THE RISKS OF EMPATHY:
INTERROGATING MULTICULTURALISM’S GAZE
Megan Boler
University of California, Santa Cruz
How old is the habit of denial? We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know. The public was told that Dresden was bombed to destroy strategic railway lines. There were no railway lines in that part of the city.I do not see my life as separate from history. In my mind my family secrets mingle with the secrets of statesmen and bombers. Nor is my life divided from the lives of others….If I tell all the secrets I know, public and private, perhaps I will begin to see the way the old sometimes see, Monet, recording light and spirit in his paintings, or the way those see who have been trapped by circumstances — a death, a loss, a cataclysm of history.1
Upon this ivory hill in central California another fall evening’s garish red-hues announce my fourth year of teaching MAUS, the comic-book representation of author Art Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, narrating his experience of surviving the Holocaust of World War II. Three hundred eighteen-year-olds — 47 of them charged to me — have been assigned this text, preceded by The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan and followed quickly with Zoot Suit by Luis Valdez — the epitome of the multicultural curriculum in the arts and humanities.
To all appearances, I should sleep well as a participant in this introductory agenda to multiculturalism through the arts and literature; I should laud myself for taking up the liberatory potential outlined by forerunners John Dewey and Louise Rosenblatt, and extended today by such philosophers as Martha Nussbaum, who studies the possibility that through the construction of both “tragic” more egalitarian modes of pity enabled by novel-reading the student will “become a participant in the lives of characters at many levels of the social hierarchy, and through the novel’s richness of detail [feel] what it is like to live those lives.”2
At the onset of World War II, the same moment that Vladek Spiegelman’s story begins, progressive educational philosophers John Dewey and Louise Rosenblatt wrote optimistically of their faith in the “social imagination,” developed in part through literature which allows the reader the possibility of identifying with the “other” and thereby developing modes of moral understanding which were thought to build democracy. In 1938 Louise Rosenblatt wrote, “[i]t has been said that if our imaginations functioned actively, nowhere in the world would there be a child who was starving. Our vicarious suffering would force us to do something to alleviate it.”3 She describes the experience of reading a newspaper in a state of numbness, that all too familiar strategy for absorbing information without feeling it. “This habit of mind,” she writes, “has its immediate value, of course, as a form of self-protection….Because of the reluctance of the average mind to make this translation into human terms, the teacher must at times take the responsibility for stimulating it.”4
Educators and philosophers of emotion have not abandoned this project of democracy through the cultivation of particular emotions, which some will call pity, others compassion, others empathy. Nussbaum, for example, directly addresses habituated numbness when she writes that the reader gains a powerful vision of social justice which does not ensure any action on the reader’s part, “so powerful are the dulling forces of habit, the entrenched structures of power.”5
MAUS might be said to function as the perfect example of what Rosenblatt and Dewey advocated: identification with the other; the ability to occupy an emotional space that feels the experience of the other; the sense that one now has insight into history.6 I am not questioning the value of Spiegelman’s work. Rather, I am questioning the reading practices encouraged by some multicultural agendas. I am deeply unsettled by the “radical incommensurability” of history and individuals, a tension which I believe characterizes the challenge of “multiculturalism” and its transformative potential. While in some cases the pleasurable reading of this text may move students enough so that they may pursue their study of Jewish history and culture, I am not sure that this benefit outweighs the risk of readings that abdicate responsibility. As an educator I understand my role to be not merely to teach critical thinking, but to teach a critical thinking that seeks to transform consciousness in such a way that a Holocaust could never happen again. I see education as a means for challenging rigid patterns of thinking that perpetuate injustice and instead encourage flexible analytic skills, which include the ability to evaluate self-reflectively the irrational and rational motives of actions. Thus, multiculturalism I understand to be, in theory, about widening what counts as theory, history, knowledge, and value.
