Beyond conventional critique in education: embracing the affirmative

ABSTRACT

This article provides new insight into the potentialities of critique. Drawing on posthuman critical theory and the Spinozan concept of power to act, we explore the limits of critique that centrally depends on making explicit power relations that are frequently hidden. Set within the context of inequalities surrounding sexuality, gender and mental health, this exploration involves two Australian government schools and critique as practised. The interdependence of affective, discursive and material relations as they play into these inequalities is shown. Affect and material forces emerge as constitutive aspects of critique with the capacity to address these inequalities and do so in generative ways. Critique presents as more than exposing power structures and power manifests as potentialising, as well as normalising. The argument is made that we might with profit move beyond human-centred and exclusively critical modes of critique. A de-centering of human subjects and re-centering of human and more-than-human relations augments received views of critique and reflects the immanent and productive power to act that underpins it. In bringing an enacted ontology of power to bear, what counts as critique is complex relational positioning with both criticality and affirmation at its core.

KEYWORDS:

• Critique
• affirmation
• affect
• materiality
• posthuman
• power to act

Introduction

One of the parents, the boy’s mother, opened the interview by telling me that she couldn’t understand people with my accent. She had worked with seven or eight [South Asians]. … ‘Sometimes it’s very hard to understand’. After she said it … it pushed me up to a far corner even; I was stunned, and at that time I wasn’t sure like how to react to that … Dad was listening and their face expressions and body language wasn’t that friendly, and stayed where I was able to see it – oh, they actually came in with that sort of mindset to give me, you know, like that, sort of, what do you call it? Racial – sort of like, abuse, there. … She was very upset with the way the interview was conducted and she was accusing and abusing me even when she left. … I never expected that sort of response though I’ve been teaching in different states for more than 25 years. (Senior teacher, Suburban School)

The words of Rishi, a teacher of colour working within an Anglophone Australian school are enlisted here to illustrate a particular tradition of critique that continues to be practised in education. The school is one of two Australian secondary schools in which Author 2 undertook an affect-led ethnographic study. Rishi is a Mathematics teacher of twenty-five years’ experience who relates an event that occurred at a parent-teacher interview where a parent, a White woman and mother of a boy in his class, launches a racial assault. Unexpected and outside his professional experience, he is ‘stunned’. The impetus for the assault is purportedly her experience of having worked with people like him who proved ‘very hard to understand’.

Rishi speaks truth to power in the spirit of the critical tradition that I, Author 1, as a white settler, former secondary teacher and longtime teacher educator, grew up with where ideological influences are unmasked and dominant power formations interrogated: ‘oh, they actually came in with that sort of mindset to give me, you know, … Racial – sort of like, abuse’. Drawing on a Marxist legacy, the tradition of critique sketched here, Frankfurt School Critical Theory, constitutes what we call conventional critique. Coming into prominence in education in the early 1980s following the rise of neoliberalism, Critical Theory ‘assumes that what is observed in the social world may not fully capture generative mechanisms underlying events and empirical experiences’ (Molla, 2021, p. 3). These mechanisms are those ideologies or systems of power such as capitalism and racism which are deeply socially entrenched.

Critical researchers adopt a ‘critical attitude’; they are disposed to social justice as Max Horkheimer (1937/2002, p. 242), a leading member of the Frankfurt School, put it some decades ago. This disposition possibly explains the enduring appeal of Critical Theory within education where commitment to social justice is commonly avowed by critical educators. In this context, the scholarship of Jürgen Habermas, who grew up in the tradition of the Frankfurt School (Rebughini, 2018, p. 7), is arguably the most significant and widely known. My own engagement with the work of Habermas occurred over the course of Doctoral research, with concepts of system, lifeworld and knowledge constitutive interests at the core of the study. It was through this study that I experienced limits to Frankfurt School critique. In investigating how knowledge transacted by education system authorities translates to the lifeworld of teaching, questions arose with regard to the role assigned to the critical educator. Thought to possess a form of sovereignty in knowing, this educator is positioned as exposing the hidden contingencies of system communications. The idea that students are cognitive authorities, however small, tends to go unrecognised. I began to think that if educators are to critique such communications, the reality that they are always already implicated in particular ways with regard to them, would need to be faced.

Critical Theory reflects a model of power attuned to macroconcepts (e.g. inequalities, domination, emancipation) and dominant structures of power (capitalism, class, gender, race) with power presumed to be exercised by social institutions and groups. In the present socio-political moment, which is increasingly understood as posthuman (indicatively, Braidotti, 2019c; Pratt & Rosiek, 2023), the limits of this model of power have become more apparent. Given how deeply immersed we, as humans, are in the material world (Braidotti, 2019b, p. 46) and the pervasive nature of power – power pertains to all entities, human and non-human (Bennett, 2010) and is inseparable from its effects (Hillier, 2023) − human-centredness and structures of domination are being called into question in many fields, including education. It is such structures that leave Author 2—a settler-migrant mixed-race queer former secondary teacher, more than Asian, more than White, more than straight, and more than gay – particularly wanting something more; a way to engage with complicating questions of power in schools with nuance. How critique is approached is of consequence for a number of issues of importance within education institutions and for education research.

