Keywords

Introduction

How can we carve out space for the imagination—moral or otherwise—when we are so busy playing the games of neoliberalism? Lauren Weber has argued that we play the neoliberal game when we suggest that ‘studying literature’ can build empathy and empathic capability. English can’t teach empathy in a way that can be measured to the satisfaction of neoliberalism. Or, as Lauren said in conversation with me, ‘reading Anna Karenina can’t make you a good person’. My own research explores the way professional ethics and identity are constituted, so I find the implications of the literary imagination—and the ethical consequences of such a notion for the development of personal ethics—really fascinating.

Weber traces the lines of agreement and distinction between Martha Nussbaum and Megan Boler, before turning to the matter of neoliberalism and the classroom. How does empathy or critique work in that environment? I want to take that concept of empathy out of the classroom and consider the public pedagogy of neoliberalism: specifically, how it contends with and activates the idea of empathy and critique. These ideas are incompatible with the neoliberal project: as scholars such as Clarke (2012) and Durán Del Fierro (2022) have argued, neoliberalism seeks to standardise and depoliticise, technicising and removing the political from the social sphere. So how exactly does neoliberalism assimilate explicitly political notions?

To answer this question, I want to argue that neoliberalism posits an alternative ‘reading’ of the world. This neoliberal imagination appropriates ideas like empathy and social movements that seek to address injustice, turning them into commodified, thinned out shadows of themselves. This happens in the social sphere through processes of governmentality and suggestion, the prime conduit for which is consumerism. Advertising is the most visible and explicit way that neoliberalism enacts this public pedagogy, and I will discuss the way the appropriation of moral practices like protest can be seen in the ‘Live for Now’ Pepsi campaign. Finally, I make the argument that affective, empathic, and uncanny pedagogical practices—such as those advocated by Boler and Nussbaum—can create intellectual space for ‘thinking differently’ to the dominant neoliberal imaginary.

The Public Pedagogy of Neoliberalism: Don’t Be Political!

Boler and Nussbaum articulate competing, though not antagonistic, approaches to the social good. Nussbaum’s conception of empathy draws on the Aristotelian sense of pity, though she uses the word compassion to set aside the negative connotations implied by pity (Nussbaum, 1996). Nussbaum argues from a Rawlsian perspective that self-interest ultimately leads to a growing care for the other: ‘there but for the grace of God go I’, from which follows the idea that compassion is a necessary but insufficient condition for justice (Nussbaum, 1996). However, where she differs from Boler is in her belief that compassion—and the empathy involved in the literary imagination—can lead to a more expansive sense of social and moral justice. In Love’s Knowledge, Nussbaum (1990) posits that ‘practical reasoning unaccompanied by emotion is not sufficient for practical wisdom’ (p. 40). Emotions and imagination have a rationality that leavens pure reason—a truth of which Thomas Gradgrind, the utilitarian Superintendent in Dickens’ Hard Times, eventually becomes aware.

Nussbaum builds a case—by discussing the figure of Gradgrind—for forms of character and virtue that are sympathetic to others and that enrich life with meaning and substance. This character is counter to the instrumental logic of neoliberalism which ‘reaches into the social’ (Brown, 2005), seeking to reduce our social position to that of consumer and worker. This is too thin for the kind of virtuous character Nussbaum advocates: she supports a certain cosmopolitanism, an orientation towards wider humanity.

As Weber has noted, Boler (1997b) makes her case for testimonial reading by challenging the ‘passive empathy’ of Nussbaum in Poetic Justice (Nussbaum, 1995). Boler situates her critique at sites of injustice—like the holocaust—or in spaces where affective pedagogies might help students to position themselves in relation to these traumatic events. MacDonald and Kidman (2021) describe a similar strategy of ‘uncanny pedagogies’ that take place at sites of colonial violence. These uncanny moments create a felt, embodied experience of historical trauma. This kind of ‘reading’, like testimonial reading, calls attention to complicity and inspires a sense of action towards justice.

Boler (1997a) has expressed concern that the role of schools under the liberal model advocated by Nussbaum fails to ‘alter social inequities’ and instead seeks to ‘adapt the individuals to the existing system’ (p. 211). Testimonial reading is anchored in a view of the world that places less stock in the individual than does liberalism. The sense that an empathic faculty can lead to an active concern for the wellbeing of others is unconvincing to Boler. Rather than being ‘concerned with emotions as a site of social control’, Boler (1997a) argues that the disciplining of emotion is a technique deployed within capitalism to attenuate the gap between unfulfilled needs and desires the system produces in the self.

