Are we 'all in this together'?
Charles Bernstein, Susan Bee, Emmanuel Levinas, and Lucille Clifton
Last week I had the pleasure of spending the evening with poet Charles Bernstein and his wife the artist Susan Bee. Here I am with Bernstein:
And here is an image of one of Bee’s extraordinary paintings which I discuss later on in this post (“Face to Face,” 2013. 20 x 24”, oil and enamel on canvas):
I was delighted to have the opportunity to discuss an idea with Bernstein I heard him talk about online at the International Literature Festival of Berlin a few years back. In this micro-video, Bernstein addresses racism, nationalism, and the possibility of co-existence. His words support the importance of resisting the urge to relate, to know, to bring your own story to the stories of others:
We may be ‘all in this together’, depending on what that means. Whatever the common menace, our outcomes will never be the same. Deep below our difference is not interconnection but incommensurability. Human is not so much shared as contested. Empathy and solidarity are crucial investments but acknowledging our uncommonness alongside our commonness grounds struggles to resist hegemony of the universality.[1]
Interconnection does not necessarily lead to peace. The inverse may be more often true: focusing on our ‘commonness’, exclusively, may lead to hegemony and control. Bernstein embraces the unsentimental notion that we can never fully know each other.
It can be problematic when different groups try to compare suffering. It’s tempting to lean towards phrases such as ‘we are all in this together’ or ‘we are all human’ or ‘we all share so much in common’ or ‘all lives matter’. But these clichés hide difference. And forcing sameness can shut down understanding and responsibility.
For example, Jews might try to compare their own past and current suffering with the historical and present suffering of Blacks. There certainly seems to be a lot in common. However, as Rabbi Yosef Bechoffer discusses in this video, the differences between the two groups are profound and distinct. It can actually block empathy to force commonalities between the two groups. And in fact doing so can lead to racism and anti-semitism.
A more authentic empathy may be born out of knowing our ‘uncommonness’ and acknowledging ‘incommensruablity.’ For instance, Rabbi Bechoffer says, that although the Jewish people have slavery in their history and historical memory (ancient Egyptian enslavement of the Jewish people), ‘We have to understand that [Black slavery] was a unique experience which we did not undergo.’ He also emphasises some differences between the horrors in Jewish history (mass slaughter) and the horrors in Black history (de-humanisation). ‘We do not have a dehumanized history. The slavery in our history in Egypt was of a completely different kind. And we came to America as a choice. We did not come here shackled and chained and we were not treated like animals.’
Simone de Beuvoir also delineates difference in this way, resisting the ‘hegemony of universality’ when she writes in The Second Sex, for instance, that the world seems to want to dehumanise Blacks, obliterate Jews, and subordinate women.
Whether Rabbi Bechoffer or de Beuavoir are correct or not in the way they outline differences, the fact is, it may be more humanizing to highlight differences and to allow empathy to flow from that place.
The French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas articulated this idea of honouring the differences of others as opposed to commonalities. He developed a model he called the ‘face to face encounter’ which was his metaphor for encountering another person’s experience. He suggested that during an encounter with another person (specifically, their face), the ‘Self’ becomes immediately aware of the Other’s vulnerability and otherness. The ‘Other’ is subject to objectification when the ‘Self’ imposes their own stories or fantasies. However, the ‘Other’ contains an infinite well of feelings, experiences, and thoughts that the ‘Self’ will never fully understand, relate to, or know. Acknowledging this ‘otherness’ is the beginning of empathy.
Susan Bee’s painting (above) reminds me of Levinas’s ‘face to face encounter’, in fact it’s called ‘face to face’. In the painting two people are having a ‘face to face encounter’ as they stare at each other. They have many commonalities including facial features in profile, they are presumably white, and they are surrounded by swirling colors; yet the differences are clear: man and woman; colorful and gray; blue eyes and brown eyes. They seem to want to connect: their faces are so close but it is unclear if they are really looking at each other. The woman’s eye especially seems to be wandering. The painting calls into question our ability to understand each other, challenges assumptions about sameness and connection and that one human can really know another.
We see this outlook at work in poems by the late contemporary Black American poet, Lucille Clifton. In her poem ‘why some people be mad at me sometimes’, she writes:
The speaker is describing an experience where her narrative history is being taken over by a ‘they’ and more than that: ‘they’ insert their own stories into her history. Perhaps they believe their stories are the same as hers – maybe they feel that they are ‘all in this together’. The speaker revolts against this force and asserts that she has her own ‘memories’ or stories, not theirs. As she emphatically declares this message, she uses the lowercase ‘i’ which highlights the speaker’s humility and vulnerability. The poem suggests that its speaker is Black with its use of African American English (‘be mad at me’) that hints the memories may be, at least in part, the traumas of slavery and racialized oppression; but it is notable that this brief poem is completely abstract and includes no images or stories – the speaker has closed the door on stories for now. And the reader can only turn to her own ‘memories’ when confronted with the blank space after ‘mine’, standing alone in the poem’s last line.
An arrogant domination can accompany a denial of the abyss of unknowing. As Levinas argued, with too much understanding comes judgement. With acceptance of not knowing, can come responsibility and transcendence. An encounter with another person should forbid reduction to complete commonality. Know that you will never know. Perhaps this is the deepest empathy.
[1] Charles Bernstein, ‘the International Literature Festival Berlin asked me for a micro-video addressing racism, nationalism, and the possibility of co-existence’ (Facebook video, posted June 26, 2020) <https://www.facebook.com/charles.bernstein/videos/10156911929881330/> [accessed 7 October 2022].