Returning to Rishi’s encounter above, presuming agency as exclusively human and revealing the veiled interests of dominant human groups seemed not to ‘capture’ all we saw in it. We particularly noticed the affective force of meanings made through embodied and material practice such as Rishi being (i) pushed ‘up to a far corner’; (ii) scrutinised by one of the parents, ‘Dad’, whose ‘face expressions and body language wasn’t that friendly’; and (iii) vilified by the other, who was ‘accusing and abusing (Rishi) even when she left’ the interview room. Questions about conventional critique presented, namely, what role do embodied material practices play in it? Is it exclusively about human agency? Is it necessarily given to addressing relations of domination and restriction? Might these relations be mobilised in other than essentialised ways? In exposing hidden forces, is conventional critique unduly negatively focused?

With these questions in mind, and taking into account the view that interrogating power relations may be a matter of refusal which is ‘not just a no’ but a ‘generative analytic practice’ (Tuck & Yang, 2014, pp. 814–817), we gravitated towards affirmation as a principle to guide critique and affirmative critique as a lens through which to reconsider conventional critique. We position the inquiry in relation to thinking that has emerged over the past two decades called variously posthumanist, new materialist and new empiricist, giving particular attention to the philosophic work of Deleuze (1988, 1987) and Braidotti (2009, 2019c). An attitude that credits critique as more than human and intentional action characterises this scholarship, as does a sense of power that goes beyond what normalises and constrains. A perspective on power where the focus falls on what it augments along with restricts is in line with a growing interest in the humanities and social sciences in affirmation, including affirmative critique, much of it from a materialist, posthuman perspective (Braidotti, 2019a; Gunnarsson & Hohti, 2018; Moberg, 2018; Moss et al., 2018; Raffnsøe et al., 2022; Remme, 2023; Staunæs & Brøgger, 2020; Staunæs & Mengel, 2023).

The limitations of conventional critique can be overstated. While sympathetic to new materialist scholarship, Lemke (2021, p. 6) is of the view that it ‘puts forward an understanding of critique as a somehow outdated or particularly ill-conceived mode of engaging with the present. … (I)t stresses the limits of critique and conceives of it as an essentially destructive, dismissive, and negative enterprise’. It is also claimed that framing power as capacity, force and potential, as tends to be done in this scholarship, affords power an overly affirmative and agentive role (Joronen & Rose, 2021).

Taking the questions above and the empirical project into account, we aim to investigate the potential of affirmative critique in relation with conventional critique, while acknowledging the significant tensions that exist between them. We ask: How might an affirmative mode of critique be mobilised to widen the space for critique in schools and what might this widening imply for conventional critique and critical educational practice? The paper is structured as follows. Initially, we sketch orientations to critique, bringing selected literature to bear. We go on to discuss the complex concept of power, by way of the terms potentia and potestas as forwarded in Spinozan philosophy and taken up by Deleuze and Braidotti. Analyses are then reported as vignettes showing how critique is enacted at two Melbourne government schools. Next, discussion on flows of force relations is staged, towards gaining insight into how critique works, the work it does and for whom.

Established orientations to critique: critical traditions

Our interests lie in the ongoing need to consider critical theorising in the light of ‘new’ times, and ‘at a time when critique can no longer be solely an unmasking tool’ (Rebughini, 2018, p. 5). While attending to the well-established critical tradition that is Frankfurt School critique, we acknowledge that various forms of critical theorising play into education. Foucauldian genealogy which inquires into the way knowledge is organised and understands power as productive of particular subjectivities, and decolonial thought which engages ‘analysis of actual (historical) structures of domination’ (Alt, 2019, p. 140, citing Rosenow, 2019, p.86) are but two projects of critique.

Conventional critique begins with certain ontological prerequisites which are now much debated. In a swingeing critique, Kilminster (2013) has coined the term ‘overcritique’ to describe the critique whose origins are traced in Kant, Hegel, and Marx, and the scholarship of the Frankfurt School. Overcritique is ‘a generalised commitment to eliminating all forms of unequal power balances between interdependent groups, which relations are prejudged as subjugation, oppression or domination’ (Kilminster, 2013, p. 1). The problem with conventional critique, it is claimed, is a priori theory (ibid., p.14). This theory assumes what remains in question with ‘the rejection of conditions or premises that are considered unsatisfactory, unfair or offensive … the necessary pre-condition for their critique’ (Braidotti, 2009, p. 44). Thus, in the case of Rishi and the parent for whom he was ‘very hard to understand’, racial discrimination is assumed to explain the situation with other considerations which could be expected to bear on the matter such as gender, school ethos, institutional ethics and leadership, attracting little attention.

Critical Theory assumes the existence of a self-regulating subject, a centre of knowing such as the sovereign critical educator subject discussed above. As critique of this centring impulse suggests (indicatively, Braidotti, 2022; Murris, 2022), it makes for dualisms (e.g. centre/margin) and binary or oppositional thinking (e.g. the ‘critical subject’ vs. the mystified subject), limiting conditions of possibility for power, to hierarchies and structures. These limiting conditions can, however, also be seen as Critical Theory’s strengths. The unequal distribution of power is assumed and ‘actually existing relations of domination’ (Alt, 2019, p. 140) are expected to be addressed.

