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Suffering BadPain undermines the autonomy of the subject and should be rejected Edelglass 6 William Edelglass is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Marlboro College, “LEVINAS ON SUFFERING AND COMPASSION” Sophia, Vol. 45, No. 2, October 2006 Because suffering is a pure passivity, lived as the breach of the totality we constitute through intending acts, Levinas argues, even suffering that is chosen cannot be meaningfully systematized within a coherent whole. Suffering is a rupture and disturbance of meaning because it suffocates the subject and destroys the capacity for systematically assimilating the world. 9 Pain isolates itself in consciousness, overwhelming consciousness with its insistence. Suffering, then, is an absurdity, 'an absurdity breaking out on the ground of signification.'1~ This absurdity is the eidetic character of suffering Levinas seeks to draw out in his phenomenology. Suffering often appears justified, from the biological need for sensibility to pain, to the various ways in which suffering is employed in character formation, the concerns of practical life, a community's desire for justice, and the needs of the state. Implicit in Levinas's texts is the insistence that the analysis of these sufferings calls for a distinction between the use of pain as a tool, a practice performed on the Other's body for a particular end, and the acknowledgement of the Other's lived pain. A consequence of Levinas's phenomenology is the idea that instrumental justifications of extreme suffering necessarily are insensible to the unbearable pain they seek to legitimize. Strictly speaking, then, suffering is meaningless and cannot be comprehended or justified by rational argument. Meaningless, and therefore unjustifiable, Levinas insists, suffering is evil. Suffering, according to Levinas's phenomenology, is an exception to the subject's mastery of being; in suffering the subject endures the overwhelming of freedom by alterity. The will that revels in the autonomous grasping of the world, in suffering finds itself grasped by the world. The in-itself of the will loses its capacity to exert itself and submits to the will of what is beyond its grasp. Contrary to Heidegger, it is not the anxiety before my own death which threatens the will and the self. For, Levinas argues, death, announced in suffering, is in a future always beyond the present. Instead of death, it is the pure passivity of suffering that menaces the freedom of the will. The will endures pain 'as a tyranny,' the work of a 'You,' a malicious other who perpetrates violence (TI239). This tyranny, Levinas argues, 'is more radical than sin, for it threatens the will in its very structure as a will, in its dignity as origin and identity' (TI237). Because suffering is unjustifiable, it is a tyranny breaking open my world of totality and meaning 'for nothing.' The gratuitous and extreme suffering that destroys the capacity for flourishing human activity is generally addressed by thinkers in European traditions in the context of metaphysical questions of evil (is evil a positive substance or deviation from the Good?), or problems of philosophical anthropology (is evil chosen or is it a result of ignorance?). For these traditions it is evil, not suffering, that is the great scandal, for they consider suffering to be evil only when it is both severe and unjustified. II But for Levinas suffering is essentially without meaning and thus cannot be legitimized; all suffering is evil. As he subsumes the question of death into the problem of pain, 12 so also Levinas understands evil in the context of the unassumability and meaninglessness of suffering. 13 The suffering of singular beings is not incidental to an evil characterized primarily by the subordination of the categorical imperative to self-interest, or by neglect of the commands of a Divine Being. Indeed, for Levinas, evil is understood through suffering: 'All evil relates back to suffering' (US92). No explanation can redeem the suffering of the other and thereby ~emove its evil while leaving the tyranny of a pain that overwhelms subjectivity. Suffering Reps BadRepresentations of suffering are essentializing and used as a commodity for market gain – reject their appeals Kleinman and Kleinman, 96 Dr. Arthur Kleinman is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University and Professor of Medical Anthropology in Global Health and Social Medicine and Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. Joan Kleinman is a Professor of Mathematics and Coordinator of Activating Learning in the Classroom (ALC), a faculty development initiative at Middlesex Community College. “The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times,” http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027351 Accessed 7/8/12 BJM Suffering is one of the existential grounds of human experi ence; it is a defining quality, a limiting experience in human conditions.1 It is also a master subject of our mediatized times. Images of victims of natural disasters, political conflict, forced migration, famine, substance abuse, the HIV pandemic, chronic illnesses of dozens of kinds, crime, domestic abuse, and the deep privations of destitution are everywhere. Video cameras take us into the intimate details of pain and misfortune. Images of suffering are appropriated to appeal emotionally and morally both to global audiences and to local populations. Indeed, those images have become an important part of the media. As "infotainment" on the nightly news, images of victims are com mercialized; they are taken up into processes of global marketing and business competition. The existential appeal of human experi ences, their potential to mobilize popular sentiment and collective action, and even their capability to witness or offer testimony are now available for gaining market share. Suffering, "though at a distance," as the French sociologist Luc Boltanski tellingly ex presses it, is routinely appropriated in American popular culture, which is a leading edge of global popular culture.2 This globalization of suffering is one of the more troubling signs of the cultural transformations of the current era: troubling because experience is being used as a commodity, and through this cultural represen tation of suffering, experience is being