786312
research-article2018
QIXXXX10.1177/1077800418786312Qualitative InquiryRobinson and Kutner
Original Article - Graduate Student
Spinoza and the Affective Turn: A Return
to the Philosophical Origins of Affect
Bradley Robinson1 and Mel Kutner1
Abstract
In their introduction to a recent special issue of Qualitative Inquiry, Taguchi and St. Pierre observed that Foucault’s
notion of “fruitful disorientation” seemed to circulate throughout the included articles. Embracing this fruitfully
disorienting impulse, the authors of this article provide a detailed reading of Baruch Spinoza’s ontological concept
of affect as he articulated it in the Ethics. Through this return, the authors consider the implications of affect for
qualitative and postqualitative inquiry and offer an example of how a return to the philosophical origins of a theory can
produce new lines of thinking and inquiry.
Keywords
affect theory, Spinoza, postqualitative inquiry
In their introduction to a recent special issue of Qualitative
Inquiry focused on concept as method, Taguchi and St.
Pierre (2017) observed that Foucault’s notion of “fruitful
disorientation” seemed to circulate throughout the included
articles. Scholars “who take up the idea of working with
concept as method in inquiry,” they wrote, “will not think
the same way about either concepts or how to use them as
methods so they won’t ‘do’ the same things” (p. 644).
Embracing this fruitfully disorienting impulse, in this arti-
cle we provide a detailed reading of Baruch Spinoza’s
(1677/1996) ontological concept of affect as he articulated
it in the Ethics. Through this return, we consider the impli-
cations of affect for qualitative and postqualitative inquiry
(St. Pierre, 2011) and offer an example of how a return to
the philosophical origins of a theory can produce new lines
of thinking and inquiry.
The last decade or so of research in the social sciences
has brought with it renewed attention to affect, and this
development has been a part of a larger shift in ontological
orientations that emphasize immanence, indeterminacy, and
relationality à la Deleuze (1970/1988), Deleuze with
Guattari (1980/1987), and Barad (2007). And despite the
work of affect theorists such as Manning (2013), Massumi
(2002), and Thrift (2004), questions continue to linger about
the conceptual and ontological nature of affect itself. What
is it? What, if anything, can it be said to do? And, critically
for qualitative researchers, how can it be accounted for?
Such questions are at the heart of the debate over effective
methodologies for studying affect in the field of educational
research, as demonstrated in Zembylas and Schutz’s (2016)
edited volume, Methodological Advances in Research on
Emotion and Education. In the volume’s second chapter,
Qualitative Inquiry
1­–7
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DOI: 10.1177/1077800418786312
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Megan Boler succinctly captured a core tension regarding
the use of Spinozan affect in education:
The affective turn has done us the major service of popularizing
the study of emotion and affect. To date, however, this now
fashionable arena relies heavily on a couple of oft-cited
readings/uses of Spinoza, and thus a great deal of what counts
as “affect theory” is not even secondary but tertiary readings or
even further removed, from original sources. This also results in
confusions such as presuming that the hypothesized “autonomy
of affect” is a concept foundational to all “affect theory” or to
Spinoza’s philosophy (Boler & Zembylas, 2016, p. 22).
We would like to emphasize two of Boler’s ideas. First,
she highlighted both the importance of Spinoza’s philoso-
phy to affect theory and the dearth of direct engagement
with his work. Second, Boler mentioned both emotion and
affect as separate ideas that are invoked within the affective
turn, but she does not reduce either to one another. It is nota-
ble that the volume’s title does not make this distinction,
which highlights how these concepts have been conflated
with, or reduced to, one another as scholars have attempted
to capture affect through research.
What is at stake when emotion and affect are conflated is
the very notion of subjectivity. After all, the term emotion
implies the existence of a singular human subject who expe-
riences feelings that can be located, isolated, reflected on,
1
University of Georgia, Athens, USA
Corresponding Author:
Bradley Robinson, University of Georgia, 315 Aderhold Hall, 110
Carleton Street, Athens, GA 30602, USA.
