2AC berlant

Ignoring images of suffering degrades ethics and legitimizes

the worst violence
Sontag 3 [2003, Susan, Peace Prize Recipient, Human Rights Activist And
Internationally Renowned Author, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 114-116]
To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people
from that hell, how to moderate hell's flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to
acknowledge, to have enlarged, one's sense of how much suffering caused by
human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is
perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned
(even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of
inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not
reached moral or psychological adulthood. No one after a certain age has the
right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or
amnesia. There now exists a vast repository of images that make it harder
to maintain this kind of moral defectiveness. Let the atrocious images haunt
us. Even if they are only tokens , and cannot possibly encompass most of the
reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say:
This is what human beings are capable of doing-may volunteer to do,
enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don't forget . This is not quite the same as asking
people to remember a particularly monstrous bout of evil. ("Never forget.") Perhaps
too much value is assigned to memory, not enough to thinking. Remembering is
an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the
only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an
ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and
who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us-grandparents,
parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go
together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in
the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in
the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish)
embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be
faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one's own life,
then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more
general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one
another.
The alternative is silence and inaction which reinforces
oppression and turns the critique
Blomley 94 [1994, Nicholas K., Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser
University, Activism and the Academy, http://www.praxis-
epress.org/CGR/CG_Whole.pdf]
So why the silence? Several reasons spring to mind. One likely option is
that, for many, it is not an issue, given that many progressive academics
seem to think that activist work is not really intellectual work. If
people engage in external struggle, they do so on their own time, as citizens.
Certainly this is something that tenure committees seem to believe. For example,
my university carefully codes it as community service and weighs it as some
small percentage of my total academic worth. That uncoupling of the
categories academic and activist seems, for me, difficult to sustain. I
was struck by the view of one friend, who noted that she did not see herself as an
academic occasionally engaged in activism, but thought of herself as an activist
who happens to be an academic. It could also be said that such a distancing
evades a special charge what Noam Chomsky once termed the political
responsibility of intellectuals. Intellectuals in the academy enjoy a special
privilege that comes from political liberty, access to information, and freedom of
expression. For a privileged minority, Chomsky (1969, 324) insists, Western
democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the
truth behind the veil of misrepresentation, ideology and class interest
through which the events of current history are presented to us. To
neglect that responsibility is, at the very best, to acquiesce to oppression.
There are more recent reasons for this self-silencing, perhaps, as we come to
embrace a postmodern humility, and caution against speaking for the Other.
Although such a prudence is laudable, it can also all too easily become a
self-serving excuse for inaction. We certainly need to be alert to the perils of
the academic colonization of community life, but we should also avoid any romantic
assumptions of some authentically pure field of activism. The activists I have
encountered have all had complex, and occasionally self-serving, agendas. As we
all occupy multiple subject positions, so activism is a field of contradiction and
diversity.