A further point of debate in the current conjuncture concerns negation, a significant concept in Critical Theory and one that particularly features in the work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Within the method of argument that is dialectics, negation attempts to determine what an object is not, rather than what it is, towards identifying and overcoming underlying contradictions within societal structures. Thus, the commodification of culture is considered to mask the true nature of cultural relations and to impede critical thought, thereby maintaining the existing social order. Braidotti (2019a, p. 470) is of the view that ‘the dialectics gets it wrong by over-emphasising the negative’. What is impeded, she claims, ‘what is not actualised is just that: a non-potentiated option’. Accordingly, in her view, we need to say ‘no’ to conditions we want to overturn but that this ‘no’ is not a matter of ‘locating negativity at the core of the exercise’. Similarly, Sedgwick (2003, p. 8) proposes that a reparative approach whose motive and force is ameliorative might replace the impulse to expose the ‘truth’ that lies beyond or beneath phenomena that has been such a ‘staple of critical work’. We keep company with Braidotti (2019a) on the point of negative critique. Conventional critique is necessary but insufficient with regard to the negative. Rather than solely an unmasking tool (Rebughini, 2018), it could with profit be connected with Spinoza’s potentialising, as we later discuss.

Emerging orientations to critique: critical traditions

The critical attitude now thought to be required is an affirmative one. Affirmation is perceived to take precedence over dialectical thinking. As Woodyer and Geoghegan (2013, p. 199) argue, ‘a preoccupation with reason and destructive power has imbued critical thinking with scepticism and negativity’. Affirmation is an attempt to break free from sceptical thinking and the classic Cartesian dichotomies of mind-body, meaning-matter and self-other. For Braidotti (2009, pp. 45–46), ‘moving beyond the dialectical scheme of thought means abandoning oppositional thinking’.

Movement of this kind also means crediting the idea that critique, when employed affirmatively, is not only about ‘what already is’, but also what resides ‘in the cracks’ (Raffnsøe et al., 2022, p. 188), in liminal spaces where things are indeterminate. In acts of exposure, as conventional critique tends to rely on, the focus falls on existing realities, the present situation, rather than the ‘new’ or what might become. In affirmative critique, one affirms ‘something that is “à venir” … something that is still arriving, or maybe even something that might, could or should be about to arrive’ (ibid., p.201, original emphasis).

In looking to better understand affirmative critique, we turn to Spinozist philosophy (Spinoza, 1994) as taken up by Deleuze (1988, 1992) and Braidotti (2019c), inasmuch as it is here that power as potentialising and what resides ‘in the cracks’ is explored. As Bryant (2011, para 3, original emphasis) describes the concept of potentiality, ‘potentiality, power, potency is pure capacity, pure “can-do”, pure ability. … These potentialities are what I call, following Spinoza, “affects”, or the capacity to affect and be affected’. They are actualised through movement and ‘in-between states’:

Subjectivity is not restricted to bound individuals, but is rather a co-operative trans-species effort … that takes place transversally, in-between nature/technology; male/female; black/white; local/global; present/past – in assemblages that flow across and displace the binaries. These in-between states defy the logic of the excluded middle and, although they allow an analytic function to the negative, they reject negativity and aim at the production of joyful or affirmative values and projects. (Braidotti, 2019c, p. 33)

In describing the work of these in-between states, Braidotti conceives critique as an imbrication of criticality and creativity (Braidotti, 2009), negativity and affirmation. She puts the question of ‘how to balance the creative potential of critical thought with the necessary dose of negative criticism and oppositional consciousness’ (ibid., p.42).

Conceived as such, critique is a relational concept with affect too framed relationally (Slaby, 2016). Transindividual, affect circulates as ‘flow’. In a potentially productive tension with the dialectical and rationalist characteristics of conventional critique, affect places ‘the individual in a circuit of feeling and response, rather than opposition to others’ (Hemmings, 2005, p. 552, original emphasis). Power is a matter of entering into multiple and mutually dependent relations or circuits of feeling:

(T)he starting point with Spinoza is not the isolated individual, but complex and mutually depended co-realities … To be an individual means to be open to being affected by and through others, thus undergoing transformations in such a way as to be able to sustain them and make them work towards growth’. (Braidotti, 2009, p. 56)

The central tenets of conventional critique where categories are dialectically distinct and opposed, shift in neo-materialist ontology to take in the ‘contiguous and co-constructed’ (Braidotti, 2019c, p. 49). A logic that is connective, relationally affective and immanent with respect to power comes to the fore. Spinoza’s analytics of power, which we now touch on, best conveys this logic. Notably, acts of exposure, negative criticism and oppositional consciousness can be considered as within this logic rather than outside it.

Power to act – to affect and be affected

In the Spinozan inflected philosophy of Deleuze (1988, 1992), all matter looks to endure and increase its capacities to act in the world. It has ‘thing-power’ (Bennett, 2010) with affect conceived as affecting each thing’s power of acting. Power operates affirmatively (potentia) or restrictively (potestas) to enable or inhibit the forces that sustain life. It functions not just through negation but additionally through affirmation (Bourassa, 2021). Also termed ‘power-to’ and ‘power-over’, these modalities of power are not mutually exclusive or hierarchical, albeit that hierarchies can form. Thus, in the context of schooling, power-to is often cultivated and marshalled towards constituted ends (e.g. policy mandates such as outcomes statements) as part of the neoliberal logic of contemporary marketisation (Bourassa, 2020). It converts to power-over. While their predispositions vary, both manifestations of power are productive. And, therein lies the potential to engage with the potency of each manifestation of power to determine and direct its course. For example, in defining violence as ‘power-over, the curtailment of the power-to’, Massumi (2017, p. 3) proffers that it can be countered, and this ‘amounts to taking back potential. To act politically is to occupy potential’ (ibid., p.4).