Email: t.brad.robinson@gmail.com
2 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
and measured. This emotion-experiencing subject is the
Cartesian cogito—the I, the rational, essential self. In this
system of thought, affect can only be synonymous with
human emotion, and researchers who attempt to map a
Spinozan conception of affect onto this system of thought
are likely to experience unfruitful disorientation. A concep-
tion of affect derived from Spinoza’s work, is only think-
able in a relational ontological arrangement in which affect
emerges as necessarily entangled with memories and mate-
rials, sensations and spaces. This Spinozan conception of
affect subsumes emotion and cannot be reduced to specific
feelings of happiness or sorrow. If we were forced to use the
word “emotion,” we might say that affect is, in this way,
posthuman emotion.
These are difficult concepts to wrap one’s head around,
and in response, some may critique Spinozan affect’s onto-
logical assumptions, claiming that any such notion of affect
must necessarily escape discursive capture and would
therefore be irrelevant and inaccessible to inquiry. Such
charges, we argue, may result from misconceptions over
what posthuman subjectivity is. Crucially, posthuman sub-
jectivity is not the denial of subjective experience—yes,
you are interacting with this text right now—but rather it
acknowledges the dispersal of subjectivity across indeter-
minate assemblages of human and nonhuman material—no,
it is not only you intra-acting with this text right now. As
Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) noted, “There is no lon-
ger a tripartite division between the field of reality (the
world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of
subjectivity (the author)” (p. 23). In this way, the “I” is a
production, not simply a producer. Such posthuman orienta-
tions work not to deny subjective experiences, or the expe-
rience of subjectivity, but rather to argue that they are
produced by dispersed and dynamic, not fixed and static,
affective flows. In other words, to move past the cogito is
not to reject the existence of emotion; instead, such a move
suggests that emotions never spring from within a body but
are produced through a circulating relationality between
and among bodies. This is affect—dispersed subjectivity,
posthuman emotion so diffuse it travels through crowds, up
mountains, and down spines.
This conception of affect only became thinkable for us
after deep engagement and struggle with the Ethics, in
which Spinoza articulates his notion of affect and its role in
his overall ontological arrangement. As Boler suggested in
her interview with Zembylas, however, few scholars work-
ing with affect theory appear to have engaged with Spinoza’s
texts directly, even if through translations. And it seems to
us that to the extent Spinoza’s name has been invoked in
affect theory scholarship, it is often in reference to
Deleuze’s, and Deleuze with Guattari’s, invocations of him.
In the sections that follow, we aim to move the discussion
around affect theory closer to its primary source by provid-
ing a description of the Spinozan ontological framework
through which posthuman affect becomes thinkable. We, of
course, recognize that our reading of Spinoza is not and
cannot be functionally equivalent to reading the Ethics one-
self—which we highly recommend, by the way—but we
still hope that our description will help readers think differ-
ently about affect theory in qualitative and postqualitative
inquiry.
The Origins of Affect in Spinoza’s
Ethics
Written in the mid-17th century, Spinoza’s Ethics is a chal-
lenging read for a number of reasons. First, the text is con-
ceptually dense, and because Spinoza is largely cutting
from whole cloth, many of those dense concepts are new to
readers (e.g., adequate and inadequate ideas). Second,
Spinoza’s argument takes the form of a geometric proof
with definitions, axioms, postulates, propositions, and dem-
onstrations—a rhetorical move, perhaps, intended to ele-
vate his philosophy to the status of Euclidean geometry. For
readers, however, Spinoza’s geometric method challenges
us to track all the definitions etcetera, which he references
by parenthetical abbreviations throughout the text to syn-
thesize various components of his broader argument. Third,
as it was originally written in Latin—yet another rhetorical
move, likely—readers of English translations must linger in
the uncertainty inherent to translated texts.
