Cry Me a River

September 18th, 2008

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Here’s something excellent on 90s genii Disco Inferno (the Walter Benjamin of pop-collage, contraposed to the Young Gods as Deleuze & Guattari) from Owen H.

And the context of that post brings us to the subject of empathy and its limits. As Gillian Rose wrote in Mourning Becomes the Law,

In a nature film, we could be made to identify withthe life cycle of the fly as prey of the spider, and we could be made to identify with the life cycle of the spider as prey of the rodent. We can be made to identify with the Peking Opera singer who is destroyed by the Cultural Revolution, and we can equally be made to identify with the rickshaw man, for whom the Cultural Revolution was ‘the beginning of Paradise”. It is only the ultimate predator who can be made to identify exclusively and yet consecutively with one link or another in the life cycle, because she can destroy the whole cycle, and of course, herself.

This is not, we should note, the same as saying, in the kind of sci-fi horror punchline parodied in various Treehouses of Horror and elsewhere, “the real monster was….MAN!!”. The “ultimate predator” is a political category: it’s a result of positioning the subject who is addressed by some form of representation.

For instance, the nature film addresses me as a spectator located outside nature depicted as a seamless circle of murder. It simultaneously invites my empathy and absolves me of responsibility. The spectacle of universal murder is a spectacle: it unites its audience at an illusory distance from what is depicted. Similarly, the invitation to empathise (not sympathise - there’s an element of identification here which goes beyond an invitation to pity) with the staff of Lehman Brothers locates its audience in a particular place, where everybody is comfortably settled in a listening circle, ready to hear testimony of a set of events which have the character of a natural catastrophe. We’re invited to identify with the loss of power, wealth and privilege by elevating ourselves beyond the circumstances of our own lives. Just suppose for one minute you had captured such a position: how would it feel to lose it? What sort of questions would you ask yourself?

Yes, I am already looking for a silver lining. I am painfully aware of how grossly America out-consumes the rest of the world, and feel guilty about this even though I have lived in Britain for nearly 25 years. When Al Gore first circled the globe, advising us to change our ways before we burnt up the planet, I wondered why people couldn’t commit to a stricter regime. I gave up blow-drying my hair for a whole year.

Empathy, however, is not a capacity with universal reach. There’s something obscene, inhuman, about assuming that it can be universally invoked, with minimal prompting. It is, in fact, a very political emotion, a way to build solidarity. It proceeds through piecemeal and daily confrontation with common difficulty.

To be invited by the likes of Katherine Bucknell to identify with the loss both of enormous privilege and of an armature of security built upon the wrenching uncertainties woven into the lives of distant others is an act of symbolic and emotional violence. What we are invited to do is empathise with the emotions engendered when one is robbed of the illusory conviction that I am not as you are, of a fantasmatic relationship with the rest of society born of might without right. The masters, unable to entirely leave their accustomed pedagogical position (cemented every day by the business pages, the prominence of the financial analysts on the TV news) are inviting us to learn a lesson here: coming, beseechingly to our door, they mutter “see how we, abandoned to our losses, are just like you“. The invitation is to submerge ourselves en masse in a moment of reconciliation no less spectacular than that enacted in Schindler’s List, of which Rose was writing.

Well, there won’t be many who don’t shut the door in their faces. You’re not like us - but who knows, you may yet become like us. So there may be a time for empathy, but it isn’t now.