our use of empathy in conjunction with broader critique

enables successful anti-racist movements even if it remains in
local spaces like debatestar this card
Chabot Davis 4 [12/05/2004, Kimberly Chabot Davis teaches twentieth-century
U.S. literature and film at Bridgewater State College. Used to teach 20th century
American literature and culture in the History and Literature Program at Harvard
University, Chabot Davis's articles on contemporary culture have been published in
Twentieth Century Literature, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal for the
Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, South Atlantic Review, Politics and Culture,
and Modern Fiction Studies, Oprah's Book Club and the politics of cross-racial
empathy, International Journal of Cultural Studies 2004 7: 399]
Lauren Berlant is right to be skeptical that a reading of a single novel could
be solely responsible for producing such radical changes in individuals.
However, sympathetic reading experiences can play an important role in a
larger chain of events , alongside other moments of critical thinking and
encounters with alternative viewpoints that might shift an individuals
perspective. As the white woman Audrey said in the program on Beloved, I
understand something now that I didnt understand before, and [the film] has made
me want to understand more (p. 13). Reading can clearly alter ones sense of
reality , as evidenced by a reader of Cane River who noted on the web-board: I
dont know if it is heightened awareness due to my reading the novel . . . but
it seems like there is so much more in the news about racism; just today I
read two articles. Reading fiction can help a person to develop an understanding of
the plight of others and a sense of moral outrage, often seen as important
precursors for action. In her ethnographic study of white womens reading groups,
sociologist Elizabeth Long argues that reading, especially when combined with
communal reflection and discussion, provides . . . in some cases, motivation
for taking individual or collective action beyond the world of books (Long,
2003: 24). Several whites in the on-line and televised discussions were
putting their anti-racist feelings to work in the public sphere , in their jobs
as teachers and social workers serving minority communities. Although it is unlikely
that fictionreading was the sole catalyst for their occupational choices, their
testimony suggests that experiences of empathy in cultural space help to
sustain and fortify their ongoing political commitments . While Berlant
doubts that emotional shifts in the private sphere ever get converted into
a larger politics of change, Lawrence Grossberg argues persuasively that
affective relations are, at least potentially, the condition of possibility for
the optimism, invigoration, and passion which are necessary for any
struggle to change the world (Grossberg, 1992: 86). While the experience of
sympathy may produce merely self-satisfied feelings of benevolence that
substitute for committed action, I contend that the larger impediment to
radical change is not sympathy itself, but conditions that weaken its
effectivity such as wide-spread public skepticism that protest can
actually accomplish social change in a world controlled by postmodern global
capitalism. Like Grossberg, I see affective culture as an underappreciated
resource in combating the disenchantment that threatens to nullify
political resistance in the United States. My work on the politics of empathetic
reading contributes to a recent shift in American studies, calling for an end to the
separate spheres paradigm that divided public from private, masculine from
feminine, the world of political action from the world of feeling. The essays in the
recent collection No More Separate Spheres! suggest that the line between the
public and the private is a blurry one, and that these two spheres are in fact
largely imbricated (Davidson and Hatcher, 2002). With a similar goal, I have
highlighted the political importance of empathetic reading in fostering
self-transformation and a radical interrogation of white privilege . In this
particular deployment of empathy, such moments of radical understanding
could be seen as an incipient form of political action, rather than its
antithesis. This form of self-transformation operates on a continuum with
largerscale political actions in both private and public settings . Instead
of equating the political only with the arena of elections, protest
movements, and collective organizing, scholars also need to consider the
importance of local, interpersonal encounters in effecting social change .
Experiencing empathy for African Americans in cultural space may move someone
to object to a racist joke among colleagues or friends, or to persuade an older
relative that mixed-race marriages can produce healthy and happy families. One of
the white participants in the televised discussion of The Bluest Eye adopted three
abused black girls and is passionately working to help them to develop self-esteem.
Is her anti-racist action any less political because it takes place within the
private sphere of the family? I argue that such local and personal examples
of taking a moral stand do work to undermine racism , and are probably
necessary stepping stones for individuals to move towards more public-
oriented anti-racist acts that require greater risk . The power of culture in
fostering personal self-transformation should not be undervalued .
Although many of Oprahs Book Club choices have been disparaged for their
rampant emotionalism, I have argued that their solicitation of sympathy is in
fact central to their cultural power. As Larry Grossberg contends, emotive
genres are politically powerful because they provoke identification,
belonging and investment, providing audiences with mattering maps
which reveal the places at which people can anchor themselves into the
world, the locations of the things that matter (1992: 82). At the end of the
Oprah discussion of her book Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison revealed her own
dream to offer such mattering maps to readers: Its the dream of a writer . . . to
have something important, truly meaningful, happen to a person whos ready for
the happening and the key to it is the experience of reading a book. . . . Its not a
lesson that said do this . . . and this is the solution, but to actually engage in the
emotions, the actions, and the company . . . of the characters (Howd They, 1996).
Oprahs Book Club selections do not provide solutions to social problems
concerning race and gender, but they do offer intense emotional
engagement that is an essential ingredient of political engagement.
Although sympathy has often worked to legitimate the status quo, my
analysis of Oprahs Book Club demonstrates that affective reading experiences
can also disrupt ideologies of racial hierarchy . Conspicuously absent from
most analyses of cross-racial sympathy are reading experiences such as I
have spotlighted here, in which white womens empathetic encounters
with African American fictional characters led to an increased politicization
and desire to combat racism in public forums such as The Oprah Winfrey
Show itself. For some white readers of African American fiction, these testimonies
of suffering offer merely a vicarious sensory experience that does little to alter
their own sense of privilege. These texts produce more radical reading effects
when empathetic connections are accompanied by critical reflection, when
thought and feeling combine to result in a critique of racism and a deeper
respect for cultural difference . While Oprahs utopian claims about the
power of individual texts to change the world may seem naively optimistic,
she is right about one thing reading literature and watching films do shape the
feelings and ideologies of individuals. This belief, after all, has been central to the
academic study of literature, and the motivation behind the move towards
multicultural literacy in education. In this academic climate of suspicion
toward a politics rooted in affect, critics need to consider that such cross-
racial empathetic identifications in the private sphere could play a crucial
role in galvanizing support for anti-racist public policy in America.

