Enactivism and Inactivism. Media, Migrations, and the Rhetoric of Empathy
It is in the nature or media to provide mediation, that is, a paradoxical and oxymoronic experience that, simultaneously, grants access to inaccessible or distant worlds, and prevents us from its actual dangers; exposes to the thrill of strong emotions and protects from the physical injuries and psychical trauma that they would cause; allows us to meet and interact and yet keeps us at a distance, socially separate, as in the pandemic era we are facing right now.
With the advent of immersive digital media, this dynamic has become more evident. And in front of global crisis and issues, such as migration, media offer empathy as a way to fill the gap, a remedy to the lack of direct experience, allowing people to “share” such suffering. I would like to intervene on its general and generic meaning (putting oneself in the other’s shoes to understand him or her) as it is used to propel a certain rhetoric in contemporary cultural discourse.
The encounter between media, migrations and immersion allows us to reflect on the unsatisfying conceptual tools we use to frame empathy as a form of action.
360-degrees video, virtual and mixed reality productions show that immersive media “are increasingly used not only to entertain, but also to create social justice by encouraging understanding and compassion with sufferers” (Raessens 2019).
The idea behind the voluntary seek for such a pleasant displeasure is that we need to go through and find out on our own skin the distressful condition of the other to really understand what is like to be an immigrant attempting to cross the Mexico-US border (as in Carne y Arena), or a refugee in camp in Syria (as in Clouds over Sidra). Immersive VR, in particular, is able to involve bodily sensibility and to offer a strong sense of presence and first-hand experiencesthat provide a direct, immediate, pre-reflexive empathic comprehension.
These “empathy machines” – as Chris Milk labelled them – seem so powerful that NGOs and policy makers employ them in order to bring the issue of migration to the attention of public opinion. No doubt, the political impact of this trend is remarkable and more than ever before desirable. According to the enthusiastic perspective, the vivid impression to be present, in real time, in the midst of events enrich our affective sphere, expand our knowledge and positively influence our attitudes generating a kind of media agentivity that can be a valuable vector for prosocial behaviour and social change.
For Paul Frosh (2016), immersive media “enable an ‘ethics of kinaesthetics’ that converts sensorimotor responsiveness into moral responsibility” (351).
For neuroscientist Gal Raz (2019), “VR may induce multi-level unconscious psychological transformations, which may sustain after the experience is over” (1011). This lasting effect is achieved by means of an “unprecedented perceptual proximity” that “is qualitatively different from cinematic sympathy” (1005).
The point is that, such a non-mediation is in fact an illusion, the result of a powerful mediation, created by a transparent “technology [that] aspires to eliminate distance only to remind us of its own complicity in mediating a false proximity” (Chouliaraki 2006: 202). The real aim is the subjectification of the other’s condition: the other should be experienced first-hand, in the first person: I know what is like to be you or what it means to feel what you feel, because I am you, for a while at least.
According to Chantal Mouffe (2013), commentating on the “political” aspect of Iñarritu’s Carne y Arena, art’s great power lies “in the construction of new forms of subjectivity … to reach human beings at the affective level … in its capacity to make us see things in a different way, to make us perceive new possibilities … through the affects that it can reach the intellect” (96-97).
But while the legitimacy and ethical imperative of these operations is beyond question, we might debate the euphoric magniloquence of empathetic participation in the media experience. Scepticism is growing in academic and cultural discourse: immersive technologies give excessive emphasis on empathy and deliver a misleading substitution of reality; empathy can be a double-edged sword when used outside clearly fictional frames, such as in the case of documentary cinema or so-called immersive journalism.
If empathy is a way to deeply understand the condition of the other, paradoxically, when technologically mediated, it can also be the most obvious way to keep at a safe distance from tragedies that we would never want to experience first-hand. As Paul Bloom (2016) argues, empathy generates pleasure for its ability to make us feel involved with others, but it is far from a valid moral and decision-making guide. “VR doesn’t actually help you appreciate what it’s like to be a refugee … In fact, it can be dangerously misleading” (2017).
Co-presence or “co-witnessing” does not guarantee an empathetic response or a deeper understanding of traumatic events. Users are not fully aware of the need to maintain a “proper distance” (Nash 2018). “Insofar the user focuses on their experience of transportation as indicative of ‘what is like’ to be in the space of suffering it is possible to speak o “improper distance”.
VR works risk conflating deep attention and learning with “slacktivism” (Morozov 2011) – the practice of supporting a political or social cause through social media or online petitions, characterized as involving very little effort or commitment.
