education and curriculum history, one encounters the historical conditions that made discourses of vision both possible and unstable: the efforts to separate subject from environment, to locate vision solely in the subject, to distinguish the pictorial from the verbal, things from words, the emergence of a standpoint epistemology, perspectivalism and phenomenology, a contemporaneous belief in the objectivity of expert external observers, the promotion of efcient forms of technical rationality thought disembodied from the observer, and nally, a belief in the demise of all of the above that left the question of vision-as-viewing unresolved and that kept in play symbiotic possibilitiesdebate over the relationship between ocular evidence and knowledge-production, and the concomitant resort to conversion experiences, forms of persuasion, suggestion, induction, inuence, or socialization. The methodological implications are at least threefold. First, a glancing history looks askance from dominant accounts, such as economic foundationalist methodologies that have colonized explanations for the emergence of U.S. common schooling. Second, it looks askance from dominant psychomedical accounts of special education, which inscribe disability naturalistically and as pathologically in someone rather than

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in social relations. Third, it looks toward other external conditions for the advent of compulsory elementary schooling and the emergence of an educational eld such as the possibility of thinking-organizing in terms of norms and deviations and the acceptability of beyond-familial custodial institutions. Focusing on external conditions of possibility for events such as compulsory attendance legislation shifts the empirical scale and research strategy.6 For example, at least four key big-picture vectors helped shape the common sense of normalization and beyond-familial institutionalization. These include: 1. Shift from an aesthetic concept of the ideal in art, which is a composite concept, unattainable by any one human, to the operation of the norm which is believed within human mastery and mapped on a bell curve (norming occurs rst in astronomy and then in welfare policymaking) (Davis, 1997; Stigler, 1999) 2. Shimmy between the invention of statistical methods and eugenic philosophies and societies where membership overlapped and governance of human populations was the main concern (e.g., the term statistik is coined in 1749 by Gottfried Achenwall, state-istics societies were established in the United States in the 1830s, and eugenics is coined in the 1880s by Francis Galton) (Mitchell & Snyder, 2006) 3. Interplay between novels and ction and assertion of scientic facts (e.g., the signicance of the man in the middle to literary plots: everyday normal characters placed in an abnormal situation or incurring an abnormality generate the action of novels, poems, and plays) (Davis, 1997) 4. Move from the proliferation of child development theories to the crystallization of standards for human measurement (e.g., timeliness of the childs ontology in which childhood is rewritten as both a recapitulated past and a space of empty waiting for the future) (Baker, 2001) The goal here is not to elaborate each of these vectors and their interpenetration.7 Nor is it to argue that analyses that focus on the emergence of mass schooling in terms of other lineages, such as the instantiation of compulsory education laws rst in 1700s Prussia and Austria, or their relation to religious conict, labor markets, new production processes, demographic changes, child welfare movements, and so forth, are misguided. Rather, there are possibilities that have not yet been exhausted in terms of their implications for events that in retrospect are quite remarkable, for example, enforcing school attendance and systematically labeling children. Shifting the empirical scale and research strategy means that attention can be given to the conguration of objects that are otherwise highly dispersed in order to understand patterns that confer the

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appearance of unity on disparate events and practices, and that dene the boundaries and content of discourse (Richardson, 1994, p. 669). To this end, the mid-century period is pivotal to revisit in curriculum historical work for reasons beyond yet related to the Civil War. It lay in the aftermath of the Great Awakening and various revivalist events, some of which overlapped with the phrenology, phrenomesmerism, and electrobiology that preceded the formation of psychology and education as academic elds within the university. The early sciences of mind, including sensationalist and associationist psychology of the late 1700s and new brainbased physiological psychologies of the early 1800s, were debated and developed contemporaneously with the above movements. Alan Richardson (2001) has noted that Neurological research and speculation was carried out in the context of a distinctively international scientic culture, one that seeped readily into the philosophical and literary discourses of the age. Not only national borders, but the equally conventional boundaries between the sciences and the humanities, between legitimate and pseudo science, and between intellectual and popular culture all need to be bracketed in order to develop a feeling for the intellectual climate of the Romantic era (p. 7). It is important to note, for instance, the availability of new terminology that travels rapidly in this mid-century period. The terms normal, scientist, and hypnosis all entered English language dictionaries in the 1840s and 1850s, carrying with them a slough of new and contested techniques for describing humans who often depicted themselves as in bounded networks of relations amid contagious inuences.8 These four initially unrelated conditions of possibility coagulate amid intensied efforts to institutionalize continuously differentiated populational groups in the mid-century decades. The urge was not new, but the manner of articulating boundaries between entities was, including species-based reasonings, and the proliferation of terminology today associated with race, sex, and ability. Theological and philosophical speculation over rewriting divinehumananimalplant relations preceded, for instance, Darwins On the Origin of Species, emerging in treatises on animal magnetism, in brain-based materialism, in antidualist Romantic psychologies, and in searches for literary genius. For instance, no less than the existence of the soul, the necessity of God, and the integrity of the self were in question in neuroscientic speculation and theories of mind (Richardson, 2001, p. 12). Amid these turn-of-the-19th-century debates, the spread of formal institution building draws rst upon preexisting segregation by reservation, slavery, and religion in invasion, settlement, and community patterns in the United States, and then intensies again in the 1820s in the east and southeast with what David Rothman (2002) calls the discovery of the asylum, which extends to both rural communities and major cities by the 1850s, and which was a discovery based on models from parts of continental Europe and the United Kingdom. Prior to the 1820s, people experiencing what today would be called intellectual disabilities

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came to notice as poverty-stricken not as disabled, and were cared for within the family and kinship structures of the town. With the advent of asylums, a new family structure and social practice had begun. John Richardson (1999) has demonstrated how in all but 10 states a particular pattern of segregated institutional formalization is encountered from the 1820s onward, predicated on the availability of the asylum. First, custodial asylums for insanity are built, then custodial asylums often called Schools for the Blind and Schools for the Deaf, then centers for juvenile delinquency and reform schools are founded, and then public school attendance is legally enforced. In 1852, Massachusetts was the rst state to convert truancy from a moral into a legal problem and other states eventually followed, often for their own local reasons, so that by 1918, all existing states had legislated compulsory elementary school attendance, some of them largely in order to achieve the status of statehood (Richardson, 1993; Tyack, 1976). As such, the common in common schooling becomes rewritten. Common schooling is not synonymous with the term public schooling. Common schooling is a trinary system where institutions for the special and delinquent preceded, and were required for, the legislation of compulsory attendance at public day schools. Without such institutions, legislative efforts would have had nothing upon which to peg their hats, for where would children who simply refused to attend be put, by whom, and under what claim? This shift in the empirical scale and research strategy, of glancing as looking askance, reorients how education came to be seen as education. As John Richardson (1994, p. 695) notes, formalization of common schooling (18521918) was a new discourse about education, rening the language of who was a pupil and what constituted a school. While having separate boundary distinctions and properties internal to their own arenas, the institutions stood in relation to each other in ways that dened both rules of access to the public school and the rules of passage through other institutions for delinquent and exceptional youth. Accompanying this new discourse were, then, multiple conicting efforts to reconceptualize mind especially, which informed who could be institutionalized at all, and often in racially segregated settings. This included efforts to reduce mind-soul to the brain and nerves, counter-efforts to preserve souls immateriality, efforts to inscribe disability as a problem of skewed or damaged Will rather than of poverty, efforts to locate delay and savagery in and as child-mind and thereby authorize public education, and signicantly, efforts to argue that vision was a product of physiology, not of revelation. This last effort was debated in early 1800s neurophysiological research especially, such as in Charles Bell, Erasmus Darwin, Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis, and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, where vision was weighed as to whether it was reducible to viewing, whether viewing was reducible to the eyes, and where the eye was rendered an unstable, unreliable, shifting,

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ephemeral, and problematic portal, susceptible to ruses such as magic tricks, illusion devices, and hypnosis stage shows, destabilizing trust in what the eye saw, and inciting new efforts to objectify perception.

