“Affective Education and the Pedagogy of Desire for Teacher Training in the Digital Affective Era”

Abstract

In the era of global neoliberalism, education is called upon to confront a profound transformation of the ways we live and feel. On the one hand, the logic of performance, efficiency, and self-promotion pervades existence, generating—as Byung-Chul Han observes—a digitally mediated economy of hyper-exposure; on the other hand, a widespread anorexia of desire affects above all the younger generations, educational institutions, and family relationships: ours is a society “without” desire. The crisis of desire presents itself as a pedagogical issue: the school, as a symbolic space for encounter and emotional mediation, is called upon to rethink the ways in which knowledge is transmitted, shifting toward a Pedagogy of Desire and an Affective education—to enable the individual to escape the neoliberal reduction of existence to mere functionality, mediated—if not replaced—by a digital algorithm. Let us ask ourselves: is it truly possible for human beings and educators to be replaced or supplanted by AI in the emotional and educational spheres? What is the human characteristic that cannot be replaced by any digital algorithm? Perhaps we can think of Desire. Educating affectivity and desire means being able to recover the transcendent and relational dimension of being human—of feeling, representing, and orienting one’s ideals. Within a broader ethical framework: understanding and teaching how to desire means conceiving of human beings as capable of planning, otherness, and meaning. These characteristics are, perhaps, still “human, all too human.”