Neoliberalism is a project which operates smoothest when it appears apolitical. In part this strategy happens through a process of ‘depoliticisation’, where policies are put in place that seek to standardise and conform human processes for consistency’s sake. Durán Del Fierro (2022) has noted the way this operates in higher education, where principles of institutional diversity and autonomy are subtly circumscribed to keep conflict out of the equation:

the market needs to impose seemingly objective and neutral regulations in order to prevent political disagreements that might give rise to new normative principles and policy frameworks. (p. 3)

Standards and frameworks like these are familiar to many who work in education: Weber notes the way Systematised Education voraciously ‘eats up data’. Consumption is the default condition of neoliberalism, and it achieves this through its depoliticised, commoditised, and quantified logics: a Gradgrind of the socio-economic imagination. The ‘Gradgrind Mind’, argues Nussbaum (1995), is one bent on calculation and utility, and Hard Times opens with the philosophy of the Gradgrind school: ‘in this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’ (Dickens, 1961). Nussbaum (1995) suggests that the economist’s way of thinking cannot do justice to the ‘inner moral life’ of the human being (p. 24).

So, what does that inner moral life look like under neoliberalism? The formation of a virtuous character associated with Aristotelian empathy might be broadly compatible with neoliberalism if we forget the full sweep of Nussbaum’s work. The capabilities approach, for example, describes forms of human functioning the development of which, she argues, ought to be the ethical goal of a society (Nussbaum, 2011a, 2011b). These capabilities cannot be produced by individuals alone: they are a product of community. This renders them incompatible with the most extreme versions of neoliberalism which collapse rich identity positions into the singular role of consumer.

Nussbaum thus argues for a sophisticated and ethical mode of subjectivity which might resist the demands of neoliberalism. Boler’s argument for testimonial reading—extending empathy to ‘the limits of historical consciousness’—stems from the notion of collective responsibility for injustices of the past (Boler, 1997b). Testimonial reading produces a personal sense of the ‘unimaginability’ of trauma and a proactive duty to engage with and rectify injustice. But that alone is insufficient for the formation of character and a rich human identity. The two approaches complement each other: Aristotelian empathy serves as a moral foundation that extends virtuous character to concerns outside of the self, and testimonial reading situates that self within the specific contexts and histories that constitute sites of trauma, injustice, and inequality.

Nussbaum and Boler’s complementary approaches to reading and to the narrative imagination are shattered under neoliberalism: cosmopolitanism is replaced with the economic logic of globalisation; social justice is co-opted by brands as another expression of consumer identity. What neoliberalism cannot assimilate, despite its efforts, are ‘thick’ concepts like virtue and justice: doing so would undermine the pro-corporate assumptions that underpin neoliberal ideology. The gap between our desires and their fulfilment, the sense of injustice that emerges from our moral imagination, each produces perverse effects under neoliberalism. I want to turn now to one such effect.

Empathy and Politics Under Neoliberalism

Thomas Gradgrind would be a good neoliberal: he is a Malthusian character, existing a century before the rise of massified consumer culture which defined the twentieth century. His philosophy is utilitarian, oriented towards facts and economic productivity. I think this highlights a social tension that exists in education today and one that Nussbaum calls attention to in Cultivating Humanity (Nussbaum, 1997). The impulse towards utilitarianism occurs in a context where everything is counted—reduced to a telos of consumption or productivity. Neoliberalism doesn’t only demand productivity from us. Where capitalism collapses our social and productive identity into the position of worker, or ‘human capital’, neoliberalism emphasises social relations slightly differently: recognising the consumer first, with other forms of identity functioning as commodified subordinates. Neoliberalism is tolerant of a wide spectrum of liberal human rights positions because it co-opts them into this consumerist logic.

Consider the example of the Pepsi’s ‘Live for Now’ advertisement, featuring Kendall Jenner.Footnote 1 Released in 2017 and capitalising on the Black Lives Matter movement, the ad features a large group of protestors marching down a street with ambiguous signs pleading for others to ‘join the conversation’ (Victor, 2017). Kendall Jenner—a member of the famous-for-being-famous Kardashian family—is modelling nearby and feels compelled to join. She offers a Pepsi to the stern policemen surveilling this ‘protest’, leading to a Pepsi-fuelled street party.

The ad itself is profoundly banal, but it reveals much about the way neoliberalism understands social justice movements. There is no rage, not even a trace of anger, in the crowd that is mobilised on the street. When the police officer accepts the offer of a Pepsi from the fantastically wealthy Jenner, the crowd bursts out into cheers of joy and applause. In reality, Black Lives Matter protests in the United States were violently policed cries for racial justice—they were not joyous occasions. The neoliberal interpretation of these protests is that they express some desire to ‘be together’, to ‘join the conversation’, to submit to a hedonic social impulse. It misses the point entirely. The way Pepsi responded to the backlash is also instructive. In a public statement, the company explained:

Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly, we missed the mark and apologize. We did not intend to make light of any serious issue. We are pulling the content and halting any further rollout. (Victor, 2017)

