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The “Social” in the Social Turn: Empathy, Bias, and Participatory Art

The “Social” in the Social Turn: Empathy, Bias, and Participatory Art JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 2022, VOL. 9, NO. 1, 65–81 https://doi.org/10.1080/20539320.2022.2146874 The “Social” in the Social Turn: Empathy, Bias, and Participatory Art Harry Drummond Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK ABSTRACT KEYWORDS empathy; participatory art; Aesthetics and social cognition are two disciplines rarely merged, social cognition; politics; despite the penetration of artworks into social, moral, and political interaction; concerns. In particular, participatory artworks involve direct social phenomenological proposal interaction and perception, and are more often than not motivated by, and aim towards, ethico-political ends. In the following, I fuse considerations aesthetic with considerations intersubjective, arguing that participatory artworks engage and exploit empathy’s biased char- acter towards a recalibration of our social relationships, namely inclu- sion and exclusion. Although critics of empathy suggest that its biased, manipulable, and narrow characteristics are detrimental to its moral promise, I argue that participatory artworks are successful intervention methods just insofar as they use these characteristics for their ethico- political gain. This is stimulated by their facilitation of affective, primary intersubjectivity, something I argue is unique to participatory art. After detailing these operations, I suggest that works that seek to address exclusion, rather than those that facilitate inclusion, have a greater potency in addressing and recalibrating empathy, in part owing to their provocation of empathy-related emotions and forms of fellow- feeling such as shame and compassion. Introduction To assess the potential for, and efficacy of, art’s involvement with the ethical and political is essentially to gauge art’s penetration of the domain of interpersonal relations. It is therefore surprising that little, if any, literature in philosophical aesthetics has attempted to fuse considerations of politically and ethically charged art with contemporary research in social cognition. Recent research of the latter has shown that, for better or worse, empathy plays a significant role in our moral and political lives. As the basis of both exclusion and inclusion, it has an “ambivalent status”, or is a “double-edged sword”. If our moral and sociopolitical exclusions are based on our empathic preferences and extension of recognition to others, and art has some efficacy in ethico-political develop- ment, then there is a prima facie case to make that art exploits, expands, or retrains empathy. In the following, I make the claim that not only are participatory artworks effective through their reworking and recalibrating our empathic preferences by using the biased character of empathy, but also that they stand in a unique position amongst the arts owing to their utilisation of affective, bodily (primary) empathy. CONTACT Harry Drummond harry.drummond@liverpool.ac.uk © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 66 H. DRUMMOND As this paper is primarily targeted at aestheticians and philosophers of art, I commence in section one by drawing out some lessons from social cognition, focussing on the nature of empathy and its relation to inclusion, exclusion, and morality. Critics of empathy’s role in morality voice concerns about its bias, manipulability, and narrowness, suggesting that empathy should not ground our moral lives. In tandem with others, I suggest that empathy should be retrained rather than fully discounted, owing to its still being a significant mechanism for inclusion. In section two, after clarifying what I take participatory art to be – delimiting the notion’s stronger and weaker uses – I argue that participatory artworks draw upon the biases of empathy, such as proximity, common ground, and salience, to retrain and redistribute our empathy. In alignment with the multi-level, phenomenological proposal of empathy I adopt in section one, I then show primary, secondary, and re-iterated modes of empathy are engaged and facilitated by participatory artworks. Finally, in section three, I address the distinction between exclu- sion and inclusion focussed works. As works that take exclusion as a critical focus, rather than inclusion as a pragmatic goal, can provoke empathy-related emotions and forms of fellow-feeling such as compassion, sympathy, and shame, I suggest that they are more efficacious in recalibrating our empathic preferences. That is, although primary empathy represents a unique point of departure for participatory art from other artistic practices, retraining cannot be done by interaction alone. 1. Lessons from Social Cognition It is platitudinous that empathy is a contested concept, but generally it can be cast as our primary mode of social cognition: our understanding of the behaviour and mental goings-on of others. I endorse here a multi-level, phenomenological proposal about empathy following the likes of Gallagher and Zahavi, inspired by twentieth-century instigations of the immediate affectivity of intercorporeal (embodied) engagement. Our dominant mode of empathy and interpersonal understanding is itself an affective experience, intentionally directed towards the other’s experience, primarily engaged by second-person, sensorimotor, dynamical interactions where unobservable, inaccessi- ble mentality is expressed through observable, accessible, and expressive behaviour. From the outset, then, direct sensorimotor engagement, direct social perception, with