Reading the Ethics, we found it useful to entangle our
own experiences with the text, to lodge ourselves in its
obtuse angles, and then to work ourselves out of them. For
example, Brad found it useful to think about his experience
moving to Georgia, where the heat of the sun led him to
suspect it might actually be closer to the earth than it was in
his previous home of North Carolina. Indeed, Spinoza used
such an example in the Ethics to demonstrate his conception
of inadequate ideas:
Similarly, when we look at the sun, we imagine it as about two
hundred feet away from us, an error which does not consist
simply in this imagining, but in the fact that while we imagine
it this way, we are ignorant of its true distance and of the cause
of this imagining. For even if we later come to know it is more
than six hundred diameters of the earth away from us, we
nevertheless imagine it as near. For we imagine the sun so near
not because we do not know its true distance, but because an
affection of our body involves the essence of the sun insofar as
our body is affected by the sun. (p. 59)
In other words, that the sun may have seemed—to Brad,
at least—closer to the earth in Georgia than in North
Carolina was due to the intensity of its effects on his body
to the extent that his mind understood them. Indeed, for
Spinoza, at the moment in time when Brad’s body experi-
enced an intensity leading him to imagine something false,
he was blind to the fact that the sun is, according to Spinoza,
Robinson and Kutner 3
around 600 diameters away from the earth. Despite Brad’s
knowledge that the sun is not actually any closer to the earth
in Georgia, it felt to him that way, Spinoza explained,
“because an affection of [his] body involves the essence of
the sun insofar as [his] body was affected by the sun” (p.
54). What Brad was left with, then, were what Spinoza
called inadequate ideas of both the sun and his body. But
what is an inadequate idea? What would an adequate idea
look like? What does Spinoza mean by affection? Finally,
what does all this have to do with affect theory? To answer
these questions, one must first come to some understanding
of Spinoza’s ontology. And, it all comes from substance.
Substance
For Spinoza, substance is “that whose concept does not
require the concept of another thing, from which it must be
formed” (p. 1). Substance, then, is that which cannot be
divided and which constitutes all things which can be
divided. The immanence of substance is fundamental to
Spinoza’s ontological monism, and it stands in contrast to
Descartes’s conception of dual substances: mind and body.
Beginning from substance, Spinoza goes on to describe his
new, anti-Cartesian system of thought that is only thinkable
in monist terms. Consequently, we, the authors, must be
careful in how we describe this system of thought, and our
readers must be careful as well, making sure we all think
substance. (Perhaps this will not be too difficult, however,
given the influence of quantum and particle physics on
modern conceptions of reality.)
A reader of the Ethics might object to our characteriza-
tion of Spinoza’s substance, arguing that he made it clear
that God is immanent, that God is the true, infinite cause of
all things. It is true that Spinoza used the word “God”
throughout the Ethics, but he explained his unique concep-
tion of God in Part I, Proposition 11: “God, or a substance
consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses
eternal and infinite essence, necessarily exists” (p. 41). God
is substance, and Substance is God. (Readers of the Ethics,
and of this article, may find it helpful to replace the word
“God” with “substance” anytime they encounter it.)
Furthermore, substance is only understood by the intel-
lect through its attributes, or characteristics, and God’s infi-
nite intellect can comprehend infinite attributes of substance.
The human mind, however, can only comprehend two attri-
butes of substance: thought and extension (i.e., matter).
Consequently, the infinite nature of substance always-
already exceeds the human mind’s ability to apprehend it.
Thought is an attribute of substance that manifests only in
the mind, whereas extension is an attribute of substance that
manifests only in space, individuating bodies through rela-
tions of “speed and slowness” (p. 41). It is in this division
between two different attributes of the same substance that
we, the authors, and our readers must be careful as it would
be easy to align Spinoza’s thought and extension with
Descartes’s mind and body. To do so, however, would be to
conflate two incommensurable ontological frameworks.
