Affective Relations

The Transnational Politics of Empathy

C. Pedwell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137275257
• eBook ISBN: 9781137275264
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Exploring the ambivalent grammar of empathy where questions of geo-politics and social justice are at stake - in popular science, international development, postcolonial fiction, feminist and queer theory - this book addresses the critical implications of empathy's uneven effects. It offers a vital transnational perspective on the 'turn to affect'.

1

Economies of Empathy: Obama, Neoliberalism and Social Justice

Empathy is invoked by President Barack Obama throughout his political memoirs and speeches as both central to his politics and vital to the creation of a more unified, just and socially responsible America. As Obama tells readers of The Audacity of Hope, ‘I find myself returning again and again to my mother’s simple principle – “How would that make you feel?” ... It’s not a question we ask ourselves enough, I think; as a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit’ (2006a: 67). Cultivating ‘a stronger sense of empathy’, Obama argues, would ‘tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society’, both inside and outside the nation (67–8). This link between empathy and social justice has been long discussed within feminist and anti-racist social theory. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty argue, for example, that in a contemporary world order structured by transnational capital, ‘engagement based on empathy’ is integral to processes of fostering ‘social justice’ and ‘building solidarity across otherwise debilitating social, economic and psychic boundaries’ (1997: xlii). Writing more recently, Breda Gray contends that critical empathetic engagement ‘can bring emotion, ethics and politics together to facilitate contextually-sensitive, contingent and, hopefully, politically effective feminist solidarities’ (2011: 207). Yet empathy has also been mobilised by popular business discourses that figure empathetic identification as a key affective strategy available to multinational corporations in their efforts to become more in tune with their customers’ needs and interests as a means to generate greater global profits. As Dev Patnaik and Peter Mortensen argue in their bestselling book Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, ‘People are wired to care. Organizations need to be wired to care, as well. When that happens, the effects of empathy can be profound. Companies can prosper. Communities can thrive. And we all have a better day at work’ (2009: 18). Probing the fundamental ambivalence of empathy, this chapter traces how it is produced, felt and mobilised in different ways in different contexts and for different social, cultural and political purposes. Building on the work of feminist cultural theorists who have explored the ‘ambivalent grammar’ of emotions,¹ I tease out some of the key ways that empathy has been defined and theorised in feminist and anti-racist literatures and the implications of these conceptualisations as they ‘travel’ within and across various sites of political significance. In an analysis that juxtaposes social and cultural theory, American presidential politics, popular business and neo-Darwinian evolutionary discourses, I investigate the possibilities, risks and contradictions of figuring empathy as an affective tool for engendering transnational social justice.

In particular, I ask how we might think through the transnational politics of empathy in a context in which visions of community and social justice premised on empathetic engagement need to be situated within prevailing neoliberal discursive, political and economic frameworks. In theorising neoliberalism, I draw primarily on the work of Aihwa Ong (2006), who describes neoliberalism as involving processes whereby market-oriented logics come to order and refigure modes of political governance and citizenship. Of course, there is no one or all-encompassing ‘neoliberalism’. Ong and other theorists have stressed the importance of scholarly attention to the specific contexts in which neoliberalisms operate, and to the ways in which neoliberal forms of governmentality frequently adapt and transform their boundaries as a means to differentially produce and regulate subjects and populations. As such, it is important to clarify that this chapter offers a critical reading of how discourses of neoliberalism in the context of the United States – and the network of transnational links which fragment and exceed its borders – condition and shape understandings of empathy. Within this analysis, ‘America’ is understood as both ‘an imperialist nation state’ and as a ‘discourse of neoliberalism’ itself (Grewal, 2005: 2).

