affectivity in education

Jay Lemke (jllbc who-is-at cunyvm.cuny.edu)
Wed, 18 Feb 1998 23:42:32 -0500

I've enjoyed catching up with the discussion about 'emotions' in education.
Certainly something we'd all like to be able to say more useful things about!

Not to look the Gift Horse in the mouth, but I'll be happier when the title
of that journal is closer to _Cognition and Other Emotions_. It is the
dichotomy itself, as much as the neglect of affectivity, which seems
pernicious to me. There is a particular and specialized affectivity
associated with 'reasoning' and logicking, which grounds them and shapes
their courses, just as other kinds of affectivity do for the more
specifiable practices and contents of our lovings, crusadings, and
detestings. It may hardly need repeating here, but the cultural antecedents
of the dichotomy are so closely associated with masculine vs. feminine,
middle-class vs. working-class stereotypings, that it is not at all
difficult to unravel the whole mystique of 'cognition' and 'reason' as
being in any way superior to other affective states (except perhaps in
being among the most easily controlled and directed to the ends of
technical economic productivity, the other key historical context for their
rise in status).

So looking at cognition (the term is hopeless in this demystifying
context!) or at ratiocination (least fraught with baggage of the available
synonyms) as coupled with, or specialized out of, some form of affectivity
or 'emotional' disposition -- looking at the affective dimension of
ratiocination -- seems very important as part of the project of looking at
'emotion' in education.

Because of the historical-cultural linkages, the neglect of affectivity in
education, i.e. neglecting to value its _study_, also probably has to be
investigated in relation to the denigration of 'emotion' and all to do with
it in upper-middle class North European cultures, from which most of our
academic disciplinary traditions (in the US anyway) descend. Vygotsky's
Slavic culture was never as totally under this sway (cf. also Bakhtin on
carnival), and the Romance cultures rebelled against it, too (recent
examples: Barthes on jouissance, Foucault on pain, Ortega and Merleau-Ponty
on feeling -- BTW who are the relevant Italians?). Because this hegemonic
culture was also pretty exclusively masculinist, not just exhibiting
non-rationalist emotions in the public domain but taking them _seriously_
was thought to be itself irrational, if not indeed the sort of matter only
_women_ could possibly be interested in!
So we get the feminist, and gay/queer theory, rebellions as well, asking
for and trying to provide accounts of the importance of affectivity.

Short of physical force, affectivity would seem to be the primary
instrument for control during all socialization processes. From inducing
fear through the threat of pain, to charismatic teachers inspiring best
efforts from students, affectivity seems pretty fundamental, and nowhere
more so than where it really matters to the stability of basic cultural
norms and patterns: early socialization in the family, where manipulation
of the emotional attachments between mothers, fathers, and children seems
bedrock fundamental (whether by the guilt-culture methods or the
shame-culture strategies). The emotional powderkegs (I first typed
"powerkegs"!) that are American middle-class families may exaggerate this
somewhat, but it seems true across a fairly wide range of cultural
variation as a matter of degree.

Which makes it very strange indeed that affectivity has not been the number
one topic of inquiry in educational psychology since its inception, or at
least in the postwar period when the principle was finally 'scientifically'
accepted (i.e. when Freud became folk theory). Why do hundreds of
researchers investigate 'expert cognition' and 'problem-solving strategies'
and almost no one looks at the role of interactional affectivity in
learning? (1) because, as above, it goes against the mystique of objective
rationality to which the habitus of middle-class masculinized, etc.
researchers disposes, and (2) because if we did understand it, many of our
automated cultural reproduction processes might become highly vulnerable to
disruption.

(BTW, I don't believe that affectivity is by any means the whole story of
cultural reproduction, but even such matters as the acquisition of class-
or gender-specific linguistic habitus at an unconscious level, would seem
to depend to a considerable degree not just on social positioning,
interest, and differential exposure, but on _identification_ with
lifestyles through transfer of interpersonal affect-values to attitudinal
ones -- i.e. who you like has a lot to do with what you like, and so with
what you are like.)

Finally, on the cultural analysis side (the history is pretty well known
here), _professionalization_ in education has gone hand-in-hand with a
bureaucratic de-personalization of the teacher-student relationship. Moreso
for male teachers, and moreso for teaching older students. To make teaching
an acceptable middle-class-masculine (that's one conceptual category, not
two) job, it had to be radically distinguished from mothering (not
masculine) and from tutoring (a servant-class occupation historically).
Women, who were the majority of teachers in early US history (different in
Europe I think, and perhaps the source of the higher status of teachers
there), got rather steamrollered in this process. It never really succeeded
in the US. Teaching is a very marginally middle-class occupation, and not
terribly 'macho' or high male-hierarchy status. Many teachers I know,
especially in their first years, agonize quite a bit over how much to 'get
involved' with their students as human beings. Most of those who are drawn
to teaching seem to want some emotional attachments with their students,
but are aware that this is (a) frowned on as unprofessional, and (b) said
to be fraught with peril. It is of course also highly inconsistent with a
mass education-factory model in which the people you might get involved
with come in packs of 30-40, only hang around for 40 minutes at a time, and
disappear after several months. (Note that this dimension also shifts in
parallel with the age of the students and the movement from
teaching-as-mothering to teaching-as-professoring.)

One not-so-obvious research study to add to a bibliography on affectivity
in education would be Stanton Wortham's book "Acting Out ..." which uses a
rather precise linguistic tool to examine the interdependencies in
classroom discussions between the real-life attitudes and affect-laden
relationships of the participants and the study of textbook curriculum
content. The connections are impressively pervasive and intriguingly
fundamental.

Taking affectivity in education seriously is dangerously subversive.

Do it!

JAY.

PS. For those of you who are way ahead of me on this, yes I do realize
there is a fundamental paradox in rationalistically theorizing about
affect. But if reasoning and feeling are not divorced as categories,
neither need they be as practices. Which would imply that what 'taking
affectivity in education seriously' ought to mean includes a broadening of
the range of feelings allowed to participate legitimately in theorizing,
and a change in the nature of theorizing to make it a more comprehensively
feeling activity.

---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
---------------------------