1.1 Suffering As a Key Concept of Modernity
Never has there been so much suffering as there is in our time. Despite the enormous technological progress that has been made, there are now more people suffering from wars, malnutrition and curable diseases than at any other time. The reports about human rights situations by international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) show a clear increase in atrocities despite all attempts to âhumanizeâ or âcivilizeâ even armed conflicts. Moreover, not only has suffering increased in objective terms, but the individual and social perception of suffering is also shifting from perceiving suffering as a natural condition of human life to perceiving it as a situation that produces moral outrage. Suffering is no longer tolerable.
The changing role of suffering in society renders it a key term for understanding modern societies. Suffering and its representation seem to be omnipresent. Whether in the advertising campaigns of NGOs, in popular culture or in the arts , suffering is a topic that moves society. From a sociological point of view, we must ask why suffering is so appealing in modern societies and why it is so present in everyday life. Only after answering these questions can we turn to the sociological study of suffering and its conceptualization.
One of the answers to the question of why suffering seems so appealing is given by Eva Illouz , who studied the exposure of suffering on The Oprah Winfrey Show, a highly popular American talk show. Illouz suggests âthat suffering [âŚ] is one of the thickest texts in contemporary culture because it contains and condenses stories about the self that at once reflect the âobjectiveâ difficult conditions of selfhood and bestow meaning on these conditionsâ (Illouz 2003: 112 ). Here, a thick concept is a concept that combines and condenses several aspects of life. In this case, suffering is a thick concept in which one is able to connect a variety of the experiences and objective conditions of modern societies and to relate these aspects to oneâs own experience. Suffering contains a social narrative as well as psychological insights. It contains a moral story about the state of the world and a political demand, and it relates this story to the very intimate experiences of bodily vulnerability1 and personal identity.
Suffering contains an element of pain , namely, physical pain. At the same time, suffering is more than that. Suffering is also present âin experiences of bereavement and loss, social isolation and personal estrangement â (Wilkinson 2004: 16). Suffering, thus, has a psychological component, leading to âdepression, anxiety, guilt, humiliation, boredom and distressâ (ibid.: 16f). Unlike the physical and medical term of pain , suffering is seen as less objective and unmeasurable. It seems to be more of a subjective response to physiological, psychological and social events. Physical pain can lead to suffering, but suffering can also come from independent sources. We can suffer from the loss of a beloved one, unemployment or a direct insult. In these cases, there is even a path from suffering to pain : it is this precise suffering that can be the source of physical pain .
What makes suffering such a universal term is that everybody has experienced suffering. A type of democracy of suffering exists for two reasons. First, suffering is not an experience exclusive to certain social groups. It includes all human beings. Second, suffering does not seem to require mediation and seems to be immediate. Unlike other concepts of moral complaints, such as alienation, injustice and poverty, suffering does not require any proof. It is sufficient to say that someone is suffering to establish the presence of suffering in a discussion. Suffering is pre-rational. No arguments are needed to feel suffering. Suffering is democratic because it can be claimed as a lived experience by everyone and does not require the use of complex, elaborate, or intellectual concepts.
However, why is suffering a key concept of modernity? The answer to that question has to do with the rise of suffering as a specific modern topic. Modernity, the modern state bureaucracy and the rational organization of the social, of enormous social systems, and of education, health and the sciences all point towards the end of suffering. We can even say that these institutions are basically legitimated by contributing to the end of human, individual and collective suffering. The very modern project of the present time is the project of increasing happiness and feeling entitled to be happy, that is, an increase in claims to a life without suffering.
At the same time, it is this very modernity that increases suffering by an amount and to a degree never before seen in the history of humanity. Modernity has seen the rise of weapons of mass destruction as well as of the ârationalâ and bureaucratic organization of the production of death in the Nazi concentration camps. Modernity is characterized by a spectacular increase in mental diseases, neurotic disorders and depression. Many terms describing the phenomena of suffering, such as social exclusion, alienation, reification, inner loneliness, social anomie, disenchantment, and estrangement, are typical descriptors of modern and not traditional societies. They all describe at the same time the claim of the absence of suffering and a specific modern way of suffering.
Furthermore, suffering as a topic is related to a specific theme of modernity that can be described as liberal culture or liberal individualization and that also places the individual and her lived experiences at the centre of political, social and moral debates. Under the perspective of liberalism, the relation between the individual and the social becomes re-configured. Society is no longer the âgreater goodâ for which the individual can be expected to make sacrifices. Instead, society becomes the framework to allow the individual to become as autonomous and free as possible. By setting up the individual as a fact, modernity, with its ideas of liberal individualism, is âopening the way to recognition of the affective and sentient materiality of the subject who bears this individualityâ (Renault 2017: 56 ). Only when the individual is placed at the centre of social and political life can the expectation or the pursuit of individual happiness become a key value for society.