For his part, Spinoza insisted that “the thinking substance
and the extended substance are one and the same substance,
which is now comprehended under this attribute, now under
that” (p. 35). In fruitfully disorienting terms, Spinoza’s
notions of mind and body are different, yet the same. To
think posthuman subjectivity, then, it is useful to reckon
with the implications of both Spinoza’s substance and his
distinction between thought-as-substance and extension-as-
substance. If it is the case that posthuman subjectivity is
dispersed and dynamic, not localized and static, one can see
how Spinoza’s conception of substance allowed him to lay
out a plane of immanence upon which posthuman subjec-
tivity could circulate and unfold.
Mode
Spinoza populated his plane with many other concepts,
including that of mode, a concept which allowed him to
describe specific manifestations of substance-as-thought
and substance-as-extension. And it is worth repeating here
that thought and extension are the only two attributes of
substance the human intellect can comprehend. “By mode,”
Spinoza wrote, “I understand the affections of substance, or
that which is in another through which it is also conceived”
(p. 1). To understand this, it helps to understand first what
Spinoza meant by affection, or affectio in Latin. An affec-
tion is a mode of substance—either one of thought or one of
extension—as it entangles with other modes of substance.
The term affection emphasizes how modes of thought
encounter and co-constitute one another, and also how
modes of extension encounter and co-constitute one another.
To return to Brad’s experience with the sun, when it occurred
to him that the sun might be closer to the earth in Georgia,
he was reckoning with the intensity of the relation between
his body and the sun, both of which are modes of extension,
and this interaction constitutes a relation of affection.
Although Spinoza collapsed this relation into the phrase
“affection of our body,” it is crucial to keep in mind the
active, relational quality of affections. For Spinoza, this
entangling of modes of substance was quite literal—the
sun’s substance entangled with the substance that is Brad’s
body—and this relation of affection was so intense that he
became blind to true causes and was momentarily tempted
to conclude that the sun may in fact be closer to Georgia.
The second half of Spinoza’s definition of mode, indeed
the trickier half, defines mode as “that which is in another
through which it is also conceived” (p. 1). This paradoxical
phrase may seem more obfuscating than clarifying, but it is
nevertheless important to understanding Spinoza’s concept
of mode. How can a mode be “in another”? Indeed, in
another what? And how can a mode be “in another” and
4 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
“conceived” through it? Here, we offer two interpretations,
each of which depends on how one understands “con-
ceived,” or concipitur in Latin. If “conceived” means
“becomes,” then Spinoza was suggesting that modes exist
within the same substance through which they come to be,
an interpretation which highlights their entangled, co-con-
stitutive nature. Alternatively, or perhaps complementarily,
if “conceived” means “comprehended” (i.e., understood),
then Spinoza was suggesting that the processes by which
the mind experiences modes of thought and extension are
functions of relations of affection. Both interpretations
assume the immanence of substance, and we suggest that is
the crucial takeaway. Spinoza’s modes are unique manifes-
tations of substance as they exist in relations of affection
between bodies and other bodies, between thoughts and
other thoughts.
All the discussion so far begs a vexing question: How
can relations of affection between extensive modes (e.g.,
bodies) be apprehended by the human intellect, itself a
mode of thought? How does the mind develop an idea of the
body if they are each different modes of substance under
different, mutually exclusive attributes? How was Brad’s
mind able to develop an idea of the sun’s effect on his body?
These questions point to the mind–body problem, the
Cartesian split. Spinoza’s solution to the problem is this:
“The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the
body, or a certain mode of extension which actually exists,
and nothing else” (p. 39). That is to say, although the human
mind is itself a mode of thought, it can only experience
itself as a mode of extension (e.g., a body) entangled with
other modes of extension because the body is the object of
the mind’s thought. Put differently, thought is necessarily
embodied. Ultimately, then, the physical body is a mode of
extension, the idea of the physical body is a mode of
thought, and these two modes are united as the same sub-
stance under different attributes.
