In recent years campuses everywhere have been reporting alarming levels of absenteeism and underperformance. It’s certainly something I hear a lot from colleagues at UC Irvine, many of whom are left scratching their heads about exact causes. And of course, it’s typical to lay the blame on students rather than anything relating to instruction or the university itself. Affect theory can help in finding better answers.
Let’s start with how faculty talk about engagement. The typical focus is nearly always on learners themselves. Students choose to scroll or skip class. They take shortcuts or use AI. Of course these behaviors frustrate educators. But they are little more than symptoms of what’s really going on. Most learners have studied hard to get into college and borrow heavily to remain there. The vast majority want to do the work, care about the material, and value courses. But they still can’t bring themselves to fully function. They may show up, take notes, say the right things, and yet still feel nothing. That is not simply a decision. It ‘s a mental state. And often a defensive one.
Classrooms operate as affective machines, creating a vast array of feelings and physical reactions in students. While many educators blame educational problems on motivation or attention lapses, they in fact stem from the systemic creation of negative affect by policiesof the kind critiqued in these pages. Meritocratic institutions produce conditions of “affective scarcity,” in which success, recognition, and belonging are limited resources to be fought for individually rather than collectively. Learners internalize beliefs that their struggles stem from personal deficits and nothing else. The resulting shame is so normalized that failures become quietly accepted, making studentsagents of their own oppression. They focus on improving themselves, measuring their success through performance metrics, and aligningwith institutional standards. Today’s pervasive culture of mistrust adds to the degradation of students’ learning experiences. Learners are monitored by LMSs tracking online behavior, exam proctoring software, and AI-detection algorithms presuming dishonesty.
Busy faculty can miss these subtleties because they read behavior as a transparent matter. They suspect that students procrastinate because they don’t care. Missing class means they must be lazy. An anxious appearance signals fragility. AI use is simply cheating. While these interpretations may make a certain kind of sense, they can misinterpret the learner’s internal experience. Students don’t simply react in the moment. Rather they anticipate the classroom, act on their fears, prepare for potential outcomes. Their bodies react when instruction generates anxiety and defensive reactions, often in unconscious ways.
Freud called education an “impossible profession.” In saying this, he didn’t mean that that education is ineffective. Freud was describing the often unknown and uncontrollable outcomes of learning encounters, many of which aren’t fully transparent to students themselves. This means that faculty can’t always know how students will react to their teaching.[i] Learners don’t begin courses as blank slates. They arrive with minds preloaded with prior experiences of judgment.
Add to this the current mood of campuses today (exhaustion, surveillance, competition) along with the uncertainty of the world outside, and it’s clear that for many students there is no way to see learning as an invitation. Many see college as a test of their worth. A term like “motivation” hardly can account for all of this in suggesting that students simply need more desire to learn. What learners actually require is less fear and risk of failure.
One way to look at this is through the concept of the unconscious. According to psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan, the unconscious is more than a repository of hidden impulses. It’s a system of symbols, signs, and methods that shape human identity.[ii] Key elements of the Lacanian unconscious are desire and lack, manifest in students as behaviors to please, receive recognition, or simply get good grades. In intimidating classes or simply when things don’t go well, learners may unconsciously disconnect because they can no longer find a sense of self in the learning exchange. In this situation, student disengagement can signal a counter-reaction to authority in maintaining subjective existence in the face of unhealthy demands.
Sometimes this simply is a matter of prior conditioning.[iii] When someone’s upbringing has been inconsistent, punitive, or indifferent, their adult educational behavior can be more rigid or reactionary. Some become hypervigilant. Others shut down. Still others do both, oscillating between anxious over-functioning and sudden collapse. This is not a personality type. It is an acquired response to a world that does not feel safe. Many aspects of college are like insecure environments. Students receive constant evaluations, but their feedback is typically thin, delayed, or transactional. In competitive classrooms offering little support, they are told to be independent or even “take risks,” only to be punished for doing so.
Within this framework grading shifts from a neutral measure to symbolic event. A good grade signals reassurance and membership in a successful or otherwise “safe” group. Ironically, such rewards also can generate fear and a dependency as learners develop obsessions with tests and grades. Faculty sometimes report students confessing “addictions” to academic success. While this might seem a casual joke, it’s also an extremely accurate metaphor. When a student’s brain interprets approval as safety, academic achievement can become a substitute for emotional regulation.