President Obama’s political memoirs and speeches are a primary site for my analysis. As the first African American president of United States and the political ‘underdog’ who made the previously ‘unimaginable’ reality, Obama has been the locus of a phenomenal well of affective energy and attention, both within America and internationally. Through reading the ambivalence of Obama’s emotional engagement, this chapter illustrates how his political rhetoric resonates (in different ways) with both feminist and anti-racist debates about empathy and social justice and the neoliberal discourse of the ‘empathy economy’ expressed within popular business literatures (Nussbaum, 2005; Patnaik with Mortensen, 2009). On the one hand, I suggest, in urging Americans to develop more empathetic attitudes to those who are less privileged than themselves, both within and outside the borders of the nation, Obama employs a language of ‘mutuality’, ‘debt’ and ‘obligation’ which seems to echo feminist and anti-racist concerns regarding empathy, privilege and social justice. On the other hand, I argue, in framing empathy as a competency which should be developed by individuals alongside imperatives to become more risk-taking and self-enterprising, Obama’s political rhetoric reveals its centrist neoliberal underpinnings in ways that risk (re)producing social and political exclusions and hierarchies. Yet, in the third and final part of the chapter, I turn to writing on ‘Black radical imagination’ (Kelley, 2002) and ‘queer futurity’ (Muñoz, 2009) to suggest that the phenomena of ‘Obama-mania’ may contain the seeds for alternative ways of thinking through the politics of empathy. I argue that reading Obama-mania and its aftermath as produced not only within discourses of neoliberal governmentality, but also through more radical intersections of empathy, hope and imagination, illustrates how empathy might be conceptualised as an affective portal to different spaces and times of social justice. That is how, I consider, Obama-mania provides an affective economy through which empathy might be conceptualised not (only) as an affective capacity, skill or competency, but also a political space of mediation in which the ambivalent (and often exclusionary) nature of empathy and hope as ‘wish feelings’ (Ahmed, 2010) can be negotiated. Through such affective negotiations, which allow us to collectively (re)imagine the past and feel its continuing impact in the present, I suggest, radically different ‘temporal and spatial maps’ (Muñoz, 2009) of the future might emerge with the potential to generate new structures of feeling that scramble the neoliberal status quo.

Affective connections: feminist and anti-racist theory, empathy and social justice

Within feminist and anti-racist theory, the achievement of cross-cultural and transnational social justice has been premised, in part, on the development of empathy. Providing an affective ‘bridge’ between the individual subject and the social world (Nussbaum, 2001: 66), empathy is understood to play a vital role in ‘opening up lines of communication’ (Ahmed, 2004: 181–2) and ‘connecting the self to others’ transnationally (Chabot Davis, 2004: 400). Diane Tietjens Meyers suggests, for example, that through empathising ‘with another’s subjectivity’ we can ‘grasp the circumstances of that person’s life along with the beliefs, desires, abilities, vulnerabilities, limitations and traits of characters that give rise to these experiences’ (1994: 35). Achieving genuine empathy can be difficult and time-consuming, especially ‘when the other’s background or circumstances are very different from one’s own’ (33). Yet, successful empathy, Meyers claims, provides the basis for mutual-recognition, ‘a relationship in which empathetic understanding of others comes together with self-understanding to sustain moral judgment’ across cultural, social and geo-political boundaries (120). From Kimberly Chabot Davis’s perspective, ‘in the context of an alarming international rise in hate groups and terrorism, left-oriented scholars cannot afford to give up empathy’s promise for fostering cross-cultural understanding and desires for social justice and equality’ (2004: 406). As she contends in her analysis of African American literature and ‘the politics of cross-racial empathy’, individual experiences of empathy ‘can play an important role in larger chain of events’ (2004: 412), ‘local and personal examples of taking a moral stand do work to undermine racism, and are probably necessary stepping stones for individuals to move towards more public-oriented anti-racist acts that require greater risk’ (414). In these and other feminist and anti-racist texts, the suggestion is that, while ‘we’ might theorise social inequalities and commit ourselves to political responsibilities and obligations in the abstract, a transformation at the affective level is required to make ‘us’ actually feel, realise and act on them.