Power-to is ‘the power to change’ (Massumi, 2017, p. 2). If one looks to shift the frame of reference from conventional to affirmative critique, it is to power-to that one might turn. Thinking with the imbricated concepts of power-to and power-over, might an expanded notion of critique be similarly conceived as a multi-modal dynamic of critique and affirmation, as a growing body of literature maintains (Alt, 2019; Braidotti, 2009; Mayes, 2020)? The message we take from Massumi (2017) is that the concept of power, in the context of critique, extends beyond its customary vocabulary of structural formations of domination and dialectical overturning of power relations (e.g. shifting the balance of normatively centred relations and reinstating the margins). In sum, politics and critique too ‘is no longer a matter of gesturing toward the hidden forces that explain everything’ (Felski, 2015, p. 171). The problem lies with essentialising these forces, with narrowing the construction of critique. Other forces also exist.

Charting critique: more than unearthing hidden forces

We take for study assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) through which staff, students, and nonhuman others at two government secondary schools in Melbourne, Australia enact critique towards unsettling norms of sexuality, gender, and mental health. These examples are drawn from a large-scale, ethnography of slow violence and schooling undertaken by the second author in which affective capacities were mapped to gain insight into school violence (Higham, 2024). A broadened approach was taken towards what constituted violence, rather than limiting the study to particular social or cultural groups, or to particular forms of violence. Violence, here, was understood as a ‘curtailment of the power-to’ (Massumi, 2017, p. 3).

The Deleuzian questions of ‘Does it work, and how does it work?’ (Deleuze, 1995) were used to guide the present study. Flows of force relations (semiotic, material, and social) were traced to gain insights into how critique works, and the work it does. These flows afford attention to (i) the critical and affirmative possibilities of critique; (ii) nonhuman powers that play into it, e.g. powers of place, space, and infrastructure; and (iii) the contribution of affect as powers to affect and be affected. Tracings of relations were made specifically with regard to the identity work demanded by norms of sexuality, gender and mental health, this work being conceived as inclusive of the nonhuman. Our analyses were oriented to identifying everyday enactments of critique and analysing the forces immanent to them. We posit that these forces can include modalities of power that are associated with conventional critique.

Critical affirmative encounters: everyday enactments of critique

Pride Club↔Stand Out Club: attuning to LGBTQ+ identities

Suburban School is a mid-sized, mixed-gender government secondary school in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. Its student enrolment is around six hundred, the bulk of whom are Australian-born. A category that is taken as given, Whiteness tends to go unacknowledged at Suburban, and plays into normative views of gender and sexuality. From conversations with students and teachers at the school, we learnt that queer lives are lived quietly, with students and staff maintaining a semblance of heteronormativity, so they can endure within the local school context and wider community. An openly gay student, Matilda, speaks to her experience of this context in these terms: ‘You look everywhere, there’s gonna be people that are queer, that have different gender identities. We’re out there, and for our school, there is more hate than there is love towards that kind of stuff’.

Suburban’s new Pride Club provides an instructive study in ‘hate’, ‘love’, and related affective relations. In association with a closeted teacher, a group of enthusiastic queer students created a space of community so that they could feel pride in their queer identities. The first Pride Club meeting was held in the Wellbeing Centre, a building detached from the main part of the school requiring that those attending walk through the school’s main courtyard and pass the popular canteen where, it was reported, the ‘cool kids’ would sit and surveil members of Pride Club as they crossed the courtyard to attend Club meetings. Spatial dynamics and the affects attaching to them – ‘more hate than there is love’ – play into the affective micropolitics engaged by the ‘cool kids’ as we go on to explore.

A member of Pride Club, Matilda, relates her experience of gender difference and the reception given the Club at Suburban in this way:

Like I remember, we had an out of school uniform day. And I wore like a Pride badge. Oh, I was the talk of the town, you know? Yeah. Like, ‘Oh, look at them meeting out and proud’, and stuff like that. Like, it just gives kids ammunition … I know a lot of other kids, you know, you hear it out in the schoolyard, but um, you know, kids [are] like, ‘Oh, that’s so stupid, you know, why would they need a club’, or ‘Go look at them go now’ and just other derogatory kind of stuff. But, you know, as a queer student, you’re used to blocking that out, and I think it’s nice that we actually have a community that we can go to, and just, you know, even talk about, ‘Oh, did you hear what such and such said about our group’, like, you know, like [Suburban]’s just a toxic place.

Interventionist acts such as creating Pride Club ‘just give kids ammunition’ in a school in which the power of potestas circulates and produces discomfort (toxicity) for members of the queer community. Performed as a set of derogatory remarks, power functions as a form of institutional control that prompts a practice of ‘blocking that out’. Striving to shut down expressions of difference, the potency of potestas readily provokes judgment: ‘(T)hat’s so stupid, you know, why would they need a club’.

Nevertheless, and as Massumi (2015, p. 58) observes, ‘[e]ven in the most controlled political situation, there’s a surplus of unacted-out potential that is collectively felt. If cued into, it can remodulate the situation’. And, so it is here. Potentialising capacities are at work in assembling Pride Club. Imbued by more than negative affects, gender and sexual difference is affirmed for some, in fact for Matilda – ‘I think it’s nice that we actually have a community that we can go to’. The desire to belong to a community and, we infer, to refuse the larger school community, gives rise to critique, instantiated in the material form of Pride Club.