Art Spiegelman stated in an interview that, in writing this comic-book, he had no intention of the work representing history. Rather, this comic — his unique artistic genre, first published as a comic book series in RAW — was his way of coming to terms with his relationship to his father, and to his mother’s suicide. The story takes the form of two narratives, Vladek’s story of survival during the war, interrupted by present-moment interactions of Vladek and the author, Art Spiegelman, living out their father-son relationship as Art interviews his father. MAUS is one of the oddest books in existence, as it borders mesmerizing pleasure, the apotheosis of the pleasure of the text, alongside a sense of absolute horror. Spiegelman enables a mixture of detachment and identification through his use of animal caricatures of Nazis, Jews, and Polish people. Some students do recognize MAUS as a portrait of father/son dynamics rather than a story centrally about World War II.7
The effect of this book on its audience is remarkable, literally beyond words: few readers put the book down, once begun; students attest again and again how profoundly the reading effects them; and often they state that for the first time they are able to “identify” with the experience of the Jewish people during World War II. This year one student says that the device of representing people as animals — Spiegelman’s technique of detachment, dehumanization, and understatement — made the story all the more horrific, while another disagrees saying that these devices are effective because the reader can learn about the Holocaust without guilt. Another student writes:
A person unaccustomed to reading the kind of material presented in novels recounting the Holocaust might be more comfortable reading the easier flow of the comic-book-style used by Spiegelman. Spiegelman can ensnare readers into his book MAUS by sheer curiosity, and once they have begun it would be difficult to stop reading.I notice in her account the juxtaposition of “just telling [a] story” and “factual information” with the emotionality of blame pity, rage, and guilt. And I cannot help but ask, if this text allows the reader this sense of gripping and relatively “easy” reading, what moral message is being taught? Given the relationship of dominant and non-dominant perspectives, for whom is it a positive feature to be spared the emotions of rage, blame, and guilt? The desire of the reader to occupy a particular space of empathetic identification, and the question of the ethics of this empathy, is illustrated by another example. This year a philosophy professor delivered a lecture on MAUS to all 300 students, during which he stated that the reader is utterly deceived if s/he feels they can imagine the Holocaust from reading MAUS. He argued that to learn successfully about the Holocaust required reading stories and statistics until it becomes, precisely, unimaginable. Indeed, the primary response of students is a variation of “after reading MAUS, I feel for the first time that I understand the experience of those who survived.” In our discussion some days later, the students expressed an almost unilateral offense by his statement that we could not imagine the Holocaust: they deeply wanted to believe that their identification was sufficient — a version of Rawls’s commitment to “reversibility” in thinking of moral situations.By not pulling any punches, he addresses the horrors that occurred without making the reader feel as though she or he has been bombarded by feelings of rage and guilt. Often, the story of the Holocaust is told from a standpoint of such emotional turmoil that factual information is lost. Although MAUS is filled with strong images and disturbing occurrences, the reader does not feel that blame and pity is being forced onto himself or herself, but rather than Spiegelman is just “telling his story.”
Is it possible that the model of social imagination, and its subsidiaries Nussbaum terms pity, and I term empathy, may be doing our social vision more harm than good? I have come to refer to this model of knowledge and self as “romantic functionalism,” which in the teaching of literature translates in part to a seeking of harmony and equilibrium. Romantic functionalism adjusts the parts to the whole, seeks to establish a smoothly-running, socio-biologic machine called society composed of individuals. What cannot be accounted for within this model are the relations of power that define the image of the whole, the definition of harmonious relations, and the normative definitions that necessarily include as their supportive opposite the deviant and aberrant individual, the unadjusted self.8 Romantic functionalism offers no accountability to differences produced through historical and structural forces. Reading MAUS in this model potentially allows the reader a harmonious experience of reversibility and the pleasure of identification — at the expense of what?
All of this has led to my deeply unsettled discomfort with the context and use of this text, which leads me to question the intent of an introductory “multicultural” curriculum and my participation in the production of empathy. One central misgiving was clearly articulated in the context of a discussion of arts and education at a recent meeting of educational philosophers, when Ron Glass pointed out that these “others” whose lives we imagine do not want empathy, they want justice.9 However, at a recent public lecture Cornel West insisted that empathy is requisite to social justice.10 I, in turn, have come to ask the following questions which interrogate the ethics of literature as a means for moral development. What are the risks of reading a text like MAUS in the absence of a more complete historical context? More generally, what kind of history are we presenting to our students in the name of multiculturalism, and does this historical sensibility further democratic ideals?11 As Michael Katz poses the question: “What distortions may occur from decontextualizing a particular type of moral problem?” Who and what, I wonder, benefits from the production of sympathy and empathy? As philosopher Karen Jones asks, how do students come to occupy a fantasy space through the construction of particular types of emotions produced by certain readings?
