Other People’s Struggles

IMAGE CREDIT: STEVE IBBITSON, DARK CHANNEL (FUJIFILM EMULSION, 2016).

Emotions, we learn from recent social movement theory, bind social movements together.

In my research project Other People’s Struggles, I differentiate between constituents, whose participation is motivated by standing to benefit themselves if the movement achieves its goal; and adherents, who participate despite not being motivated as beneficiaries.

So one important question to consider is whether constituents and adherents are bound together by emotion, or whether their emotional registers differ. Here are a few ways – there are more in the longer version of this paper – in which they might be thought to differ.

1. Consider adherents and constituents in a movement concerned with expressive work. There are, let us suppose, constituents who share a well-established identity, grounded in certain common experiences, and adherents who do not. The constituents will tend to think in the indicative mode (‘I am, I will be, I was’). Adherents, in such a case, lack the relevant identity and experiences. They will, at most, be able to think in the potential mode (‘I can be, I may be, I might have been’).

The emotional registers of those thinking in the indicative mode will differ from those thinking in the potential mode. There are, for example, the differences between the emotions associated with suffering and those associated with the contemplation of suffering. To feel for someone as they suffer is not exactly the same as to share their feeling as they suffer. As Adam Smith argued in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, imaginative sympathy for suffering is briefer, more intermittent and less acute than suffering itself. ‘Mankind’, he wrote, ‘though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally animates the person principally concerned’.

2. The emotions experienced by adherents and constituents may vary not just in intensity or duration, but also in fundamental character. We can distinguish, for example, between indignation (a negative belief concerning the unjust subordination of others) and resentment (a negative belief concerning the unjust subordination of oneself or one’s own social group).

3. Social psychology has distinguished experimentally between moral outrage, triggered when one’s moral standard is violated; personal anger, felt when one’s own interests are thwarted; and empathic anger, felt when the interests of someone one cares for are thwarted. It seems likely that participants in social movements will experience a mixture of all these feelings, but we might expect that the feelings of constituents would contain a larger share of anger and resentment, and those of adherents a greater share of indignation and moral outrage.

4. There are also, among adherents thinking in the potential mode, important differences between someone who thinks in the potential present tense, ‘I can be a constituent (e.g. here and now)’, one who thinks in the potential future tense, ‘I may be a constituent (e.g. in the foreseeable future)’, and one who thinks in the potential past-perfect tense, ‘I might have been a constituent (e.g. had my life begun differently)’. In the first case, the adherent is very close to thinking and feeling as a constituent. The norm of reciprocity may be sufficient to motivate her to help and the consequent emotions may be those of sympathy and other strong forms of fellow-feeling. The adherent who thinks in the potential-future tense may also feel the same fears, anger and so on as the constituent, but diluted by the likelihood that she will experience the same state in the future. The adherent thinking in the potential past-perfect tense is likelier to experience pity, the more distant and distancing emotion in which ‘one holds oneself apart from the afflicted person and from their suffering, thinking of it as something that defines the person as fundamentally different from oneself’. Pity, unlike sympathy, is an emotion that can only be felt for those one regards as positionally, rather than just fortuitously, worse off. We feel sympathy for those whose experiences we think it possible or likely we might share, as they may do for us. Pity, though, is disjoint. We feel it for people whose shoes we do not expect to be in. It can even be accompanied by a peculiar sense of relief or pleasure that we are not in their shoes. The relevant norm for an adherent moved by pity is likely to be the disjoint norm of service.