While empathy is defined differently across these literatures, it is generally understood as similar to other ‘humanising’ emotions such as sympathy and compassion in denoting an orientation of care or concern towards others. Yet empathy is also distinguished from these feelings on the basis of its stronger element of identification or ‘perspective-taking’– that is, the process of ‘imaginatively experiencing the feelings, thoughts and situations of another’ (Chabot Davis, 2004: 403). This process of perspective-taking is, in turn, conceived as an important ingredient of affirmative social transformation which recognises and respects the subjectivity and agency of others and interrogates oppressive hierarchies of power across geo-political boundaries. Empathy, however, is seen to involve more than simply a process of imaginative reconstruction because of the emotional charge it carries. Indeed, it is the radically ‘unsettling’ affective experience of empathy that is conceived as potentially generative of both personal and social change (LaCapra, 2001).² Through establishing empathetic identification with those who are differently positioned to themselves, the possibility exists that (privileged) subjects will experience a radical transformation in consciousness, which leads them not only to respond to the experience of ‘the other’ with greater understanding and compassion, but also to recognise their own complicity within transnational hierarchies of power. Megan Boler, for example, envisions an approach to transnational empathetic engagement which ‘radically shifts [one’s] self-reflexive understandings of power relations’ (1999: 157) and enables one to ‘recognize oneself as implicated in the social forces that create the climate of obstacles the other must confront’ (166). In my own previous work, I suggest that ‘empathetic connections across cultural and geo-political contexts’ might be engendered through recognising ‘our fundamental discursive and social interdependence’ – that is, ‘how we continuously affect one another and shape one another’s conditions and experiences, if unequally and often violently’ (Pedwell, 2010: 123). This empathy, I suggest, could not be produced through flattening distinctions of power between differently located subjects, or by obfuscating ‘privileged’ subjects’ complicity in the maintenance of hierarchies, but rather through developing understanding of how such relations of power operate and shape our multilayered encounters with one another in ways that suggest both ‘radical complicities and radical indebtedness’ (Bell, 2007: 24–5).

However, feminist and anti-racist theorists also discuss the significant limits and risks of figuring empathy as a progressive political resource. As Sandra Bartky notes, ‘our capacity to enter imaginatively into the lives of others – their joys and sorrows, the peculiar texture of their suffering is limited’ (1996: 179). Scholars also underscore that claims to ‘know’ or represent the experiences of ‘others’ through empathy may involve forms of projection and appropriation on the part of ‘privileged subjects’ which can reify existing social hierarchies and silence ‘those at the margins’ (Spelman, 1997). As Sara Ahmed argues, ‘empathy sustains that very difference that it may seek to overcome’ when subjects assume that they can feel what another feels in ways that fail to take account of differences in history, power and experience (2004: 29). Moreover, empathy is, as Clare Hemmings (2011) points out, not boundless but rather always has a limit based on which distinctions between subjects are inevitably redrawn. Further concerns address whether empathetic engagement across social and geo-political boundaries can be mutual and dialogical, or whether empathy is more likely to remain the purview of those who are already socially privileged (Bartky, 1996; Koehn, 1998).³ From this perspective, it is important to ask who is being compelled to empathise and who is being empathised with in discourses of cross-cultural or transnational empathy, and whether such discourses risk reifying categories of ‘empathiser’ and ‘sufferer’ which reproduce, rather than contest, dominant geo-political relations of power (Pedwell, 2012b, 2013).⁴ The fluid and unpredictable quality of emotion also underscores the risks of figuring empathy as a stable or abiding resource for mobilising movements for social justice. While empathy is envisioned as an affective catalyst for radical self-transformation which can lead to social action, theorists argue that empathy is, more often than not, rather passive or fleeting (Boler, 1999; Nussbaum, 2003; Berlant, 2008a).⁵ Also, like other affects, empathy is hard to control (LaCapra, 2001) and cannot be ‘translated into an outcome, which would be knowable in advance’ of any social encounter (Ahmed, 2004: 182).

