Toward a Reparative Pedagogy: Art as Trigger, Art as Repair

I am an artist often in the position of having my work trigger warned.[1] I am also an educator often in the position of having to decide whether I should trigger warn the artwork of others situated in the same aesthetic and political lineage as me, one centered on performance-based practices that rely on resonant objects and embodied acts. On one hand, these practices make work from lived trauma, often representing, referencing, or otherwise reproducing that trauma; on the other, they do so with a vested interest in seeking justice, building collectivity, or finding repair. Trigger warnings present a conundrum for artists and scholars like me. I believe in my audience’s and students’ real relationships to the traumas that the work frames. I believe in consensual viewing and learning as a core principle of this work. Yet I am concerned about the way trigger warnings presuppose and structure the relationship someone will have to a piece, and perhaps more importantly, I am wary what they implicitly communicate to us about the limits of art and academia as transformative spaces. As someone whose first relationship to this discourse is that of being the trigger, I wonder: Why do we presume that the repair we find in an artwork will devolve into injury when we attempt to teach it?

In a moment where many of us are grappling with how to address the unprecedented and ongoing trauma of a global pandemic and nationwide racial reckoning, it is useful to critically reexamine the institutional policies already in place that attempt to adjudicate trauma. As one of those policies, trigger warnings implicitly frame pedagogical space as one where we have the potential to engage our students not only intellectually but also emotionally. Yet such warnings follow a paranoid logic: one where the capacity to be moved disappears into the capacity to be harmed. This is especially true when it comes to showing students work or empowering them to make work that addresses the lived experience of structural harms such as racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, and xenophobia. In order to better understand existing institutional responses to the specter of trauma, we might turn to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick influential formulations of the paranoid and the reparative in her essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” which give us a vocabulary with which to ask: What can the successes and failures of the trigger warning tell us about the possibilities and limitations of pedagogy as a mode of repair?

I am not the first to argue that teaching can be a realm where we do something more than disseminate information. Louis Althusser understood education as the primary ideological state apparatus, that is, where we learn to become political subjects, or in his parlance, where the subject as ideology is reproduced and maintained.[2] From his critique, we know that the space of education is never neutral, never safe, but rather a structure that shapes us into ideological beings we call “subjects”—subjects who can no less strip ourselves of our ideological formation than we can our own skin. Nonetheless, others have found a liberatory potential in education. Paolo Freire posited education as an instrument for liberation insofar as learning is a mutual, world-mediated process between teacher and student, one that “makes both teachers and students” and moves us towards becoming more fully human together.[3] Similarly, bell hooks proposed that “to educate as a practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn,”[4] advocating for an “engaged pedagogy” wherein “teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own wellbeing if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students.”[5] Both Freire and hooks recognize a formative power and active force in the practice of teaching—one that not only forms community, but actualizes the self. Across these different understandings, we see that education is an action that exceeds its content: it is a practice that has the power to both subjugate and liberate, to harm and heal. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney propose we navigate this ambivalence with cunning. They argue that the only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one: “To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.”[6]

Yet for me, Sedgwick’s concept of the reparative in particular offers a provocative blueprint for not only a reading but also a teaching practice that navigates the increasingly paranoid logic we encounter both inside and outside the university, be it around fake news[7] or institutional liability. To return us to the epigraph: Sedgwick argues that to take a reparative position is to “surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new.”[8] What is captivating about the reparative, as Sedgwick employs it here, is the suggestion that teaching can do something other than confirm what we already know: it can be a practice that, like artwork itself, leaves us open to surprise. In my own work in the classroom, I have been exploring what such a “reparative pedagogy” might look like.[9] It is not one rooted in protection, but rather in the transformative potential of the difficult, didactic, identity-laden, and politically engaged artwork I believe in. If we believe in what can happen when we make or see this work, then we must also believe in what can happen when we teach this work—that is, when we make it available to students as something to think with and actively use. A reparative pedagogy in many ways inverts the logic of the trigger warning. It does not posit the potential of an artwork to unexpectedly impact or move a person as always-already harmful. Instead it takes as its premise, to invoke Sedgwick’s words, that in addition to terrible surprises, there can also be good ones. Reparative pedagogy is therefore one that allows students and teachers to creatively and provisionally assemble the resources they find in the course materials, in themselves, and in each other. It is one where neither teacher nor student presumes to know the outcome beforehand.