One night this fall, swimming in these questions, I fell asleep and dreamt a discussion with a colleague who suggested that what is at issue is obligation. Upon waking, I began to consider the concept of obligation in relation to testimony, and hence the question that frames this paper: How may we be encouraging an abdication of responsibility by perpetuating a version of social imagination that does not take seriously the question: What is this text asking of me? What obligation do I have as a result of witnessing this testimony? If we understand empathy to be an emotional construct that abdicates responsibility, is it possible that the obligations that issue from testimony resist empathy? These questions were eloquently discussed by Roger Simon’s recent work on “commemorative pedagogy,” a pedagogy committed to an integration of history and biography.12 In a question that resonates with my concern with obligation, Shoshana Felman similarly inquires, “Is the art of reading literary texts itself inherently related to the act of facing horror? If literature is the alignment between witnesses, what would this alignment mean?”13
I argue that at least two modes of reading history might issue from our reading of a text like MAUS: testimonial and confessional histories. In order to make sense of this, I define and contrast Shoshana Felman’s work on testimony and Michel Foucault’s definition of confession. Let me briefly define two additional concepts on which my argument rests. A full exploration of empathy is beyond my scope here, but Nussbaum’s work suggests a sufficient frame. In her “Pity Debates” Nussbaum chooses, from the somewhat interchangeable trio empathy/compassion/pity, to use “pity.” Nussbaum’s reference to Aristotle’s definition of the “three cognitive elements” of pity assists in my analysis of reading MAUS:
[pity posits] (1) the belief that the suffering is serious rather than trivial; (2) the belief that the suffering was not caused by the person’s own fault; and (3) the belief that the pitier’s own possibilities are similar to those of the sufferer.14My discomforts with the agenda of multiculturalism are specified within this definition: the belief that the suffering was not caused by the person’s own fault; and “the belief that the pitier’s own possibilities are similar to those of the sufferer.” The first two defining features of pity describe the positions students take in relation to MAUS which trouble me. First, to be moved by the other only as a result of my identification with the other, and the self-concerned fear that the same fate could befall me, falls short of the kind of recognition I want to encourage. Secondly, there is a distinct element of judgment of the other’s experience, which points out at minimum that pity encompasses a power relationship through which we estimate the extent of suffering — whether the person “warrants” our pity, and whether or not the person is to blame and then does not deserve our pity.
Nussbaum’s example of pity, in which we empathize with an injury to a bassoon player’s lip which stymies her musical career, is, of course, quite different than evaluating, for example, whether Vladek can be held accountable for his own imprisonment, or imagining my own experience had I been a Nazi prisoner of war. This difference raises my central worry about the moral value of pity. To understand pity as a “structure of feeling” — the second concept I want to define briefly — calls for a great deal more than judging the innocence or guilt of the other, or fearing that this catastrophe might just as easily have happened to me. In other words, if this judgment and identification is all that pity ensures, I can only hope that testimony as a pedagogical and reading genre resists that construction of pity.
To understand the moral implications of pity ideally entails a full analysis of the role of emotion in judgment and its cognitive function. For my purposes in the study of the social and cultural histories of educational philosophy and practice, I borrow Raymond Williams’ notion of “structures of feeling” as a productive framework for understanding the intersection of psyche, culture, and social structures.
