Pity and a Politics of the Present

With diffidence one turns on the news or opens the newspaper. Is one ever really ready to receive visions and descriptions of the horrors of war, of massacre, of civil strife, when fellow human beings are in extremis? And once absorbing the images or the descriptions — what then? Typologies may help to buffer the effect. We sort out the guilty and the innocent. We may seek connections with particular groups of the oppressed — our ancestral homeland, our political or religious confreres, and so forth. But such typologies always leave a bad taste in the mouth. They may feel narrow and self-interested, and convenient. And even with their historical or political narratives of justice, they don’t tell us, exactly, what to do — now.

Originally published in 1993 in France as La Souffrance a Distance, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1999), by Luc Boltanski sets itself the daunting task of articulating the practically available and morally acceptable ways that distant spectators of suffering might respond to undifferentiated suffering. Boltanski, a French sociologist and the Director of the Ecole des Hautes Etude en Sciences Sociales, goes way beyond the necessary acknowledgement of the role of the mass media in transmitting images of suffering to and from around the globe. In a deeply learned and complex series of meditations, he articulates the many types of mediations that intervene between spectator and those who suffer.

Boltanski, along with other scholars and co-authors (Laurent Thevenot and Eve Chiapello among them) has come to prominence in French sociology with the development of a situated approach to social life in such works as De la Justification (1991) and Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme (2000) — an approach that differentiates itself from the critical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. As Peter Wagner writes:

Trying to synthesize its theoretical elements, it achieves what it does by combining an observation of situated actions, where situations are always in need of interpretation… with the analysis of the registers of justification and evaluation which are mobilized in the situation but transcends it, and the study of the elaboration of devices both material and cognitive, that are meant to stabilize situations and can potentially create widely extended and relatively durable social phenomena (this being the usual domain of macro-sociology).[1]

Distant Suffering builds on this project through its exploration of the forms and devices available for the modern actor/witness. This involves siting oneself in and communicating across a public sphere, a space precisely of mediations imposed by distance and the absence of pre-existing pathways connecting spectators to sufferers. Boltanski raises a series of questions about the possible relationships (all, importantly, of a temporary nature) between these protagonists. For example, what is the difference between pity and compassion? What is the relationship between justice and suffering? What is the relationship between pity and justice? What are morally acceptable responses to suffering apprised at a distance and how do the specific discursive and aesthetic genres that shape the responses relate to these moral imperatives? How can we gainsay our motives for viewing the “spectacle” of suffering?

Boltanski begins with Hannah Arendt’s differentiation of compassion and pity. Compassion is that stance directed towards particular individuals whose situation evokes a strong, caring impulse. Pity is a response to suffering heeded at a distance; in fact it “generalizes in order to deal with distance” (page 6). In its distanced acknowledgment and its generalizing capacity it is, precisely, political. With echoes of Benedict Anderson, Boltanski argues that the task of politics is to unify and overcome dispersion across time and space. The spectator’s structural impartiality in this system becomes both a strength and a weakness and Boltanski spends considerable analytical energy examining the tension this impartiality creates. However, before addressing this tension, we need acknowledge an important paradox that dogs the opposition between compassion and pity — in spite of the generalizing ethos of pity, pity itself is not inspired by generalities. An effective politics of pity must, then, find a way to effect a rapprochement between singularity and generalizability...