1. To Trigger

For over a decade, I have thought a lot about what it means “to trigger,” largely because I have been told by various arts and educational institutions in both implicit and explicit ways that my work—which uses real experiences from my life and my body as material—is too dangerous for unmediated consumption. This ultimately suggests that I am myself dangerous when unmediated—a sentiment that echoes the long-held stigmatization of queer and femme subjects. That said, I believe in the premise of trigger warnings; they were not conceived to censor or punish, they have nothing to do with being “correct,” politically or otherwise.[10] One does not choose to feel triggered. The language of triggers emerged from clinical psychiatric research on war-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and more recently, trigger warnings became part of online feminist cultures as important acts of maintaining community and performing care. They were akin to other kinds of content warnings (“18+,” “NSFW,” and so forth) and emerged in response to the unique layout of journaling platforms such as LiveJournal and Tumblr, with the intent to enable rather than foreclose difficult conversations.[11]

Certainly in an individual classroom, trigger warnings can still have such functions, and as something communicated relationally in the context of learning, a trigger warning allows a student to opt in rather than to opt out. As university policy, however, the trigger warning takes on a different role. As we have seen in the case of workplace sexual harassment trainings and university Title IX policy, practices that originated in feminist activism are often appropriated by institutions to position and protect themselves as violable bodies rather than protecting vulnerable members of the community. In the logic of the trigger warning, someone speaking about or otherwise representing her experience of sexual assault is just as potentially injurious as someone sexually assaulting. For a number of years now, trigger warnings have become mobilized within the university context as part of an overall program of protecting the institution itself from liability; as such, have been a subject of queer, feminist, and anti-racist critique.[12] As university policy, trigger warnings can censor or otherwise estrange work by artists who deal with violence, trauma, and the body as part of an activist practice, while naturalizing and re-centering historically white masculine “apolitical” practices as valuable objects of study. Queer, “crip,” feminist, BIPOC, and otherwise “identity”-laden artists find that we ourselves are trigger-warned when we make work about our own experience. Too often, the tools of power find their usual targets.

Reading Sedgwick’s essay, we might recognize that the current discourse on trauma and trigger warnings follows what she describes as psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s logic of the “paranoid position”[13]: a splitting of good and bad objects, good and bad pedagogies, good and bad art. Notably, these discussions of triggering in the classroom emerged at an increasingly paranoic time in American politics, coinciding with broader crises of faith in public discourse perpetuated through online echo chambers—one that the pandemic has only compounded. In her essay, Sedgwick takes up Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic terms as a lens for critiquing contemporary queer theory, arguing that although paranoia can be useful for “discovering” the “secret” harms we always knew to be present (the misogyny, racism, classism, ableism, homophobia, etc. which structure the world we live in), we can forget that paranoia is not the only option for critical thought. Paranoia arises out of a perceived need for self-defense; however, it exists always in relation to another, reparative position: one “from which it is possible in turn to use one’s own resources to assemble or ‘repair’ the murderous part-objects into something like a whole—though … not necessarily like any preexisting whole.”[14]

As institutional paranoia, the trigger warning is defensive and anticipatory: it is meant to protect us from bad surprises.[15] At the same time, it collapses any kind of temporal unfolding of experience, leaving us always-already alive to an assumed totality of content’s impact. Such paranoia has its uses: many things truly are sexist, racist, homophobic, classist, homophobic, and ableist, born of the violence and enduring material legacies of capitalist expropriation, colonization, enslavement, gendered disciplining of the family as a reproductive unit, and race-based conceptions of property. Yet we need not entirely dismiss the knowledge that paranoia time and time again “exposes” in order to constructively assert that teaching can be more than merely affirming the presence of those violences that we already know. Particularly for those of us who teach from the lived experience of navigating such violences, it becomes necessary for us to also imagine that teaching can be a mode of repair, one that allows us to slip the singularity of our subject positions to attend to experiences held in common.