Or, worse, immersive media might give rise to “identity tourism” (Putting in the other’s shoes as a leisure activity) produced, marketed, and consumed by mostly white, able-bodied users (Nakamura 2020). Aren’t VR work also marketing gimmicks?
Following the work of Hanna Arendt, Luc Boltanski and others, Chouliaraki argues that “The spectacle of human pain […] may be manipulative for spectators. Unless accompanied by practical action or compassionate care, the spectators’ pity vis-à-vis distant sufferers may become part of a persuasive machine” (2006: 203).
This means that “VR alluring promise of transcendence and proximity risks a fetishization and further marginalization of the distant other (Duszak, 2002)” (Lueurs et al. 2020). Immersive media are thus empathy machines that provide pleasurable substitutions of awful and undesirable experiences, contrary to moral responsibility.
In this sense, immersive media paradoxically run the risk of not promoting a prosocial activism but rather a substantial inactivism: by recreating an alternative, spectacularized, gamified and psudo-masochistic pleasurable experience of the other’s suffering, VR mediated empathy provides a moral justification to avoid action. Technological mediated emotionality seems to respond to the need of a sort of “mimetic undesire” – paraphrasing René Girard –: we tend to empathize suffering people as a form of narcissistic orientation toward expression of solidarity, or to reduce our sense of guilt.
These discourses, by which new technologies operate under the paradigm of “hegemonic humanitarianism” (Irom, 2018), reveal that a “humanitarian impulse” (Rangan 2018) is at work: suffering humanity is not only the outcome of media representation, but also the fuel.
To prevent this inappropriate attitude, some scholars claim that we need to move away from media experiences designed to excite and induce visceral engagement and return to forms of contemplation and rational reflection, an objectification. In order to understand the other’s condition, I need not to overlap or identify with, but to stay at the proper distance.
In sum, while some claim that media actually bridge the gap between real and mediated experiences, other see this as an “utopia” (Irom 2018, 4269) or even a dangerous and amoral behaviour. On the one hand, the enthusiasm for the capability of immersive media to create proximity as a form of potential radical subjectification of the other; on the other, a sceptical position that avoid improper distance and requires a rationalistic objectification of suffering.
References
Irom, Bimbisar (2018). “Virtual reality and the Syrian refugee camps: Humanitarian communication and the politics of empathy.” International Journal of Communication, 12, 4269–4291.
Bloom, Paul (2016). Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. New York: Ecco.
Bloom, Paul (2017). “It’s Ridiculous to Use Virtual Reality to Empathize with Refugees.” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/virtual-reality-wont-make-you-more-empathetic/515511/.
Chouliaraki, L. (2013). The ironic spectator: Solidarity in the age of post-humanitarianism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Chouliaraki, Lilie. 2006. The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: Sage.
Duszak, A (2002). Us and Others: Social Identities across Languages, Discourses and Cultures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing.
Frosh, Paul (2016). “The Mouse, the Screen and the Holocaust Witness: Interface Aesthetics and Moral Response.” New Media & Society 20(1): 351-368. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816663480.
Gregory, Sam (2016). “Immersive Witnessing: From Empathy and Outrage to Action,” Witness. https://blog.witness.org/2016/08/immersive-witnessing-from-empathy-and-outrage-to-action/
Leurs, Koen (2020). “The politics and poetics of migrant narratives”. European Journal of Cultural Studies 23(5) 679-697.
Mouffe, Chantal . 2013. “Agonistic Politics and Artistic Practices.” In Agonistics. Thinking the World Politically, 85–105. London: Verso.
Nash, Kate (2018). “Virtual Reality Witness: Exploring the Ethics of Mediated Presence.” Studies in Documentary Film 12(2): 119-131. https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2017.1340796
Nakamura, Lisa (2020). “Feeling Good about Feeling Bad: Virtuous Virtual Reality and the Automation of Racial Empathy.” Journal of Visual Culture 19(1): 47-64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906259
Parikka Tuija, Intimacy and Rivalry: Becoming a “Self” in the Virtual Reality of Migration
Rangan, Pooja (2018). Immediations: The Humanitarian Impulse in Documentary. Durham, NC:Duke University Press.
Raessens, Joost (2019). Virtually Present, Physically Invisible: Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Mixed Reality Installation Carne y Arena. Television & New Media, 20(6), 634-648. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419857696
Raz, Gal (2019). “Virtual Reality as an Emerging Art Medium and Its Immersive Affordances.” In The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, edited by Noel Carroll et al., 995-1013. London: Springer International Publishing.
Ticktin, M. (2016). “Thinking beyond humanitarian borders.” Social Research: An International Quarterly, 83(2), 2155–2271.