Located at the Wellbeing Centre it happens, however, that the Club proves unsustainable due in large part to the arrival at the first meeting of a teacher who lets herself into the meeting, checks out the membership of the Club, and leaves – an observer, rather than a member staying to join the Club, to participate. The potency of potestas again plays into events, here in the form of a straight teacher’s infiltration of a queer space, which creates further and deleterious effects. Blinds are drawn and doors locked at the Centre producing, in effect, an affective atmosphere and institutional positioning of ‘margin’ (us) and ‘centre’ (them). Binary relations and the normativities they support ‘stick’ in these circumstances. Pride Club begins to shed numbers. Over the course of two weeks, attendance drops sharply from ten students to a single student.

It came to pass, however, that Pride Club members soon learned to relate to power differently, to proceed less along lines of isolation and lack in relation to the power of heteronormativity, and so a successor version of the Club was created called Stand out Club, posing the question ‘Why fit in when you can stand out?’ The practice of critique was directed discursively and materially to standing out, to rendering Club activities anew and visible, and happily for the Club, it took hold. Standing out we suggest has affective ‘pull’; it folds into aspirations to not only belong but to showcase belonging. Belonging not as retreat and ‘lack’, but as ‘out’ and proud. Now scheduled to meet in the centrally located library, and far from being hidden away behind locked doors and closed blinds, Stand Out Club gatherings are held in the open, in a space where students feel relaxed and congregate, because it, and the library staff, are inviting.

Stand Out, with its signature message of ‘Why fit in when you can stand out?’ is inclusive, meaning queer allies are welcome too. A broader range of students attends Stand Out, some of them connecting for the first time within the group whose numbers have climbed and now range between ten to twenty students. Being open to all means that genders and sexualities can remain ambiguous – a safer position for those perhaps already marginalised, within what Matilda described as a ‘toxic place’. Those queer students attracted to the possibilities of Stand Out, and who prefer to remain closeted, can now do so, while still supporting Suburban’s queer community. As Ruddick (2012, p. 209) reports, ‘some assemblages we might be open to because they enhance our potentia or capacity to act, others we attempt to avoid because they constitute apparatus of capture, separating us from what we can do’.

Materialised as Stand Out, the ontological status of critique begins to shift. The reversioned Club offers widened opportunities to effect social change. Club members’ and allies’ identities exist in tension and this tension – difference immanent in the assemblage – would appear to well support queer club members and advance the possibility of a more just school life. A politics of refusal in the form of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is no longer engaged; in the safe space of the library, ‘us’ and ‘them’ appear to mingle and exchange qualities (courtesy, curiosity). This is Spinoza’s potentialising at work.

This mingling does not, however, satisfy everyone. For Matilda, queer pride is compromised, put ‘back in the shadows’, the collateral damage done perhaps by an overly enthusiastic impulse to be ‘inclusive to everyone’:

I mean, myself personally, I would have preferred it to stay as Pride Club because that’s—we’re branding ourselves and we’re letting you guys know that we’re here and yeah, this is Pride Club, this is for our community to stay safe. And I feel personally, that changing it to Stand Out Club, as humble as that was, and it’s not a bad thing, but it’s kind of, I feel like it’s downplaying what we’re about. Like it’s like, ‘Oh, we’re inclusive to everyone, we just want to stand out’. Like again, it’s a very cute name and I get the reasonings why and I’m not against it, but it’s just, I feel like we’re putting it back in the shadows. Like ‘This is what we are, get used to it’. Kind of now we’re just trying to conform. Like that’s again, just me personally, I’m not against the idea, but I would have preferred it. Yeah. Like people need to get used to it.

There is no guarantee as to how critique will play on the ground. Ultimately, it is ethico-political commitments circulating in relational arrangements that provide the ‘steer’. Matilda’s commitments centre queer identity and identity politics − ‘what we are’ and ‘what we’re about’ − not the post-identitarian move that we assume is being made by opening Stand Out Club to non queer others. The discursive and affective appeal of Stand Out would appear to have trumped Matilda’s preference for a more traditional-categorical form of critique: ‘Like ‘This is what we are, get used to it’’.

The Club takes back potential and it is discursive, affective and ethicomaterial forces that underscore its activities, and help this on. Host to divergent groups, the logic of the critique it enacts is connective, affirmative. Stand Out can be considered to actualise transformational change to gender and sexuality dynamics at Suburban. Given the toxicity of the school culture, however, this change is precarious; it can be put ‘back in the shadows’. Approaches to critique oriented to (i) opposing the privilege and power that attaches to dominant modes of enacting sexuality and gender and (ii) experimenting with capacity to affirmatively address privilege and power with regard to these modes will likely continue as both conventional and affirmative critique are practised.

Affirmative critique with its capacity to marshal multiple heterogeneous forces (ethical, affective, material) acts to displace − not replace − conventional critique with its more essentialised and narrowed us/them orientation. Nevertheless, and in company with Alt (2019, p. 140), we hold the view that ‘(p)rioritising affirmation should … never come at the expense of analysing actually existing relations of domination’ (Alt, 2019, p. 140). Matilda is alert to these ‘actually existing relations’ in the larger school assemblage. Where ‘there is more hate than there is love’, the work of conventional critique, while not sufficient in addressing social injustice, remains necessary.

