Enacting affirmative ethics in education: A materialist/posthumanist framing

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore the worth of a materialist/posthumanist approach to ethics, specifically affirmative ethics (Braidotti, 2018 Braidotti, R. (2018). Affirmative ethics: Posthuman subjectivity, and intimate scholarship: A conversation with Rosi Braidotti. In K. J. Strom, T. Mills, & A. Ovens (Eds.), Decentering the researcher in intimate scholarship: Critical posthuman methodological perspectives in education (Vol. 31, pp. 179–188). Emerald Publishing Limited.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 2019a Braidotti, R. (2019a). Affirmative ethics and generative life. Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 13(4), 463–481. https://doi.org/10.3366/dlgs.2019.0373[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), within the field of education. I work empirical material that ‘does’ this ethics in classrooms and draw on Deleuze’s (1988 Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza: Practical philosophy (R. Hurley, Trans.). City Lights Books. [Google Scholar]) ethically guided materialism as taken up by Braidotti (2019b Braidotti, R. (2019b). Posthuman knowledge Oxford. Polity Press. [Google Scholar]), to gain purchase on it. Defined as a relational matter of human and non-human powers of acting in pursuit of affirmative values, affirmative ethics focuses up relations, forces and affects. It poses considerable challenges to a normalised construction of ethics as located solely within a constituted human subject with moral intentionality as its core. Affirmative ethics presents empirically as an emergent property of relational assemblages of human and more than human elements that bring ethical subjectivity into effect. Pedagogy and curriculum perform a constitutive role in these assemblages, as does pedagogic affect, showing how this ethics can be activated. A materialist affirmative ethics makes for a multi-faceted and generative practice of ethics. Oriented to collectivity and with relationality ‘built-in’, it has the potential to play a significant role in the reconstitution of individualised subjectivity which neoliberal modes of governance continue to advance in education.

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