Narratives of Responsibility and Responsible Narration: Schiff’s Burdens of Political Responsibility
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Jade Larissa Schiff’s Burdens of Political Responsibility makes two valuable interventions in debates over the politics of responsibility.i First, in light of the late Iris Marion Young’s “social connections model,” in which agents are responsible not merely for their actions but for the suffering caused by unjust structures from which they receive benefits,ii Schiff raises the critical question: “How can we come to acknowledge and experience practically meaningful connections between our everyday activities and the suffering of other people” (28)? While praising Young’s articulation of a theoretical model of responsibility for complex structural injustices, including sweatshop labor, climate change, and armed conflict, Schiff contends that this theoretical model is insufficient. To act on their responsibilities, individuals must first acknowledge their own complicity in injustice, which in turn requires experiencing a connection to distant and often obscure suffering. With this orientation, Schiff seeks to better connect models of responsibility with an account of how individuals experience, or disavow, responsibility.
To this end, Schiff develops the concept of responsiveness, which she defines as “the acknowledgement and experience of connections between our everyday activities and the suffering of others.” Crucially this is “not only a cognitive capacity and undertaking” but also “an affective stance involving attunement to the suffering of others, and openness to acknowledging and experiencing the claims that such suffering might make upon me” (34). Drawing on William E. Connolly’s “ethos of critical responsiveness” (35), Schiff develops responsiveness into a necessary pre-requisite to taking responsibility (36). The narrative construction of the political world is crucial. “Through the stories we tell each other and ourselves about our condition, we build worlds (in more and less motivated ways) that make suffering more or less intelligible as an object of response” (39). As Judith Butler argues in her work on framing,iii which Schiff briefly takes up in the conclusion (192–193), the ability to acknowledge one’s relationship to suffering is enhanced or impeded by the ways that different stories frame and connect events, actions, structures, and people. When narrated as an everyday injustice, the oppressive conditions faced by garment workers can be dismissed as an unfortunate but necessary cost of a globalized economy (40–41). In contrast, narratives of crisis such as those accompanying 9–11 or Hurricane Katrina disrupt everyday life and “highlight the contingency of the everyday and call our ways of being into question” (42). For Schiff, the importance of narrative is demonstrated by the dismissal of some suffering as inevitable everyday injustices, compared to the demands for immediate response generated by the language of crisis.
Schiff’s second intervention consists in outlining three specific dispositions, linking each to underlying narratives, which impede the experience and acknowledgment of responsibility, especially in cases of complex structural injustices. In the three main chapters, Schiff details these dispositions—thoughtless, bad faith, and misrecognition— through compelling readings of Arendt, Sartre, and Bourdieu respectively. Each underscores the cognitive, affective, and political burdens that preclude the experience and acknowledgement of responsibility. These dispositions are presented as “effects of storytelling in which we constitute our condition differently by telling each other and ourselves different kinds of stories about it” (48–49). Therefore, overcoming these dispositions requires alternative narratives that challenge these dispositions and seek to draw closer affective and cognitive connections to suffering.
These dispositions often overlap and complement each other. Tracing the concept of evil in Arendt’s thought, Schiff shows how thoughtlessness inhibits responsiveness through unthinking ideological devotion (75) or routine unquestioned practices (77). While suffering is made bearable when narrated as an inevitable cost of doing business, other narratives “can also make them unbearable to us” by connecting suffering to everyday practices (82, original emphasis). Thus, stories are not unequivocally salutary, as some perpetuate thoughtlessness while others challenge it (83). Cultivating responsiveness, therefore, requires understanding both why individuals favor certain narratives and how habitual narratives can be disrupted. Sartrean bad faith explains why individuals cling...