Trigger warnings can thus be useful provocations—especially for those of us who are regularly told that we are a trigger—precisely because they point to the capacity of both art and pedagogy to impact us. Unlike law, or medicine, or other frameworks for repair, art and pedagogy do not require that we testify strictly to our own experience or that we understand violence and injury as necessarily parceled out among discreet, autonomous, treatable, and compensable bodies. Art and pedagogy are spaces in which we can imagine and attend to the interiority of another, and posit violence as collectively experienced in ways that exceed concrete measurement. Through arts pedagogy in particular we train students in the transformative potential of this kind of imaginative work that primes us not only for empathy or solidarity, but also for understanding the porousness of the self. Our classrooms are the places where we can provisionally enact what law and medicine must repress, but activists already know: that we come into being through our relation to others. To the reparatively positioned teacher, education is a process of not only imparting to students a set of technical skills, but also instilling in them the idea that they are part of something larger—a discourse, an artistic lineage, a community of thought. Teaching is a way of telling them that they, and we, are not alone.

2. To Repair           

As someone who has tried to think critically and accountably about what it means to trigger, I have necessarily thought a lot about what it means to repair. Pedagogical spaces are not, as I have noted, medical spaces or legal spaces. We must understand that the kinds of repair they offer are distinct from medical healing or juristic recompense, and that distinction is the foundation of their great possibility. To say that pedagogy can “repair” us is to insist that we can do more with each other than the paranoid work of cataloging the harms that could befall us either inside or outside of the classroom—as important as that task can be. It is to insist that we can use the resources of our field to creatively assemble the disparate pieces of knowledge that our criticality has parsed into something like a whole, though to invoke Sedgwick’s words again—“one not necessarily like any preexisting whole.”

The reparative mode of teaching runs in many ways counter to what commonly feels like meaningful knowledge production. When I teach Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading” text, I often illustrate this point by asking my students to think about how embedded the language of “critique” and “criticality” is in arts education. What would we do together, sitting in a room, if not critique the work presented to us? What other word besides “crit” might we use for such a group activity? An “appreciation”? Why is it that terms not rooted in criticality sound so jarring, unrigorous, or even silly? In the context of arts pedagogy, being reparative perhaps translates to using the creative strategies of the artists we study—or the artists we are—to process, negotiate, and make something out of the experiences, violence, and traumas we have helped our students to name. This approach accomplishes two things. First, it demonstrates a good-faith belief in the knowledge we produce, one that takes seriously the idea that there is something unique, even remarkable about art that is more than merely an illustration of concepts produced elsewhere in the humanities and the sciences. Second, this belief demonstrates a meaningful engagement with the techniques of such knowledge production, allowing for an activation of the visual, spatial, and performative dynamics and vocabularies that are our objects of study.

Sedgwick tells us that “paranoia is nothing if not teachable.”[16] The reparative, on the other hand, resists teachability in that it must be provisionally and locally enacted in order to be apprehended. For this reason, I cannot be more prescriptive about what reparative pedagogy might entail than to offer an example of an in-class exercise that has been successful for me: one that uses performance to explore the relationship between consent, dissent, and repair. This exercise employs a strategy derived from my own investigations as an artist which my students and I found useful. Certainly, there are others. I share this experience with the hope that it can be helpful to those of us exploring the reparative possibilities of pedagogical work.

Despite the issues I have identified in their institutional application, trigger warnings are useful for the way they open a space for consent in the classroom. They mark the way the conditions of viewing within a classroom are not the same as within a gallery: a student is often part of a captive audience. Trigger warnings also highlight, depending on your reading of them, a capacity for dissent. Yet what trigger warnings fail to identify, and perhaps even occlude, are the many different instances of choicelessness students encounter as part of their education. That is to say, we ask students to choose—but always in conditions not of their choosing.

My classroom exercise takes its impetus from a video artwork I made in 2018 entitled Disconsent: Pedagogy. The artwork was produced outside the context of teaching, though it took the power dynamics between teachers, students, and the institutions in which they meet as its subject, and it looked at pedagogical space as one in which various practices of consent and dissent unfold. I hired four former students from four different programs in which I had taught to perform in the work by following a score. The score instructed them to relate narratives to the camera describing times they either consented or dissented within the context of school. It explained that they should not relate anything that they would be uncomfortable sharing, and that it was up to them how detailed, or even how factual they wanted to be. Then, I asked them to retell the narrative of another participant, “flipping” the terms of consent and dissent. This flipping could range from replacing the terms used in the original narrative (for example, replacing “yes” with “no”) to inventing entirely new details. When exhibited, the video is played on a continuous loop without identifying which of the narratives is “original” or to whom it originally belonged: