Intellectualism and the Posthuman: How Affect Changes the Intellectual

• In Event: 51.023 - Rethinking the Intellectual for the 21st Century

Abstract

In a decidedly anti-intellectual moment in American society (i.e., denials of science, defunding of universities, and distrust of “facts”), the role and responsibility of the intellectual needs clarity. This is all the more important considering the numerous challenges to western humanism--the home of the intellectual--brought by critical, poststructural and posthuman thought. While such challenges question the role and function of the intellectual in contemporary society, they are equally relevant for curriculum scholars considering what knowledge and experience is of most worth. This present paper explores the place of the intellectual in light of the current debates about humanism, specifically considering what developments in posthuman theories of affect mean for notions of intellectualism and intellectuality.

As does most American scholarship, curriculum scholars study the notion and practice of intellectualism through the lineage of critical humanism. Drawing on the likes of Edward Said, Jean Paul Sartre, and James Baldwin, the practice of the intellectual is related to “speaking truth to power,” or the “socially committed provocateur” (see, Barone, 2010; Dimitriadis, 2010; Pinar, 2004). Within this work, notions of aesthetics, resistance to power, and social justice are frequently related to the work of not just saving schools but also democratic societies (Barone, 2010). However, building off this prior work, this paper suggests an expanded conception of the intellectual, one extending beyond epistemological claims to truth and knowledge towards affective experimentalism.

In so doing, this paper draws on the recent reconsiderations of affect in line with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri (1987) and Brian Massumi (2002). Such reconsiderations take affect not as an individual or biological quality (e.g. emotion) but as a relational product (e.g. intensity) that both constitutes and exceeds an interaction (Thrift, 2008). Understood in this way, as intensity both within and beyond the individual, the notion of affect suggests a virtual, third space of an existence (Massumi, 2002). Much of the recent work in affect theory explores this virtual space, where affect overflows, asking what this space does, what it co-create, and how modes of interacting with the world might be different (Massumi, 2015)?

Rethinking notions of affect are as much political as they are personal. The affects that mobilize action in the world aren’t just habit or tendency, they are also highly normalized and privileged. A shift in affect not only opens up experience to the new and different but, as Manning (2016) suggests, provides an alternative to a neurology-based intellectualism that reeks of white superiority, classism, and neurotypicality (viz. Jordan Peterson). Thus, this paper argues for an intellectual practice that attends to affective experiences and the more-than-human drivers of the world, a practice that is equally important for the field of curriculum studies.

Author

• Tim Wells, Arizona State University