Inadequate Ideas
Crucially, however, because the mind and body are mutu-
ally exclusive modes of the same substance, Spinoza
claimed that “the ideas of the affections of the human body,
insofar as they are related to the human mind, are not clear
and distinct, but confused” (p. 51). They are inadequate
ideas. That is, the mind can by its nature only have inade-
quate ideas of modes of extension, including the physical
body which is the mind’s object of thought. Spinoza added
that “the human mind does not perceive any external body
as actually existing, except through the ideas of the affec-
tions of its own body” (p. 50), which again are necessarily
inadequate and confused ideas. Perhaps one can now under-
stand how Brad’s superficial idea of the sun’s proximity to
the earth was clearly inadequate, but more importantly, per-
haps one can understand how Brad’s idea of the sun will
remain inadequate so long as he remains a thinking thing.
Yes, he can be reasonably sure there is a sun as a result of
the relations of affection between substantive bodies, but
his idea of both bodies is necessarily inadequate. Indeed,
Spinoza was not immune to such inadequate ideas himself,
as his reference to the sun’s distance from the earth (over
600 diameters of the earth, he claimed), while technically
and minimally correct, understated the distance by approxi-
mately 88,209,500 miles based on our calculations.
Adequate Ideas
So far we have discussed the relations among Spinoza’s
concepts of substance, attributes, affections, and modes,
explaining how they inevitably lead to inadequate ideas.
But all this begs another question: What constitutes an
adequate idea? Assuming it is possible to do so—and per-
haps it isn’t—how might Brad arrive at an adequate idea
of the relation between his body and the sun? It is here
that we turn to Spinoza’s concept of affect, or affectus in
Latin, which Spinoza defined as follows: “By affect I
understand affections of the body by which the body’s
power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or
restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affec-
tions” (p. 70). Here Spinoza seems to equate “affect” with
“affections of the body” inasmuch as they both can
increase or decrease the “body’s power of acting.” Note,
however, that in the first half of the definition, the human
mind is not to be found; it is all about bodies, about rela-
tions of affection that either elevate or depress a body’s
conatus—that is, its striving, its ability to maintain those
individuating relations of “speed and slowness” that hold
it together. Affect, then, is both dispersed and dynamic,
not located in or reducible to the cogito. It is only toward
the end of the definition that we encounter the mind: “and
at the same time, the ideas of these affections” (emphasis
added). Spinoza made an important distinction here, one
that laid out the plane of immanence within which post-
human subjectivity could emerge and circulate. Although
affects are precisely those relations of affections that
either strengthen or weaken bodies, they are simultane-
ously the human mind’s idea of those relations of affec-
tions. And such ideas will be either adequate or inadequate
to the extent that the mind is, respectively, either acting or
being acted on.
Affect
Returning to Brad and that blazing Georgia sun, then, one
can see both dimensions of affect at work. First, the relation
of affection between the sun and his body was affective in
that the sun lowered his body’s power of acting, but that
affective response existed in a dispersed, dynamic, noncon-
scious arrangement between physical bodies. As Spinoza
Robinson and Kutner 5
explained, however, because “the object of the idea consti-
tuting the human mind is the body” (p. 39), after a few
moments of insufferable heat Brad’s mind entered into a
relation of affection between that of his body and the sun—
and other bodies, too—which is to say his mind conceived
an idea of the sun’s power on his body. It was an inadequate
idea that prompted him to suspect the sun was closer to the
earth in Georgia. Only a moment later, however, his mind
understood that this was, of course, not true. It only seemed
that way, perhaps, because he had just stepped from an air-
conditioned vehicle onto pavement radiating intense waves
of heat. For Spinoza, such rational engagement between the
mind and its ideas of relations of affection can lead to more
adequate ideas of those relations of affection. He wrote,
“Our mind does certain things [acts] and undergoes certain
things, namely insofar as it has adequate ideas, it necessar-
ily does things, and insofar as it has inadequate ideas, it
necessarily undergoes things” (p. 70). Clearly, then, Brad’s
wrong-headed impression of the sun was a result of “under-
going,” or enduring, the power of the sun, and he was there-
fore limited to an inadequate idea of it. But Spinoza added
that “if we can be the adequate cause of any of these affec-
tions, I understand by the affect an action; otherwise, a pas-
sion” (p. 70). As a pure mode of substance-as-thought,
Brad’s rational mind possessed the agentive power to
become the adequate cause of the relation of affection
between his mind and his inadequate idea of the sun, and
this adequate idea enhanced his power to act. He continues
living in Georgia, after all. Central to Spinoza’s Ethics,
then, is the call to active, relational ways of being in the
world that strive to rise above the passions, those external
forces that obscure rather than clarify understanding.