Raymond Williams argues that structures of feeling are the least understood aspect of cultural transmission of ideology.15 Investments in particular regimes of truth are rooted in affect, in the lived or “practical” consciousnesses that bear an often unarticulated relationship to dominant or “official” consciousness. Structures of feeling, as defined by Raymond Williams, are characterized by their “embryonic” nature, the difficulty of articulating this practical consciousness into language. Structures of feeling are “concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt.”16 For example: if my students were to analyze the structures of feeling that compel them to claim that “identity is temporal like a bad hair problem”; “slavery and the Holocaust are irrelevant things of the past”; and “Audre Lorde is expressing contempt for her audience by stating her identity” — what we would understand is the history of the privilege of not seeing. We would understand also the desire to forget, the very human desire for resolution and harmony. We would see as well how deep are the wounds (and not necessarily the oppression) of those who cannot imagine slavery. I am saying that in multicultural education, responsibility means neither a simple rejection and judgment of another’s moral choices; nor a simple identification with the other which functions only to appropriate a perspective which is not our own. Rather, responsibility requires us to analyze the obligations that issue from listening to testimony, and to understand that we have the privilege of reading MAUS only because of all of the arbitrary injustices that bring us to the present.
To address the risks of empathy, I draw on Felman’s definitions of testimony to distinguish testimonial and confessional reading practices. I focus on two key distinctions: first, testimony is inseparable from a responsibility to self and to history, while confession is precisely what Nussbaum calls the “taint of [pity’s] personal eudaimonistic origins” — in other words, confession bears no consistent commitment to responsibility beyond oneself. Secondly, while testimony may issue from solitude, it defies isolation, while confession produces isolation. And while MAUS as a text may represent testimony, reading practices may situate the text as confession.
Fifty years following Rosenblatt’s concern that numbness prevents the potential for alleviating suffering through empathy, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History Felman analyzes the role of testimony in relation to pedagogy to illustrate the crises of meaning and histories that mark education.17 To “bear witness” suggests a methodology that contributes to a search for truths which utilizes one’s own lived stories as well as self-reflective consideration of histories that define the meaning of such narratives. Felman begins her definition with reference to its legal use where, in the courtroom,
testimony is provided, and is called for, when the facts upon which justice must pronounce its verdict are not clear, when historical accuracy is in doubt and when both the truth and its supporting elements of evidence are called into question. The legal model of the trial dramatizes, in this way, a contained, and culturally channeled, institutionalized, crisis of truth. The trial both derives from and proceeds by a crisis of evidence, which the verdict must resolve.18Felman analyzes the use of testimony in contemporary works of art and literature, and notes how this genre represents
our relation to the traumas of contemporary history....As a relation to events, testimony may seem to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frame of reference.19MAUS is without a doubt a testimony to the difficulty of “settling occurrences into understanding,” and functions powerfully through “bits and pieces of a memory,” although as a narrative, MAUS flows with significant continuity and does not read as fragments. The notion of testimony as an attempt to represent, as Felman says, “events in excess of our frame of reference” refers to a commonly-held position with respect to occurrences like the Holocaust: that such histories must retain an unimaginable status.20 However, with respect to readings of the text, a different set of questions emerge.
According to Felman,
[w]hat the testimony does not offer is, however, a completed statement, a totalizable account of those events. In the testimony, language is in process and in trial, it does not possess itself as a conclusion, as the constation of a verdict or the self-transparency of knowledge. Testimony is, in other words, a discursive practice....As a performative speech act, testimony in effect addresses what in history is action that exceeds any substantialized significance, and what in happenings is impact that dynamically explodes any conceptual reifications and any constative delimitations.21This abiding definition of testimony as a discursive process in defiance of closure confirms my discomfort with the risks of reading MAUS in isolation from a fuller historicization of surrounding events. Quite to the contrary of this definition, student response to reading MAUS easily permits a “conceptual reification.” Their reading of the text did not give the lasting impression of “action” in history that “exceeds any substantialized significance.” Rather, the readings allowed students to experience a cathartic, innocent, and I would argue voyeuristic sense of closure. This points to the primary challenge of testimony: that it easily blurs into confession.
