Passive and Active Affects
The concepts of active and passive affects have their roots in Enlightenment thinking, particularly John Locke, who observed that active power is only realised in relation to the passive properties of its object, for example, for fire to be able to melt gold, gold must have the capacity to be melted (the active power is dependent on the passive affect). An active affect is the ability for an actor to act in a certain way. Active affects not only refer to physical powers, but also to mental ones, such as the ability to reflexively adapt to a situation, or to reject a power acting on us. Passive affects, meanwhile, are ways of acting that can be attributed to another agent, or no agent at all, for example when a learning platform tracks student data and makes it visible, then students’ actions become guided by the data.
The concept of passive affect was extended in the twentieth century (particularly by writers such as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Jurgen Habermas) to explain the coercive power of practices embedded in social institutions, such as prisons, mental hospitals and schools, where power is not exercised directly but through indirect mechanisms such as surveillance or regulation. In the twenty-first century, the concept has been used as a useful way of exploring non-human agency (particularly technology) within complex socio-technical systems. The technicalisation of teaching and learning may result in technical disempowerment, where technical processes narrow the concept of learning (for example, gamification may reduce learning to affective responses such as fun) or reduce pedagogical practices to the working of technology. Online learning platforms can impose practices on to its users that they would not otherwise employ (such as competition or the ranking of student performance).
