Mapping the Affective Turn in Education

Theory, Research, and Pedagogy

Bessie Dernikos, Nancy Lesko, Stephanie McCall, Alyssa Niccolini, Bessie Dernikos, Nancy Lesko, Stephanie D. McCall, Alyssa Niccolini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000055801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunstlehre

Passions are high in education, and this edited volume offers bold new ways to conceive of the affective intensities shaping our present historical moment. Concerns over school practices deemed "ineffective, " "disruptive, " "irrational, " or even "promising" are matters modulated by and through feelings, such as, optimism, shame, enhanced concentration, or empathy. The recent turn to affect offers vibrant methodological and theoretical material for an educational present marked by high stakes rhetoric, heated debate, teacher and student vulnerabilities, and extreme educational measures. Affect studies are a part of new materialist and post-humanist turns, and this volume connects these new theoretical directions within education. This comprehensive volume on affect crosses educational subfields and responds to the transdisciplinary interest in thinking through pedagogy, education, and feeling.

This comprehensive reader addresses affect in education from a wide range of styles, topics, and perspectives. This collection offers an introduction to theory, empirical research studies, interviews with affect studies scholars, and an assessment of the current and future significance of affect studies in education. Contributors utilize a range of theoretical and interpretive approaches to thinking with and through schooling phenomena. Interviews with affect scholars in the humanities and social sciences address affective dimensions of teaching. The editors' introduction, different foci, and interdisciplinary genres of writing help readers feel their ways into what affect studies in education does and might do.

This field-defining collection will be of interest to a range of readers--from graduate students to established scholars--with varying levels of expertise and familiarity putting affect theories to work in education. All the contributions are accessible to those new to the theory, methods, and debates in this vibrant area of educational studies.

Part I
Politics

3
Passion, Pedagogy, and Pietas

An Interview With Rosi Braidotti

ALYSSA NICCOLINI: You have had some very well-known teachers, including Genevieve Lloyd, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, and, of course, Gilles Deleuze. Could you walk us through a bit of your own educational genealogy? How would you characterize the different pedagogies your teachers offered?

ROSI BRAIDOTTI: At the heart of all pedagogies, there are different ideas about the university. It’s the answer to your question: I was trained in a very different university where the teachers really mattered and the classrooms would be very informal. I did my BA university training in Canberra and the PhD work at the Sorbonne. Both were informal in different ways. With Genevieve Lloyd, Maurita Harney, and Ian Donaldson, my major teachers at the National University in Canberra, we worked within a sort of colonial variation of the British tutorial system, where students and teachers would sit down and talk; you read out your paper and the teacher comments. You go for a walk together. “When Jenny [Genevieve, ed.] Lloyd came” to visit me in Utrecht years ago, of course we went for a long walk, and we talked. I think that is crucial. It’s unimaginable in a quantified neoliberal university where every minute counts and where we have to clock in and out like a factory system, where everything is about being assessed, evaluated, and controlled. It’s the constant auditing system that destroys the meditative and critical soul of what is the university. A university training in the Humanities, as elsewhere, was supposed to be a moment of suspension in space and time, so you could focus completely on learning and on being trained to think, argue, and do research in a complex and ancient field of knowledge production. It was a suspension of daily reality in some ways, but a deepening and broadening of it in others. The taxpayers got their returns in helping to produce highly trained people, capable of innovating constructively, and to go out and construct the contemporary world of culture and science…

I wonder whether the students of today still have a figure of the teacher. It can be an academic star, but that’s a different concept. An academic star is part of the celebrity circuit, and then it’s an object of idolatry but also of aberration. It’s an object of envy, emulation, of both positive and negative affects. And you can be a celebrity and a teacher, but it’s a lot more difficult because you have to get rid of the celebrity thing to try to act or use the celebrity aura to get to people…. I guess the teacher dies when the figure of the intellectual shifts from content and critique to the whole culture of assessment and media presence. And that happens somewhere in the nineties, with the rise of the first academic stars. Because why is Jean Paul Sartre not an academic star? Why is Michel Foucault borderline? Because he’s an academic star in the United States, but not in France. He’s an intellectual, a public figure as a great professor. At what particular point does the academic star kill the teacher? I think it has to do with something the neoliberal system has deliberately done. They have encouraged the production of both academic stars and the academic “precariat.” Somehow every major university has to have the radical celebrity. Then they are a sort of brand, but the rest of the staff is in a different predicament.