others is laced with “relational affect similar to the feeling of solidarity”, having an inherent affective component in itself that stimulates a “feeling-with-another”, without precluding additional affective states like grief or elation. Importantly, commitment to the phenomenological proposal does not require a total abandonment of modes of empathy and social cognition endorsed by third-person approaches, such as perspective-taking or simulation. Instead, the phenomenological proposal can allow for a variety of empathic mechanisms ranging from the dominant sensorimotor-affective interaction, to specialised cognitive and reflective endeavours such as perspective-taking: empathy involves all manner of processes, but “it is not reducible to any one”. It is the multi-level phenomenological approach that allows us to incorpo- rate this variety of intersubjective resources available to us. A clear picture of this is painted by Fuchs’ approach to levels of empathy, which aligns neatly with Gallagher and Zahavi’s interactionist and phenomenological theories. These are primary (sensorimo- tor), secondary (cognitive, reflective), and re-iterated (self-referential). Primary empathy JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 67 refers to sensorimotor interactive engagement with others developing from early infancy, already laced and “soaked” with affect and emotion. We undertake action and reaction (interaction) loops with others, generating understanding and meaning with and through others in dyadic relations. Subsequently, when we develop reflective and cognitive capacities that allow us to form triadic relations between self, other, and environment, and reflect upon what it is like for others, we enter the stages of secondary, cognitive empathy. Although primary empathy is neither a prerequisite nor necessary for secondary empathy, it can serve to amplify and enhance secondary empathic understanding. As I will go on to show, I think this compounding effect gives participatory art a powerful, and unique, edge. In addition, this primary mode of intersubjectivity does not cease upon the development of secondary intersubjective capacities, instead serving to facilitate social cognition throughout our lives. As the phenomenological proposal endorses, it is instead the case that primary intersubjective engagement remains our dominant mode of social cognition. Fuchs then develops a further level of empathy as self-referential, self-judgement. Termed re-iterated empathy, this understanding is generated by the perception of oneself as the subject of otherness, that is, as empathically understood by the other. Sartre’s analysis of shame, and subsequent literature on the state, is useful here. We are only ashamed of ourselves insofar as we realise that we are the subject of otherness, of empathic understanding, for the other; an intentional content of ourselves vicariously. It is a “self-recognition [. . .] presented from a point of view that is not my own”, and as such can facilitate a scrutiny of one’s relations with others, as a “wake-up call”, including our reasoning for empathising with some but not all others. This level, then, is important for empathic recalibration. When we come to understand and recognise others, where this recognition refers to an encountering and treatment of the other as an autonomous, self-conscious, ‘worthy’ subject, we begin to establish divisions: groups of exclusion and inclusion. This affects with whom we empathise both categorically and by degree, alongside the ease and readiness with which we empathise. Recognition of the other is an achievement rather than something bestowed upon all others universally, naturally, and immediately. When others stand in a relationship of recognition based on similarities and the sharing of values, commitments, and beliefs, they form in-groups. However, where this empathic recognition fails to be extended to others based on dissimilarities and diverging commit- ments and values, out-groups are formed. As the other in these latter cases is deemed alien, political demerits ranging from hidden prejudicial and discriminatory attitudes to unjust and abhorrent action, arise. Fuchs, for example, views in- and out- group inclu- sion and exclusion as the source of atrocities such as genocide. Hence, empathy is a “double-edged sword”, its ambivalent status rendering it the process through which we both include and exclude others. It is this ambivalent status that invites not only Bloom’s and Prinz’s rejection of the necessity of empathy for morality, but also their claim that empathy can be harmful for our moral lives. This is surprising given that our intuitions would have us think that empathy is directly related to moral attitudes and prosocial behaviour. The core of their scepticism tracks empathy’s being biased, easily manipulated, and extended to indivi- duals rather than groups (narrowness). Prinz identifies numerous modes of bias. Arbitrary bias can generate the permissibility of what otherwise would be considered 68 H. DRUMMOND immoral, for example, when lauding one’s favourite boxer for clobbering their opponent. Proximity bias shows we are likely to extend empathy to geographically and culturally proximate others and, inversely, less likely to extend empathy to those of cultural and geographical distance. Salience bias causes those events that are salient to us to be more likely to gather our empathic response than events that dissipate in salience. Consider, for example, the level of empathy extended to victims of a newsworthy terrorist attack over AIDS, hunger, and poverty crises that have had their salience dispersed throughout a temporally extended period. And, of