Glance as Deection This dimension of a glancing history is informed by two sources: recent humanities literature and the old activity of games-playing. Recent analyses in the New Disability History have (re)challenged the prerogative of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell as the presumed portals to the formation of mental concepts and complex linguistic expression (Davis, 1997; Longmore & Umansky, 2001; Wrigley, 1996). Belief in sensory-based mind theory was popularized via a Lockean sensationalism in which an exterior object or event was thought to have powers that were then transmitted to the mind through interacting with an object. An idea, the objects replacement or copy in the mind, is thus stored. The mind, being in natural condition to compare like and unalike ideas, builds up a repertoire that will be ready for the unfolding faculty of reason which appears with maturation (a moral faculty) (Locke, 1689/1975). Despite the controversy at its point of publication in the 1690s, which forced Locke to secretly depart England, his major thesis, distilled and secularized, rests comfortably at the base of nearly every enthusiastic upholding of hands-on learning, appeal to material reality, and privileging of empiricism. Sensationalist epistemology has dominated theories of learning as the explanation for how the contents of the mind get in there. Its organizational mode needs to be challenged, its primacy deected, however, even if only to ascertain how much it has quietly comported judgments made but rarely considered, judgments about what is a human, a child, a skill, a powerand a reality. The second aspect of glancing as deection is drawn from the game of cricket. If the timing is good, the ball that has been glanced backward in a game of cricket allows the batswoman on strike to run forward, to score runs. This action is homologous to the play between the special, the delinquent, and the public that gave the formalization of common schooling the appearance of a continuous forward movement where, with the assistance of certain deections, more runs in one form or another were believed to be put on the board in the name of a particular team. There are three methodological implications from this dimension of glancing. First, deection of late-20th-century empiricism in educational research opens to reconsideration the enormous debates of the early 19th century, particularly those which facilitated the currently fashionable view that mind is reducible to brain. These debates were not simply the old materialist-idealist disputes of Hume and Kant. They extended into whether the soul had a seat in the body, whether the mind was separate

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from soul, whether there was agreement on what constituted matter and spirit, and whether knowledge-production was, for instance, processual or revelational, a route composed of impulses traveling through sensory portals and along nerves or whether knowledge was instead that which was revealed in moments of ecstasy or through altered states. Such debates were inspired by animal magnetic trials, such as Cazots, by stage shows, by frequent demonstrations in New England especially where hypnotized subjects sat still while ames were put against their forearm, and by brain-based research, predicated especially upon new techniques of anatomical dissection and studies of alcohol, drug-taking, and head injury.9 All of these pursuits at some level were taken in the early decades of the 1800s by critics as markers of radical atheism, social revolution, and/or anti-establishment politics. Consider, for instance, the impact that demonstrations of animal magnetism had on William L. Stone, Superintendent of New York Public Schools, who then published a pamphlet about his observation, defending the ne line he tread. After strident criticism and ridicule of his pamphlet, Stone subsequently collected case studies from around the country, including instances of how children in the classroom were magnetizing each other.
The inference from your letter is, that I have suddenly become a convert to Animal Magnetism, to the whole extent claimed and practiced by Frederick Anthony Mesmer, the founder of the art, and contended for by Wolfart and Kluge, and the other German and French enthusiasts, who have written in explanation and support of the system. This is an error. I am not a positive believer in the system, because I know not what to believe; and yet, I am free to confess, that I have recently beheld phenomena, under circumstances where collusion, deception, fraud, and imposture, were alike out of the question, if not impossible, which have brought me from the position of a positive skeptic to a dead pause. From the evidence of my own senses, I have been compelled if not to relinquish, at least very essentially to modify, my disbelief; and I can no longer deny, although I cannot explain, the extraordinary phenomena produced by the exertion of the mental energy of one person upon the mind of another, while in a state of what is termed magnetic slumber. (Stone, 1837, p. 5)

Second, glancing as deection indicates how a trinary approach to educational institutions constituted a tutelary system. Glancing beyond public school curriculum policy and classroom practicebased studies makes it possible to understand how compulsory attendance legislation could actually be enforced on and by populations whose earlier generations had no experience of going to school. It brings to notice how schooling was resisted in some locales, such as on reservations, and embraced in others as a sign of equality, for example, in Black townships especially in the South (Anderson, 1988; Simmons, 1942). And third, it brings to the threshold of noticeability how the deection of special and delinquent children into various asylums, where deection implied nonproductivity, was integral to the (re)formation of the public. By the mid-century the public in

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public schooling was dened not so much in opposition to the private as in consonance with the human, with perhaps the most striking example being Horace Manns lecture On School Punishment. Here, repetitive reference to the gures called madman and lunatic uphold the rationale for what should be done to disobedient children in public schools (Mann, 1855/1969). The methodological implications collectively suggest key new lines of sight for curriculum historical research, that is, what diffrance does the having of multiple, formal institutions, linked into a tutelary complex, make? In commentaries on Derridas 1968 lecture on diffrance, the most attended to reduction has been a rendering of the nonconcept of diffrance as to differ and to defer. Equally important, however, is the stress that Derrida placed on the ance endingto differ, to defer, and to remain undecided are three different nuances within the terms play.
We must consider that in the usage of our language the ending -ance remains undecided between the active and the passive. . . . [T]hat which lets itself be designated diffrance is neither simply active nor simply passive, announcing or rather recalling something like the middle voice, saying an operation that is not an operation, an operation that cannot be conceived either as passion or as action of a subject or an object, or on the basis of the categories of agent or patient, neither on the basis of nor moving toward any of these terms. For the middle voice, a certain nontransivity, may be what philosophy, at its outset, distributed into an active and a passive voice, thereby constituting itself by means of this repression. Diffrance is temporization. Diffrance is spacing. (Derrida, 1968/1982, pp. 89)

There are several key internal effects that emerged from within the experiences of connement that suggest that the pattern of institutional formalization is signicant. These include the working out of various principles of differentiation, of to differ, to defer, and to remain undecided, the last enabling especially a continually adjusted classication process to operate in, as, and through the experiences of compulsory schooling (Richardson, 1999). Several principles of differentiation, that is, criteria for determining that which governs the distinction between sameness and difference, appear by the turn of the 20th century. In particular, ontological categories crystallized from within the experiences of connement, operating still now as taken-for-granted forms of educational identity. For example, in regard to to differ, principles of differentiation were worked out in debate over promotion, such as age-grading versus exible promotion plans (based on mastery of content), such as the St. Louis (1862), Pueblo (1888), Cambridge (1893), Platoon (1900), Dalton (1919), and Winnetka (1919) promotion plans (Richardson, 1993); in comparative school surveys, where the focus shifted from retention rates to student grouping across the early decades, such as those conducted by Ayres and Hanus;10 in the mental measurement movement, including the development of special tests for identifying the backward child, such as Seguin and Binet