At the same time, individuals still depend on communities. No development of individuality outside communities is possible; concurrently, these communities require individuals to accept certain norms. Communities place restrictions on the behaviour of individuals, leading to an âuneasiness in culture,â as described by Freud (2002). For Freud , the capacity to balance the claims of individuals (understood here in a psychological sense) and the imposition of society, which will always impose restrictions on autonomy, is the crucial question for further human development, as he pointed out in the aftermath of the uprising of the Nazi regime: âThe fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destructionâ (ibid.: 111). Freud describes this âuneasiness in cultureâ experienced by modern individuals as a permanent tension between immediate drive satisfaction and culturally stable patterns of long-term, sustainable satisfaction of those drives.
It is exactly that tension between the typical modern claim to individual happiness and the typical modern social restrictions placed upon the individual that form the core of the notion of social suffering. The growing importance of individual suffering and the social responsibility for it are the central topics of contemporary inquiry on suffering.
Therefore, it seems inevitable that under modernity and liberalism, the individual as a figure of thinking and as a âsocial factâ (Durkheim) appears in the political arena. It is this individualism that also allows for the rise of the concept of suffering. The crucial question of the relation between individuals and society in modernity is therefore, as described by Verena Das, âhow much suffering is imposed on individuals as a price of belongingâ (Das 1997: 563). Whatever we aim for individually or socially, even when using individual values such as freedom or autonomy, we can realize these goals only in relation to others, that is, in society. Thus, at the very moment at which autonomy is claimed as an aim for individual and social development, we must ask about the price of autonomy. What do we have to sacrifice, or what are we sacrificing, to obtain autonomy, however we understand that term?
Suffering is a concept that transgresses the traditional separation between the private and the public. Some authors, therefore, see suffering as a Trojan horse. By aiming at individuals, it depoliticizes the social, turning the unbearable social order to something individual and private and, thus, keeping the debate away from the arena of the political. McNay (2008) understands at least some form of talking about suffering as part of a neoliberal agenda:
There is a certain manufactured discourse of suffering that has become prevalent in contemporary social and political life and that is a symptom of a wider neoliberal depolarization of citizenship. From the Reagan period onward, U.S. citizenship has been reconfigured in the language of a privatized individualism in order to diffuse the critical energies that emerge from politicized movements in civil society. A key strategy in this privatization has been the manipulation of a rhetoric of intimacy and, in particular, of personal sufferingâ (ibid.: 282).
For other authors, however, the concept of suffering is not the privatization of the social and the political, but rather the politicization and socialization of the private (e.g., Illouz 2003; Renault 2009). The importance of suffering as a public topic challenges the dominant and male logic of the public sphere as a realm of unemotional, rational debate that is free of psychological considerations, where intimate feelings should be kept outside. Through suffering, it seems that the private becomes political. The notion of suffering helps bring into public debate the topic of individual and subjective harm as a legitimate source of knowledge, not only about personal wellbeing but also about social wellbeing. It is exactly by highlighting individual suffering in the public arena that we can become aware that suffering is not always individual and private but, rather, is commonly shared among large groups of society and clearly shows patterns of social injustices. Moreover, as scientists, we can become complicit in injustices by excluding alternative sources of knowledge about the social, by excluding certain experiences and social groups from public debates and by rejecting the study of their suffering as a social phenomenon. If suffering is seen as too individual or too psychological, sociology âindirectly participates in the technocratic discourse that leaves aside the question of experienced injustice and domination because these cannot be made the object of scientific scrutinyâ (Renault 2017: ix). When accepting the division between the private and the public and between the emotional and the rational argument, we enter headlong into the âorder of discourse .â We then take part in the exclusion of spheres of the social that go beyond the discursive, namely, the social vocabulary, that is, the social techniques available for expressing what matters and what should be and for exerting social control over suffering. Social suffering âis part of the reality of social experience that is irreducible to a categorization, a meaning or mode of interactionâ (ibid.: 28); its defining characteristic is that it cannot be captured by traditional disciplinary divisions. Social suffering is always, to some extent, irreducible to the given means of social representation. Therefore, talking of suffering is always an alternative means of problematization that requires considering the individual and the social, the public and the private, the cultural and the psychological, as well as the objective harm and the subjective reactions to it.
Nonetheless, we should be careful not to discuss the modernity or the liberal society as if we were treating monolithic, unchangeable blocks. First, there is a diverse range of constellations of balancing the individual and the social. We have more liberal societies, often with strong local communities; we have welfare societies with an important social bond to the welfare state; and we have societies in which capitalist modernity goes hand in hand with strong family ties and even tribal or religious identities. All of these structures could be read as possible ways to balance individualsâ claim to freedom and autonomy with the human need to live in community and the understanding that freedom cannot be reached against but only in society as a way of âsocial freedom â (Honneth).
In addition to the enormous diversity of societies, rapid social change is a fundamental part of modernity. Since the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, society is no longer imaginable as a linear succession of the same type of events. The political and the economic are in constant transformation, and if one thing is certain, it is the fact that the future will be different from the present. These political and economic changes also produce (and in turn are influenced by) social transformation and transformation in individuals, that is, their inner psychic lives. Relative stabilization can be reached only through change. So, for example a company that wants to stabilize its position in the market and its relations with workers, clients and suppliers will definitively fail to do so if it decides to reproduce the exact same patterns of production for the next 20 years.
Until now, not onl...