Indeed, that the words “passion” and “passive” both derive
from the Latin pati, meaning to suffer, calls our attention to
the ethical force of Spinoza’s philosophy.
Spinozan affects can get in the mind’s way of under-
standing true causes, which is why Spinoza encouraged us
to “separate emotions, or affects, from the thought of an
external cause, and join them with other thoughts” (p. 163).
When we are successful, “the love, or hate, toward the
external cause is destroyed, as are the vacillations of mind
arising from these affects” (p. 163). For Spinoza, then, an
affect can be a sort of problem, one only the rational mind
can solve as it makes its way through the levels of knowl-
edge, working toward true knowledge of God, of Substance,
of Nature. This is an important point, as affect sometimes
carries a more positive valence in the work of contemporary
affect theorists. Massumi (2002), for example, associates
affect with the “perception of one’s own vitality, one’s sense
of aliveness, of changeability (often signified as ‘free-
dom’)” (p. 36). For Spinoza, however, there are affects of
sadness, which decrease our power of acting and lead us
away from true knowledge, and there are affects of joy,
which increase our power of acting and, when our rational
mind is their cause, can lead us toward true knowledge.
Given such nuance, when researchers position their work in
a philosophical lineage of affect that includes both Spinoza
and Massumi—even Massumi himself—it is easy to see
how things can become confused, how inadequate ideas can
abound. In her interview with Zembylas, Boler highlighted
one such confusion, namely that Massumi’s “‘autonomy of
affect’ is a concept foundational to all ‘affect theory’ or to
Spinoza’s philosophy” (p. 23). As Spinoza makes clear,
affect, or affectus, is not an entirely prepersonal intensity
that always-already exceeds our capacity to engage it with
it. Instead, Spinozan affect is a suprapersonal intensity, one
amenable not only to discursive capture but also to rational,
productive, and ethical engagement within a posthuman
conception of subjectivity.
Spinoza and Deleuze With Guattari
Importantly, we do not claim that Spinoza’s ontological arrange-
ment necessarily implied posthuman subjectivity and did so
about three centuries ago. Rather, we claim that Spinoza’s
monist ontology laid out a plane of immanence within which a
thinkable conception of posthuman subjectivity could take
shape. And thanks to the work of Deleuze (1970/1988) and
Deleuze with Guattari (1980/1987), Feminist New Materialists
like Braidotti (2006) and Barad (2007), it has and continues to
take shape. However, the nuanced ontological arguments in
Spinoza’s Ethics are essential to engage with in any account of
affect theory that traces its philosophical lineage to Deleuze and
Guattari, who themselves profess the importance of Spinoza.
For example, in What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari
(1991/1994) anointed Spinoza as the “‘prince’ of philosophers”
(p. 49)—“the only philosopher never to have compromised
with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere,”
adding that “he discovered that freedom exists only within
immanence” (p. 48). Braidotti (2006) too returned to Spinoza’s
conception of conatus to explore the political ethical impera-
tives of nomadic philosophy.