One of Felman’s pedagogical objectives in using testimony was to
make the class feel...how the texts that testify do not simply report facts but, in different ways, encounter — and make us encounter — strangeness; how the concept of testimony...is in fact quite unfamiliar and estranging, and how, the more we look closely at texts, the more they show us that, unwittingly, we do not even know what testimony is and that, in any case, it is not simply what we thought we knew it was.22
Overwhelmingly, students reading MAUS experienced a sense of untroubled identification with a narrative that did not create estrangement or unfamiliarity. Rather, their reading provided them with familiarity, “insight” and “clear imagination” of historical occurrences. The identification functioned both through reversibility, and through a mode of pity that not only freed the reader from blame, but in this case allows — like confession — the voyeuristic pleasure of listening and judging the other from a position of power. While MAUS may be a testimony of a father and son relationship defined through histories in the present, it is easily read in a confessional mode. If their reading had been testimonial, they would instead have experienced a sense of events in excess of social imagination.
As educators, how might we distinguish the intent, effects, and agency involved in testimony and confession with respect to “responsibility?” If testimony is characterized by responsibility, confession is marked by a search for redemption and freedom from guilt. Foucault describes confession as follows:
The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications of the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation.23Students’ reading of MAUS functioned analogously to exonerate and redeem them from the usual sense of guilt and numbing horror that they associate with histories of the Holocaust. These readers functioned like the priest, and MAUS like the confessor. Reading MAUS, like confession, becomes a ritual in which the reader “requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated.”24
On the issue of responsibility, confession bears none; rather, it seeks redemption, or approval, but does not pose itself as a speech related to others, to history, or necessarily to the social. Confession seeks to establish a relation of power between two unequals, by making “public” what is “secret,” and by granting to the silent authority the power to determine guilt and redemption. Testimony, on the other hand, seeks, as Britzman suggests, to offer “redress for what, in history, has not been acknowledged or granted justice.”25
In summary, confessional history is one which enables us to situate ourselves as readers within the framework of redemption, guilt, and hopes for an individual salvation or proclaimed innocence. A confessional reading does not seek, indeed is not allowed, to find its meaning in relation to a larger social sphere. Confession allows the isolation of the individual, in this case allowing one story to represent an entire historical sensibility. Confessional reading encourages moral judgment within a fixed moral code, and leaves unquestioned relations of power between reader and text and dominant and marginal culture as this relation defines what and how we choose to see and not see.
Testimonial history, on the other hand, might refuse several key modes of pity. It would refuse simple reversibility, stepping into the other’s shoes, and would refuse easy judgment and condemnation. The fact that testimony defies isolation does not mean that it relies on identification or reversibility. Testimonial history, I argue, demands self-reflective analysis of structures of feeling as a map of the terrain between history and individual consciousness since structures of feeling situate our willingness and ability to engage in responsible moral reflection. I am suggesting here a mode of self-reflection that does not use the other as a catalyst, a substitute for oneself — in short, that does not allow empathy to substitute for other functions of self-reflective work.
In reading MAUS, a testimonial history would require analysis of how structures of anti-Semitism and shame are present in contemporary Anglo-Protestant culture. It would ask us to consider how we participate in structures and relations that allow a continued sense of terror, shame, and despair — for example, the despair that would issue from the fear that non-Jewish allies will not protect a Jewish person if another holocaust were to occur. To read another’s profound mistrust as expressed through testimony does not obligate the reader to empathy, pity, or guilt. Rather, it obligates a culture of responsibility ideally formed through one’s own community and structures of feeling, and ideally has little to do with identifying with the other.