As the points above imply, feminist and anti-racist debates regarding empathy’s political promise have been premised on quite different visions of what empathy is and what it does. We might identify two key (although not mutually exclusive) conceptualisations operating within these literatures. Firstly, there are theorists who figure empathy primarily as a capacity, skill or tool (Meyers, 1994; Boler, 1999; Nussbaum, 2003, 2010; Chabot Davis, 2004;). Meyers suggests, for example, that ‘diversity will continue to seem threatening and that the obstacles to morally responding to difference insuperable unless we augment our repertory of moral skills’ (italics mine, 1994: 9). ‘In particular’, she argues, ‘intersubjective channels of communication and understanding must be opened through empathy’ (9). Similarly, from Martha Nussbaum’s perspective, without empathy, ‘we are likely to remain obtuse and unresponsive, not even knowing how to make sense of the predicament we see’ (2003: 330–1). Empathy is thus ‘a very important tool in the service of getting a sense of what is going on with the other person and also of establishing concern and connection’ (italics mine, 331). The main idea here is that empathy is an affective and cognitive capacity that might be cultivated in order to augment moral skills and promote ethical relations between people across social and geo-political boundaries. Secondly, there are authors who understand empathy primarily as a social relation or product of circulation (Boler, 1999; Ahmed, 2004, 2010; Berlant, 2004, 2008; Hemmings, 2011; Pedwell, 2012a, b, 2013). In her analysis of ‘affective economies’, Ahmed (2004: 8), for instance, argues that emotions do not ‘reside in subjects or objects’, but rather, ‘are produced as effects of circulation’ (8). In contrast to theorists who figure empathy primarily as a capacity that individuals can cultivate, Ahmed suggests that understanding emotions as ‘contained within the contours of the subject’ (46), risks ‘transforming emotion into a property, as something one has, and can then pass on, as if what passes on is the same thing’ (10). Similarly, in her discussion of emotions as circulating within ‘economies of the mind’, Boler understands emotions, including empathy, as residing not ‘within the individual’, but rather as ‘mediating space’ (1999: 21).⁶ In her words, ‘emotions are a medium, a space in which differences and ethics are communicated, negotiated and shaped’ (21). For these theorists, empathy – like other emotions – is understood productively as investment in social norms and relations of power. However, as Boler underscores, if ‘emotions are a primary site of social control’, they are also ‘a site of political resistance and can mobilize social movements of liberation’ (1999: xiii).

Keeping these debates about empathy with feminist and anti-racist theory in mind, the forthcoming sections of the chapter explore how discourses and practices of empathy are being mobilised in two other arenas where affective politics and hierarchies are at stake – recent American presidential politics and popular business literatures. I examine how, and to what ends, feminist and anti-racist languages of ‘empathy’, ‘care’ ‘community’ and ‘social justice’ are echoed, utilised and/or appropriated within these literatures. Furthermore, I tease out some of the specific ways in which empathy is conceptualised as a capacity, skill and/or social relation across these sites and the critical implications of such understandings for theorising the transnational politics of empathy in the context of neoliberalism.

‘I feel your pain’: the political rhetorics of empathy

Rhetorics of care, compassion and empathy have been pivotal to recent American presidential politics. As Katherine Woodward (2004) argues, ‘the political fortunes of George Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush’ all turned on a ‘national discourse of empathy’ (60). For Bill Clinton, the empathetic catchphrase ‘I feel your pain’ was a consistently successful mode of political rhetoric (Garber, 2004). Via the slogan of ‘compassionate conservatism’, the Republican party skillfully ‘appropriated the rhetoric of feeling that had been so powerfully associated with the Democrats’ (Woodward, 2004: 59). As Woodward comments, ‘the presidential race of 2000 at times seemed to be marked by a competition between Al Gore and George W. Bush in terms of who could lay claim to being most compassionate’ (2004: 59–60). Yet, as cultural theorists have pointed out, Republican discourses of compassion served merely as code for the privatisation of the State and for the federal government’s divestiture of responsibility for ameliorating social suffering through impelling individuals, local institutions and faith-based organisations to take up this obligation themselves. From Lauren Berlant’s perspective, ‘if an expanding liberal state used laws and programs to animate the technology of amelioration, the compassionately conservative state wants to limit these mechanisms severely and in particular to shift its economic obligations from redressing poverty to protecting income by taking less from and giving less back to workers and citizens’ (2004: 2).

President Barack Obama has not shied away from mobilising such affective rhetoric. Indeed a discourse of empathy was central to his 2008 presidential campaign. As Obama writes in his second memoir, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006a), ‘a sense of empathy’ defines my personal ‘moral code’ (66) and serves as ‘a guidepost to my politics’ (67). Here, and elsewhere, he argues that an ‘empathy deficit’ characterises the nation’s social and political life and calls on Americans to develop more empathetic attitudes towards those less ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Empathy, Emotional Politics and Transnationality
• 1  Economies of Empathy: Obama, Neoliberalism and Social Justice
• 2  Affective (Self-) Transformations: Empathy, Mediation and International Development
• 3  Affect at the Margins: Alternative Empathies in A Small Place
• 4  Affective Translation: Empathy and The Memory of Love
• 5  Circuits of Feeling in The Age of Empathy
• Conclusions: Empathy and its Afterlives
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index