5. Adherents may feel compassion but this also has its own difficulties. Hannah Arendt suggested that there can be ‘compassion’ between the sufferer and the sympathizer, in which the sympathizer is so affected by the plight of the sufferer that she experiences something very similar herself. Compassion, she proposes, is ‘to be stricken with the suffering of someone else as though it were contagious’. But such compassion is essentially private. Its ‘curious muteness or, at least, awkwardness with words’ is the sign of its authenticity. As soon as an attempt is made to speak of suffering in public, the voices necessarily diverge. Pity – ‘to be sorry without being touched in the flesh’ – expresses itself through a sort of ventriloquism, and thereby distances itself from inarticulate ‘co-feeling’ or compassion. The ‘eloquence’ of pity is the sign that it is not speaking for itself, and also grounds for suspicion, for such depersonalized pity is the language of assumed virtue, invoked by revolutionaries ever since the French Revolution to justify their actions.

6. If pity is eloquent but too distant, and compassion silences us, then we are left with empathy. This implies ‘being with’ the sufferer in her suffering, but not necessarily feeling the same thing. For Martha Nussbaum, it consists in an ‘imaginative reconstruction of the experience of the sufferer’, combined with a sense of distinctness, if not necessarily distance, from him. We can feel something for those whose sufferings we do not share because we have all experienced some suffering in life and probably expect to do so again. When we empathize we share common feelings with others, even if their suffering is much greater or of a different character. This may all reduce the gap between constituent and adherent, but a gap remains and there are perhaps dangers in trying to reduce it to nothing in the hope of conjointness. As we noted in the last chapter, at least some constituents are likely to feel that attempts to share what they feel is intrusive and disrespectful. It is to attempt to share what cannot be shared.

7. These differences of exposure to suffering mark one important distinction between the emotional registers of constituent and adherent. But there are other disjointnesses to consider too. For example, some emotions are prompted by people’s capacity to alter their own situation. Constituents may not just be typically angrier and more resentful. They may also experience ressentiment, the form of anger that emerges specifically from a position of powerlessness, sometimes compounded by the inability to express this anger. By contrast, adherents may not feel disempowered at all. Their strong sense of personal efficacy may be precisely what has drawn them to other people’s struggles. If so, they will not feel ressentiment, though they may feel indignation at the disempowerment of others.

8. Constituents may feel fear or uncertainty as they challenge the existing order; where adherents, placed more securely, often do not. More positively, constituents may be able to experience pride from what they do to achieve their own empowerment, through transcending their own subordination. Adherents may be proud of what they themselves do too: indeed, adherents may feel pride precisely from having adhered to other people’s struggles. But they cannot share this pride with the constituents; and for the achievements of the constituents, they cannot feel pride at all, but only admiration.

9. A further register of emotion concerns culpability. An actor who feels responsible for injustice may experience feelings of shame and guilt. Within this register, there are two dimensions to consider. The first is the degree to which personal culpability is felt for an injustice. If adherents and constituents agree that the injustice is the fault of a third party or a common enemy, they may share the same feelings about culpability. But if they disagree on the degree to which the adherents, or the groups to which they belong or with which they maintain links, are complicit in the injustice, differences of feeling may result. ‘Social conscience’ is the term usually used to describe the emotion of guilt-without-personal-culpability. It is felt when those with whom one is associated are believed culpable for a wrong. It is not unusual for constituents to feel it is insufficient, or that its relief is not their affair, or, simply that it is not an emotion they can share.

10. The second dimension of culpability concerns the identity of those who are entitled to judge. Shame is characteristically felt as a consequence of the contempt of others at the violation of a social norm, and guilt as a consequence of a violation of one’s own moral or quasi-moral norms. Shame is therefore often believed to be the more ‘social’ emotion, resting on others’ opinions and our internalization of them; and guilt the more ‘individual’ emotion, a product of the reflective self. An adherent who accepts that she is herself responsible for injustice to members of a subordinated group may therefore feel guilty about it as a breach of her own moral code. But her guilty emotions are prompted by her judgment of herself as having unjustly harmed them, rather than by any judgment of theirs. She will feel shame only if she experiences, and feels to be valid, the contempt of others.