How might we read, not through the ethics of reversibility and universalizability? What would it mean to understand the structures of feeling that define our relationship to history, and our consciousness in reading the text of another? Minnie Bruce Pratt argues for an alternative as she analyzes her work integrating her biography with her history as a white Southern woman, and writes, “Sometimes we don’t pretend to be the other, but we take something made by the other and use it for our own.” She describes her identification experience listening to Black folk singing, and reflects her major turning point when she realized that
I was using Black people to weep for me, to express my sorrow at my responsibility, and that of my people, for their oppression: and I was mourning because I felt they had something I didn’t, a closeness, a hope, that I and my folks had lost because we tried to shut other people out of our hearts and lives.I propose to define the relation of testimony and obligation in this way: once both the speaker and the listener recognize the words as testimony, a sense of obligation is confirmed. This obligation should be seen less as a moral “bind” than as a bond, a commitment, more in the nature of an act of kindness than an act of law, an act which issues not from the burden of guilt but from responsibility: “I am obliged to you for your testimony,” rather than “I am obliged to you because your testimony imposes upon me.” Obligation calls for recognition, and an acceptance of responsibility for the discrepancy of experience. This obligation does not mean that I fully understand the spoken testimony, or recognize the words from the perspective of the speaker. It means at minimum an obligation to analyze the historical genealogy of my consciousness as part of the structure that forms and accounts for the other’s testimony.Finally I understood that I could feel sorrow…yet not confuse their sorrow with mine, or use their resistance for mine….I could hear their songs like a trumpet to me: a startling…a challenge: but not take them as a replacement for my own work.26
In his chapter on “Shame,” Primo Levi analyzes the complicated structures of shame experienced by those who survived the Holocaust, and momentarily extrapolates beyond the survivors to a universal we and asks, “Are you ashamed because you are alive in place of another?”27 And as readers of MAUS, I want to know why such shame should be contained to Vladek and Art, and not to the reader. What would it take for the reader to be a witness to the testimony of shame, for example, and to recognize the choices of these characters as simultaneously my responsibility, my obligation within history?
To accept this obligation of testimony is to recognize the incommensurability of history with our individual experience today. As Levi states, “Changing moral codes is always costly: all heretics, apostates, and dissidents know this. We cannot judge our behavior or that of others, driven at that time by the code of that time, on the basis of today’s code.”28 Levi’s insight challenges, I think, a faith in the social imagination. While we might think that Levi’s point about the cost of changing moral codes is isolated only to the extreme circumstances of a holocaust, I ask whether we should not consider the present historical moment of economic depression and increasing discrepancies of privilege to signify a crisis of truth. This crisis moves me to question identification and empathy produced through well-intentioned multicultural education.
Let me conclude with one hopeful example in which a student seemed to move from a confessional and decontextualized reading of MAUS to a reading that seemed to take seriously testimonial history. We had a lengthy and careful discussion of her troubling first essay on MAUS — a conversation in which I took risks, and pushed her to think deeply about her relationship to the text, to her own audience, and to her experience. Her first essay expresses a classic example of social imagination at work: “Spiegelman uses mice and cats to assign Jews and Germans specific characteristics that we usually attribute to these animals….For example, if we imagine a town of mice, running everywhere with nowhere to go, always cautious and afraid, scampering to hide, it gives us a clear picture of what it must have been like for the Jews to be attacked by the Germans.” In the following excerpt of her revised essay, she seems not only to locate herself, but to consider this text in the broadest sense of history and responsibility. “I used to look at history with a sense of guilt,” she begins, and lists Native American and African-American history and white supremacy, “and I hated to think that I might be distantly related to some of these people.”
“This way of thinking led me to reject some aspects of history. I felt that I should not dwell on the past….I rid myself of any sense of responsibility for what these people had done to other races.” She then recounts a turning point in high school after viewing Farewell to Manzanar. The issue was not guilt, she realizes, “it was more a question of discovering how things like concentration camps were started, and how it was that people came to think along these lines. It was a matter of examining their mistakes and our own mistakes so that we could move on….[Spiegelman]….wants us to find an alternative to guilt.” Strikingly different from her earlier notion that by imagining the Holocaust as a cat and mouse chase we understand history, one of her revised conclusions remarks: “The collective guilt that overpowers many of us should not be the reason for examining the Holocaust. We need to explore the origin of the cruelty of it.”
“To explore the origins of this cruelty” as an example of testimonial history is a project that might take many forms. One form returns us to Levi’s discussion of shame, for shame as a structure of feeling traces the residue of history. The question “Are you ashamed because you are alive in place of another?” demands an account of biography and history. Second, to draw on testimonial history invokes Roger Simon’s call that we learn to “listen differently,” through which we integrate history and biography to establish what he calls “living memory,” and he states that this “depends on subject positions created by a particular history,” and on structures of feeling “that determine our relations to that history.”
