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A Pedagogy of Empathy for a World of Atrocity

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 36; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10714413.2014.958374

1556-3022

Esther Lezra,

Social Science and Policy Research

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes In the pursuit of imagining a critical theory based humanist-social scientific pedagogy of ethical witnessing, Geertz (2000–2001), Mudimbe (1996 Mudimbe , V. Y. (Ed.) . ( 1996 ). Open the Social Sciences. Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences . Stanford , CA : Stanford University Press . [Google Scholar]), Trouillot (2003), and Avery Gordon (1997 Gordon , A. ( 1997 ). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination . Minneapolis , MN and London, UK : University of Minnesota Press . [Google Scholar]) are most useful. See Giles Gunn (1992 Gunn , G. ( 1992 ). Interdisciplinary Studies . In J. Gibaldi (Ed.), Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures (pp. 239 – 261 ). New York , NY : Modern Language Association . [Google Scholar]) and David Sill (2001 Sill , D. ( 2001 ). Integrative Thinking, Synthesis, and Creativity in Interdisciplinary Studies . The Journal of General Education , 50 , 288 – 311 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). Jameson's understanding of the hurts of history privileges state-dominated histories shaped by state-led acts of violence and the ideologies that explain and justify these acts. My understanding of the hurts of history extends and multiplies the social bodies that experience the hurt: state-dominated acts and narratives take shape within a multilayered text of suffering and disavowal. Elsewhere I show that a symptomatic reading of colonial administrative documents reveals not only anti-colonial struggles but also a deeply repressed horror at the atrocities—both state and antistate—unleashed by colonialism. For a theoretical treatise on violence that engages what I would like to call a reading or a pedagogy of empathy, see Taylor Wilkins's (1992 Taylor Wilkins , B. ( 1992 ). Terrorism and Collective Responsibility . London , UK : Routledge .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) Terrorism and Collective Responsibility. His complex study disengages the question of organized violence and atrocity from the perpetrator/victim binary, troubling the conventional grammar of blame and demonization that this binary encourages. He reads organized violence as social text that narrates both the hurts that drive the perpetrators to commit and organize violence and the wounds of the victims. For a piece of expressive culture that enacts a reading of empathy that disturbs the perpetrator/victim binary, see Gillo Pontecorvo's (1962) classic Battle of Algiers. Disparate colonial documents, visual images, objects of expressive culture, and literary narratives stand as grammatical units in a dominant narrative of organizing, disciplining, and pacifying power. This narrative withholds other narratives that are partially legible through a symptomatic reading characterized by a poetics of empathy, where disciplinary, national, and geographical boundaries are transgressed. Through these poetics, disparate objects of study coalesce across national, linguistic, disciplinary, and temporal boundaries into a broad social text where shared social narratives do not just exist side by side but are interlocking nodes in a transnational, multilingual, multilocational, and mobile network of meaning, documentation, self-activity, and knowledge. Agents, witnesses, interpreters, and participants of these networks produce and translate symbols of self-activity across space, language, and nation. This interlocking multilingual multiregister language can neither be fully embraced nor evaded but must be understood if we are not to risk the loss of knowledge of sustained resistance and self-activity that consistently have challenged—and continue to do so—the workings, narratives, and structures of domination and power. In The New American Exceptionalism, we learn from Donald Pease that “irreconcilable rifts [during times of conflict, war and violence] state/dominant administrative, controlling and normalizing fantasies emerge to organize people's relationship to these antagonisms.” These fantasies, he warns, “[do] not refer to a mystification but to the dominant structure of desire out of which US citizens imagine their national identity” (italics added for emphasis). Further, Pease argues, “the state uses fantasy in order to avoid having to make logical arguments for domination” (Introduction, 1). In the form of images and narratives that serve to dehumanize, degrade or monstrify communities perceived as threatening by the US state, these fantasies that on one level can be understood as productive of a validation of authority can be understood as symptoms of the state's repressed reliance on fantasy for an authority that, based on a repressed acknowledgment of lack of authority, the state can neither secure nor justify (2). Greimas's (1987) proposal of the primacy of narrativity as an object of study in itself is useful to understand the transgression of conventional boundaries and disciplinary gates that I suggest are necessary for a pedagogy of empathy. In his grammar, narrative is a mode of thinking—it is a continuous process of narration, negotiation, and production of meaning based in continuous mis-translations (On Meaning. Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory). These mistranslations serve dominant narratives and ideological frameworks (both state and nonstate, of the colonizer and of the colonized) to misunderstand and cause violence to the subject/object being represented. Foucault's notion of power disturbs the usefulness of such binaries as legitimate or illegitimate power. Foucault (1995). This article builds on the scholarship already well established by several major studies of historical atrocity where it is shown to be a practice of both those empowered and those divested of power. Some of the most prominent examples of this important scholarship include C. L. R. James's (1963/1989) The Black Jacobins, Fernando Ortiz's (1940/2002 Ortiz , F. ( 1940/2002 ). Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (E. M. Santí, Ed.) . Madrid , Spain : Ediciones Cátedra . [Google Scholar]) Contrapunteo Cubano, Franz Fanon's (1961 Fanon , F. ( 1961 ). The Wretched of the Earth (Trans. Constance Farrington) . New York , NY : Grove Press . [Google Scholar]) Wretched of the Earth, Albert Memmi's (1957/1991 Memmi , A. ( 1957/1991 ). The Colonizer and the Colonized . Boston , MA : Beacon Press . [Google Scholar]) The Colonizer and the Colonized, and Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's (2000 Linebaugh , P. and Rediker , M. ( 2000 ). The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic . Boston , MA : Beacon Press . [Google Scholar]) The Many-Headed Hydra. These works establish that atrocity is an instrument of power wielded by communities both within and against the state. My article, and the pedagogy I propose, complicates a state/counter-state binary of power and attends to the wider social text of hurt in which these atrocities take place. It is particularly illuminating these days to follow the multiple grammars through which local and international news coverage has represented state attempts to deal with events following the momentous February 20, 2011. See Geertz (2000–2001). Hannah Arendt, Franz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Elaine Scarry, Giorgio Agamben, Anne Cubilié, Mark Danner, and Susan Sontag, among others. See Hartman (1997 Hartman , S. ( 1997 ). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America . New York , NY : Oxford University Press . [Google Scholar]). See Sontag (2003 Sontag , S. ( 2003 ). Regarding the Pain of Others . New York , NY : Picador .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). The importance assigned to the visual component of representation in her written work should be understood in relation to her life-long engagement with film, art and performance as critical and representative media. See Jameson (1981 Jameson , F. ( 1981 ). The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act . Ithaca , NY : Cornell University Press . [Google Scholar]). The term global could apply to these events and their circulation just as well. I have chosen to use transatlantic and transnational to highlight uneven processes of transferal and translations as these images travel through time and space. For instance, the ritual of protest of disappeared people by the mothers and women of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina is implicit in the later context of the Colectivo Mala Leche's representation/reproduction of the dead bodies of the murdered women of Juárez, studied by Rosa-Linda Fregoso in her talk and forthcoming article. Rosalinda Fregoso presented her material on the Colectivo Mala Leche in her plenary address at the conference “Mutli-Ethnic Alliances: A Conversation for the 21st Century” at the Center for Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, May 12–14, 2006. I am referring here only to the visual portrait of Stedman. Stedman's own narrative description of the colonial and military atrocities he sees reveals a markedly and fascinatingly different dynamic. For the purposes of this article, however, my analysis here is limited to the artistic image. The narrative order into which I have put these sentiments I see evoked in Blake's own work should not imply that his representation of revolutionary agency is uncomplicated. I show elsewhere that his revolutionary vision in fact erases the revolution propelling enlightenment revolutionary thought at that time. Ian Baucom argues that the social and material devastation Goya documented reached well beyond the boundaries of the struggling Spanish nation: what Goya painted, what held Europe in its grip and what was the moving center of and sovereign in the world the artist observed was the mobile and mutating system of terror and atrocity that had devastated Europe (2006 Baucom , I. ( 2006 ). The Disasters of War: On Inimical Life . Polygraph , 18 , 166 – 190 . [Google Scholar], 171–172). What I am calling here the transatlantic circuit of terror relates to what Baucom sees as sovereign war. Although my article intersects with Baucom in the objects of analysis with which I begin and end, as well as in some of my perspectives on the relationship of material and historical violence to its cultural representations, there is a productive difference in what it is I see in these documents. Although Baucom's analysis privileges the sovereignty of the state and the abjection of