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Intelligence tests, New York Regents Literacy Test, Pintner-Patterson Performance Test, Haggerty Intelligence Exam Delta II, Trabue Language Competence Scales B & C, Woody-McCall Mixed fundamentals in Arithmetic, and the Thorndike-McCall Reading Test (Kode, 2002); in vocational education, such as whether all of high schooling should be vocational for all students, as exemplied in the Committee of Ten report debates;11 and in the formation of a unique educational levelthe junior high or middle school which was raised around different theories of that new creature, the adolescent, and conicting assessments of the specialness of the period (Baker, 2001; Lesko, 2001; Richardson, 1993). In regard to to defer, the biomoral liminality previously attributed to children marked as special and delinquent and taken as signs of pauperism and need for charity shifted into a new kind of statusa neurophysiological inscription of permanent decit, attributed to a suspect unconscious, which in turn was theorized as a lack of control over volition or Will that such children were thought to have. This incited polemics about the menace of the feebleminded. In Alfred Binets terms, in France, the answer was to educate feebleminded children through programs adjusted for them. For Lewis Terman in the United States the answer was to exclude feebleminded children from public school classrooms and formal education altogether, if not to eradicate them under the auspices of a popular eugenic philosophy. The irreconcilability of the approaches, predicated on similar nationalist anxieties, guaranteed as Henri-Jacques Stiker (1999) has already noted, that something would always be made of disabilitya continuous, functional if not convenient deferral of the inconvenient. A second aspect of deferral is evident in debates over order, over in which position the moron, the idiot, the lunatic, and the backward should be placed on a sliding scale of deciency (Trent, 1994). And third, deferral took place around the transcendence of another new educational identity which emerged more fully in the 1920s, the child genius, also called the gifted child. Debates over whether genius was a kind of insanity, whether gifted education should be funded separately, and whether genius was genetically determined, erupted, taking place in national newspapers and magazines, not just in scholarly journals (Baker, 2005). Last, the undecidability conferred by the ance ending in diffrance played out in a series of questions, only some of which have been attended to by curriculum historians. Most obvious were questions about what constituted knowing, raised in debates over mental measurement and vocational education especially and taken up in detail in Kliebards (1986/ 2004) Struggles for the American Curriculum. Lesser considered but palpably disturbing and ultimately undecided were questions about how to pin down the boundaries of the human, especially post-Darwin and pre-eugenics, and whether there was a discreteness to the states called life and death. As the discussion of animal magnetic states drew out, who was what, where they were or went to, and what they did there once in a magnetic slumber,

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remained unclear, with effort after effort to template the uidity of the observed characteristics of a magnetized subject (see below) taking place. What, for instance, were teachers to make of examples of uneducated or working-class subjects who could suddenly do magnicent things in somnambulic states or who claimed to be channeling a departed spirit, thereby potentially perturbing neat classications of the this-worldly and other-worldly? The popular example of Pearl Lenore Curran, born in Illinois in 1883, is a case in point. In 1912, Curran began to experiment with the ouija board. She reported that gradually the letters came to her with increasing speed, and then vivid mental pictures developed. Suddenly, on July 8, 1913, she argued that she received a communication from a personality calling herself Patience Worth, allegedly a woman who had lived on a farm in Dorset, England, in the 17th century, and who dictated to Curran an enormous literary composition, including poems and novels. Several of the novels and a selection of the poems were published, written in a variety of peculiar old English dialects that no one could conrm had been spoken. The dialects, different in each novel, as well as the historical knowledge contained in each bafed psychologists. Curran was interviewed by Casper Yost and Walter Franklin Prince, who concluded that Mrs. Currans case was an unusual instance of the creative powers of the subconscious mind.12 Out of the experience of connement, then, a special kind of synergy between processes of differentiation emerged, indebted to how perceptions of behavior and appearance had become reliant on particular norms. The earlier patterns of institutionalization (asylums, Schools for Deaf and Blind, reform schools, etc.) in a sense puried who would be compelled to attend a public day school and who would never pass through its doors. Once so established and delimited, new forms of diffrance, such as special education, could take shape, focusing on those who Lewis Terman called high-grade defectives and being practiced not in hospices or hospitals but in buildings, training schools, and classrooms that such defectives could make it to. Thus, new links and possibilities for governance were forged amid the synergy of external and internal forms of connement, joining and modifying an array of tutelary complexes into a coordinated system of common schooling. Moreover, new educational identities were produced and continually adjusted through the operation of diffrance not just in the formation of institutions with specialized inhabitants but in law. Such links in processes of purication (the external and internal) become evident both in the passing and the content of compulsory attendance legislation, which acted as vehicle and effect of diffrance. Compulsory attendance legislation had several central features across states: (1) All drew on mutual responsibilities of parents and schools, dening the in loco parentis authority of schools

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(2) All specied physical and mental disabilities as conditions that exempted or excused children from attendance (3) All conrmed the authority to expel children from attendance whose behavioral conduct threatened the function of schools (Richardson, 1994, p. 698) John Richardson (1999) argues that if formalization is viewed as a new discourse, the impact of compulsory attendance becomes visible outside the public school as well, for such laws had as much to do with specifying the conditions for exclusion and exemption as with compelling attendance. The internal conditions of possibility for the formation of an educational eld, for the localization/reduction of curriculum history primarily to public school policies and practices, thus take on different shades of meaning in light of glancing as deection.

Glance as Luster and Planish: The Absorption of Animal Magnetic Debates Into Educational Policies and Practices The external conditions of possibility and internal effects of connement surveyed above do not in or of themselves speak to the black hole that usually accompanies their theorization. That is, why does it matter whether things are seen as discrete, how they are grouped, what is seen as alike or unalike, or what ways of knowing are deployed? I suggest that the answer does not lie within a study of animal magnetic debates but that those debates screamed such questions over and over, inciting a hysteria around interpretation and generating such varied and heartfelt responses that it is impossible to unpack late -19th-century curriculum reforms without attending to them. When animal magnetism was reignited in the United States in the 1830s through characters such as Charles Poyen (1833), the self-proclaimed Professor of Animal Magnetism, or through the Superintendent of New York Public Schools, William Stone (1837), and phrenologist Robert Collyer (1843), self-proclaimed Professor of Mesmerism and Psychography, the subjects used in itinerant lectures, demonstrations, and stage shows were often female, household servants or enslaved, medical patients, a traveling clairvoyant used for staging demonstrations, or the magnetizers themselves. Mesmeric-based theories of human nature interpenetrated abolitionist and feminist movements as well as underpinned the religious devotions of Phineas Quimby, Andrew Jackson Davis, and Mary Baker Eddy (Fuller, 1982). Mid-century, the site of fascination was not just the skull that phrenologists loved to squeeze, but also the epigastric region and the extremities of ngers and toes. Debates emerged over whether the hypnotized subjects self was inside or out, discrete from the magnetizer or not, and

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interpenetrated by a universal uid that was extra-planetary or not. Reports from the continent, such as the physician Pettins conversion narrative, were translated and included in public lectures, informing American experiments and trials, which were conducted in the home, sometimes at a university or hospital, and sometimes in a public hall.
M. Petetin, an eminent physician, and honorary and Perpetual President of the Medical Society of Lyons, made a variety of experiments, with a view to verify the fact of the transference of the faculties to the epigastric region. These experiments arose from an accident. He had a cataleptic patient, who appeared to be, for a very long time, in a state of absolute insensibility. No stimulant had any effect upon her; her eyes and ears had entirely lost the power of receiving sensations. M. Petetin, however, was greatly astonished by the accidental discovery, that she heard him perfectly when he spoke upon her stomach. Having satised himself of this fact by repeated trials, he afterwards perceived that the case was the same in regard to the senses of sight and smell. (Colquhoun, 1831/1833, p. 211)