My genealogy has moved generationally through moments where the academic Humanities, in general, but particularly philosophy—which is about dialogue and thinking through—was allowed the space and the time to actually be deeply influenced by incredible intellectual figures who worked in the university but addressed society as a whole…

One important factor in being an outstanding intellect is the combination of passion and high levels of specialization. For instance, I wrote to Jenny Lloyd recently because I needed a reference on Spinoza. She came back—time difference notwithstanding—within 12 hours with the exact, direct, precise scholia in Spinoza’s Ethics, where he wrote the sentence I was looking for. When I was in Sydney in November 2016, of course I visited Jenny and took a long walk with her on Coogee Beach, talking. And in Melbourne, I always stay with my former philosophy tutor Maurita Harney, even after all these years. We’re looking therefore at a very specific genealogy, which now feels like a different era.

And the different pedagogies were, of course, also an effect of the knowledge we shared…. The continuing factor was the history of philosophy. In her undergraduate course, Jenny Lloyd taught Michel Foucault as a historian of philosophy, in fact taught him as a commentator on the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth century, [as a] commentator on Descartes, on Spinoza and beyond. So we used him as secondary literature because this was 1972, 1973, and post-structuralism was just starting. The key idea was that we do have a history of philosophy, but it is not one, canonized, untouchable, but a set of authors that carry on a tradition. And in a sense, Lloyd was very much an Oxford philosopher and worked within the British system, which, both in philosophy and in the Law, doesn’t believe in codes as such. They believe in jurisprudence, and I think that the connection between Jenny Lloyd and Deleuze is the flexibility of jurisprudence and its case stories. Applied to philosophy, this means there is no master code that asserts a proper and fundamental history of philosophy. That’s why Deleuze attacks Roman law and prefers British law because it is made of cases, of precedents. It’s jurisprudence, not the law.

That is the constant factor for me in the way Jenny Lloyd taught the history of philosophy and how the French thinkers approached the issue. Both Lloyd and Deleuze taught Spinoza. Nobody else taught Spinoza then. She taught Foucault. Who was teaching Foucault? Most philosophy undergraduates are taught the big classical H’s: Hegel and Heidegger, or the three radical M’s: Mao, Marx, and Marcuse. Or they would follow the master narrative, where everything ends with Immanuel Kant. The history of philosophy dominates the practice of thinking philosophically: it’s the end of philosophy, isn’t it? But my teachers were different, and I developed my own pedagogics on very different premises that take respectful distance from that scholastic, canonical pressure. The constant fact of the radical pedagogies, apart from upholding the passion for ideas, is a critical engagement with the history of philosophy, but in a nondogmatic and antiauthoritarian manner. In fact, there is no such thing as the history of philosophy; there are only multiple narratives, some of which get territorialized as dominant accounts. There are many authors, but they are not “sacred monsters”; you rather need to see them as a network of interlocutors. The history of philosophy is just a collection of texts, but they’re in dialogue with each other.

That conviction was what took me from Jenny Lloyd’s classes in Canberra to the Sorbonne where I took a degree in—guess what?—the history of philosophy. And then I attended the public lectures of Foucault, who was already a demigod at the Collège de France, but also went to the splendid, but not academically accredited, classes of Deleuze, who taught alongside so many other intellectual giants (Lyotard, Serres, Cixous, etc.) at the radical University of Vincennes, which had no legal value as a credit-giving institution in France at the time.

The constant factor for me was this engagement with a project whereby the history of philosophy is what you deal with in a cartographic manner because it explains how we got to where we are at now. But the point of retracing the itinerary is to illuminate the present and raise the pertinent power questions.

What we had in my generation is the strength of numbers: we had each other. So, we developed an alternative pedagogy where we self-supervised and we advised each other, and we talked extensively about the effect of being exposed to these incredible teachers. And why were they teachers? Because they gave us a method, an approach, a road map. They gave us a way of doing things with and while thinking. They weren’t into pastoral care like Jenny Lloyd was in the British system, where you actually remember the names of the students and worry about their health. The French academic system at the Sorbonne at the time—I don’t think they’ve changed much—didn’t believe in this nurturing approach. It rather followed the French Republican elite tradition, which is competitive and spurs the students on by exposing their weaknesses and assuming that the best ones will learn to swim and the others are destined to sink. There is a bit of sadism involved in this approach, and Deleuze does comment on it in Anti-Oedipus. He connects the practice of belittling others to an authoritarian institutional system that is reiterating dominant values, in the academy as elsewhere.

