The Risks Of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism's Gaze
This article was downloaded by: [Portland State University]On: 25 September 2012, At: 14:12Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UKCultural StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription he risks of empathy:Interrogating multiculturalism'sgazeMegan BolerVersion of record first published: 22 Aug 2006.To cite this article: Megan Boler (1997): The risks of empathy: Interrogatingmulticulturalism's gaze, Cultural Studies, 11:2, 253-273To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502389700490141PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLEFull terms and conditions of use: sThis article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sublicensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expresslyforbidden.The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make anyrepresentation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. Theaccuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independentlyverified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising outof the use of this material.
THE RISKS OF EMPATHY:Downloaded by [Portland State University] at 14:12 25 September 2012INTERROGATINGMULTICULTURALISM' S GAZEABSTRACTEmpathy is widely embraced as a means of educating the social imagination;from John Dewey to Martha Nussbaum, Cornel West to bell hooks, we findempathy advocated as the foundation for democracy and social change. In thisarticle I examine how students' readings of Art Spiegelman's MA US, a comicbook genre depiction of his father's survival of Nazi Germany, produces theAristotelian version of empathy advocated by Nussbaum. This 'passiveempathy', I argue, falls far short of assuring any basis for social change, andreinscribes a 'consumptive' mode of identification with the other. I invoke a'semiotics of empathy', which emphasizes the power and social hierarchieswhich complicate the relationship between reader/listener and text/speaker. Iargue that educators need to encourage what I shall define as 'testimonialreading' which requires the reader's responsibility.KEYWORDSempathy; emotion; testimony; MA US; reading; powerHow old is the habit of denial? We keep secrets from ourselves that all alongwe know. The public was told that Dresden was bombed to destroy strategic railway lines. There were no railway lines in that part of the c i t y . . . .I do not see my life as separate from history. In my mind my familysecrets mingle with the secrets of statesmen and bombers. Nor is my lifedivided from the lives of others . . . . If I tell all the secrets I know, publicand 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 whohave been trapped by circumstances- a death, a loss, a cataclysm of history.(Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones)Social imagination and its discontentsUpon an ivory hill in central California another fall evening's garish redhues announced my fourth year of teaching MA US, the comic-book representation of author Art Spiegelman's father, Vladek, narrating hisCultural Studies 11(2) 1997:253-73 1997 Routledge 0950-2386
Downloaded by [Portland State University] at 14:12 25 September 2012experience of surviving the Holocaust of the Second World War. Threehundred 18-year-olds - forty-seven of them charged to me - have beenassigned this text, preceded by The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan and quicklyfollowed with Zoot Suit by Luis Valdez - the epitome of an introductorymulticultural curriculum in the arts and humanities.To all appearances, I should sleep well as a participant in this introduction to multiculturalism through the arts and literature; I should laud myselffor taking up the liberatory potential outlined by forerunners John Deweyand Louise Rosenblatt. At the onset of the Second World War, the samemoment that Vladek Spiegelman's story begins, progressive educationalphilosophers John Dewey and Louise Rosenblatt wrote optimistically oftheir faith in the 'social imagination', developed in part through literaturewhich allows the reader the possibility of identifying with the 'other' andthereby developing modes of moral understanding 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 childwho was starving. Our vicarious suffering would force us to do somethingto alleviate it' (1938: 185). She describes the experience of reading a newspaper in a state of numbness, that all too familiar strategy for absorbinginformation without feeling it. 