Here, then, was a style of report that interrupted the predominance of sense-based learning. When the power of receiving sensation had shut down in the usual portals, other things seemed possible. Animal magnetic trials became so controversial that the City of Boston held an investigation into the plausibility of the practice in the 1830s, with the representatives deciding that while they could not conrm or deny the existence of a universal uid, they could say that something unique was happening to magnetized subjects (Fuller, 1982). The possibility of permanently conned populations in asylums changed the location and theorization of mesmeric-based studies, however. Without prior conned populations and the stabilized observational grid thought necessary for comparison, experimental studies of children described as backward, vicious, or degenerate and women described as hystericalthe two main targets of psychotherapeutic researchwere less convenient. The restricted location and repetition in clinical and laboratory studies, which continuously claimed experimental status, distinguished these activities from stage show hypnotism, Christian science, and nontraditional spiritualism and mediumship. Experimental studies in late-19th-century Europe, such as in Janet and Charcots Salptrire School in which Binet trained and worked and Freud visited, and its opponent, Bernheims Nancy School, and in the United States, such as at the Vineland Institute in New Jersey, foregrounded animal magnetism as a key research tool to ascertain how mind worked, particularly in relation to mechanisms now described as unconscious. The methods developed through laboratory mesmerism assumed minds location as always on the inside, as restricted to the head, in most theories, the brain only, and as operating via procedures which were only able to be ascertained under controlled conditions of studying apparently hysterical or insane patients. The term unconscious, coming into novels and brain-based research at the turn of the 1800s, took on new

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meaning by 1900 on the basis of such studies. Under the inuence of Janet, Charcot, and Freud especially, unconscious meant not just a lack of awareness, but a repository sitein some accounts a hot, steamy, if not tropical, repressed, sex-laden, and chaotic zone and in others a ruthlessly efcient, automated, cold machine that took care of business so that the conscious mind would not have to (Richardson, 2001). The unconscious as depicted in the rst dynamic psychiatry especially, started to resemble colonial and anthropological descriptions of natives, barbarians, primitives, and also noble savages whose darkness, distance, exoticism, servility, and/or mysteriousness began to metaphorically occupy recesses of the white mind. Three levels of altered states were often depicted on the basis of studies of conned women who were classied as hysterical and children as degenerate. Similar phenomena were repeatedly reported and debated, although caveats were often placed around the dangers of templating: there may be more than three states; the three states may be mixed in form and displayed suddenly, originally, and separately; they may or may not be produced in succession within a subject; and the order may differ. (1) The cataleptic statemotionless unless otherwise instructed; eyes open; xed gaze as if fascinated; complete insensibility to pain; limbs light when raised by someone else and stay there; retains muscular and sensory activity; tendon reex disappears; does respond to suggestion and hallucinations (2) The lethargic stateachieved by closing eyelids or putting subject in dark place after (1) above, followed often by emission of a peculiar sound from larynx; complete insensibility to pain; limbs relaxed, accid and drop when raised; sometimes sensory organs retain activity; efforts to inuence patient by means of suggestion or intimidation are fruitless; tendon reex is exaggerated; image of death (3) The state of articial somnambulismalso called magnetic sleep; eyes closed or half-closed; no tendon reex; different kind of rigidity of limbsnot as relaxed as lethargic state; skin insensible to pain; reacts to mesmeric passes; easy to induce very complex automatic actions via commands and suggestions; retention of sight, smell, and sound activities (Binet & Fr, 1888, p. 160) Alfred Binet, whose primary area of training and study was hypnosis, wrote with Charles Fr one of the most comprehensive treatises on animal magnetism in the late 1800s, as well as publishing his clinical studies on alterations of personality and double-consciousness upon which both William James and Lewis Terman were to rely. In Animal Magnetism, Binet and Fr (1888, p. 160) argued that differing results will be obtained if the patients are subjected to a different modus operandi; if,

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in other words, they do not receive the same hypnotic education [induction procedure]. Either way, a compelling consideration remained, construed within a shift from overt sovereign power to the dispersed, disciplinary, and institutionalized pathways of authority characterizing nation-building and welfare states: The question arises how it should be possible for one person to exert over another the power of making him speak, act, think, and feel as it pleases the experimenter to dictate? (Binet & Fr, 1888, p. 172). Binet overtly theorized whether it was ethical to subject normal children to hypnosis and laid out educational applications of suggestibility for schoolchildren and soldiers in his La Suggestibilit. In anglophone educational applications of animal magnetism, lustered were the concepts of suggestibility and Will, while planished were any occurrences pertaining to clairvoyance, precognition, remote viewing, diagnosis, and prescriptionhappenings that appeared to mangle time and space, that might undermine the hold that emergent experts had on the certication of knowledge, or that were future-oriented and thereby potentially undermining of a teachers manipulation and control of an empty space of waiting. This suggests, as Alison Winter (1998, p. 6) has noted, that the existence of a scientic or medical orthodoxy must not be presupposed; the very constitution of this orthodoxy was at issue. Denitions of science were malleable and there was no agreement on what could be said about natural law, nor was it obvious when, where, and how one could say it. The perception of uidity and the lustering and planishing of mesmeric phenomena directly bore on activities now associated with education in at least four ways: behavior management, the contouring of expertise and authority, the role of Will in intelligence testing and child development theories, and the redenition of public and private. As the examples below indicate, debates over mind, consciousness, and the unconscious were absorbed into certain practices to the point that a phantasmic retrieval becomes necessary to understand how the common sense of educations restricted focus to public schools predominantly and curriculum history to policy and/or classroom practice could form, and repeatedly circle around particular concerns.

Behavior Management: Soft and Hard Versions By the turn of the 20th century, the impact of animal magnetic debates and practices ranged from what today would be called interventionist strategies for disability treatment to the reformation of national imaginaries, the former a more direct and obvious site and the latter more subtle. First, animal magnetic therapy was recommended and tried as a form of disability treatment and intervention for children labeled vicious and degenerate. The methods circulated in modied forms through institutions in a variety

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of locales, including Canada, Europe, and the United States, were discussed in multiple languages, and circulated as controversial and cutting-edge strategies for governance. Suggestive therapeutics, while perhaps most associated with Edgar Brillon in the 1880s and 1890s was discussed in a urry of literature at international conferences, in educational, scientic, and medical journals, and in textbooks and pamphlets. In anglophone literature J. Milne Bramwell and Osgood Mason were staunch proponents. The hypnopedagogic method was applied to children for whom ordinary education proved insufcient to repress impulsive tendencies including, for instance, kleptomania, onanism, laziness, restlessness, deceitfulness, incontinence, disobedience, chronic temper-tantrums, and nail biting. It was believed to constitute a moral orthapaedics, and by 1898, Brillon in particular claimed to have had a great deal of success with it. Five principles were enumerated: 1. Assess the suggestibility of the child through specic tests. Ready responsiveness means that the child is intelligent and docile, easy to instruct and educate. 2. Induce state of hypnosis, or a passive state of some kind, preferably before suggestions are undertaken. 3. Once hypnotized, impose moral direction by imperative suggestions, expressed with authority and clarity. 4. With imperative verbal suggestion one should associate a psychomechanical discipline, in order to create a center of psychic arrest. This will render the child incapable of performing the forbidden act. For example, for the chronic masturbator, the arms are raised in the air and it is suggested that the arms are paralyzed. The child is then assured that the next time an impulse to onanism arises, the paralysis he/she now feels will return immediately. Where the habit is laziness, then it is movement rather than inertia that is imposed. 5. The child should be woken quickly and the same phenomena obtained with conscious participation (Gauld, 1992, pp. 492493). Debates raged over whether such practices ought to be used in regular classrooms and if so, whether they would weaken the Will of children who were not seen as ill, thereby ruining their educability. For the degenerate child, then, presumption of a weak Will made them t for hypnotic therapy. Paradoxically, their suggestibility would indicate their intelligence, their potential to be persuaded, transformed, and redeemed. In this way, animal magnetic debates also contributed to advice for citizen-production through behavior management of the normals. For instance, in their chapter titled The Application of Hypnosis to Therapeutics and Education, Binet and Fr discuss the modication of instincts in children through the example of a hen, which disinclined to sit, was made to do so with seemingly no memory of how it was persuaded:

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The efcacy of suggestion by teachers may, as we believe, be shown by the possibility of modifying certain instincts by suggestion in the case of animals. One of the present writers repeatedly witnessed a curious practice employed by a farmers wife in the district of Caux. When a hen has laid a certain number of eggs in a nest of her own selection, and has begun to sit, if there is any reason for transferring her to some other nest, the hens head is put under her wing, and she is swung to and fro until she is put to sleep. This is soon done, and she is placed in the nest designed for her; when she awakes, she has no recollection of her own nest, and readily adopts the strange eggs. By means of this process, hens may sometimes be made to sit which had shown a previous disinclination to do so. This modication of instinct by suggestions seems to show that the educational use of suggestion is not so absurd as some authors assert it to be. (Binet & Fr, 1888, p. 360; emphases added)

In certain circumstances, then, animal magnetic experiments had a signicant impact on how claims about the nature of inuence were formulated. Scholars concerned with the physiology of inuence asked what were the processes by which people came to think the same things and what constituted the ethical use of suggestion with children. Studies of the unconscious had moved from the mid-century-period fascination with catalepsy and lethargy to a more focused concern with hysteria and sexual deviation by the 20th century. New models of mind, dipsychism and polypsychism, for instance, were proposed and new models of education developed to take advantage of the physiology of inuence and the study of suggestion (Ellenberger, 1970; Winter, 1998). The redenition of hypnosis by Bernheims Nancy School in France as suggestion induced to enable further suggestion blurred the difference between somnambulic and waking states (Bernheim, 1880). Suggestion became used with such frequency and in such a wide variety of ways that it began to lose any shared reference points (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 151). It is here that the absorption into teaching practices for normal citizen-children becomes most evident. In the absence of corporal punishment, which in child-centered movements (harking back to Rousseau) was debarred, how was a teacher to get the normals to do what she wanted? The models developed were not only reactions to, but assimilations of, mesmerism. They relied on a particular understanding of unconscious mental action, of inuencing the Will through the power of looking and verbal commands, and of trances and psychic manipulation. As Winter (1998, p. 8) has already noted, only in retrospect would it be possible to portray the new mental physiologies developed as unambiguously different from and opposed to mesmerism. This is borne out, for instance, in how novel and controversial the idea was of suggesting to a child what you wanted him or her to really do, insofar as suggestion constituted in some analyses an ambiguous middle ground between complete physical force and laissez-faire. In 1888, Binet and Fr (p. 171) argued, Strictly speaking, suggestion is an operation producing a given effect on a subject by acting on his intelligence. Every suggestion essentially consists in action on a person by means of an idea; every effect

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suggested is the result of a phenomenon of ideation, but it must be added that the idea is an epi-phenomenon; taken by itself it is only the indicative sign of a certain physiological process, solely capable of producing a material effect. They argued further:
It is possible not only to make suggestions to subjects in the waking state [after coming out of hypnosis], but also to persons who have not been hypnotized at all. Learned men have been agitated by these latter experiments, which have aroused in them doubt and dissatisfaction. They have no difculty in admitting that suggestions may be made to hypnotized subjects, since they are not in normal health, but they cannot understand how they should be made to individuals who are awake, not under hypnotism, and that this should be done by modes of action in daily use in our relations to one another. (Binet & Fr, 1888, p. 171)

In terms of teaching, then, If it is the characteristic of suggestion to address itself to the subjects intelligence, it follows that there are as many forms of suggestions as there are modes of entering into relations with another person (Binet & Fr, 1888, p. 171). In his 1900 book, La Suggestibilit Binet presents a historical overview of experimental work done in the eld of suggestion, including his own contributions. He argued that group experiments produce (1) a division of functions, with some children becoming leaders and others followers; (2) an increase in suggestibility; and (3) a strong tendency toward imitation, which is the advantage of collective educationimitation and emulation are powerful stimulants for progress.13 Thus, the ties that bound nationalism to collective compulsory education, compulsory education to imitation and emulation, and emulation to evolution and progress of humanity become clearer and the stakes high. Whenever mesmeric experiments took place, a national imaginary could be transformed, for the discourses in which such experiments and their outcomes were nested were invested in part in citizen-production, offering access to or information about a zone previously considered private, out of reach, or ungovernable. Moreover, at a philosophical level late-19thcentury mesmerism provided forums for studying the laws by which a nation functioned, or could form. Mesmeric practices had raised uncomfortably stark issues spoken of in terms of class and gender and also became the occasion for reections about the basis of racial distinctions and the natural laws that had helped one people to bend another to its Will (Winter, 1998, p. 7). Such practices spread through the coloniesparts of Algeria, Australia, Brazil, Haiti, and India, for instance, lending feedback, reinforcement, and complication to the hierarchies with which the centers were preoccupied. Mesmeric practices thus brought to the surface

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issues of equality, endowment, and national security that linked hens to children, classrooms to armies, and Africa to the Americas and Caribbean.

Contouring of Expertise and Authority


In psychology, physiology, and medicine, wherever a debate between the mystics and the scientics has been once and for all decided, it is the mystics who have usually proved to be right about the facts, while the scientics had the better of it in respect to the theories. The most recent and agrant example of this is animal magnetism, whose facts were stoutly dismissed as a pack of lies by academic medical science the world over, until the non-mystical theory of hypnotic suggestion was found for themwhen they were admitted to be so excessively and dangerously common that special penal laws, forsooth, must be passed to keep all persons unequipped with medical diplomas from taking part in their production. (James, 1897/1960, p. 28)

Alison Winter has noted of Victorian Britain a pattern that erupted also in the United States: the impact of the traveling mesmerists in the mid-century decades shows how little consensus there was about what constituted a legitimate practice of truth-production. In the later part of the 19th century, important changes took place in the authoritative status of the sciences and medicine. By 1870, new disciplinary divisions had crystallized, brought on by reform in university education and the new laboratories, leaving less space for the lines of inquiry that mesmerism had earlier suggested. Winter (1998, p. 3) argues that as experimenters asked each other how a particular trial was to be conducted and evaluated, they confronted the larger question of who could pronounce upon any scientic and medical controversy. It was vital to determine whether someone was in an altered state (and why), because issues of much greater signicance hung in the balance. By 1900, as William Jamess critique indicates, the observability of the effects was less in question, but their signicance was another matter, because whatever conclusions one drew would involve ascriptions of relative social and moral standing. It was largely on the basis of the criminal threats perceived around the abuse of mesmerism that the proposed reduction of its practice to medical doctors with a diploma was forwarded. Moreover, the expertise of the early psychologists became authorized in part through such requirements and debates. G. Stanley Hall and William James are usually treated as oppositional characters in the history of psychology, for instance, having palpable digs at each other that are particularly evident in Jamess (1899/1915) Talks to Teachers. They were united, however, in their upholding of the importance of facts, an importance brought to notice by the multiple claims to multiple forms of awareness that studies of somnambulism seemed to generate. Both drew on hypnosis experiments to authorize their commitments, with Hall examining, for