We students didn’t care much about the lack of attention, however, because we had each other and we were learning new ways of thinking and speaking about ideas. I think the [post-structuralists’] use of language as well as their immense erudition were inspirational, and in that way, they had a big pedagogical impact. They were meta-methodological. No one told us the direct answers to our many-layered questions. But they did show us how we should do things. In their conversation about intellectuals and power, Deleuze and Foucault even say it, that a thinker has to be the provider of toolboxes. And Deleuze provides conceptual schemes and then lets you solve your own problems, as you should. This is practical philosophy, in the problematic mode, and you are responsible for the questions you raise and the possible answers they may evoke. So [there was] freedom in this respect, with a bit of indifference in the French academic system. Then we had our own alternative collectives, groups, and communities and the great excitement of creating new structures, which, in the course of time and with the unfolding of our careers, became women’s studies, gender and gay studies, environmental and peace studies, and all of that.

ADN: You yourself have taught for many years at Utrecht University; you started your career at Reid Hall and the Columbia campus in Paris, and you taught again at Columbia University in New York recently. You also have an annual summer course that attracts students from all over the world. Could you talk a bit about how you conceptualize your own pedagogy?

RB: Well, you can imagine how much time I have spent thinking about, if not about pedagogy as a meta-discourse, about the styles through which I can convey what I am trying to achieve both conceptually and institutionally. Almost all I have done has been about this. And I had the honor of becoming a professor very young to set up a radical curriculum in women’s studies, partly because of advanced government support for innovative teaching and partly due to the Dutch policy of repressive tolerance. The thinking goes: let’s take a 30-year-old, put her in charge of inventing a university program, the chances that she will fail anyway are very high, just so we can say that we’ve tried to get it done. But when I did succeed, the Dutch system proved to be supportive, reliable, and truly innovative. From the start of the institutional practice, the question is: how do we translate our ideas into teaching models? I am very interested in institutions. Women’s studies, gender, queer studies are crucial because we brought … into the curriculum progressive groups that went into the universities in an activist mod, as opposed to staying outside fighting the whole institution of patriarchy.

Going into the institution was a very big choice for my generation. The long march through the institution was very real…. Choosing to go in was a political tactic that in the end was all about meta-methodology: How do we do this? How do we stay loyal to a tradition of radicalism while feeding the institutions and changing them from within if possible? And in the early days of women’s and gender studies, the students were women from the movement…. The interaction was very, very dialogical and quite intense. It really went through different phases in my career. The first PhDs I passed were women older than I who had been in the university since the 1970s…. Many of my early PhD students were important feminist figures that I supported so that they could qualify and go on, and we continued doing that…

How do we strike a balance between narrating the history and political passions of a social movement and how do we formalize courses that do this? Again, this is both a tactical and a meta-methodological issue. The first textbooks that were made available to the generation of women’s studies pioneers were written in the USA and narrated a completely American story. One of the first things my colleagues and I did, within the European networks that we were setting up from scratch at the time, was to produce local teaching material. Great examples are the edited volume Thinking Differently and the teaching manuals book series, which were part of the official publications of the Athena network. This was the official women’s and gender studies European institutional network, which I co-founded and was the first director of. It was funded by the European Commissions for a decade, from the mid-1990s, and consolidated both a web of connections and a strongly situated political and academic agenda. I think the Athena publications are extraordinary, though they are “grey literature” that was never officially published. But there are about ten volumes of the annual publication of Athena where you really have voices from all over the EU stating their own perspectives and also the desire to practice feminism locally, although we have to keep on thinking globally.

My desire to work toward a European perspective was and remains a priority. We cannot teach only with textbooks generated in L.A. It makes no sense…. This is not Euro-centrism, but a way of practicing the politics of locations, that is to say an immanent and grounded way of approaching the issues. Look at the problems that we have here in Europe: we may not have police that are shooting down Black boys, but we do have governments that are putting up fences against citizens fleeing from countries that the USA and allies are bombing. It’s a different predicament. But we can’t address that if we’re using textbooks that are completely inadequate…. This is nomadic feminist theory at work, and it comes down to developing a counter-memory. The idea of bringing European feminists to confront their own backyard, that is to say Europe and confronting its specific problems, including Islamophobia and racism, is necessary, but also painful and exciting. It is especially acute for Eastern Europeans because they experienced a dramatic erasure of their historical memory post-1989 and the fall of Communism....