This marketing guff is the kind of empathy that Boler (1997b) critiques: it is a call to recognise the ‘other’ but hollowed out of even the most basic empathic content. It is worse than performative. This kind of participation carries a similar risk to that of passive empathy which Boler (1997b) describes: ‘the annihilation of the text into an object of easy consumption’ (p. 266). This consumption safely depoliticises conflict, stripping it of its intensity and historical situatedness, rendering it neither ‘strange’ nor ‘uncanny’ (Boler, 1997b, p. 266). In a similar collapse of conflict and context, Boler and Zembylas (2003) describe a number of ‘reductive conceptions of difference’ that are expressed as part of American liberal individualism: the idea that ‘everyone is different so we should respect and honour everyone’s difference equally’, that ‘we are all the same underneath the skin, so let’s not pay so much attention to difference’, and that ‘some fears of difference are innate and therefore natural’ (pp. 109–110). The thinness of Pepsi’s ethical position is obvious in its call for a message of ‘unity, peace and understanding’—empty moral concepts with no substantial concept of justice. A counter to this moral emptiness are rich pedagogies that engage the emotions, which can be used to introduce politics back into our narrative imagination.

Pedagogies That Add the Human Back into Humanity

The tradition of pedagogy drawing on empathy and affect is rich and varied. Zembylas (2007, 2013, 2020), who has written with Boler, has discussed ways to incorporate affective practice and use emotions in the classroom—particularly when dealing with the political. In a recent paper, MacDonald and Kidman (2021) describe pedagogies of uncanniness, where sites of trauma can be used to educate through feelings of unease and tension. In the context of teaching students about the New Zealand Wars and violent episodes in that country’s colonial history, MacDonald and Kidman (2021) describe ‘uncanny pedagogies’: an affective practice that draws on embodied, emotional, and uncomfortable learning experiences to stimulate and inspire thinking around history:

A deep sense of respect emanates from the crowd. The objects give presence to the dead and the uncanny is quietly activated through a personal connection to historic figures. (MacDonald & Kidman, 2021, p. 6)

This is the kind of connection and historical situatedness which Boler (1997b) advocates as a consequence of testimonial reading. The trauma and excess of these experiences is precisely the point, since it ‘raises the question: what are the forces that brought about this crisis of truth?’ (Boler, 1997b, p. 264). That excess achieves an inner transformation—a sense of the unimaginable—which has powerful pedagogical implications:

The challenge for educators who work with uncanny pedagogies at sites of colonial violence is to sustain the embodied, intellectual and affective transformations outside the crypt, so that the disturbed feelings and the trouble that ghosts represent do not go away. (MacDonald & Kidman, 2021, p. 11)

The literary imagination, therefore, reveals the very limit of neoliberalism: an excessive social dimension—an ‘inner life’—that can resist the subjectifying neoliberal gaze.

I find it significant that Nussbaum’s humanism and reverence for empathy is grounded in an Aristotelian ethic. The cosmopolitan ideal—of an expansive circle of concern gifted through narrative imagination—is one way to build practical wisdom and personal virtue. Boler builds on these foundational capabilities to invite us not only to expand our moral imaginations, but to do so in a way that demands action which might correct injustice. Testimonial reading is a political act, it reintroduces critique and conflict to the narrative imagination. Nussbaum herself is attuned to the inadequacy of the literary imagination to which Boler and Weber refer. In Poetic Justice she explains:

People cannot learn everything they need to learn as citizens simply by reading works set in a distant place and time, no matter how universally applicable those insights may be. Reading Dickens shows us many things about compassion; it does not show us the very particular ways in which our society inhibits our compassion for people of different race, gender, or sexuality. (Nussbaum, 1995, p. 11)

Nussbaum refers to novel-reading as a ‘bridge’ to a vision of justice and the capacity to enact that vision, but not something sufficient for a notion of social justice. That bridge can be made sturdier through testimonial reading, uncanny pedagogies, and other such rich approaches that embody notions of restorative justice and normative moral deliberation.

However we choose to teach matters relating to social justice, we usually wind up taking a stand against the public pedagogy of neoliberalism. Such approaches challenge neoliberalism by re-embedding the political. They require that we weigh up questions of value, ethics, and sociality in a manner that is incompatible with neoliberal standardisation. In so doing we repoliticise, introducing ‘conflictivity’ in the way Durán Del Fierro (2022) suggests: ‘contestation, opposition, disagreement, division, debate, dispute and dissent’, and the ‘active critique and refusal of power relations derived from a given regime of truth’ (p. 9).

Even for higher education, facts are not all that there is: we should not be Gradgrinds. Weber argues that empathic reading requires time and cannot be reduced to a tick box under regimes of neoliberal accountability. There is also a significant political role that emotion can play in learning and research. Whether that emotion is foundational like empathy or complex and embodied like uncanniness, these forms of pedagogy lift our moral horizons, add texture to our inner worlds, and lend substance to a self that is embedded in the social world of others.