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instance, reaction time and attention in the hypnotic state and James practicing hypnosis on occasion as well as using other research results to theorize exceptional mental states that for him included dreams, hysteria, demonical possession, and genius. Both functioned, then, ironically in regard to Protestantism, as interlocutors for hypnotic research, publishing for and lecturing specically to teachers on their respective versions of the sciences of mind and how to inuence a child (Hall, 1881, 1883; James, 1896/1982, 1899/1915). Thus, while oppositional models and research strategies might have been predictable responses to the reportage of new phenomena, the parameters of education and psychologys symbiotic relationship were drawn in part through an absorption of animal magnetic debates into reformers concerns with how to get other people to do what they preferred, and signicantly, to grapple with a spirit/matter problematic in the midst of having to assert scientic facts. Focus on Will in Intelligence Testing and Child Development Theories While many of the early American psychologists had gone to Germany for their PhDs the mental measurement movement emanated more directly from experiences of connement made possible in France. The studies were motivated, in part, by the notion that one persons mind, or the mental character of a group, supplied a key to the collective mental features buried within an apparently fragmented society. Key to this unlocking was a conception of Will. In 1902, Marey supported Binets application for a professorship at the Sorbonne, arguing that Binet persuaded himself that the study of hypnotism as interesting as it was did not provide by itself a basis sufciently large on which to build a scientic psychology, and he thought it was necessary to replace it in priority with the study of the normal person (cited in Gould, 1981, 151). In Purpose of Testing, Binet argued that his study of the normal person led him to see the need for better identifying the stupid ones. Stupidity, however, was not permanent. Binet argued against the motto stupidity is for a long time, chastising teachers who
are not interested in students who lack intelligence. They have neither sympathy nor respect for them, and their intemperate language leads them to say such things in their presence as This is a child who will never amount to anything . . . he is poorly endowed . . . he is not intelligent at all. How often have I heard these imprudent words! (Binet, 1909/1984, p. 100)

Binet did not propose a biological determinism for feeblemindedness predicated upon a diseased Will:
How can we help a child if we label him [sic] as unable to achieve by biological proclamation? If we do nothing, if we dont intervene actively and usefully, he will continue to lose time . . . and will nally become discouraged. The situation is very

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serious for him, and since his is not an exceptional case (since children with defective comprehension are legion), we might say that it is a serious question for all of us and for all of society. The child who loses the taste for work in class strongly risks being unable to acquire it after he leaves school. (Binet, 1909/1984, p. 100)

He thus protested against the brutal pessimism of studies that argued, on the basis of hypnotic therapy, that intelligence was a xed quantity dened by the power of the Will: Some recent thinkers seem to have given their moral support to these deplorable verdicts by afrming that an individuals intelligence is a xed quantity, a quantity that cannot be increased. We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded upon nothing (Binet, 1909/1984, p. 101). While in France, Binet and Simon were most renowned for inscribing a notion of Will into child development tests, in the United States, Goddard on the east coast and Terman on the west coast exemplify how Will informed the denition of intelligence and the demarcation between developmental stages and mental types. The role Will played differed, however. By the mid-1920s, Termans Stanford-Binet had become popular in city-based common schooling in particular, feeding off a conception of defective Wills in children now labeled backward and feebleminded. The image of a statistically small but disproportionately menacing number of feebleminded children complemented alarm over inefciency. If the capacity to engage in moral conduct is given by heritability of intelligence and exposed by ones hypnotic suggestibility, then the problem of inefciency is a matter of nding those who are ineducable. If you submitted readily to hypnosis, your Will was considered weak, you were aligned with lunacy, and your educability was in question. An important conceptual transformation is effected in this new process of attribution. What was once a problem of organizational inefciency was now redened as a problem of intellectual capacity, a harbinger of negative morality (Richardson, 1999, p. 56). A shift in mind theory accompanies it; feeblemindedness and genius are dependent upon the operation of the Will, which now inhabits the unconscious. Will organizes and bursts through the conscious in ways that feebleminded children, dangerously, cannot control and that child geniuses allow automatically into beautiful, if not mystical, performances. Thus, while animal magnetic studies had led to theorization of the role of Will in child development and intelligence testing, Binets purposes of testing and rationale seemed quite contrary to that of Terman:
Intelligence tests of the feeble-minded. Thus far intelligence tests have found their chief application in the identication and grading of the feeble-minded. . . . Wherever intelligence tests have been made in any considerable number in the schools, they have shown that not far from 2 per cent of the children enrolled have a grade of intelligence which, however long they live, will never develop beyond the level which is normal to the average child of 11 or 12 years. The large majority of these belong to the moron grade; that is, their mental development will stop

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somewhere between the 7-year and 12-year level of intelligence, more often between 9 and 12. (Terman, 1916, pp. 56)

For Terman, the nation was at stake as for Binet, but the solutions were different. Educability goes through the Will and the Will must, therefore, not be too weak or too strong. High-grade defectives often overlooked in classrooms and elsewhere posed a particularly difcult problem for Will-management:
It is safe to predict that in the near future intelligence tests will bring tens of thousands of these high-grade defectives under the surveillance and protection of society. This will ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction of feeblemindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial inefciency. It is hardly necessary to emphasize that the highgrade cases, of the type now so frequently overlooked, are precisely the ones whose guardianship it is most important for the State to assume. (Terman, 1916, p. 67)

Stanford-Binet tests were not to identify who needed which kind of help in the formation of moral character but who could not be helped altogether. The postCivil War and World War I United States of Terman was a vastly different time space from postRevolutionary and postNapoleonic France of Binet: in the latter the larger social purpose was to uplift and dissipate the presumed impact of feeblemindedness via integration and assimilation. For Terman, it was via strategies of plain exclusion. Either way, the strategies proposed are indebted to the interventions of mesmeric experiments that had helped reinscribe the feebleminded as educable in France and ineducable in the United States within a particular strand of efciency discourse.

Redenition of Public and Private Last, animal magnetic performances changed the meaning of the sites in which it was practiced. Such changes came about because such performances questioned what was proper or possible to do in particular locales. In the mid-century period, sickrooms were converted into public halls, dining rooms into laboratories, and hospital wards into theaters (Winter, 1998). By the turn of the century and under the pressure of an international eugenic philosophy, classrooms, asylums, and reform schools risked being converted to funeral houses:
Dr. Johnson: I remember a year ago when the Nebraska State Medical Society met in Beatrice and I invited a number of the physicians out to our institutions, that, after looking through some of the worst classes we had, one of the physiciansa physician I have known a great many years and who had practiced medicine for forty yearsremarked, Doctor, do you want me to suggest a sure cure for those

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cases? I said, yes. He replied: Two grains of morphine hypodermically. [understood as lethal] I asked him if he cared to administer the dose. No, he said, he did not care to. But in all seriousness most of the physicians that have visited our institution have said in substance that it is certainly too bad these children have to live, and we ought to put them out of the way, either by morphine or by the chloroform route or some other route. Dr. Morgridge: They do not like to be the executioners, however. Dr. Johnson: No. (Johnson, 1906, p. 230)