course, immediately empathy suffers from in-group bias; those we consider to be included in groups of shared commitments, values, looks, beliefs, and so on, will more immediately receive our empathic recognition than those in out-groups who have dissimilar looks, beliefs, values, and commitments. That these biases are so easily alterable augments Prinz’s case for arguing we would be foolish to base our moral lives on empathic preferences and their training. This is compounded by empathy’s narrow character; it is something we extend to individuals not groups. I interact with you, take your perspective, feel your gaze as the instigator of shame, rather than every philosopher around the world. Training the racist or sexist to empathise with one member of the race or sex is great, but it won’t cause the discrimi- nator to retrain and subsequently extend their attitudes towards all members of those groups. As such, in ethico-political spheres, generating empathic understanding on an individual level is insufficient for the extension of empathy to the broader group. If empathy is not necessary for, and indeed can be detrimental to, moral and political inclusion, then surely any examination of participatory art’s effect(s) on empathy is unwarranted. If empathy can’t help us, then nor can manipulating or recalibrating empathy therein through participatory art. However, the claim Prinz and Bloom defend is this: empathy has certain negative characteristics, and so we should not use it as the basis for moral understanding or a system of morality. This does not discount that generating inclusion through empathy without, or through exploiting, these ‘negative’ characteristics constructs the inverse: empathy is good for morality. We should not endorse the claim that empathy is bad for morality tout court, but instead that empathy has some characteristics in virtue of which it can be bad for morality. If we can overcome, or indeed use, these characteristics for recalibration then empathy can be utilized for effective ethico-political gain. Indeed, much of the literature responding to Bloom and Prinz’s scepticism tends to focus on this claim that empathy is beneficial, despite some negative characteristics. According to such discussion, we should focus on retraining or overcoming these negative aspects. Persson and Savulescu, for example, argue that making voluntary adjustments to our biases and expanding empathy through reasoning away unjustifiable grounds for exclusion can retrain our empathy. Morris likewise suggests that we shouldn’t suppress empathy on the grounds of bias and manipulability, but retrain and expand empathy, drawing on recent empirical work showing its being a precursor to prosocial behaviour. In fact, Morris goes as far as to conclude that “it would not be unreasonable to think that empathy may be humanity’s best hope for overcoming the various social and political challenges that we face”; a conclusion of direct contradistinc- tion to Bloom and Prinz. Passos-Ferreira takes this prosocial effect to conclude that empathy can help transcend our individuocentric view of the world and generate moral JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 69 understanding, once again turning to empirical verification via social psychology such as Valentino, Sirin, and Villalobos’ study on empathy levels amongst different groups. I concur with these authors. That empathy can promote prosocial attitudes and behaviour is intuitively plausible and indeed convincing. Although empathy might be a “double-edged sword”, recalibrating and exploring it may serve to blunt the second, coarser edge of the blade. If we can retrain and expand empathy by way of manipulating, exploiting, or using its biased character, then the road to prosperous advancement within sociopolitical spheres looks of smoother paving. Rather than eradicating empathy, we should look to intervention mechanisms that use these characteristics for positive gain. One of which, I suggest, is participatory art. 2. Participatory Power Participatory artistic practices emerged with significance in early twentieth-century avant-garde movements such as Constructivism, Dada, and Futurism, meshed with Happenings and Situations that took on a variety of delineating characteristics across the globe. These caused an explosion of artistic methodologies that sought to dismantle art-life and artist-audience dichotomies, encouraging and necessitating participation from non-art agents. In particular, these works sought explicitly political ends. Constructivist theatre, for example, pursued an egalitarianism in its productions that would then seep into wider society, whilst Futurism incited revolutionary attitudes in participants that would leak into real-life revolution, thus in both cases overturning bourgeois dominance and bringing about ‘utopia’. Whereas their initial instantiations maintained semblances of traditional artistic form, despite perhaps lacking artistic quality due to omni-participation, more recent participatory practices such as relational aesthetics, socially engaged art, and relational antagonism, diverge radically from tradi- tional artistic values. These works, prominent since the 1990s, are a new phase of artistic practice that take interpersonal relations as the very form of the work. Denoted by Bishop as maintaining and accentuating the social turn, they withdraw from aesthetic-artistic tradition and aim towards micro-utopias formed through immediate “angelic programme[s]” of participation. Participatory art can be loosely classified as sets of actions or tasks to be performed by some person/s who is/are not professional art performers. These non-art performers can be the