LMAKprojects/Elga Wimmer
526 West 26th Street, #310
until october 8th.

If you’ve got $20,000 to spare, pick up one of the early ones, they’re classic.

It’s a conundrum whether to be specific or general, and in what ratio to deploy either as modes of communication. What makes no sense at all is to preternd they overlap, or that photography- with its ersatz physicality or pseudo presence- can perform the functions of- can mimic successfully- either words or experience. I’m far from alone in thinking that documentary as such is much of an illusion as objectivity in what’s now called ‘journalism’ What photography can do as an art is to give specificity a weight that words can not. But that comes at a cost.

PS Susan Sontag is famously an aesthete and a dilettante.
Friends witnessed her atrocious behavior in Sarajevo.
Don’t get me started on Annie Leibovitz.

Would you define “compassion.” This might aid the discussion.

Thanks,

I don’t think so. I began by noting that I agree with what I take to be the classic accounts of the dangers of compassion—including Arendt’s—while also wanting to raise the possibility that it may not be so easy to distinguish compassion from a hypothetical alternative like solidarity or even possibly from the apparent invocation of principle or argument. Put another way, I’m doubtful about what seems like Arendt’s allergic reaction to compassion and am suspicious (though admittedly I can’t defend the view without reading your whole essay) about the possibility that that allergic reaction may depend on an abstract and implausible alternative—which is my untutored sense of what the public realm is in Arendt. In this context, it seems to me that it matters that the concept of solidarity isn’t yet elaborated. If it can’t be constructed on the lines you prefer, I think the complaint against compassion can’t be as strong.

My view is close to Dan’s, who puts the case a lot more clearly and eloquently than I can. In response, you note that politics and ethics are distinct but overlapping realms. That seems right to me. But if they are genuinely overlapping than it may not be possible to define something ethically important like compassion as categorically non-political. Abolitionism was, for instance, a political movement which was in part inspired by and which also made political use of compassion. It could not have been successful without relying on the sense of justice, the principles of religion, the feeling of solidarity (in attractive and unattractive guise) and the instrumentalities of argument and other political techniques. But it seems to me just impossible to pull compassion out of the mix and say it’s the nonpolitical or irrelevant element in this compound.

You say, “if we want to think about the political uses of photography in terms of mobilizing political responses to mass suffering, aiming at a compassionate response is a mistake.” I don’t disagree entirely. I’d just add the problem seems to me more basic and lies in the idea of using photography to mobilize political response period. Its capacities will always be limited and the range of its possible uses will make for good and bad results. Similarly, when you say it may be harder than we think to move from ethical motivations to political principles or action, I’d say, yes but would doubt your phrasing slightly. It seems to me also and equally difficult to move from political principle to action. People act politically on reasons, but rarely on reasons alone. Photography and other forms of political rhetoric appeal to interest and emotion and that’s all prey to pathology.

I agree with abb1.

Sean, I already have conceded that I need to do more work on solidarity. I took a stab at that at the end of a 45 page paper on the interaction (baleful, in my view) between compassion and documentary photography that tries to look closely at both.

If I understand properly, you are trying to defend a view of compassion that runs contrary to the entire theoretical literature on the topic. And you are doing so without argument whatsoever. (You may think that I have not provided an argument either – here I’d say read the paper.) Why is Arendt wrong to see compassion as particularistic and subversve of our capacities to articulate political grievances? She seems persuasive on that point. Why is she mistaken to depict solidarity as a principle? It is not just me that makes that claim. And her claims there (as I pointed out earlier) converge quite surprisingly with theorists like Rorty & Nozick. The oddity of the line-up leads me to think there is somsething to be said there (even though I admit to not haveing said it very well yet!). How can we draw a distinction between compassion being irrelevant and inadequate in ways more persuassive than Nussbaum? She thinks compassion is crucial to the moral repertoire of citizens in liberal demcoracies but ends up (I think) showing that it is de-politicizing.

This leads me to Dan whose post seems to converge with my views in interesting ways. I have never said copassion is not an important ethical imperative/motivation. What I have tried to argue is that it is politically irrelevant (politics and ethics being overlapping but not identical domains). And I claim that if we want to think about the political uses of photography in terms of mobilizing political responses to mass suffering, aiming at a compassionate response is a mistake. It is self-defeating precisely because compassion works in something like the way you suggest – to narrow and concetrate our attention on the suffering of some specific individual at tthe expense of attendiong to broader concerns.

It may be an irony that compassion works like that in the sense that it means we cannot easilyy (or as easily as we might like to think) from ethical motivations to political principles or action. That irony is the basic point of the paper I wrote.