In revising the geography of public and private spaces and offering new conventions for proper conduct, animal magnetism broadened sites considered part of public knowledge, especially amid the invention of the unconscious as a repository site now open to governance. When possibilities for redemption appeared at their limit, where no shift in consciousness was deemed possible, where the unconscious was also considered compromised and the last hope for any kind of intervention apparently lost, eradication discourses sprang, ironically, to life. The profoundly retarded child especially helped illustrate more dramatically new parameters of the public. Being seen as of several different kinds, children labeled as retarded and its analogueinsane, lunatic, or moronpresented several possibilities to their keepers. To be judged as moving down toward death or up toward self-governed life gave experts some sense of control, of handles to grasp, an idea that they could have an impact on or window into an event insofar as something was moving. Sovereign power requires motion-aschange, as well as a notion of possession, and a causeeffect binary to be so recognized as power. Where an effect is believed to follow a cause such as in intervention, and where something is moving on a predetermined scale, the idea that something is happening can form and the idea that one can have power over it in some way can be conjured. To be in a stable, constant, yet ambiguous state, not appearing to be impacted by therapeutic strategies gave the sense of no action, no event, no happening, no movement, no evolution, and was the most dangerous position of all in terms of eradication. Such ambiguous but stable Being, Being that was not simply going to disappear overnight, seemed to taunt expert efforts to reshape someone else in an image of likeness to a preferred original. Such discourses of Being illuminated the boundaries of control and citizen-production, and hence of the desired public in nationalistic vein. The child who was never permitted entry to a public school, and the child who did not respond to hypnotic or other therapeutic interventions, thus played an important role in what it was that public schools seemed to be about. Second and related, the public is redened in relation to compulsory school attendance and especially new inections of what it meant to be a special or delinquent child. Through the linking of tutelary complexes, the parameters for the public are reestablished in the early decades of the 20th century more in consonance with the fully conscious human and less in

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opposition to the private. A stricter conscious/unconscious binary now inects what/who is acceptable in terms of a public schools population and what/who is not, reshaping previous exclusions predicated on racialization and sexualization of capacity and suitability. In the late 1700s, theological doctrines buttressed claims regarding the suspected incapacity to read printed matter. They were invoked as rationales for delimiting formal education, and took shape especially in the continued practice of slavery and reservation systems. PostCivil War, however, it was simply not enough to overturn such discourses by claiming to be human and to use the classication as basis for a right to education, or for refusing its enforcement. By the turn of the 20th century, one has to be a fully conscious and suggestible human within particular limitslimits that were pregnant with the racialization and sexualization of past meaning systems and that were being weighed upon further by contemporary images of unsuitable immigrants crashing like waves upon the shore. Thus, inclusion in the broader species category of the human did not imply, let alone guarantee, inclusion in public education. In todays terms, such inclusion in public education programs was not unilaterally desired, nor was such inclusion vaunted as the key purpose of public schooling in the rst place. This structure of reasoning is why some scholars could refer to institutions as public schools, not see exclusivity as an issue, and feel comfortable with what Peter Wagner (1994) calls the play of liberty and discipline within the rst crisis of modernity. Mesmeric practices/debates thus helped reorient public/private domains in relation to new conventions for proper conduct, in regard to new sites of governance, and amid reguring old lines of inclusion/exclusion that appeared newly worded. In regard to lustering and planishing, then, animal magnetisms relative obscurity at the turn of the 21st century has encouraged the idea that it has always been a fringe or pseudo- science, eking out a precarious existence on the margins of real science. The relegation is anachronistic and question-begging. Animal magnetism became the occasion for contests over authority in science, medicine, education, and intellectual life at large, and these contests revealed the location and character of such authority to have been more insecure than historians have appreciated (Winter, 1998, p. 4). Animal magnetism was not the passive recipient of established modes of explanation, but rather, a contributor to the development of new modes of interpretation. Emerging most strongly in a period populated by phrenologists, spiritualists, mediums, and psychics, it did not seem out of place in such a broth of magnetic uids, vital powers, and swarming spirits (Winter, 1998). But the disciplining of fascination with animal magnetic practices across the century bespeaks a new orientation to sciences of consent and dissent, and the sciences of appearance, contouring educations domain, helping to produce its puried scientic objects, and giving curriculum history its delimited home.

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Conclusion In sum, the four dimensions of a glancing historylooking askance, deection, lustering, and planishinghelp rewrite curriculum historys lines of sight, bringing to consciousness how the restricted focus on public schooling and curriculum policies or practice could so repeatedly become the object of study. The analysis has further suggested how what makes compulsory attendance legislation both possible and modern is a seemingly simple and insistent operation of diffrance as to differ, to defer, and to remain undecided. Humans could not and still cannot accept that conceptions of the world seem to differ, making obedience, persuasion, inuence, suggestibility, and the procuring of agreement central foci of a welfare state and emergent experts. As such, the quieting of noise in favor of one frequency is vigorously pursued at every level. Late-nineteenth-century theory building is like the hypnotized subjectonly certain things are permitted to sensation and much is forgotten afterward. Underwriting all of the movements that historians now research as curriculum reform is the appearance and pursuit of monism against recognition of a pluralized background, a long-standing biblical fear of the fatalistic threat presumed to inhere in diversity, proliferation, and miscegenationnot just of races, sexes, and immigrants, but of anything already entied such as prohibition against the mixing of ideas, Wills, morals, theoretical frameworks, or characters who or which were not seen as alike from a particular point of view. The dedication to separating alike from unalike, with or without naming the principles/ criteria governing the separation, is an idiosyncratic, curious, and implicit theme imbuing curriculum reforms at the turn of the 20th century, making the acts of age-grading and exible promotion, comparative school surveys, racially segregated schooling, mental measurement, and special and gifted education circularly seem normal and unquestionable. In a different kind of closing, then, this article suggests a series of springboards for rethinking curriculum historys terrain. First, in looking beyond and to the side of reduction of curriculum history to debates over public schooling, content, textbooks, or sequencing of subject matter, it does not seek inclusion of institutions such as asylums or centers for juvenile delinquents as singular, focal sites in curriculum history, as though the word curriculum has historically been spoken in relation to such sites. Nor does it suggest a simple extension of focus to such locations as Schools for Blind or Deaf. Both inclusion and extension in the mode of how curriculum histories are ordinarily performed around preoccupation with subject matter knowledge would be assimilation within principles of analysis that maintain the same onto-epistemological structures. The point is to historicize the coming-into-being of such presumptions as distinction between ontology and epistemology, not to spread them in a form of technical responsibility that enacts a law of social justice in distributive or corrective form rather than interrogates its limits.