11. Shame arguably has the greater potential to bond adherents and constituents, because it derives from communal judgments based on shared conceptions of what is shameworthy. As Bernard Williams observes, in a shame culture, people share a common conception of honour, and hence the same sentiments when the honour of any one of them is violated. Guilt can ‘direct one towards those who have been wronged or damaged, and demand reparation in the name, simply, of what has happened to them’. But only shame, because it ‘embodies conceptions of what one is and how one relates to others’, can ‘help one to understand one’s relationship to those happenings, or to rebuild the self that has done those things and the world in which that self has to live’. For shame to do so, however, requires the adherent to accept that others are not only right to condemn her, but also entitled to do so. The ‘other’ who shames me has to be someone, real or imaginary, whom I respect. The unchivalrous knight is made to feel shame by other knights, not unentitled peasants whom he doesn’t respect. If constituents are not included among those so respected, it seems quite possible that they will feel resentment or direct their anger at the adherent.

12. Sympathy, empathic anger and indignation, finally, are qualified by cognitive knowledge of the cause of the other’s suffering, thwarted interest, or subordination, and a judgment as to whether or not it is deserved. Full sympathy, Adam Smith suggests, arises only when we approve of the passions of the other person. We do not readily sympathize with someone whose suffering was deserved, even if we can fully imagine what the suffering is like. We have to judge whether the other person is an appropriate object of our sympathy. For someone who has brought their suffering on themselves, we can feel some emotion, such as a kind of cold pity, but not the same emotion as we feel when we do not believe this to be so. This judgment introduces a further asymmetry into the relationship between constituent and adherent. Judgment places the adherent at a critical distance, sufficient to judge the reasonableness of the constituent’s feelings, but not vice versa. In short, these asymmetric judgments introduce disjointness into the movement, not the conjointness needed for solidarity.

13. Why should it matter if constituents and adherents do not feel quite the same way? One reason is that emotions have also characteristic ‘action tendencies’. They are linked to specific urges or impulses to action, to end negative emotions and prolong positive ones. Differences of emotions may therefore not remain invisible but may be expressed outwardly. Sometimes these action tendencies can combine productively. The anger of the constituent and the indignation of the adherent, for example, may mix satisfactorily in retaliation against an offending third party. But other action tendencies may not be so easily combined, at least within a single organization. For example, the action tendency of shame is to seek forgiveness, but an adherent who demands this may be asking too much of constituents whose greater need is to express their anger. Constituents who experience fear may be reluctant to engage in confrontational actions that more securely placed adherents welcome. Sympathy and guilt will incline adherents to offer help, but the constituents’ desire to experience pride through self-reliance may incline them to refuse it. An adherent’s feeling of guilt is triggered by a breach of her moral code, which requires her to put things right with herself; whereas shame, triggered by a breach of a shared social norm, requires her to put things right interactively with other people. Adherents who act out of a sense of historical guilt are a case in point. It is one thing for them to take upon themselves voluntarily the obligation to make restitution, and quite another for them to be placed under such an obligation by a wider social code made in part by the victims of historical injustices. The former is a familiar, disjoint relationship, the latter a more conjoint social obligation.

IMAGE CREDIT: JOSEPH WRIGHT (‘WRIGHT OF DERBY’, 1734-97), AN EXPERIMENT ON A BIRD IN THE AIR PUMP (DETAIL) (OIL ON CANVAS, 1768) THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON.

Like other socialists, Wilde rejected the disjointness of charitable philanthropy as degrading both to giver and recipient. But he also rejected the claim, made by socialists and philanthropists alike, that it was proper to give oneself over to the service of others. To be expected to live for others was ‘sordid’ because it risked the loss of one’s own chosen opportunities for self-development. The aim of life was the flourishing of the individual personality, which might occur in any number of ways, because people were so different. The problem with other socialists was that they prescribed ways one ought to behave towards others. Wilde feared the authoritarian violence of such collective expectations, and the deadening effect of conformity. True socialism, he argued, would welcome ‘many and multiform natures’. Each individual nature would help others not by trying to make them like itself, but ‘as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is’. In this respect the artist was exemplary, in resisting others’ demands for conformity, and insisting on the priority of her own flourishing.

