Can Courage Be Cruel? Finding Courage in the Situated Practice of Teaching

• In Event: 28.075 - Feminist Affect Theory and Education: The Cruel, Complex (and Politically Inflected) Emotions of Teaching Today

Abstract

I begin this paper with Lauren Berlant’s trope of affect as potentially cruel, that is, as simultaneously appropriate to the activity at hand and destructive of the best practice of that activity. In a book of the same name, Berlant explores the “relation of cruel optimism [that] exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” She is quick to assert that optimistic attachments are not intrinsically cruel. “They become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.”

My focus here is not optimism as Berlant construes it, but a related affect: courage. Teaching today – especially teaching students who are under-resourced and underserved – seemingly requires, in the idiom of education reform, “grit” (defined by Angela Duckworth (2016) as “power generated through passion and persistence”). I argue that this framing of courage (linked largely to traditional, individualistic, and typically masculine models of the hero) fails to take into account the reality of the situated practice of teaching. Those who adopt an individualistic version of courage encounter the “cruelty” of courage, both appropriate and self-defeating.

In this paper, I take seriously both Berlant’s central insight about affect (“the present is perceived, first, affectively”) and the lived experience of teaching as a social practice. I acknowledge with Berlant that we are affected – personally, politically -- before we understand or name that affect as object. The genre of response that lets us perceive this affectively constituted present is, for Berlant, the “impasse.” The impasse is a “stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things…” .

I turn then to a particular set of teachers (documented through my own work as participant-observer) to name the “impasse” that generated their awareness (both wandering and hypervigilant) and, ultimately, the reconstruction of their teaching situation that I name “courage.” Their practice of courage -- and their practice of teaching – came to be collaborative, realized in the “embodied process of making solidarity itself” (Berlant, 2011), that is, in the practice of collectively creating conditions in which teachers “hold space” (Plett, 2015) for one another. In such conditions, purposes are shared, supports are constructed, and persistence is the carefully-facilitated norm — thus rendering heroism and grit unnecessary.

In the end, I make a pragmatist argument for courage as both affect and virtue, an excellence in action. Any growth-producing, intelligent response to dangerous circumstances in pursuit of a worthy goal may be marked as courageous. The habit of responding to danger intelligently and purposefully is courage as virtue. Therefore, moving narratives of grit and heroism are themselves dangerous -- and cruel -- to the extent that they obscure the communal responsibility to construct spaces and systems where all can flourish.

Author

• Barbara S. Stengel, Vanderbilt University