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Second, the analysis has demonstrated the dependencies of discourse that came into operation in establishing a trinary system of schooling, which is not the same as blanching or leveling those institutions as though they existed on an equal plane with equal respect and funding for their inhabitants. It has elucidated how tutelary complexes draw on ideas that are anterior to them, as well as generate their own effects from within. The paradox is that interdependent institutions become sites of authority in regard to a dependence/independence binary, for example, of children, of teachers, of districts, and of nations. The alleged discreteness of subjects, of subjectivities, of entities thus remains under contention when dependencies of discourse are the focus. This under contention of discreteness is not loss of possibility for rupture and distinctiveness, however. The pervasive colonizing effects of an extreme associationism would become particularly noticeable where the public school is simply placed a priori as the norm and all other institutions judged in hope of likeness to it in curriculum historical research. An alterity not tied to a preexisting norm or form of understanding remains open, not as gift or as charity, but where in Levinasian terms the face of the Other can evade without evading the kinds of connement that claim to know it in advance. This suggests a mode of historiography that allows for surprise, confusion, and ambiguity and not just around humans and our institutions, but as a broader form of ethical responsibility that, as this glancing history has attempted, engages, views, and ultimately fails to capture every dimension in what can be noticed. Moreover, when animal magnetic phenomena specically are engaged, not as a priori true or false, but as events that contemporaries thought could happen and hence debated, the historical signicance of perceptions of uidity and threat of nonclosure become exposed for their motive potential in the building of segregated institutions, as much as in the building of distinctive theoretical frameworks to analyze them. Third, the elaboration of dependencies of discourse has provided food for thought regarding the operation of narrative prosthesis in and as educational eld formation. It has indicated how disability has historically been used as a crutch upon which narratives lean for their representational authority, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insights, and yet in curriculum history more often than not under-theorized or ignored. Narrative prosthesis forwards the notion that narratives operate to compensate for a limitation or to reign in an excess (Mitchell & Snyder, 2000). This narrative approach identies the literary object par excellence as that which has become extraordinary. Attention to animal magnetic debates/practices indicate the extent to which narrative prosthesis was formative of late-19thand early-20th-century educational scholarship. Amid the moves from the spirit to the esh, from the connements of slavery and reservations to asylums and reform schools, from nation differentiation to the splitting of states and territories internally, animal magnetic debates and practices interpenetrated the formation of educational objects, concepts, classica-

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tions, and categories. Such debates and practices helped reshape more overtly articulated and theologically laden race and sex discourses of the earlier 19th century into scientized and encoded disability discourses of the new nationalisms at the turn of the 20th century. Such new and not-so-new meaning systems and logics around educational objects (e.g., types of races, types of children, types of intelligence), concepts, classications, and categories gave the educational eld a home base and focus for moralistic imperatives to identify and belong to a single popucational category, inciting self-perpetuating concerns over perceptions of excess, uidity, and multiplicityan onto-epistemological politics, if not reduction, that underwrites, in turn, the necessity of insights generated by frames such as narrative prosthesis. Fourth, in pointing to where the term curriculum has not been used historically, such as in asylums, the article alludes to consideration of other sites where curriculum has appeared such as in curriculum vitae. Consideration of this point bespeaks the range and the limit of the term curriculum as it is currently enacted in curriculum historical research. If the notion of compending a life course, which draws on vestiges of the Latin currere, is taken seriously as a site of study, scholarship focused less on the course part and more on the life part may generate new insights that confront broader philosophical, in not onto-theological, debates that animal magnetic literature continuously pursued. Questions for consideration implicitly involve revisiting the question of inuence, theories of how things travel, take shape, and/or associate, and of why such theories have been played out so frequently in the West around an overt or covert spirit/matter problematic. Such questions might include Why are life and death considered oppositional states? What does or does not belong to the domain called Life? Why is the monolocalization of Being so vigorously upheld in particular religious and philosophical traditions? Why is subjectivity so often presumed unitary, singular, and interior? What qualities are thought mutable or amenable to inuence in educations engineering of subjectivity? What qualities/experiences are spatialized as beyond, as otherworldly, as impossible to take on, as noncrossable borders in the shaping effects attributed to curriculum? Why have distinctions between that which is and is not amenable to inuence and reducible to Life come to matter so much? Rather than misconstruing this as a theological turn or backdoor, such questions are poised to confront deeper theoretical issues concerning relationships and inuence that animal magnetists often took on, such as how could a person really believe they were a dog, insist, in spoken language, wholeheartedly upon it, and start acting as such in a hypnotic state? What were the ethical consequences of this inuence upon each other when the mechanism seemed still uncertain, unknown, and so forth? The above seem a compelling and important series of questions, then, certainly not exhaustive and surely with their own presumptions, that this article suggests, constituting potential springboards for

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historicization beyond a Foucaultian analytics, beyond Abrahamic traditions, and beyond reduction to the West. As sites of engagement inspired by an examination of animal magnetism and its incitement to discourse, they arise in both beginning and end, their presumptions transformed. They operate as particularly fertile, if not urgent, points of consideration in contemporary settings, however, given especially the treatment and functional role attributed to children labeled special and delinquent in the past and the possibility for neugenics in the present. As such, the analysis as it stands here is not a straightforward call for either inclusion or extension of where curriculum history has traditionally trained its view. Rather, it is a questioning of where historians think Being comes into being and what noticeability means, a testing of the point at which curriculum studies becomes possible as and unto itself around the theorization of inuence. As noted above, the division of ontology from epistemology has now been assumed as part of an educational elds formation, for if there was no such thing as the childs mind considered amenable to inuence, then why would the content of any school teaching matter? Animal magnetic experiments contributed to the development of fundamental assumptions, concepts, and interpretative tools we now bring to the study of such debates/practices, including ideas about inuence, forces, the boundaries of the human, memory, and perception, drawing into relation present strategies of historical interpretation and 19th-century ways of making sense of special and delinquent children, child geniuses, and their normal public school peers. This study of animal magnetism and its role in educations eld formation, the shaping of pedagogical ideas-practices, classication systems, and categories, and the ontological status attributed to major concepts such as mind, suggestibility, inuence, and mental measurement thus raises to the level of a glance how the availability of a curriculum studies eld and the production of historical accounts such as this one are both the effect and vehicle of the very conditions being analyzed. NOTES
1. Somnambulism technically referred to a state of sleepwalking, but was often used to refer to a hypnotic state before the term hypnosis was coined. 2. I prefer the later Foucaultian notion of ideas-in-action and the earlier notion of discursive regularities rather than theory/practice dichotomies. Theoretical concerns are, in this sense, practical events. Thus, I use interchangeably terms such debates/practices and ideas-practices when referring to debates in literature on animal magnetism, because the arguments were part of the doing around its emergence as an event and because the spirit/matter distinction was so overtly under contestation. 3. I thank John Richardson for insightful feedback on an earlier version of this article that enabled the linkage between these levels to be more explicitly drawn out.

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4. This approach is more fully elaborated in Baker (2004). I focus in this paper on inscriptions of the child, deliberately forestalling consideration of late-19thcentury inscriptions of the teacher as adult-in-waiting. I have discussed this relationality between child/adult and teacher education in Baker (2001). 5. These dimensions are paraphrased, condensed, and drawn from the 1989 Oxford English Dictionary. 6. Compulsory elementary schooling in this case refers to the legislation of compulsory attendance and not simply the provision of a school building, a teachers salary, or lessons. 7. For an elaboration of each of these conditions, see Baker (2004). 8. New terminology for describing humans emerges between 18301860 including Scientist William Whewell, 1834; Hypnosis James Braid, 1842; and norm, with the root based on a tool, the old carpenters square. Davis (1997) notes that norm and associated terms, including norm, normal, normalcy, normality, abnormal, and average, enter English dictionaries such as Johnsons between 18401860. 9. Reports of such events during demonstrations and stage shows appear, for instance, in the appendices to Poyens 1833 translation of the French report. 10. For examples of school surveys with different principles of comparison and separation in the period, see Ayers (1909) and Hanus (1913). For an excellent discussion of the shift in foci, see Richardson (1993). 11. See Herbert Kliebard (1986/2004) for an account of the Committee of Ten controversy over the purposes of postelementary schooling. 12. For period accounts of this story and their conclusions about the interview, see Yost (1916) and Prince (1927). See also Henri Ellenbergers (1970, p. 163) analysis of the event. 13. See Stephen Jay Goulds discussion of the appropriation of Binets work in the United States in his 1981 The Mismeasure of Man.

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