Furthermore, the life of the artist – and even more the critic as artist – was not one of certainty but of ambivalence. The true critic was ‘ever … curious of new sensations and fresh points of view’. ‘He will not consent’, Wilde wrote, ‘to be the slave of his own opinions’. But the critic also knew that the truth was never simple. In ‘recognizing no position as final’ and that important truths were always a matter of contradictions, he could embrace contrary possibilities without losing himself in doing so. Ambivalence was neither indecision, nor mere posing, nor a failure to think. It followed from the twin requirements that we hold no position to be final, and that it is individual flourishing that matters most, even – or especially – when we engage with others. We are led to ambivalence because we feel the force of other views, but cannot, indeed must not, live primarily for others.

Wilde did not disdain other people’s causes, therefore, but could only embrace them with ambivalence. His attitude can be contrasted with the other Victorian socialists I examine elsewhere in Other People’s Struggles and in other writing on socialist fellowship.. He liked Edward Carpenter’s work, but could not share his desire to live without privilege. Wilde’s idea of prefiguration was not to sink to the condition of the lowest, but to live the life of cultivated leisure and self-fulfilment that everyone would live under socialism. The aim was not to give up what one was, but to realize it fully. Nor could Wilde have approved of the Webbs’ functional disjointness. It reduced the individual to a function: to what was merely useful to the socialist cause. Nor again could he have been a ‘heartless’ or ‘unsocial’ socialist like Shaw or Bax. Although he shared Shaw’s love of inverting bien pensant morality, he could not share Shaw’s certainties. And, of course, Wilde famously observed that the trouble with socialism was that it took up too many evenings. His evenings were – unlike those of William Morris – too busy to be filled up with socialist activism.

Indeed, Wilde’s ambivalence obliquely exposed the reservations the other socialists harboured concerning the demands of solidarity. Among the poor, he wrote in the Soul of Man under Socialism, ‘there is not grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilization, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy in life’. Carpenter could not have written this, but it was, after all, quite close to what he had himself found in rural Derbyshire. These were the ambivalent feelings that had obliged him to reduce his circle to like-minded people. Morris could never have said that socialism made too many demands on the wealthy. But he privately felt it, and, as we saw in chapter 8, smothered it in vigorous activity and forced good fellowship. The Webbs too led split lives, confining their despair about achieving socialism through the workers to the privacy of the diary. But here Beatrice admitted what Oscar said openly: what on earth was the use of the lower orders if they could not set a better example to their social superiors? To a scientific Marxist like Bax, Wilde’s love of paradox amounted to ‘mere bizarrerie’ and the ‘decadence’ of a dying class ‘run mad’. For Wilde, however, the scientific propagandists’ insistence that the truth was simple if only people would listen – all their earnestness, logic, and ‘taking sides’ – was unpersuasive. It could never charm people as socialism might if only it ceased to insist on its own certainties.

Among the socialists of the 1880s, Shaw came closest to Wilde in pointing out other people’s contradictions to themselves and the world. But with regard to his own views, Shaw did not express much doubt. He blithely shrugged off ambivalence in favour of brazen certainty. In his plays the didacticism is never far below the surface, even when it is not pushed directly at the audience. For Wilde, suppressing or denying ambivalence never worked. Instead, he expressed it in his life, and also on the stage, the strongest literary form for ambivalence, as it is refracted into characters and the whirling staged conflicts between them. His writings are full of split identities and double lives, secrets and unmaskings, ghosts and hauntings. People who concealed what they were lived only half a life. If they declared themselves, they risked losing their whole lives. Only in a refusal to choose could they flourish.

