The problem is becoming worse than the condition of inter-passivity, with student disengagement now often leading to mass chronic non-attendance in lectures and seminars. Rather than go through the motions of learning, many students simply do not bother to go through the motions, except to submit essays and often that is done with the assistance of AI. While lectures may also be recorded, the viewing data suggests most are not watched or watched fully, and while the cost of living crisis forces more students into more paid work, universities which recruit many students from affluent backgrounds still experience chronic non-attendance.
In a recent article in Radical Philosophy (RP 215), Alan Bradshaw and Mikael Andehn argue that:
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that we are now amid a ‘stunning level of student disconnection’ … Despite enormous investment in the ‘student experience’ – ranging from campus architecture that looks like airport terminals … to the requirement for all university teachers to be certified by professional associations – the reality is that lecture theatres today are increasingly dysfunctional
spaces in which teaching and learning does not, and often cannot, take place. Ironically, despite the
chorus of indignation lamenting the rise of the student as consumer, today the student is all too often precisely the person who refuses to consume their education.
They go on to propose that students experience ‘flat affect’ in the face of the attempt to manage their affective relationship to education:
Implicit in the all-important UK National Student Survey, for example, is the idea that the ‘student experience’ must be constantly measured and responded to as the engine that will drive university reform towards its predetermined neoliberal endpoint. Student affect, therefore, becomes a form of capital that a university seeks to build. In this regard, the students’ affective response is not just pre-determined (‘the students want more employability content’) but also the key point of legitimation and the primary alibi for the neoliberal re -territorialisation of the university. The student subjectivity they are expected to inhabit, therefore, is one that is not just predetermined but also overdetermined, making excessive affective demands. In this context, the withdrawal into flat affect jams the juggernaut, leaving an excruciating absent centre.
Rather than define such students as passive, Bradshaw and Andehn (drawing on Robert Pfaller), suggest
that they are engaging in the strategy of interpassivity, which is the strategy of displacement. Students will go through the motions of studying but not engage in the process of learning. They note that Pfaller’s examples of interpassive behaviour
include a student who purposefully spends hours in a library photocopying course literature that they will never read. Or a person recording movies but never watching them. Or a person who watches a comedy show yet never laughs. In each case the pleasure is delegated onto an external object, as though it is the photocopier that studies the texts, the Tivo box that watches the movies and the canned laughter that is amused by the comedy.
However, while this is a refusal to be co-opted affectively by neoliberalism, ‘flat affect is the final recourse of the profoundly disempowered that carries the risk of self-negation’….
Read the full essay
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