This is how compliance becomes its own reward. Rather than a passive or dull surrender, obedience can give learners an illusion of control. Course rubrics tell them exactly how NOT to fail, offering ways to produce acceptable work without wandering into uncertainty. Rigid systems can feel safer than open-ended ones if the student is preoccupied about being exposed. When this is true, the very “freedom” of open inquiry and experiment can register as danger. This isn’t because students are immature, but because the social cost of being wrong is high, and so many have learned to equate uncertainty with punishment. One result is that students become attached to the very mechanism that drains them.[iv] Not unlike the paradox of capitalism itself, the reward system of higher education convinces many students to play by rules even as it crushes them.
The incentives described here run deeper than rubrics and transcripts. They reach into the neural machinery of wanting itself. With so much instruction making students feel badly, what (besides grades) keeps them striving amid diminishing returns? Recent neuroscience suggests that hope of success can override even repeated disappointment. Something makes the brain keep expecting satisfaction even though it rarely comes. Advertisers long have capitalized on the irrational reality that wanting something is far more powerful than getting it. The expectations associated with college are part of a larger mechanism that influences our wanting. A new smart phone may give you a rush, but soon there will be a longing to upgrade, buy a new version, make another purchase.
Studies using brain scans show that “wanting” and “liking” occur in two different areas of the brain and “wanting” occurs in both a broader and greater degree than “liking.” Thus, the conventional view that fundamental appetites drive human behavior is not entirely true. The less obvious operations of imagination and expectation matter much more than actual experience. For this reason, anticipation is a bigger animating force than what follows. Researchers believe that wanting impacts everything we do on an ordinary basis, whether it’s buying a candy bar or playing a computer game, texting a friend or seeking success. Such expectations are so strong that they make people desire things that offer no benefits. This helps explain the level of addictive consumption in American culture and why success and wealth do not bring people long-term meaning. It offers insights into why people eat to excess or develop habits that don’t bring them enjoyment. Also, this failure to deliver satisfaction is a major cause of Learning on Empty.
Ultimately, anticipation and emotional desire can affect an individual’s decision-making process when it comes to major choices. Here again, economists may argue that people are motivated to do well at their jobs so they can afford to buy things. But neuroscience showsthe pursuit animates excitement more than compensation. Researchers conducted a now-classic study of how one part of the brain (the nucleus accumbens) responds to the idea of getting paid. The expectation was that more pay would mean more happiness. But according to Harvard Business Review, “Brain activity stopped at the point the subjects were actually paid, implying that it was the expectation and not the receipt of payment that excited them.”[v] If people can be misled on something so basic, what else may they be mistaken about?
“The brain seems stingier with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire,” stated Kent Berridge, the scientist primarily known for these findings.[vi] Berridge’s main finding was that the so-called “feel good” neurotransmitter dopamine was relatively unimportant in terms of the pleasure associated with eating sweets or winning a contest. Instead, Berridge located dopamine’s major role in the anticipation of pleasure (as in desires), unconscious thought processes, and even the memory of a pleasant event. Berridge has since found thesepleasure systems behind pursuing success, the “good life,” and overall well-being. He concludes that true joy is more a mental construction than anything else. Success is a function of attitude rather than absolute reality. Even more sobering, the powerful forces of wanting also lie behind anxiety and the fear of bad outcomes. For students caught in this loop, the next reward always promises the satisfaction the last one withheld, and the striving rarely resolves on its own.
Missing in this dynamic is any feeling of being a part of something bigger than oneself. Such alienation creates an emotional void that can only be filled with more work, harder studying, or better time management. Such gaping emptiness presents an opportunity to rethink education. Baruch Spinoza’s concept of “conatus” can be helpful here. Spinoza used conatus to name the striving force in every living being, the drive to persist and to expand one’s own capacities. Learning can constitute that same drive at work, extending the reach of what the striving subject can think, feel, and do.[vii] In this revised approach, joy can arise from increasing the ability to think or act, just as sorrow can result from decrease. A conatus-informed pedagogy tells students that authentic learning comes not from correct answers or test scores, but from their growth in thinking creatively and connecting with others. To Spinoza the key to learning lies in harnessing the subject’s inherent drive to preserve its own being. When this is done effectively and students discover new ideas, learning produces a special kind of joy.
