The rhetoric of therapy and the politics of anger: From the safe house to a praxis of shelter

Abstract

Although there has been much discussion in composition studies for the past several years about the importance of contact zones, dissensus, and conflict to the process of learning (Bizzell; Harris; Jarratt; Lu; Olson; Trimbur; West), there has been less talk of the relationship between safe houses and conflict, as well as the role anger plays in social and political engagement. Some composition scholars have argued that in order to help prepare students for participation in civic culture, it is necessary to articulate radical pedagogies, ones that encourage modes of argumentation and that see the tensions of social difference as points of political friction to be interrogated. In arguing for the necessity of agonistic pedagogical models, however, it is easy to overlook not only the affective relations of social and political engagement but also the fact that conflict and dissensus-precisely because of emotional ties and affective investments--o not always follow the proscriptions of reasoned or civil discourse, that engagement cannot always be understood in terms of prevailing rationalities and intelligibilities. In arguing for the importance of conflict (that ideological positions are forged and tested through argumentation rooted in social difference), it is also easy to ignore that sometimes we need to deal with some of the more damaging and long-lasting results of engagement: the effects of pain, violence, cruelty-psychic and emotional injury as well as physical