In Touching Feeling, Eve Sedgwick (2003) drew on a material approach to performativity and included an affective dimension. For those unfamiliar with performativity theory, here’s a summary: when we use language, we do not mirror the truth, but we constitute it, challenge it or reproduce it in a complex tango of repetition and difference, like signing one’s name (always the same and always different). As soon as we agree that language has a material existence, it becomes easy to understand how, upon hearing particular words, we may feel our bodies react. Particular words summon us into recognizing ourselves as particular types of being, a notion associated with Althusser’s (1970/1989) concept of ‘interpellation’, a speech act comparable to a siren’s song which tries to catch our attention.
Touching Feeling is a play on the ambiguity of the words ‘touching”, which may indicate both the state of being emotional and the act of using your hand to perceive the world, and ‘feeling’, which may be a synonym for ’emotion’ and ‘tentatively putting one’s hand on objects available in a particular environment as a way to orient oneself’. Even the word ’emotion’ itself carries this double-bind between feelings and movement: an emotion is a word used to describe an affect and it is also a word derived from ‘motion’. The experience of being moved by something or someone, then, might be construed as an invitation to act. In spite of Wetherell’s (2014) criticism of Sedgwick’s mocking attitude for building up her views on affect, the collapsing of emotions with physicality represents an epistemic gain towards balancing approaches to performativity that reduced everything to discourse, a kind of essentialism that does not sit well with late modern approaches to subjectivity.
With this in her attention, Sedgwick (2003) moves on to develop an approach to the production, reproduction and contestation of the social world which gives support to language’s power to injure, a point which is inherited, so to speak, from Judith Butler’s (1990/2008) analysis of gender and language. What she adds to this discussion is a way around a subject which is sometimes cast as overly conscious in Butler’s formulations, even though the latter has argued that “to be injured by speech is to suffer a loss of context” (BUTLER, 1997, p. 4). To Sedgwick (2003), however, there are sensations which escape definition and knowing, and this is where performativity is strongest, according to her.
In fact, Sedgwick (2003) writes her whole text with a mocking attitude, tapping unexpected meaning-making resources: star signs, cats and Buddhism, among others. These resources are not common in academic argument, to say the least. In a time where texts have begun to circulate with unprecedented speed, Sedgwick (2003) invites us to stay still, relax, and take pride in loosing our way. To lose one’s way is commonly considered to be something negative, but Sedgwick (2003), who had terminal cancer at the time, finds another word play: lose one’s way and loose one’s way.
One of the examples she uses to illustrate this attitude is her cat metaphor. Cats tend to bring dead animals to their owners and this act is commonly believed to be a gift. Sedgwick (2003), however, argues that this is pedagogic moment whereby a particular cat might be willing to teach their subordinates (us, humans) how to hunt, by providing a “hands-on” (p. 153) example. We somehow fail to understand what cats have been teaching us for centuries, which leads Sedgwick to question if “[it] is true that we can learn only when we are aware we are being taught” (p. 153). Her answer is that this is not the case. Even if we become aware of the cat’s pedagogical project, we will probably resist hunting for birds and cockroaches because “we do not want to learn the lesson our cat is teaching” (p. 154). There is no immediate gain for us to do that; we can rush to the supermarket and get our meals in a much less time and energy-consuming way. The cat is thus wrong about its assumptions towards our identification with it. We just can’t get around to seeing ourselves as cats.
As learning theorists have long emphasized, learning may happen in spite of “intentional instructional” (LAVE & WENGER, 1991, p. 40), in way that teaching is not “the source or cause of learning” (p. 41). In the same way, failure to learn may happen in spite of direct instruction. As Foucault (1999[1975-1976]) argues, power is an exercise. Many learners fail to learn more or less consciously because they are not subjectively and affectively invested in the core assumptions about the identity they need to accept in order to learn something in a meaningful way.
This view on learning looks with suspicion at strong mentalist views lurking behind each decision we make. Cognitivist, modernist and positivist approaches are embedded in such powerful discourses that I often find myself wading through the muddy waters of received notions about teaching. Honing in one’s skills at delivering surgical explanations does not guarantee learning. While this is an important step in planning lessons, keeping one’s heart open is just as important or perhaps even more crucial.
This is an important reminder for educators to be emotionally open to their students reactions and to allow for learning to follow its natural course, even if it means loosing one’s way.
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BUTLER, J. (1990/2008). Gender trouble. Feminism and the subversion of identity. London: Routledge.
______ (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. London: Routledge.
FOUCAULT, M. (1999[1975-1976]). Em defesa da sociedade. São Paulo: Martins Fontes.
LAVE, J.; WENGER, E. Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation.
SEDGWICK, E. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. London: Duke University Press.
WETHERELL, M. (2014). Trends in the turn to affect: A social psychological critique. Body and Society, vol. 21 (2). Pp. 139-166. doi: 10.1177/1357034X14539020