A big warm hug: urban school and ‘soft’ governance

Urban School is a small progressive government school in an area of Melbourne which was formerly working-class and is now rapidly gentrifying. Urban prides itself on no assessment, no school fees, free hot meals, and free school camps. The student population consists of a range of gender and sexual identities, ethnicities, and neurodiversities. Considerations pertaining to emotional dysregulation in a world that expects emotional regulation are our particular concern. As a small progressive school, many of the issues that present at Suburban school with regard to social division and stigmatisation are seemingly absent at Urban. No explicit homophobia, sexism or racism were observed; indeed, the school affirms and empowers aspects of student identities that are marginalised elsewhere. As a staff member explained at interview, ‘it’s a big warm hug here, this school’.

Urban school takes direct action to transform the ‘disadvantage’ experienced by its students. This action takes the physical form of providing hot meals free of charge for students through arrangements with community and volunteers, giving toasties to students if they happen to be hungry when in class and soliciting donations of warm clothing for student use over cold winter months. Regarding emotional dysregulation, interventions involve staff ‘removing stressors’ and engaging emotionally-regulating practices as practical and protective buffers. Thus, if acting out, upset or anxious, students are allowed to leave class for short breaks to calm down and avoid escalation. They may spend time with one of the most popular members of the Urban school community, Lola the ‘therapy dog’, or other nonhumans resident at the school. They may feed chickens and tend to veggie gardens.

Sarah, an early-career teacher, speaks to the need for direct action in this way: (S)o it goes back to removing stressors. So food being [a source of] huge anxiety, and again with the experience we have, we know certain behaviours … can be as basic as anxiety [about] … how on earth do I get through recess? A queer, neurodiverse student at Urban, Katerina, puts a similar view:

… helping other people, you know, even if it’s just like giving them a warm meal so that, you know, they’re not cold and hungry tonight is a good thing, right? Like, I don’t understand how anyone could think this is a bad thing, you know, right. Like, you know, when, when the federal government neglects to provide for the children of this country, then yeah, individuals have to stand up and do something about it. And if it’s as small as providing school lunches, then that’s how small it has to be. But it’s sure as fuck better than what the government’s doing at the moment. So yeah.

Here, poverty which triggers anxiety plays into ‘certain behaviours’ that require ‘removing stressors’. The care-taking evident at Urban goes hand in hand with conventional critical practices of calling out injustice and exposing the neglect of authorities to ‘provide for the children of this country’. ‘removing stressors’ can be interpreted as extending the scope of activity of Urban students, enhancing their capacity to learn and live well through educational assemblages oriented to wellbeing. Potentially, this practice is an instantiation of power-to and carries forward ‘a politics affiliated to the ethical and ethological question of affirming’ (Bergen, 2010, p. 34). A longstanding concern with progressive schooling, however, has been that in the pursuit of happiness – viewed as positive affect – more negative affects are denied:

The desire for happiness is a sentiment echoed throughout [progressive] classrooms … where the children are allowed only happy sentiments and happy words … There is a denial of pain, of oppression (all of which seem to have been left outside the classroom door). There is also a denial of power, as though the helpful teacher didn’t wield any. (Walkerdine, 1990, p. 23)

As the flows of force relations unfold, we consider the work of the ‘big warm hug’ and for what and whom it appears to work. We become more alert to how discourses of denial (potestas) may circulate in the practice of ‘removing stressors’, how practices that ostensibly affirm, potentialise and connect (potentia) can serve to control.

The values, Safety, Learning, and Opportunity, are explicitly located within Urban’s School Wide Positive Behaviour Strategy (SWPBS), along with a fourth value, Respect. As is the case for various schooling practices in contemporary neoliberalised education, student behaviour has become a central point for institutional intervention. A subset of this behaviour, student management of emotions forms part of programming in the Australian school curriculum as Social Emotional Learning (SEL) which has gained popularity, possibly as a result of a proposed mental health epidemic in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2020–21). SEL emphasises individual students’ management of their own behaviours, with emotional regulation to promote positive social interactions being explicitly taught. An ideal of interaction is constructed for young people based on curriculum formulations, for example, that they ‘express emotions appropriately’. Potentia as a power to act may be potent but it is not necessarily productive. Valorising ideal states of emotional wellbeing can subtly impose the cultural norms of dominant groups, a complex situation for a school with students who have become marginalised from mainstream education, many of whom identify as neurodiverse. Students directly implicated in and impacted by this valorisation can become complicit in upholding what can prove to be for them incapacitating norms.

A suite of strategies and resources was employed at Urban to regulate emotional dysregulation – time outs, a chill out room, Lola, and toasted sandwiches on demand. These strategies and resources stockpile and can set students on a particular path. Who you can be as a student-without-stress is inscribed in policy and units of curriculum. Held to be important at Urban school, the SWPBS can be considered a form of affective governance that directs the desire and behaviour of students towards the positive and mentally healthy. It can be difficult to argue that pursuit of happiness is a negative, as it is consistently identified as an object of human desire (Ahmed, 2010). Students’ capacities to express themselves otherwise at Urban – as feeling angry, scared, or disgusted, perhaps – can become curtailed.