Recognizing non-normative trauma from other groups creates

solidarity between us and motivates political analysis and
action to ameliorate the conditions of possibility for that
suffering. Its neither a wounded attachment, nor a museum,
but rather a catalyst for social change
Craps 13 (Stef, English at Ghent University, Belgium, directs the Centre for
Literature and Trauma, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, 2013, p.
126-127)

Cogent though these various critiques are in their own terms, it seems to me that they unduly
homogenize and simplify different forms of interest in and inquiry into trauma.
While it is true, of course, that trauma research does not in and of itself lead
to political transformation, I would argue that a trauma theory revised along the lines I
have suggested is not destined to serve as the handmaiden of the status quo or
a mere academic alibi for the indulgence of voyeuristic inclinations. On the
contrary, it can help identify and understand situations of exploitation and
abuse, and act as an incentive for the kind of sustained and systemic critique
of societal conditions called for by Berlant and Brown. In fact, the expanded
model of trauma I have proposed, based on the work of Laura Brown, Frantz Fanon,
and others, bears a close resemblance to the model of suffering that Berlant
puts forward as an alternative to the (traditional) trauma model, which she finds
inadequate: "a model of suffering, whose etymological articulation of pain and
patience draws its subject less as an effect of an act of violence and more
as an effect of a general atmosphere of it, peppered by acts , to be sure, but
not contained by the presumption that trauma carries, that it is an effect
of a single scene of violence or toxic taxonomy" (338). Berlant's observation
that "the pain and suffering of subordinated subjects in everyday life is an
ordinary and ongoing thing that is underdescribed by the (traumatic)
identity form and its circulation in the state and the law" (344) is perfectly
in line with the argument I have presented in this book. That trauma research
can act as a catalyst for astute political analysis and meaningful activism
would seem to be borne out by the [END PAGE 126] development in Fanon's
writing, from Black Skin, White Masks, which describes the psychological impact of
racial and colonial oppression, to the overtly political The Wretched of the Earth,
which confronts the source of the mental strife he saw in the clinic.3 Since Douglas
Crimp's plea for "[m]ilitancy, of course, then, but mourning too: mourning and militancy" (18) in relation to the AIDS
an interest in issues of trauma,
movement back in 1989, several scholars have argued that
loss, and mourning is in fact compatible with a commitment to radical
activism. A desire to make visible the creative and political-rather than
pathological and negative-aspects of an attachment to loss is the thread
that binds together the essays gathered in David Eng and David Kazanjian's volume Loss: The
Politics of Mourning (2003), which seeks to "extend[] recent scholarship in trauma
studies by insisting that ruptures of experience, witnessing, history, and
truth are, indeed, a starting point for political activism and
transformation " (10). Eng and Kazanjian see their collection as moving "from trauma to prophecy, and
from epistemological structures of unknowability to the politics of mourning" (10). As one of the contributors, Ann
Cvetkovich, puts it, trauma can be "the provocation to create alternative
lifeworlds" ("Legacies of Trauma" 453) .4 Recognition of suffering serves as a
necessary first step towards the amelioration of that suffering. In Judith Butler's
words, "The recognition of shared precariousness introduces strong
normative commitments of equality and invites a more robust
universalizing of rights that seeks to address basic human needs for food,
shelter, and other conditions for persisting and flourishing " (28-29). Without
wishing to overstate its likely impact, I believe that rethinking trauma studies from a
postcolonial perspective and providing nuanced readings of a wide variety
of narratives of trauma and witnessing from around the world can help us
understand that shared precariousness. By fostering attunement to
previously unheard suffering and putting into global circulation memories
of a broad range of traumatic histories, an inclusive and culturally
sensitive trauma theory can assist in raising awareness of injustice both
past and present and opening up the possibility of a more just global
future -and, in so doing, remain faithful to the ethical foundations of the field.5