the subject constructed as inimical to it, my analysis seeks to emphasize the sovereignty of the relentless struggle for justice waged by those communities and individuals constructed as monstrous (in my terms) or inimical (in Baucom's terms). The placement of this figure at the center of the tableau, in which he is clearly delineated as the only one whose eyes are fully taking account of the event, the viewer of the tableau can identify with his horrified gaze, which, I would argue here, collapses the position of the horrified victim into that of the horrified spectator. It is necessary also to consider the effect that Algerian and North African Islamic populations are having on the delineation of how the post-Franco-Algerian French nation perceives and represents itself—what to do with the Franco-Algerians? They are largely ghettoized in the French metropole, not to mention the populations that were erased from the equation—lost to diaspora—almost entirely, such as the once fairly substantial population of Algerian Jews. Two French generals, Pélissier and St-Arnaud, are responsible for the violent death by fumigation of two large Berber tribes (the Sbéah and the Ouled-Riah) in the recesses of the caves into which hundreds of people had retreated to escape from the French army. Djebar's examination of the connections between violence and historical writing through these events is informed by the difference in the documentation of the events that otherwise would have been similar. St-Arnaud learns from the public outrage and momentary attitude of paralyzed horror at the violence of Pélissier's act of fumigation the danger of recording violence so meticulously. Although he chooses not to make any official documentation of it, Djebar chooses to exhume the bodies Pélissier meticulously recorded. Serfaty was obliged to live in exile in France for years after being released from the Kenitra prison. After the death of Hassan II, Mohammed VI, responding to international political pressure to allow Serfaty back into Morocco, galvanized by Serfaty through his consistent activism and untiring public talks, officially allowed Serfaty to return to Morocco, returned his Moroccan citizenship, and, in fact, went so far as to put him on his board of advisors. Serfaty has recently articulated his relation to the state through a language of humanitarianism rather than overtly Marxist language (private telephone interview with Serfaty). This has not been translated. All translations of this text are my own. Djebar indirectly represents scenes of torture through the imagined dialogue around the scene of torture in unmapped torture houses in the Algerian countryside in Fantasia during the Algerian resistance movements to the French in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The victims of torture whose voices she records and captures are depicted in her writing as having strong agency and voice, even in the moments of torture. Recent weeks have produced yet another harrowing example of the pattern of refusal of complicity in atrocity that I have been tracing throughout this article: the recent video footage released onto the Internet by ISIS showing the ritualized beheadings of James Foley (August 19, 2014), Steven Sotloff (September 2, 2014), David Hanes (September 13, 2014), and Alan Henning (October 3, 2014) has overwhelmingly, in Western media coverage, prompted the comfortable and familiar discourse of demonization (in this case of ISIS/ISIL) as opposed to the more difficult and uncomfortable question of the responsibility the targeted self (namely the United States, the UK, and its allies in the fight against ISIS/ISIL) may have in these actions. It is crucial to understand these beheadings of innocents as a re-articulation or “blowback” of colonial violence. These beheadings are not something to be celebrated or supported, yet must be understood. As Richard Falk points out in his analysis of the current state of political relations between Islam and the West in his September 18, 2014 blog entry “ISIS, Militarism and the Violent Imagination,” what we are seeing currently in the chain of violence between the Islamic State and the West is a twenty-first century re-configuration of older historical relations, in which the populations of people that would have been termed “the colonized” in other historical times are actively, radically, and in some cases violently and desperately standing up against what in other historical times would have been termed “the colonizer.” Falk writes: [T]he last several decades should teach the West that the days of staging successful colonial interventions at acceptable costs are long past, and that premising post-colonial interventionist diplomacy on a moral crusade of human rights, democracy, and counter-terrorism fools almost no one except some of the people in the metropole, and wins few real friends in the target societies other than cynical opportunists or desperate insurgents. (http://richardfalk.wordpress.com/) This recent cycle of colonizer-colonized atrocity, in which we see ISIS/ISIL and the U.S. and UK governments speaking in the currency of the limbs of innocent people is yet another illustration of the urgent need to change the terms of the political, ideological, and imaginative horizon between colonizer/colonized into one of shared humanity rather than one of mutual destruction and devastation.