'This habit of mind,' she writes, 'has itsimmediate value, of course, as a form of self-protection . . . . Because of thereluctance of the average mind to make this translation into human terms,the teacher must at times take the responsibility for stimulating it' (ibid.).Social imagination protects us, in this view, from Susan Griffin's above condemnation of the 'habit of denial' that enables an occurrence like thebombing of Dresden. Thus faith is maintained today, for example, by Aristotelian philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who advocates 'poetic justice' inwhich the student as 'literary judge' comprehends the other through sympathy and fancy as well as rationality as the foundation for dignity, freedomand democracy (1995: 120-1).Educators, philosophers of emotion and politicians have not abandonedthis project of cultivating democracy through particular emotions, of whichempathy is the most popular. Across the political and disciplinary spectrum,conservatives and liberals alike advocate variations of empathy as a solution to society's 'ills'. At a recent public lecture, Cornel West insisted thatempathy is requisite to social justice. 1 Empathy is taught in legal andmedical education under the rubric of 'narrative ethics'; there is now ajournal entitled Literature and Medicine. Cognitive scientists claimempathy as a genetic attribute, and speculate on a neurological map ofethics (May et al., 1996). Empathy has been popularized recently throughthe bestselling book Emotional Intelligence, further publicized throughOprah Winfrey, Time Magazine and National Public Radio. Empathy, aprimary component of 'emotional intelligence quotient', is a product ofgenetic inheritance combined with self-control, Aristotelian fashion. Thisemotional literacy, essentially a behavioural modification programme, isnow taught in hundreds of public schools throughout the United States. 2Finally, in the last fifteen years of Western 'multiculturalism', empathy is254CULTURAL STUDIES
Downloaded by [Portland State University] at 14:12 25 September 2012promoted as a bridge between differences, the affective reason for engagingin democratic dialogue with the other. 3But who and what, I wonder, benefits from the production of empathy?What kinds of fantasy spaces do students come to occupy through the construction of particular types of emotions produced by certain readings? 4 Inwhat ways does empathy risk decontextualizing particular moral problems? s In short, what is gained by the social imagination and empathy, andis this model possibly doing our social vision more harm than good?While empathy may inspire action in particular lived contexts - it islargely empathy that motivates us to run to aid a woman screaming nextdoor - I am not convinced that empathy leads to anything close to justice,to any shift in existing power relations. In fact, through modes of easyidentification and flattened historical sensibility, the 'passive empathy' represented by Nussbaum's faith in 'poetic justice' may simply translate toreading practices that do not radically challenge the reader's world view.I see education as a means to challenge rigid patterns of thinking that perpetuate injustice and instead encourage flexible analytic skills, whichinclude the ability to self-reflectively evaluate the complex relations ofpower and emotion. As an educator I understand my role to be not merelyto teach critical thinking, but to teach a critical thinking that seeks to transform consciousness in such a way that a Holocaust could never happenagain. Ideally, multiculturalism widens what counts as theory, history,knowledge and value, rather than enabling modes of empathy that permitthe reader's exoneration from privilege and complicities through the 'ahhah' experience.Nussbaum admits that no matter how powerful a vision of social justiceis gained by the empathetic reader, our habituated numbness is likely toprevent any action. 'People are often too weak and confused and isolated,'she says, 'to carry out radical political changes' (1996:57). One can onlyhope then that empathy is not the only viable route to inspiring change. Asanother colleague succinctly stated, these 'others' whose lives we imaginedon't want empathy, they want justice. 6The untheorized gap between empathy and acting on another's behalfhighlight my discomfort with the use of MA US in an introductory 'multicultural' curriculum. My students' readings of MA US enabled them to enter'imaginatively into the lives of distant others and to have emotions relatedto that participation', Nussbaum's prescription for an 'ethics of an impartial respect for human dignity' (1995: xvi). But passive empathy satisfiesonly the most benign multicultural agenda. MA US could be taught, I recognize, within a curriculum in such a way as to avoid some of the risks ofempathy. 7 Yet introductory multicultural curricula cannot be all things, andmost often do not provide detailed histories as backdrop to the literatureread. What are the risks of reading a text like MA US in the absence of morecomplete historical accounts? 8 What kinds of histories are presented in thename of multiculturalism, and what kind of historical sensibility is associated with these democratic ideals?In question is not the text itself, but what reading practices are taught,THE RISKS OF EMPATHY 255