audience, a prescribed set of persons, or both. Resultantly, the literature (such as Bishop) absorbs works with and without audience participation into one category participatory art. As participation takes on these different forms, I think it is useful to propose a spectrum of participatory art, delimiting its stronger and thinner uses. Strong participation refers to works wherein audience participation or intervention is an essen- tial, constitutive component for the work’s realisation. Medium participation refers to works wherein there is at least a potential – perhaps prescribed, as in Abramovic’s The Artist is Present (2010) – for audience participation or intervention. Weak participation refers to those works for which the audience’s participation is neither necessary nor potential. These latter works maintain the ‘participatory’ label as typically non-art participants – as opposed to professionals, as in the performing arts – are used as performers, such as Sierra’s numerous tattooing works. 70 H. DRUMMOND As I focus here on the unique nature of participatory art’s relation to the multi-level phenomenological approach to empathy and I take the target of empathic recalibration to be the audiences of the works, I will focus on works that are participatory in mostly a strong sense, but also find works of medium participation illuminative. In these works, the audience’s intervention or participation is at least a potential, but ideally necessary for the realisation of the work. Paradigmatic examples of strong works include Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #5 (2008), where unsuspecting crowds in Tate’s Turbine Hall were subject to crowd-control techniques by mounted police; Tiravanija’s makeshift kitchen works, which invite gallery and exhibition visitors to eat and converse together; or Boal’s Forum Theatre, which reproduced works after their initial occurrence to allow for the addition and/or replacement of interventions. Medium participation includes works like Bony’s The Worker’s Family (1968), wherein a working-class family were paid to sit on a plinth for a working day. As the audience is present, regardless of potential interaction or participation, a relational, bodily affectivity can be processed that contributes to empathic relations with the performers. Our task, then, is to excavate where and how these stronger participatory works exploit the perceived ‘negative’ characteristics of empathy towards the generation of retrained or expanded empathic inclusion. From the outset, we see that participatory works place participants into an immediate setting and framework of shared commit- ments, values, and intentions. More precisely, they place us into scenarios of common ground. Read argues that common ground – “set[s] of shared beliefs, attitudes, values, and experiences” – can generate or be generated by empathy. Read cites a real-world case wherein a prominent leader of the civil rights movement and the head of the Ku Klux Klan were elected co-chairs of a committee addressing racial segregation in schools, which eventually led to amicable relations between them. Placing, then, even antag- onistic relations within a common ground and framework generated further common- alities, leading to empathic recalibration and recognition. Participatory artworks draw upon this feat: agents in participatory works share common goals and intentions just insofar as they desire the work to be realized. Gallery- goers eating and conversing within Tiravanija’s makeshift kitchen installation works immediately share this common setting, conversing and forming relations amongst themselves based on their commonalities within the artworld context. If an antagonistic pair found themselves mutually engaged in this work, we might find similar effects to Read’s civil rights case. Shared intentions and goals are seen most explicitly in Boal’s Forum Theatre, wherein works were reproduced after their first instantiation to allow for the addition and/or replacement of interventions. As such, explicit reframing of shared commitments and values took place. When individuals engage with a participatory work, they are always already in a position of having shared commitments, values, and inten- tions, that is, common ground. This common ground immediately generates similarities for empathic engagement, but also allows participants to uncover and excavate further common ground upon which empathically resonant relationships can flourish. In this way, exclusion is made less prominent and instead makes way for new modes of inclusion and recognition based on similar values and commitments. Insofar as these participants are interacting within the confines and parameters of the given participatory work, they are consequently placed into an in-group. Based on this immediate group, individuals are in some sense forced to extend empathy and JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 71 recognition towards one another, lest the work be left unrealised. A participatory artwork within which participants fail to empathically engage and collaborate with one another will not get very far. Participatory artworks therefore exploit the in-group bias of empathy. If we are prone to extending empathy preferentially towards those with similarities and in-group status, and participatory artworks place us into relations of similarity through the construction of groups of shared intentions and values, then participatory artworks are likely to generate efficacious empathic understanding amongst their participative agents. What is unique to participatory art, as I previously intimated, is its demand for participants to engage in sensorimotor, primary, intersubjective