Our speculations about governance strategy came to a head with regard to a situation where action was taken that involved a rough sleeper, Mickey, who had made his home at the entrance to the school. While this home is one of the first spaces that one encounters on entering the school, and in mapping feelings and affects attracted the most negative responses, Mickey is never mentioned by students or staff. It is only when the issue is raised during an interview that we learn that how to resolve the issue of a rough sleeper, who is and isn’t part of the Urban school community, is a considerable challenge. Sarah again:

That concept of sleeping rough isn’t perhaps so far [from] potentially, some of our students’ [lives]? So, I think we have to be careful in how we manage it. What is the opportunity there? And then what do we put in place, especially in our very unique setting, to ensure that yes, it is safe, and it is safe for our students … yeah, our responsibility as teachers but also community members—it’s very complicated.

A seeming anomaly, a school with a history of progressive ideas looks to ‘manage’ this situation with reference to two of the espoused values of its School Wide Positive Behaviour Strategy, Opportunity, and Safety. While the school’s progressive history and ethos position it towards respecting Mickey’s human dignity, questioning along the lines of Opportunity is intriguing in a school that works as a ‘big warm hug’, a school that removes stressors to counter emotional dysregulation.

The school is stalled, its power to act inhibited by this ‘very complicated’ situation. Accumulating affect eventually sets things in motion; strategies targeted at protecting vulnerable students, cushioning them against adverse events, are mobilised. The resolution to the problem turns on securing the safety of school members and the school, in the service of those students whose realities are not unlike that of the rough sleeper’s and who, it is decided, need to be shielded from the worst of this reality. Mickey is moved on by the police to a nearby shelter for the homeless.

Urban likely provides the optimum possible conditions for researchers looking to learn about affirmative schooling and affirmative critique. It is filled with practices that affirm life, but within such a school, complicated relations of power can mean that even while a situation creates powers to act, power-over can be at work. Sarah describes the school supporting the rough sleeper ‘in the lightest possible way’, that is, by doing nothing, allowing him to remain at the front entrance. At the same time, students are avoiding use of this entrance. Hygiene presents as an issue. As the situation comes to a close, potestas prevails, a possible effect of exasperation, discomfort or distaste.

Encounters had at Urban pull in different directions. Practices of ‘removing stressors’ and determining what to do about the rough sleeper embody ambivalence. Student stress induces an ethics of care as well as curriculum intervention oriented to regulating emotional dysregulation; the rough sleeper, attracts a practice of benign neglect. Provision of local protective buffers and careful student support jostles with state sanctioned student self-management strategy with regulatory intent. Power to act is channelled towards constituted ends (e.g. SWPBS markers), yet, it also circulates ‘in the cracks’: ‘And if it’s as small as providing school lunches, then that’s how small it has to be’. Spinozan ethology ‘is the art of selecting good encounters, in the sense that they raise life to the nth power; and conversely the art of detecting the relationships which − compromising the cohesion of the body – depreciate, condemn and atrophy life’ (Bergen, 2010, p. 37). Affirmative critique at Urban school instantiates this selecting work and has the capacity to detect relations that compromise it: ‘when the federal government neglects to provide for the children of this country, then yeah, individuals have to stand up’. This detection work, however, is largely latent. We speculate that the ambivalence that attaches to critique at Urban circulates through the dominant discourse of the ‘big warm hug’ which acts to modulate negativity, to shield the students against undue negative influences. Critique affirms and arguably overly so, marginalising resources such as negative criticism that conventional critique can provide. An unresolved tension between affirmative and conventional critique exists. Critiques can contradict, co-exist and converge with no certainty as to which can come to raise life to the nth power (Bergen, 2010, p. 37) or come most to matter.

Embracing the affirmative: what is critique capable of becoming?

In drawing the threads together, we discuss how complex interrelations can exist between different renderings of critique. Capacities to act affirmatively and critically are not mutually exclusive. The significant question for critique is what it is capable of becoming. We hold the view that a Spinozan perspective provides an enriched understanding of the nature of power and expanded possibilities for critique. Centring concepts arising from the analyses, initially we discuss the shift in frame of reference from conventional to affirmative critique.

As demonstrated through the two vignettes, in moving beyond conventional approaches to critique when addressing established hierarchies of gender, sexuality and mental health, the constitutive contribution of affect and material practice comes to view. Thus, relocating Pride Club from the out of the way Welfare Centre to Suburban’s centrally located library initiates a changed dynamic with regard to who is attracted to the project of unsettling the hold that heteronormative norms have at Suburban school. Similarly, at Urban school, affective atmosphere (concern for safety, anxieties surrounding mental health) and material considerations (space and its appropriation by the rough sleeper) direct decision-making around a situation in which a rough sleeper takes up residence at the doorstep of a progressive school. Forms of oppression and exclusion present less as discrete and detached categories of power (e.g. heteronormativity, emotional regulation) than as performative practices with interventionist possibilities. Holding Pride meetings in the popular space of the library invites connection across disparate student groups which, if actualised, will likely serve ultimately to shift sex/gender divides.

