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The Contribution of Non-representational Theories in Education: Some Affective, Ethical and Political Implications

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Abstract

This paper follows recent debates around theorizations of ‘affect’ and its distinction from ‘emotion’ in the context of non-representational theories (NRT) to exemplify how the ontologization of affects creates important openings of ethical and political potential in educators’ efforts to make productive interventions in pedagogical spaces. The ontological orientation provided by NRT has two important implications for educational theory and practice. First, it exposes the indeterminacy and inventiveness of affective capacities of bodies, illustrating how diverse socio-materials events are variously enrolled in everyday school life processes of differentiation. Second, it emphasizes an affirmative account of the ethics and politics of affect in which connections and relations forged between bodies, things and spaces constitute the basis of new configurations of affects and emotions in schools.

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Notes

  1. In this paper, the plural ‘non-representational theories’ is preferred over the singular ‘non-representational theory’ to denote that there are many different manifestations of these bodies of thought, as they are enacted in different disciplines within the humanities and the social sciences. Their common basis of all these manifestations is their critique of the role of representation in accounts of the social and the individual (Anderson and Harrison 2010).

  2. Anderson and Harrison (2010) remind us that it is important to acknowledge how despite the explanatory limitations of social constructivism, NRT inherit two important insights from this theoretical perspective: first, the idea that symbolic orders are ‘invented’ and not ‘natural’, and second, the recognition that the nature of symbolic orders is plural and contested. Both insights emphasize how representation matters and that social order is not immutable. What NRT essentially do is to revisit and enrich these insights, framing them in a different way.

  3. As Anderson and Harrison (2010, p. 16) explain, there are ongoing debates around how to theorize ‘affect’ and ‘emotion.’ In their view, such debates have turned around three important issues: the apparent distinction between emphasizing an impersonal life and the embodied experience of subjects; the relation between affect and its signification; and the crypto-normativism that seems to have entered work in relation to the ethics and politics of affect (e.g. see Anderson 2014; Barnett 2008; McCormack 2003, 2006; Popke 2008, 2009; Thien 2005; Tolia-Kelly 2006). These issues do not necessarily imply an ontological distinction between affect and emotion, but rather a ‘pragmatic-contextual’ (Ngai 2005) distinction “that is designed to attend to the different types of experience gathered together in a unitary category such as ‘affect’” (Anderson 2014, p. 12). As it is explained next, I adopt a similar distinction, while discussing how the above issues are relevant in educational contexts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Open University of Cyprus, P. O. Box 12794, 2252, Latsia, Cyprus

    Michalinos Zembylas

  2. University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa

    Michalinos Zembylas

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Correspondence to Michalinos Zembylas.

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Zembylas, M. The Contribution of Non-representational Theories in Education: Some Affective, Ethical and Political Implications. Stud Philos Educ 36, 393–407 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-016-9535-2

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