Unsettling certainty and displacing the absolute

Critiquing the Culture of Empathy

This empathy culture is defined by Davis as the thing which we are taught in daily lives as a moral good and as a core and inherent part of what it means to be a person in the world. There is the example of HR training sessions that Davis speaks about in interviews, but the strongest and most pertinent and consistent example from the text itself is the human zoos, something I pick up a bit later in this review as well. Davis highlights archival evidence of human zoos, but also speaks about her own experience attending one such cultural center in Hawai’i1 as a teenager. For Davis, the relationship between the development of the photograph and technology broadly speaking alongside the development and expansion of empathy culture becomes evident through the ways in which the photograph comes to be deployed as a means of storytelling, using the example of Germans attending and photographing Samoan human zoo displays. It is here where I would argue Davis makes her biggest intervention, in the space left between the photograph and the non-politic of empathy.

The point of the text is to challenge our assumption that empathy is an intrinsically good and positive aspect of humanity. Dr Jade E. Davis sets out to counter both the liberal moralistic voices, shouting loudly over so much of the humanities and critical theory, as well as the pseudo-radical intellectual cultures governing studies of race and ethnicity in and from the West especially. The critique is launched from the intersection of studies of archives, anti/postcolonial theory, and affect theory. And the challenge is daring exactly because it comes at the foundations of so many of the assumed absolute realisms we have been taught over time: that empathy is intrinsic to human existence and a necessity in the making of a morally good person. To exhibit no empathy means you are defective, often related to sociopathy or psychopathy. To shake and stir the foundations of what we think of as human life takes a considerable amount of effort, because it means that we also stir the foundations of what we assume we know to be true which can really upend life for many people.

Beyond Empathy

Beyond empathy, there lies far greater ways of building solidarity that do not rely on one trying to completely immerse oneself in the experience and perspective of another, which is entirely not possible. Further, the text opened to me new ways of reading and enjoying the works of Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon. For Biko, as for Fanon, the other is imagined through the absolute demarcation of race as biological certainty, where whiteness denotes at once a superiority, and blackness denotes something other than human. For Davis in The Other Side of Empathy, though, this distorted foundation is shown to be a fallacy, taking us closer to the work of the predecessors in postcolonial theory and anticolonial/antiapartheid work: blackness exists and not only lives within regimes of violence, but also in frameworks of aliveness, interiority, solidarity, and of quietness. A beautiful text that discusses and theorizes these thoughts is a book by Kevin Quashie called The Sovereignty of Quiet, and it posits a theory of blackness as always existing within the framework of loud resistance discourse and much more. I tend to see these two texts as being in discussion with one another, reaffirming each other and serving as a constant reminder to the rest of us that even though there is a desire within many corners to frame race and experience within singular discourses, that they are far more broad and colored by the contours of place and time and the fortune or misfortune of where we are born. For me, as I read Fanon through the work of Davis throughout the text, blackness emerges relationally insofar as to become subject to the ways in which colonization operates, there must be a relational manufacturing of black as other thing outside of person, a sentiment Davis repeatedly points out when discussing the abject violence of this manufacture of blackness sans humanness. She takes time to show us in practical ways why mutual recognition becomes a way beyond the type of theory making that renders black subjugation a permanent and unshifting condition, and that to exceed empathy culture is at its core also an anticolonial and liberatory effort.

Davis arrives at the core of her argument by scouring colonial archives, especially archives where colonized subjects become the things people ogle at, like human zoos or displays of indigenous peoples in the mode of Saartjie Baartman, where the still alive Baartman was made into a display for the pleasure and scorn of European audiences. In addition to this Davis also highlights her own continued experience with personal encounters in cultural centers, the photograph as technology, and the reading and misreading of the work of theory of folks like Franz Fanon. In her own reading of the life and display of Saartjie Baartman, Davis comes to many of the same conclusions those of us concerned with the study of South African history have come to – that Baartman is object and medium through which European colonial reasoning gets worked out and processed. She is a figure only worthy of the value it brings to the continued justification of the project of whiteness.