Spinoza’s approach also sees learning as a product of emotional engagement. Students are most successful at learning when they feel fully accepted and energized to thrive. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari further developed these ideas into a theory of “desiring-production,” with even greater pedagogical potential.[viii] Seeing learning as desiring-production offers a compelling alternative to the deficit approaches so common today. Deleuze and Guattari envisioned a flow of willful energy running through all human endeavors, animated by intrinsic desire. Circulating from person-to-person, desiring-production can animate and amplify learning. When channeled productively, it offers potentials for students to make sense of their experiences, create links between concepts, and produce new meanings.
Individualism is devil in this scheme, as it constrains insight and prevents connection. Rather than an inevitable aspect of human nature, Deleuze and Guattari see individualism as a social construct discouraging interconnectedness and community. Their concept of “becoming” offers a direct critique of the individual in rejecting the premise of a stable, immutable, and independent self. Instead, identity is viewed as fluid, changing, and always connected to the world around it. In contrast to the static binary of students as either capable or incapable, Deleuze and Guattari see learners engaged in a process of becoming other as they evolve toward new abilities and potentialities. This positive ontology begins with what each learner brings rather than what they lack.
When a student appears disengaged the question is no longer “what’s wrong with them?” but rather “what forces are blocking their natural potential for learning?” Psychologist Silvan Tomkins developed a typology of affects identifying affect pairs ranging from positive ones like “interest-excitement” and “enjoyment-joy” to negative ones like “fear-terror” and “shame-humiliation.”[ix] As with Spinosa, a focus on developing joyful passions was central in recuperating learner attitude and agency. Rather that fear or shame to drive student learning, this approach would nurture student enthusiasm, curiosity, and collaborative engagement. Ways to do this include creating connections between assignments and students’ own interests, using assessment procedures that encourage reflection, and fostering environments where students feel comfortable taking risks. The transformative potentials of this come from an understanding of shame in school contexts. As in attachment, Tomkins attributed adult shame to early experiences of “absence,” “unmet need,” and “disappointment.” In this reckoning, shame appears after a learner has felt interest and enjoyment, only to have them taken away by a bad outcome. Such epistemic injury is seen in the subjective harm to students when failure results in something valued and worked for like college.[x] As such, it is one more piece in the puzzle of student disengagement.
The resulting motivational ambivalence is a key component of Learning on Empty. And it helps explain why ordinary solutions simply won’t work. By themselves specific methods may provide some help, but they only treat problems from procedural perspectives. They don’t fully address the psychological/emotional aspects of why students lose traction. This isn’t to say that all educators should act as therapists. But it does mean making learning less threatening. Creating security is an atmospheric project. It’s a feeling of not expecting punishment for failures or mistakes. Felt security is created through reasonable expectations and opportunities for repair. It comes from productive feedback for growth and improvement, conveyed without judgement. It can be implemented through early low-risk practice experiences to give students confidence before being evaluated. It inheres in structured courses designed with incremental scaffolding to lessen anxiety. Together these steps can generate a relational pedagogy treating students as responsible subjects.
These intersecting theories point to the powerful affective potential of instruction geared for learner interest and agency. By attending to affect educators can transform education from a system of depletion into one replenishing joy, discovery, and collective becoming.[xi] Even when institutional pressure mounts and the world seems an uninviting place, learners can draw upon curiosity and connection with others. Ultimately, affect theory provides way of understanding learners based on possibility. The crisis of engagement that definescontemporary education need not continue. It is a direct outcome of institutional practices that limit learner desire itself.
[i] Sigmund Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957).
[ii] Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
[iii] John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, vol. 1, Attachment (New York: Basic Books, 1969); Mary D. Salter Ainsworth et al., Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1978).
[iv] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: Continuum, 1970); Alex J. Armonda, A Lacanian Foundation for Critical Pedagogy: In Freire More Than Freire (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025).
[v] Gardiner Morse, “Decisions and Desire,” Harvard Business Review (Jan. 2006) https://hbr.org/2006/01/decisions-and-desire
[vi] “Why ‘Wanting’ and ‘Liking’ Something Simultaneously is Overwhelming,” University of Michigan (Mar. 3, 2007) https://news.umich.edu/why-wanting-and-liking-something-simultaneously-is-overwhelming/.
[vii] Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, trans. by Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
[viii] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley,
Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1983).
[ix] Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Complete Edition (New York: Springer Publishing, 2008).
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Parables for the Virtual.