remade, thinned out, and distorted. It is important to avoid essentializing, naturalizing, or sentimen talizing suffering. There is no single way to suffer; there is no timeless or spaceless universal shape to suffering. There are com munities in which suffering is devalued and others in which it is endowed with the utmost significance. The meanings and modes of the experience of suffering have been shown by historians and anthropologists alike to be greatly diverse.3 Individuals do not suffer in the same way, any more than they live, talk about what is at stake, or respond to serious problems in the same ways. Pain is perceived and expressed differently, even in the same commu nity.4 Extreme forms of suffering?survival from the Nazi death camps or the Cambodian catastrophe?are not the same as the "ordinary" experiences of poverty and illness.5 We can speak of suffering as a social experience in at least two ways that are relevant to this essay: 1) Collective modes of expe rience shape individual perceptions and expressions. Those collec tive modes are visible patterns of how to undergo troubles, and they are taught and learned, sometimes openly, often indirectly. 2) Social interactions enter into an illness experience (for example, a family dealing with the dementia of a member with Alzheimer's disease or a close network grieving for a member with terminal cancer). As these examples suggest, relationships and interactions take part, sometimes a central part, in the experience of suffering.6 Both aspects of social experience?its collective mode and intersubjective processes?can be shown to be reshaped by the distinctive cultural meanings of time and place. Cultural represen tations, authorized by a moral community and its institutions, elaborate different modes of suffering. Yet, local differences?in gender, age group, class, ethnicity, and, of course, subjectivity?as well as the penetration of global processes into local worlds make this social influence partial and complex. Representations of suffering cause policy paralysis and justify colonial expansion Kleinman and Kleinman, 96 Dr. Arthur Kleinman is the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University and Professor of Medical Anthropology in Global Health and Social Medicine and Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School. Joan Kleinman is a Professor of Mathematics and Coordinator of Activating Learning in the Classroom (ALC), a faculty development initiative at Middlesex Community College. “The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times,” http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027351 Accessed 7/8/12 BJM This may seem too thoroughgoing a critique. Clearly, witnessing and mobilization can do good, but they work best when they take seriously the complexity of local situations and work through local institutions. Moral witnessing also must involve a sensitivity to other, unspoken moral and political assumptions. Watching and reading about suffering, especially suffering that exists some where else, has, as we have already noted, become a form of entertainment. Images of trauma are part of our political economy. Papers are sold, television programs gain audience share, careers are advanced, jobs are created, and prizes are awarded through the appropriation of images of suffering. Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer Prize, but his victory, substantial as it was, was won because of the misery (and probable death) of a nameless little girl. That more dubious side of the appropriation of human misery in the globalization of cultural processes is what must be addressed. One message that comes across from viewing suffering from a distance is that for all the havoc in Western society, we are some how better than this African society. We gain in moral status and some of our organizations gain financially and politically, while those whom we represent, or appropriate, remain where they are, moribund, surrounded by vultures. This "consumption" of suffer ing in an era of so-called "disordered capitalism" is not so very different from the late nineteenth-century view that the savage barbarism in pagan lands justified the valuing of our own civiliza tion at a higher level of development?a view that authorized colonial exploitation. Both are forms of cultural representation in which the moral, the commercial, and the political are deeply involved in each other. The point is that the image of the vulture and the child carries cultural entailments, including the brutal historical genealogy of colonialism as well as the dubious cultural baggage of the more recent programs of "modernization" and globalization (of markets and financing), that have too often wors ened human problems in sub-Saharan Africa.21 Another effect of the postmodern world's political and eco nomic appropriation of images of such serious forms of suffering at a distance is that it has desensitized the viewer. Viewers are overwhelmed by the sheer number of atrocities. There is too much to see, and there appears to be too much to do anything about. Thus, our epoch's dominating sense that complex problems can be neither understood nor fixed works with the massive globalization of images of suffering to produce moral fatigue, exhaustion of empathy, and political despair. The appeal of experience is when we see on television a wounded Haitian, surrounded by a threatening crowd, protesting accusa tions that he is a member of a murderous paramilitary organiza tion. The dismay of images is when we are shown that the man and the crowd are themselves surrounded by photographers, whose participation helps determine the direction the event will take.22 The appeal of experience and the dismay of images fuse together in Kevin Carter's photograph, and in the story of his suicide. The photograph is a professional transformation of social life, a politi cally relevant rhetoric, a constructed form that ironically natural izes experience. As Michael Shapiro puts it, .. .representation is the absence of presence, but because the real is never wholly present to us?how it is real for us is always mediated through some representational practice?we lose something when we think of representation as mimetic. What we lose, in general, is insight into the institutions and actions and episodes through which the real has been