It is Deleuze and Guattari’s description of affect in A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia that
seems to dominate conceptions of affect in inquiry after the
ontological turn. That in mind, now that we have worked
through Spinoza’s ontological arrangement, we will turn to
one of Deleuze and Guattari’s most cited passages, one of
just two instances where they offer something close to a
definition of affect. This reading will indicate what new
potentialities can emerge from affect theory following a
return to Spinoza’s original philosophical origins. Deleuze
and Guattari write
We know nothing of the body until we know what it can do, in
other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter
into composition with other affects, with the affects of another
body, either to destroy that body or be destroyed by it, either to
6 Qualitative Inquiry 00(0)
exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in
composing a more powerful body. (p. 257)
A few things to note about this passage. First, it opens
with a line that echoes Deleuze’s (1970/1988) book A
Practical Philosophy, in which he discusses the work of
Spinoza. In A Practical Philosophy, Deleuze (1988) com-
ments that one of Spinoza’s greatest philosophical insights
was that “no one has yet determined what the body can do”
(p. 72). This is important to note because it indicates the
extent to which Spinoza’s philosophy was foundational for
Deleuze and Guattari’s constructions, although they do not
state so explicitly. Second, Deleuze and Guattari implied
that knowledge of the body and its affects is possible, if
aspirational. As we saw earlier, the epistemological distinc-
tion between adequate and inadequate ideas is a key feature
of Spinoza’s Ethics, and while Deleuze and Guattari are not
as proscriptive, there is a clear epistemological implications
to their ontological arguments. Third, their attention to the
potential for affects to “enter into composition with other
affects” seems to rely on Spinoza’s conception of modes,
particularly their capacity to enter into co-constitutive rela-
tions of affection. This emphasizes the more-than-individ-
ual relationality aspect of affect. Fourth, Deleuze and
Guattari preserved Spinoza’s distinction between affective
actions and passions, whereby actions strengthen bodies’
strivings to cohere, to maintain their relations of “speed and
slowness” (p. 41), while passions weaken bodies’ strivings
to cohere, destroying them in the process. That is, affect is
not simply a poetic descriptive. Affect does, and does dif-
ferently in its onto-epistemic relations among bodies.
In this way, Deleuze and Guattari called upon Spinoza
because he raised the status of the body to that of the mind,
thereby complicating them in compelling ways. However,
what is left out of this invocation of Spinoza is the ethical
and epistemological force of his project. Those who would
grasp onto a Spinozan–Deleuzoguattarian ontology of the
body without directly engaging with Spinoza’s Ethics—not
to mention Deleuze’s and Deleuze with Guattari’s large cor-
pora, as well—may miss opportunities to experience the
fruitful disorientation produced by his ideas of what the will
and the mind can do, thereby allowing affect to slip from
their hands, which are left holding just a body.
Implications for Inquiry
Importantly, by our reading of Spinoza we do not mean to
suggest that a return to the Ethics is all affect theory needs.
Spinoza has his own problems—strict determinism, for
example. What he offers, however, is the possibility of
negotiating between two seemingly contradictory impulses
for engaging with affect theory through inquiry. Which is to
say that Spinoza helps us avoid reducing affect to humanis-
tic emotion on one hand or some inevitably inaccessible
so-called “force” on the other. By laying out a plane where
posthuman subjectivity becomes thinkable, Spinoza showed
how affect can exist in a discursively accessible state of
excess to the body–mind.
We also suggest that our return to Spinoza might be con-
sidered an act of inquiry itself, a postqualitative inquiry in
which we delved into the origins of the philosophical con-
cept of affect and in so doing were able to think something
new (St. Pierre, 2017). There are two primary ways in which
affect is discussed in education. First, research on affect
with a posthuman inflection often leaves behind the indi-
vidual student-subject or teacher-subject to investigate the
school or classroom in terms of rhizomatic assemblages, or
bodies with without organs. Second, research on affect in
education often involves analyses that frame educational
environments, practices, or moments in terms of lines of
flight, or conditions of emergent becoming. Our reading of
Spinoza led us to think about the ethical force of Spinozan
affect in education, which we will relate here to curriculum
theory.