The story of Baartman is central to how the Black female body is understood in media and scholarship, particularly around contemporary issues of commodification, power, resistance, and embodied experience. Her body is the medium through which the Black female body enters the large cultural landscape of knowledge production. Limited agency, tragic endings, and the white male gaze define the medium. Her existence is what made seeing twelve people on display in a zoo in 1888 so tantalizing; people alive and in the flesh, to be gawked at and interacted with by European families, putting on shows and selling the hierarchy of culture through their perceived inferiority. While their photographs have continued to be circulated through scholarship, their voices have not. (Davis, 46,47)2

For Davis, for me, for those of us concerned with the lives and stories of the people made into objects for the West, the continued quieting of their voices is an ongoing reminder of the violence of these displays. We have enough examples of Davis talking in interviews, including in one with me, about the expanse of her research but also her personal encounters with the work. The encounter with a cultural center in Hawaii is but one of the many examples of the grounded work being considered here. Davis’s own struggle with her judgment of the people taking part in the performance of the cultural center, the center’s own ties with colonial Mormonism, and the reduction of what she calls thousands of years and thousands of miles into this condensed display of people in their most essentialized form for the gaze of the tourist, is all on display early on in the text already. This for me is a vital part of the text as well, where the personal education towards empathy as a core principle also leaves space and leads to internalized practices of judgment and reduction of people.

Another example of the culture of empathy and its accompanying assumption Davis points out, that her epidermis denotes a certainty of collective experience with anyone who shares her pigment in the room, comes from an interview3 where she speaks about another black person finding her in a room of only white people, and relaying a story about growing up poor in rural USA and assuming that this would land and be consistent with her experience of the world. That it is Blackness, and not blackness that is present. The categorical certainty of the capital B (though of course Davis continues to use it as is convention) is unseated by the awareness that blacknesses exist in multitudes, and that we can find each other always, but that to assume a cohesive and permanently affixed narrative of experience would be to undermine the very real expanse of life and story and experience. Empathy culture is a deception, then, telling us that if we cannot imagine an other so intimately that we know their pain and their suffering, that we have lost our footing in what it means to be a good and decent person in the world. Blackness is an expansive set of experiences and histories and stories, and to assume that there is a collective unity and a permanent suffering and deadness attached to that collective unity, is in and of itself entirely bound up in racist mythologies.

In Davis’s own estimation, the text is an attempt to push against the assumed certainties and absolutes presented by the prospect of empathy as a practice of overcoming or contending acutely with political and historical structures like South African or Israeli apartheid. In her argument, which I tend to agree with simply on a personal and anecdotal level, empathy almost always places the burden of the labor of understanding and of feeling at the feet of the person suffering subjugation, with the subjugated charged with coming to understand and to feel with their oppressor so absolutely that some kind of resolution becomes available. One such example from my lifetime and my home would be the Christian moralistic impulse of the making of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. The entire foundation of the project was to bring about a radical shift in the language of justice, to replace it instead with the pacifying tendency of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the then recently disciplined and formerly quite radical ANC, then under the leadership of Rolihlahla Nelson Mandela and his advisors. This was also within the time of the so-called first government of national unity of South Africa, the first of its kind in the post-apartheid moment, meant to usher in a sense of national shift to forgiveness and forgetting. The TRC was a project of enforced empathy, with violators confessing their crimes, and the violated, if they are lucky enough to still be alive, subjugated to listening to a retelling of the crimes committed against them before the panel grants amnesty.

Mutual Recognition Demands More From Us

If we are to take this example then it becomes apparent, once we peel back the macabre facade of religious moralism and Christian doctrines of forgiveness, that this kind of iteration of empathy is a sentiment of quelling rage or frustration or feelings of vengeance. Davis, once again to her credit, is more concerned with empathy culture than the implications of the word empathy. The distinction being that empathy could possibly contain within it the useful ideas that she presents as alternatives, like a sense of mutual recognition. There is no fantasy of this emerging automatically, as it must be something taught over time, but unlike with empathy culture especially, there is no attached value and moral judgment. In an interview on the podcast Ordinary Unhappiness that I referenced earlier, Dr Jade E. Davis goes in depth in talking about the ways that empathy culture produces valuations of people, where connecting and directly feeling with people means you are a more worthy person because of that capacity. Mutual recognition, for Davis, is defined as a process by which, though we cannot come to feel exactly in place of the experience of the people we are engaging with, we can begin perhaps to recognize in their experience some of the common factors we know as well, and through that practice of coming to recognize, perhaps then beginning to work towards a politics of care. The distinction Davis draws here between recognition and empathy is the assumption of the moral good of feeling absolutely with someone through empathy. It is the distinction that empathy is a culturally produced artifact that only relatively recently began to gain such traction, stepping into their shoes in a fully experiential and embodied way, something Davis disregards as impossible. And mutual recognition on the other hand is a practice of consideration of the personness of the people we encounter, and the possibility and impossibility of knowing some of what they come to know through their experience of the world. In Davis’s own words,