To summarize a trouble that certainly resists summary, let me say: I am not questioning the value of Spiegelman’s work. I am not saying that there are not strategic applications of empathy. I am suggesting that we reconsider our sense of empathy’s illusory role in social justice. I am saying that to “decontextualize particular moral problems” runs a risk of enabling readings that permit dangerous affective resolutions. In short, I am suggesting that a responsible multicultural agenda will take seriously self-reflection on structures of feeling. If such structures demand a simultaneous account of psyche, culture, and social and economic structures, this approach may allow us to address the obligations that arise from testimonies compelled by our contemporary crisis of truth.
For a
response to this essay, see Blizek.
1. Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones (New York: Anchor Books, 1992).
2. Martha Nussbaum “The Pity Debate I,” in Need and Recognition: A Theory of the Emotions, (The Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh, April/May, 1993), 31.
3. Louise Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration, (New York: Noble and Noble, 1938), 185.
4. Ibid.
5. Martha Nussbaum “The Pity Debate I,” 30.
6. This essay does not undertake a full explication of how, precisely, histories and historicization need to be defined. I am grateful to comments from Hayden White on this matter. In another work, “Bearing Witness: The Power of Public Feeling” I develop these questions at length, interrogating the relation of testimony to history, with particular focus on the tensions of affective structures and representational narrative. White’s work Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) provides a rich and detailed study of the tensions of vying disciplinary and discursive approaches to understanding and interpreting history. I share an association with philosophical commitments and pioneering work of William Pinar and Madeleine Grumet. See for example, Towards a Poor Curriculum (Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1976).
7. For further reading on comic books in relation to history, and commentary on MAUS, see Marianne Hirsch, “Family Pictures: MAUS, Mourning, and Post-Memory,” Discourse: Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 15, no. 2 (Winter 1992-93): 3-29; and Joseph Witsek, “History and Talking Animals,” in Comic Book as History (Miss: Univ of Mississippi Press, 1987).
8. Audrey Thompson presented a paper at the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) titled “Promise of a Storm — Political Pragmatism,” in which she delineated the difference between Dewey’s pragmatism and forms of American “political pragmatism” characterized by such authors as Patricia Hill Collins (1990) and Eve Sedgwick (1990). Her distinction rests precisely on the difference between the naturalized notions of adjustment and equilibrium in Dewey’s work that I refer to as “romantic functionalism.”
9. I am grateful as well for comments from Deanne Bogdan, Natasha Levinson, and Frank Margonis.
10. Dr. West, author of Race Matters (Beacon Press, Boston, 1993), delivered this inaugural W.E.B. DuBois Lecture and Film Series sponsored by the Ebony Museum in Oakland, January 14, 1994.
11. See Gloria Hull et al, But Some of Us are Brave (New York: The Feminist Press, 1982); and more recently, Becky Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi, ed., Beyond a Dream Deferred (Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
12. References within this paper to Simon’s work are taken from his R. Freeman Butts lecture, “The Pedagogy of Commemoration and the Formation of Collective Pedagogies,” (AESA, Chicago, 5 November 1993).
13. Shoshana Felman, and D. Laub Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 2.
14. Martha Nussbaum, “The Pity Debate I,” 9.
15. This concept is explicated briefly in Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), and is also discussed in his earlier work, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961).
16. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 132.
17. Felman and Laub, Testimony.
18. Ibid., 5-6.
19. Ibid., 5.
20. See for example Mosche Zuckerman, “The Curse of Forgetting: Israel and the Holocaust,” (Telos 78 (Fall 1988): 43-54; and on the opposite sentiment, Aharon Appelfeld, Unto the Soul (New York: Random House, 1993).
21. Felman, and Laub, Testimony, 5.
22. Ibid., 7.
23. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 62.
24. Ibid., 61.
25. From a conversation, Spring 1993.
26. From “Identity: Skin/Blood/Heart,” in Yours in Struggle, ed. Bulkin et al. (New York: Firebrand Press, 1988), 41.
27. Primo Levi, “Shame,” in The Drowned and the Saved, (New York: Vintage, 1988), 79.
28. Ibid., 81.