In Latin, the word curriculum refers to the running of
a course, or a race. Some curriculum theorists have noted
how this metaphorical course has become increasingly
literal—“Race” to the top, for example—with regimented
curricular maps and standards. Such theorists note, too,
how social and physical environments are not separate
from, but rather are a part of, those curricular courses.
Drawing on our reading of Spinoza, it occurred to us that
an alternative way to consider curriculum—a way more
in the spirit of its etymology—is to emphasize the move-
ment toward which it hints, the act of running. By these
lights, we came to consider the possibility of a curriculum
of affective joy. Such a curriculum would attend to the
how assemblages cultivate increasingly adequate, ethical
ideas of the world in educational spaces through rhizom-
atic, not utilitarian, action. This example is provided not
to argue specifically for this construction but rather to
present just one possibility of how inquiry into the
Spinozan philosophical origins of affect theory allowed
us to think of something new.
In Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research,
Youngblood Jackson and Mazzei (2012) showed how dif-
ferent theoretical and philosophical orientations could be
“plugged in” to the same set of interview data to produce
different—but not better or worse—analyses. Our return to
Spinoza provided a different type of thinking with theory,
one that used theory to drive potential questions for inquiry.
For example, one could imagine projects to investigate the
curricular and instructional implications of affect as they
relate to Spinoza’s concepts of adequate and inadequate
ideas or of the connections between affective joy and action
all within the Deleuzoguattarian assemblage. These were
not questions that we were capable of considering ahead of
our reading of Spinoza’s Ethics.
Robinson and Kutner 7
Conclusion
The notion that affect always-already exceeds subjective
experience may represent both the theory’s greatest strength
and its greatest limitation. Affect theory is an attempt to
give voice to a crucial something, a haunting that is trace-
able but always slipping. This is a problematic paradox for
researchers, especially researchers working in humanist
social sciences such as education, where “useful” concepts
are those amenable to methodological application. As Boler
suggested in her interview with Zembylas (2016), scholars
want to be put affect theory “to work” (p. 23). The chal-
lenge is how to put affect theory to work in ways that fulfill
its theoretical potential without either reducing it to psycho-
logical conventions that focus on individual feelings and
emotions or dismissing it as free-floating signification. In
this article, we have argued that one way to meet this chal-
lenge is through a re-engagement with the primary philo-
sophical origins of affect in Spinoza’s Ethics.
Our re-engagement with the Ethics called our attention to
various conceptual tools that may support fruitfully disori-
enting inquiry with affect theory: adequate and inadequate
ideas, affections, modes, substance, joy, sadness, and so on.
Our reading of Spinoza also helped make affect theory
thinkable by clarifying the philosophical origins of posthu-
man subjectivity, which would be crucial for any scholar
attempting to engage in inquiry in a posthuman ontological
turn. Furthermore, inquiry is not only about how we ask it
but also about what we ask. Our return to Spinoza suggested
to us that inquiry related to affect is not only about the pos-
sibilities of capturing affect through research but also about
returning to affect theory to ask something different, to think
and create something different. To do so, a return to the phil-
osophical origins of theory is essential. Make no mistake,
this is difficult work, but as we continue reading, thinking,
and writing our way around affect theory, we like to keep in
mind one of Spinoza’s pithier constructions: “But all things
excellent are as difficult as they are rare” (p. 181).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Bradley Robinson https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2983-0206
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Author Biographies
Bradley Robinson is a doctoral student in the Department of
Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. He
is a National Board certified teacher in English Language Arts with
over a decade of experience in North Carolina’s public schools. His
research explores the intersections of literacy, technology, and neo-
liberalism in formal and informal educational spaces.
Mel Kutner is a doctoral student and graduate research assistant
in the Department of Education of Education Theory and Practice
at the University of Georgia. They have a master’s degree in
Conflict Analysis and Resolution and eight years experience in
educational policy and research. Mel’s work explores theoriza-
tions of temporality and movement in inquiry and ethics, as well
as the circulation of conflict in educational spaces.