Downloaded by [Portland State University] at 14:12 25 September 2012and how such texts function within educational objectives. I hope to complicate the concept of empathy as a 'basic social emotion' produced throughnovel-reading. I invoke a 'semiotics of empathy', which emphasizes thepower and social hierarchies which complicate the relationship betweenreader/listener and text/speaker. I argue that educators need to encouragewhat I shall define as 'testimonial reading'. Testimonial reading involvesempathy, but requires the reader's responsibility. Shoshana Felman asks, 'Isthe art of reading literary texts itself inherently related to the act of facinghorror? If literature is the alignment between witnesses, what would thisalignment mean?' (Felman and Laub, 1992: 2). Such readings are possiblepotentially not only with testimony, or with novels, but across genres.Ideally, testimonial reading inspires an empathetic response that motivatesaction: a 'historicized ethics' engaged across genres, that radically shifts ourself-reflective understanding of power relations.The risks of passive empathyPhilosophers do not agree on empathy's role in moral evaluation. Kant, forexample, views emotions as far too unreliable a basis for moral action, andheld that only a unified and rational moral principle could be the basis ofright action. David Hume, on the other hand, saw emotions as central toour moral behaviour. Nussbaum states in passing that her Aristotelianviews could be 'accommodated by a Kantianism modified so as to give emotions a . . . cognitive role' (1995: xvi). In a pivotal treatise on altruism(Blum, 1980), a central unresolved question is the extent to which altruistic emotions must include being disposed to take action to improve theother's condition.Empathy belongs to a class of 'altruistic emotions' which go by differentnames. Nussbaum draws on Aristotle's 'pity', but switches to 'compassion'to avoid the contemporary connotations of pity that Aristotle doesn'tintend. In our common usage, 'pity' indicates a sense of concern, but morenegatively a sense that the other is possibly inferiorized by virtue of their'pitiful' status. Sympathy commonly refers to a sense of concern based noton identical experiences but experiences sufficiently similar to evoke thefeeling of 'there but for the grace of God go I'. Empathy is distinct fromsympathy on the common sense that I can empathize only if I too haveexperienced what you are suffering.Throughout the discussion that follows, a key question remains: whatrole does identification with the other play in definitions of altruistic emotions? Can we know the other's experience? Briefly I suggest that in the definitions above, pity does not require identification; sympathy employs ageneralized identification as in 'that could be me' or 'I have experiencedsomething that bears a family resemblance to your suffering'; and empathyimplies a full identification. In the cases of sympathy and empathy, theidentification between self and other also contains an irreducible difference- a recognition that I am not you, and that empathy is possible only byvirtue of this distinction.256CULTURAL STUDIES
Downloaded by [Portland State University] at 14:12 25 September 2012I elect to use the term 'empathy' because it is the term most frequentlyused across the different literatures I detailed in the introduction. However,what I call empathy and Nussbaum calls compassion is probably bestunderstood as our common-sense usage of 'sympathy'. I further distinguish'passive empathy' to refer to those instances where our concern is directedto a fairly distant other, w h o m we cannot directly help. Some philosophershave it that in such cases the sufficient expression of concern is to wish theother well. I shall argue that passive empathy is not a sufficient educationalpractice. At stake is not only the ability to empathize with the very distantother, but to recognize oneself as implicated in the social forces that createthe climate of obstacles the other must confront.In her latest work, Poetic Justice (1995) and in 'Compassion: the basicsocial emotion', recently published in Social Philosophy and Policy (1996),Nussbaum advocates a humanist, democratic vision in which educatorssuccessfully enable students to imagine others' lives through novel-reading.The 'others' in her examples are the homosexual man, the African-American man and the working-class man. She summarizes Aristotle's definitionof 'pity', which Nussbaum calls 'compassion' and I call 'passive empathy': 9[Pity posits] (1) the belief that the suffering is serious rather than trivial;(2) the belief that the suffering was not caused primarily by the person'sown culpable actions; and (3) the belief that the pitier's own possibilitiesare similar to those of the sufferer.