Alone in the Classroom as Limit‐Case: Reading the Circulation of Emotions in Education as Provocative Psychic Interruption

Abstract

As the boundaries of the body, the vicissitudes of psychic life, and the bonds of social existence can hardly themselves be regarded as straightforward facts, the everyday movements of teaching and learning likewise defy and resist understanding. There is always that which interferes, that which makes of education a problem of affect and human relation, rather than one of simple correspondence. Though we might wish it otherwise, “learning” is often not a matter of moving from ignorance to enlightenment, but something that proceeds instead through sometimes‐unruly gaps and detours.

In this article, I use a particular pedagogical limit‐case, taken from Elizabeth Hay’s (2011) Alone in the Classroom, as a framing device for provoking a discussion on the emotional and psychic dynamics of teaching and learning. In the short episode that I look at from this novel, we are presented with the portrait of a young teacher who violently and gratuitously disciplines one of her students. In considering the place of emotion and affect in psychoanalytically oriented pedagogical discourse, and allowing that what we exclude necessarily returns in distorted form, I look at the potential uses of emotions as productive obstacles to learning, the presence of love and hate in the classroom, and the ways that moments of crises can sometimes allow for a creative reimagining of the world that we inhabit.

Note

Notes

1 I should here note that even though certain contemporary cultural theorists (Massumi, 2002) have posited a distinction between the concepts of emotion and affect, I will be using these terms interchangeably: as “internal tensions that seek release” (Britzman, 2011, p. 33). As it is “always in the excess,” the affective is, as Ibrahim (2004) puts it, “that which can only be accessed through the performed, that which can not be fully captured in language,” and because its terms are forever unpredictable, “something about it is always left over” (p. 113).