The turn to affirmative critique invites attention to the role and positioning of the critical analyst. The analytical stance shifts from judging observer of events to actor affected by, and implicated in, events. Assemblage formation prompts the question: who and what are we affected by as critical researchers with respect to issues of oppression and exclusion? The political situation concerning the rough sleeper at Urban school is again instructive. Occupancy of the entrance to the school by the sleeper, silences around this occupancy, decisional ‘drift’ attaching to it and school policy and governance practices come together to suggest a final ‘solution’, agreed upon by staff and felt as inevitable given the vulnerabilities that are held to exist in the student body. Everyone involved, including the researchers, is implicated in this ‘solution’. We are reminded here of Todd’s (2003, p. 20) caution that all schooling and education is violence, the question being ‘not so much whether education wounds or not … but whether it wounds excessively’. And whether the researchers wound by raising and not raising difficult issues. Hemmings (2012, p. 150) makes the point that ‘in order to know differently we have to feel differently’. Knowing differently is taking into account the ‘feeling that something is amiss’, ‘feeling an ill fit’ (ibid.). Crediting the contribution of affective engagement in events provides for an expanded knowledge practice and ethical consideration that goes beyond conventional critical practice where the researcher assumes the stance of judging observer or, as discussed in the opening of the paper, sovereign knowing subject. Researcher positioning moves towards the researched, opening a space for reciprocal and mutual relations.

Third, the conceptual underpinnings of the shift from conventional critique centre concepts of relationality, plasticity and potentiality that can be mobilised to generatively address structures of power. Matilda maintains that wearing a Pride badge in the context of Suburban’s valorising of heteronormativity ‘just gives kids ammunition’, yet it also consolidates ‘queerness’, helps a sense of queer community to ‘stick’ (Ahmed, 2014). The badge both negates and affirms depending on those it is in relation with. It moves between student worlds of sex/gender identification, prompting forms of negation in the straight school community and affirmation in the queer community. Negation and the affirmative project bump up against each other and generate productive relations-in-tension.

Relations-in-tension are mobilised by partial objects, a Deleuzian concept discussed by Surin (2010, p. 203) in the context of psychoanalysis and enlisted here to describe objects that have a ‘flexible and plastic quality which makes them inherently political’. While not a psychoanalytic object, we consider the Pride badge to have such a quality. Plasticity is a kind of practical knowledge or métis (Scott, 2020) that circulates by means of material objects and is taken up differently in different discourse communities depending on what norms are upheld. Partial objects or tokens (Mayes, 2020) that can embed themselves in different groups while also moving across these groups, have a certain plasticity. They can give rise to radically different effects such as ‘simultaneous critique and affirmation’ (ibid.). People too can act as tokens; they can embed themselves in different groups and make entries and exits across groups much in the way that non-queer students at Suburban school do when, as allies of the Pride community, they join Stand Out. Power is rendered as a complex interplay of power-to (affirmation of queer identities) and power-over (maintenance of normative identity).

What counts as critique here is complex relational positioning with the prospect of taking back potential (Massumi, 2017). To take back potential is to take from potestas and this taking back can be effected not only with regard to systems of power but connections between these systems such as the in-between identity categories that Author 2 nominates in the introductory section of the paper. Partial objects likewise count as do partial connections between the different critical approaches under study. Thus, in the light of the sense of critique emerging from the vignettes, the Mathematics teacher, Rishi, can be considered to undertake this connecting work when, in the account made of the racist incident, he calls out racism and attunes affectively to racialised space (e.g. via an image of people of colour pushed ‘up to a far corner’). Resources from the different approaches to critique are brought to bear and used relationally to effect critical self-work.

Altogether, we claim that critique as commonly practised could with profit go beyond its humanistic foundations to take in material practice and affective processes. A de-centering of human subjects and re-centering of human and more-than-human relations augments received views of critique and better reflects the immanent character of power and how it moves across sites and scales. Exclusively, critical modes of critique tend to ‘fix’ this movement through attending to social structures. Recognising ‘relationalities instead of one-dimensionalities’ (Staunæs & Mengel, 2023, p. 91), crediting the contributions made by affective and material forces, and attuning to points in practices at which interventions can be made, widens the remit of critique. What it is in the process of becoming can be conceived as pluri-valuing (see Raffnsøe, 2017, p. 31, for the concept of pluri-valued), a valuing of more than one. For instance, power operates in a wider framework than power-over. Re-considering critique as acts of exposure and affirmation invites a widened and generous view, albeit that we might be wary of being enamoured of the affirmative. In studying critique through a lens of an enacted ontology of power, what matters is not so much what it is, but rather what it does: how it works towards redressing disadvantage and what it requires in order to continue to do so.

Biographical notes

A Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Dianne Mulcahy’s research and teaching interests centre on pedagogy, education policy and feminist materialist methodological approaches to research as examined and explored through empirical contexts. Issues of difference, disadvantage and in/exclusions are at the heart of these interests and studied chiefly using the conceptual resources of affect and critical materialist theories. Presently, Dianne is researching aspects of the ethics and politics of affect, and their implications for pedagogy and professional practice.

A PhD researcher at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education and Lecturer in Education at La Trobe University, Leanne Higham’s thesis, ‘Slow violence and schools’, is an ethnography of everyday life in two Melbourne government schools examining subject formation and the affective relations of slow violence and nonviolence. Supervised by Dr Dianne Mulcahy and Prof Jane Kenway at the University of Melbourne, it will be submitted in 2024. Leanne’s MEd thesis, ‘Becoming boy: A/effecting identity in a Catholic boys’ school’ was awarded the 2016 Freda Cohen Prize for most meritorious thesis submitted for the Master of Education. A former secondary teacher of History, Politics, and Law, Leanne is interested in the micropolitics that constitute school climates, cultures, and ethos. Presently, Leanne is researching aspects of the politics and ethics of school climates in Victorian government schools.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Australian Postgraduate Award, Australian Federal Government.