The subject of true feeling: pain, privacy and politics

Who gave anyone expertise over the meaning of feelings of injustice? I was sympathetic to the cultural politics of pain in the United States until I felt the violence of its sentimentality: presented as a collective refusal to bear any longer a population’s collective suffering, public sentimentality is too often a defensive response by people who identify with privilege, yet fear they will be exposed as immoral by their tacit sanction of a particular structural violence that benefits them. I was a wholly sympathetic participant in practices of subaltern testimony and complaint, until I saw that the stories of trauma that were deemed to exemplify a population’s subordination not only tended to confirm the state and its law as the core sites of personhood, but also provided opportunities to divide further dominated populations by inciting competitions over whose lives have been more excluded from the ‘happiness’ that is constitutionally promised by national life. Meanwhile, the recognition by the dominant culture of certain sites of publicized subaltern suffering is frequently (mis)taken as a big step toward the amelioration of that suffering. It is a baby step, if that. I suggest, in contrast, that the pain and suffering of subordinated subjects is an ordinary and ongoing thing that is underdescribed by the traumatic identity form and its circulation in the state and the law. If identity politics is a literacy program in the alphabet of that pain, then its subjects must also assume that the signs of subordination they feel also tell a story that they do not feel yet, or know, about how to construct the narrative to come.