I think it is bad if leads to substituting political action with charity. If it doesn’t, then it’s not bad, just beside the point.

Without the capacity for compassion, it is impossible to assign values in any humanly intelligible way. Values are not perceived with the eyes alone, or intuited by some direct intellectual act, but rest on a foundation of feeling. Values can subsequently be perceived indirectly, and reasoned about, but they must in the first instance be felt.

Without normal experiences of compassion, our existence would be largely affectless, self-absorbed and morally blank. There would be nothing upon which to rest ascriptions of value; nor even a disposition to do so. There would be nothing to have politics about.

However, compassion is selective, and not alone sufficient for evaluative judgment. Roughly, can only experience compassion for one object at a time. During the time I am truly experiencing compassionate identification with x’s pain but not with y’s pain, I am likely to overestimate the negative value of x’s pain as compared to y’s pain. Only by combining broad experience with the capacity for reason do we correct for this deficiency. Over time, our estimates of the value or disvalue of a person’s experiences can be based on an occurently dispassionate assessment, based on our earlier experiences of compassionate identification with others having similar experiences. Our judgments of relative value become more consistent, comprehensive and reliable.

Arendt is right that an episode of compassionate identification can interfere temporarily with our more considered assessments of relative value. But without continued experiences of compassion from time to time, those considered judgments do not grow, improve and become more discerning. And they would probably degrade over time into hardhearted, distorted and overly simplified ideological reductions of reality.

That sounds a bit disingenuous, Jim. The conversation began with your claim that “compassion, as Hannah Arendt rightly notes, is de-politicizing and . . . it is a major mistake to identify the aim of documentary photography as eliciting compassion in viewers.” If it’s a major mistake, it must be bad.

It was the sweeping character of that statement and the proposal of solidarity as an alternative that motivated my objections. I haven’t yet read your paper so, you’re right, I can’t really argue against your claim that Nussbaum’s view of the unreliability of compassion is indefensible. Fair enough.

But other than simply asserting solidarity as an alternative, you also haven’t done much here to show what it is, why it’s a principle rather than an emotion, why it’s a necessary addition to other principles, and how it could plausibly be more of an aim for documentary than compassion or, for that matter, information.

My own sense of the nub of our disagreement is about whether it’s important or possible to draw bright line distinctions between what is and isn’t political.

It seems preposterous to think that people contribute to aid agencies and to poltiical parties for the same purpose or that they are animtated by the same conerns or motivations when (rarely enough) they do either. But perhaps that is the nub of our disagreement poltiical parties are about power and how to use or dislodge it. Aid agencies are about cleaning up the messes powerholders make.

I argue at length in the paper that Nussbaum trys and fails to sustain the distinction between compassion being “only” unreliable rather than wholly irrelevant. Other than reasserting the distinciton you simply have not persuaded me that it can be sustained. Sorry.

The whole point is that compassion tends not, by its nature, to generate political action. It sometimes motivates humanitarian gestures. But these, as I have suggested, are (i) not obviously political and also are (ii) highly susceptible disapppointments that transform compassion into pity,resentment, and despair. Again, There are plenty of examples of how this dynamic works incommentaties on politics and photgraphy.

As I think I said earlier, solidarity is not on my view an emotion. Instead I htink it is a principle. ANd principles – again this is a conceptual point – operate to generalize; they are tools we use to establish similarity relations between one (new) case and another (past) case. In that sense they direst attention away from individuals (where compassionate motivations are fixated) and toward broader pehnomena which demand political remedies. I have not (nor, to the best of my knowledge, has anyone else) offered more than a skecth of how solidarity works in the fine grain. But this broad way of differenitating it from compassion seems quite clear to me. And I think the difference I’ve just stated makes solidarity less susceptinle to the vicissitudes that surround compassion and other emotions. whether as you seem to suspect, it is surrounded by other
difficulties remains to be seen.

Having said that if Oxfam wanted to play politics for real it would have to worry not just about “safe” matters like international agreements (they are important but challenging them does not directly threaten any domestic power-holder). If we share even part of the Sen view of famines (since Oxfam is primarily concerned with food issues) the target ought to be the structures of entitlement within countries. I do not know for sure, but I suspect they do little or nothing there. And I suspect you’d already have disabused me if they did!

I personally think Bill was wrong about pretty much everything. I mean this in terms of his political views and his views on science. And I especiallyt think his views about the latter have had baleful consequences in the diiscipline. But that it a long story. I admired Bill to the extent that he never saw an intellectual argument he would turn away from with a dismissive shrug. I only wish the Rochester Department now had more of that attitude.