In his own lifetime, Wilde’s approach to these questions was largely ignored by his fellow socialists. Indeed, I do not think he can be offered as a fine example now. Fine examples, too, belong to the past. A man notorious for his distrust of action must in any case be a perverse example for a social movement. But this is precisely my reason for introducing it at this stage of the argument. Perversity is what social movements – especially when they are doctrinaire, focused, closed – may need to consider again. Wilde might give us something to think about, especially if, as I have argued, no contemporary position can fully satisfy us. He offers another way to approach the problem we are left with: what should be done with the adherent self? What can be done by the adherent self?

One answer, which I also explore in Other People’s Struggles – is that of becoming-. This, however, is not Wilde’s answer. True, he described the life of the critic as artist as one of ‘becoming’, rather than ‘doing’ and ‘being’. But he meant it without the hyphen. Wilde would have hated the idea that the self should become nothing other than the flow of otherness. Such a self could only be ‘living for others’ and not for itself. Learning the critical spirit, he argues, may help us to see through the ‘mists of familiarity’, to ‘leave the age in which we were born’ and ‘escape from our experience’. But it is still we who see. Wilde wanted not the proliferation of difference (becoming other than we are), but flourishing (becoming what we might be).

The answer Wilde gives is not ‘becoming-’ but the exemplification of ambivalence. Becoming other than we are requires and affords the dissolution of all ties. This is how becoming- makes it thinkable to dissolve disjointness. But the kind of flourishing of the personality Wilde advocated – in which we become what we might be through the cultivation of a self ‘to whom no form of thought is alien’ – leads not to dissolution, but to a lived ambivalence: the refusal to confine our choices to the menu with which we are presented. Wilde rejected the Victorian aspiration to realise one’s essential character. The self was a matter of personality, not character. It was more contrived, and more performed. Rather than making sincere commitments, we should be insincere, as a means to ‘multiply our personalities’. A self formed by others’ rules must always suppress something else it feels. One which cultivates itself will admit its contradictions. It will, Wilde wrote, be a self of ‘strange temperaments and subtle susceptibilities, gifts of wild ardours and chill moods of indifference, complex multiform gifts of thoughts that are at variance with each other, and passions that war against themselves’.

Does this not sound familiar? To describe unacknowledged disjointness as ‘sordid’ is no longer shocking, as it was when Wilde challenged right-minded Victorian thinking, but a commonplace. The disjointnesses of the past have been mined from below and have crumbled from above. Yet conjointness still proves elusive. At the intersections of separate struggles, the adherent can be (must be) respectful and civil, but there are things he must not say, and the atmosphere is chilly. Perhaps something can be done about that. Perhaps by dissolving her self in common effort, the adherent can achieve a deeper conjointness. Maybe she can open up, or play with the adherent identity, performing or claiming new solidarities with others. But in an era of such self-consciousness, in which even to address disjointness is to act disjointly, it is hard to be sure how to do so.

We live, after all, in an era where – to persist with the theatrical metaphor – one set of concerns puts the self back in the limelight, at the centre of things; while another insists that the adherent self must quit the stage. Adherents now are made special not by their concern for others, but by their desire not to be special. Even as the adherent seeks a way to belong to causes that are no longer her own, or never were, some part of her self hangs back, unsure whether to stay or go, resisting dissolution, resisting commitment, remaining ambivalent. But as Wilde suggests, ambivalence need not be weak or paralyzing or shameful. It is, after all, not indecision or laziness, but an attempt to make the sort of commitment to others that follows from a refusal to be constrained by anyone else’s expectations.

IMAGE CREDITS: AUBREY BEARDSLEY (1872-98), A COMEDY OF SIGHS THEATRICAL POSTER (DETAIL) (LITHOGRAPH AND LETTERPRESS, 1894) / FROM A PHOTOGRAPH OF OSCAR WILDE BY NAPOLEON SARONY (NEW YORK, 1882) / AUBREY BEARDSLEY, AVE ATQUE VALE (CATULLUS) ILLUSTRATION FROM THE SAVOY NO.7 (NOVEMBER 1896) / AUBREY BEARDSLEY, ILLUSTRATION FROM THE YELLOW BOOK, NO 5 (1895).