fashioned, a fashioning that has not been so much a matter of immediate acts of consciousness by persons in everyday life as it has been a historically developing kind of imposition, now largely institutionalized in the prevailing kinds of meanings deeply inscribed on things, persons, and structures.23 This cultural process of professional and political transformation is crucial to the way we come to appreciate human problems and to prepare policy responses. That appreciation and preparation far too often are part of the problem; they become iatrogenic. Media appropriations of pitiful events misconstrue the facts which precludes possibility of effective response – the alternative is to interrogate compassion fatigue in order to establish a true understanding of these events Lankford, 99 Ronald D. Jr. Lankford Ronald D. Lankford Jr. resides in southwest Virginia, where he reviews books for a local newspaper. His most recent piece of satire was published in the Door. “Compassion Fatigue: How The Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death – Review,” original work by Moeller, Dr. Susan Moeller is the director of the International Center for Media and the Public Agenda (ICMPA), an academic center that forms a bridge between the College of Journalism and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is Professor of Media and International Affairs in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and an affiliated faculty member at the School of Public Policy. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_4_59/ai_55100725/ Accessed 7/7/12 BJM In 1992 relief officials warned that a famine loomed in the Republic of the Sudan, but the American press showed little interest in covering it. There were many reasons to ignore the story. Sudan's civil war continued and an unfriendly government made access into the country difficult. There was little American interest in Sudan (Sudan had supported Iraq during the Gulf War), and the internal politics of Sudan made any resolution seem improbable. Besides, there was already a famine in nearby Somalia with easy access, great images, and, eventually, American troops. The press had its famine. International news stories vie for the public's attention: starving children in Ethiopia, epidemics in Zaire, assassinations in the Middle East, and genocide in Eastern Europe. The gaunt child or refugee may provoke pity, but the sheer number of crises and the violent imagery that accompanies them dull the senses. The pictures from the old famine begin to run together with the pictures from the new one. Soon, the public's eyes have glazed over. Compassion Fatigue is a critical assessment of the American press' failure to adequately cover international news. Susan D. Moeller conducts a comparative study of how the mainstream media (CNN and network news plus the major newsweeklies and dailies) cover disease, famine, death, and war: the four horsemen of the apocalypse. In each of the four sections she explores the dynamics of crisis coverage: why each story relies on certain formulas (length of time, stereotypical characters and situations), why each story must have an American connection (culturally, economically), and why each story must have provocative imagery and language. In March 1996, the press began to report on the possible connection between Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE or mad cow disease). With a novel disease, possible epidemic, and British connection, the press believed they had a story that would "surmount the compassion fatigue hurdle." They tried to bring an American element into the story by interviewing the wife and daughter of a Florida man who had died of CJD; they also reported when McDonald's restaurants in England discontinued the use of British beef. Still, no one was dying and the story fizzled out. Moeller writes: "It's probable that if CJD had been tied to the eating of Asian or African water buffaloes it would never have come to the public's attention at all." Clearly the possible connection of CJD to BSE needed to be explored, but the media's attempt to turn CJD into the next Ebola fell flat. On October 6, 1981, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated. The press began their coverage by questioning what the crisis meant for the United States. Would amenable relations with Egypt continue? Video footage of the assassination and surrounding events emphasized the violence. Instead of attempting to describe disaffected Muslim sects in Egypt, the press boiled everything down to terrorism. Moeller writes: "Acts of terror are lethal and there is a presumption of future risk. Political assassinations, as narrowly defined, while lethal, do not typically pose a continued risk." Sadat's assassination received heavy coverage, but the story lacked context. The press even downplayed negative aspects of Sadat's past. When coverage was discontinued after the funeral, the public was left with a simple story about a saintly man cut down by fundamentalist terrorists. Moeller offers several practical solutions for overcoming compassion fatigue. Instead of formula coverage, the media should take the time required to add depth to the context. Without foreknowledge of potential problems--as in the humanitarian mission to Somalia--no one is prepared when unexpected things happen. Moeller also warns against simplifying a story by using American connections. By comparing involvement in Yugoslavia to involvement in Vietnam, the situation is reduced to whether or not to get involved in a "quagmire." Finally, Moeller warns against graphic imagery and sensationalized news. Everyday crises like measles are important, too, and it is the media's job to make them interesting. Despite its lively writing, Compassion Fatigue is an exhausting book. The number of crises analyzed leaves the reader acutely aware of the human need that exists in the world around us. It also makes us aware of just how important it is to take the necessary steps to avoid compassion fatigue. The media must choose stories where human need--not sensational images or an American connection--is paramount. They must take the time to explain why these stories are important and why the public should care. Only then will the public begin to pay attention and properly address the human need. 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