Suffering is part of the transcendental as it is central to the human condition. Rather than that being a reason to internalize and intellectualize the suffering of the Other, it is rather a call to see and acknowledge it, to listen and to accept it. The recreation of suffering that empathy demands is not moving forward. It is constantly looking back and putting the sufferer in stasis. Mutual recognition requires letting go of some level of control/power and agency. It assumes an active Other, equally engaged and valued in the process of meaning-making. Mutual recognition is accepting without understanding, and it is believing that this acceptance of the value of another is reciprocated. Mutual recognition is not about cognizing the Other into being. It is recognizing that the Otherness is mutual. To decolonize something as pervasive as empathy is to understand that the power of colonization resides in how it imprisons the oppressor who attempts to empathize while continuing the cycle of oppression. The cycle is created each time empathy is extended to people who are only worthy of existence through empathy. Five things that get in the way of mutual recognition are as follows: Power Reciprocity Fear Status Quo Cognition Empathy does not automatically lead to failure of these things, but it is annihilation. annihilation. If, for books, we are comfortable saying the author is dead, through empathy, we are comfortable with the Other being dead, too. (97)4

Before this book provided me with the language to contend with my complicated feelings around this ideology of empathy, I was content with emphasizing it in my own projects of thinking about the possibilities of a kind of radical politics that would center a general regard for one another. For me, when thinking through those projects, one now dead, and the other still trudging along, I wanted to find ways to contend with what I saw as a generalizable lack of mutual concern. The easy turn to make was to the virtues of empathy culture. What this text unsettled, in the best ways possible, was the central issue that this culture of empathy was a placation and a sedation instead of serving any kind of liberatory purpose. For Davis, the point is that we can think hateful thoughts of one another, that this is simply part of life, that to have these thoughts is not something to be ashamed of necessarily as long as you don’t act it out in harmful ways.

I want to give you a broad snapshot of why I think it matters for us to read this book. To this end, I center Davis’s own discussion around race and subjugation because to me it provides the clearest practical example in my current experience of the world, where we are further and further atomized away from each other, and an impulse becomes to reach for the fallacy of universalism and essentialism. For me, the argument against essentializing is ever-present in the text as is evidenced by Davis’s own treatment of the colonial machinations involved in the work of making and remaking Samoan and Hawai’ian people into objects for display. We read that in the context she neatly places it, but we also accept the invitation to extrapolate out into the ways in which dominant strains continue to reduce subjugated peoples into objects, or in the words of Aime Cesaire, the process of thingification. Davis intervenes for us in the space where these absolutes and universalisms emerge as standard practice within fields of study but also within human behavior. It is at no point an attack on any of these tendencies, but simply an attempt to say that there is much more at play than the eternally reducible ethnic subject, and that empathy and empathy culture cannot be the stand ins for a real recognition of the lives and experiences of the people around us, and the awareness that we cannot really ever dissolve from our own life into that of another in order to understand them. Moving away from empathy culture actually requires us to put in effort, to listen to one another if we are actually genuinely interested in developing understanding. Empathy culture is a passivity that presents us with an easy out, but Davis wants us to move away from that, and I tend to agree. This book is for anyone who is serious about anticolonial struggle and its practical necessities and implications, it requires of us to squirm uncomfortably in the isolationist academic tendency of writing and research being enough. It requires more, and it demands discomfort. For that, I am ever grateful.

Wilton Schereka is a scholar, archivist, and activist, working at the intersections of sound, history, and philosophy. In the final stages of their PhD, Schereka is currently working for the Social Thought and Political Economy Program at UMass Amherst while also continuing to DJ.

Notes

1. 1. This entire discussion begins on page 12 of the text, with Davis discussing a high school visit as to a cultural center as a means to relate the historical evidence of the colonial human zoo with the development of the photograph as a technology of empire.

2. 2. Davis, Jade E. The Other Side of Empathy (pp. 46-47). Duke University Press. Kindle Edition.

3. 3. Ordinary Unhappiness 33: “The Problem with Empathy feat. Jade E. Davis”, https://ordinaryunhappiness.buzzsprout.com/2131830/14011312, Accessed 08/15/2024.

4. 4. Davis, Jade E. The Other Side of Empathy (p. 97). Duke University Press. Kindle Edition.