(1996: 31)The central strategy of Aristotelian pity is a faith in the value of 'puttingoneself in the other person's shoes'. By imagining my own similar vulnerabilities I claim 'I know what you are feeling because I fear that could happento me'. The agent of empathy, then, is a fear for oneself. This signals thefirst risk of empathy: Aristotle's pity is more a story and projection of myselfthan an understanding of you. I can hear the defensive cries: But how canwe ever really know the other save through a projection of the self? WhileI share this question, our inability to answer it adequately is not a defenceof passive pity. More to the point is to ask, What is gained and/or lost byadvocating as a cure for social injustice an empathetic identification that ismore about me than you?Pity centrally posits the 'other' as the secondary object of concern, knownonly because of the reader's fears about her own vulnerabilities. Pity's firstand second defining aspects are supporting corollaries to this positioning ofself/other: the reader is positioned as judge, evaluating the other's experience as 'serious or trivial', and as 'your fault/not your fault'. The other'sserious suffering is 'rewarded' by the reader's pity, if not blamed on the sufferer's own actions.The identification that occurs through compassion, Nussbaum claims,allows us also to judge what others need in order to flourish. Nussbaumemphasizes that 'pity takes up the onlooker's point of view, informed by thebest judgment the onlooker can make about what is really happening to theperson being o b s e r v e d . . , implicit in pity itself is a conception of humanTHE RISKS OF EMPATHY 257
Downloaded by [Portland State University] at 14:12 25 September 2012flourishing, the best one the pitier is able to form' (1996: 32-3; my emphasis).Nussbaum indicates that we can 'know the other' through compassion. Ihave significantly less faith in our capacity to judge what is 'really happening' to others. To judge what 'others need in order to flourish' is an exceptionally complicated proposition not easily assumed in our cultures ofdifference. Feminist and post-colonial writers, from Fanon and W.E.B.DuBois, to Irigaray and Levinas, have critiqued the self/other relationshipassumed in Western and psychoanalytic models of identification. Whilethere is much more to this question than can be pursued here, I wish to pointout that the uninterrogated identification assumed by the faith in empathyis founded on a binary of self/other that situates the self/reader unproblematically as judge. This self is not required to identify with the oppressor, andnot required to identify her complicity in structures of power relations mirrored by the text. Rather, to the extent that identification occurs in Nussbaum's model, this self feeds on a consumption of the other. To clarify: inpopular and philosophical conceptions, empathy requires identification. Itake up your perspective, and claim that I can know your experiencethrough mine. By definition, empathy also recognizes our difference - notprofoundly, but enough to distinguish that I am not in fact the one suffering at this moment. What is ignored is what has been called the 'psychosisof our time': empathetic identification requires the other's difference inorder to consume it as sameness. The irony of identification is that the builtin consumption annihilates the other who is simultaneously required for ourvery existence. In sum, the social imagination reading model is a binarypower relationship of self/other that threatens to consume and annihilatethe very differences that permit empathy. Popular and scholarly (particularlyin the analytic traditions of philosophy) definitions of empathy seem unwittingly founded on this ironic 'psychosis' of consumptive objectification. 1 The troublesome terrain of identification poses questions about empathythat must be pursued elsewhere. How do critiques of identification complicate Western models of empathy? What might empathy look like, andproduce, when it doesn't require identification? What about more difficultcases in which the reader is required to empathize with the oppressor, orwith more complicated protagonists? (Here I think of Marleen Gorris's filmA Question of Silence; and of performances like Anna Deveare Smith's Firesin the Mirror, a representation of the Crown Heights conflicts in Brooklynwhich permits the viewer to empathize with multiple points of view.Deveare Smith's performance exemplifies the potential for a disturbinglyrelativized ethics, while highlighting the vast historical and cultural ignorances which cause such moral conflicts.) Finally, the readers Nussbaumspeaks of represent a largely homogenous g
Finally, in the last fifteen years of Western 'multiculturalism', empathy is 254 CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [Portland State University] at 14:12 25 September 2012 . promoted as a bridge between differences, the affective reason
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