relations. As they are participatory, they generate interactive understanding amongst agents, such that mutually participative resonance can occur and serve to lower recognition thresholds. Simply in virtue of interacting with one another, especially in these contexts of shared commitments, enhanced levels of responsibility and, ultimately, empathy for each other are generated: a kind of “automatic” and/or “spontaneous empathy”. This points to an advantage participatory works have over other artforms, such as visual art or music, in ethico-political domains: if sensorimotor participation serves to foster empathic recogni- tion, in virtue of its being an immediately affective experience, then an art form that necessitates sensorimotor activity with others is likely to be more efficacious than that art form that does not, and cannot, require such activity. An analogy of this phenomen- ological advantage can be drawn here between participatory art vis-à-vis other artforms, and empathy in real life vis-à-vis online interactions. As “[t]he other person is not present in flesh in social media” we do not receive the affective resonance that is invited by intercorporeal perception. Similarly, when interacting in participatory art we gain the “robust and fine-tuned” empathy of relational bodies unavailable when running third- person simulations of depicted persons in visual artworks, or fictional characters. Indeed, that the others in participatory art are real serves to foster a kind of resonance that is also unavailable to empathic undertakings with fictional agents. We might look to the nature of participatory sense-making – the enactive conception of intersubjectivity that suggests individuals generate meaning with and through each other in states of autonomous, interactive coordination – to compound our understand- ing of the phenomenological advantage of participatory art. Through participatory sense- making, meaning and significance are generated through spontaneous action and feed- back: I can feel the tone of your grip on my arm as suggestive, fearful, or consolatory, and respond in an appropriate way. Consequently, via participatory sense-making, we are engaged in an understanding of “the other’s lived experience”, a rich understanding of how it feels for them as an embodied, living agent, i.e., the unique makeup of cognising agents. In the realm of fiction, we lack the understanding of living, embodied agents, resulting in a deficient encounter lacking the phenomenological richness of interaffective resonance as is present in participatory art. After all, our empathic relations need to be repaired regarding living, embodied agents, rather than fictional characters or depictions. This interactive understanding indicates that participatory works exploit the (spatiotem- poral) proximity bias Prinz identified as a negative characteristic of empathy. In turn, if it is the case that we are more likely to extend efficacious empathy towards proximate others, and our empathic understanding of others is enhanced by participating in 72 H. DRUMMOND a sensorimotor way, then participatory works can setup the conditions for generating empathically resonant relationships through proximate sensorimotor activity. For example, it is unlikely that in Tatlin’s Whisper #5 the audience-participators observed the actions of others, perspective-took through simulation and/or folk psycho- logical theory, before proceeding to move into different areas. Rather, participatory sense- making and interaffectivity provide a better explanation of the immediacy and ‘unspoken’ interaction and understanding of individuals. Participants within the work empathised through immediate sensorimotor engagement with one another, leading to the fulfilment of the work. Resultantly, participatory art’s placing agents into proximate intercorporeal relations can provide an immediate feeling for one another as autonomous agents with the ability to engage in coordinative behaviours. Bruguera’s work paradigmatically indicates that participatory art can facilitate primary empathy, exploiting the proximity bias. Additionally, the positive aspect of this proximity need not be confined to the spatiotemporal. Prinz argues that both spatiotemporal and cultural proximity bear weight on our empathic preferences and, subsequently, who we include and exclude. Participatory artworks might exploit the cultural bias in three ways. First, the artist can attempt to subsume participants under one culture, in particular one that is (typically) excluded. Second, the artist may seek to dismantle the idea that some cultural phenom- enon is a justification for exclusion. Third, the artist subsumes participants within the cultural framework of the artworld or artistic practice. These context effects can further serve to facilitate empathy insofar as empathic understanding carries with it the context of actions and intentions. Consider, for example, Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument (2002), which drew upon a marginalized community to construct a monument critical of capitalistic exchange and commerce, whilst allowing public access to the community through installations around the city. This work aimed to dismantle a juxtaposition of cultures by way of enveloping participants and the public into one participatory frame- work. In so doing, participants are absorbed into a cultural in-group bound by the parameters of the work, whilst reassessing exclusion premised on cultural juxtaposition. Simultaneously, participatory works introduce, or exploit, a salience into the circum- stances that is augmented by such proximity: participatory “art is saying here, now, this”. In virtue of the proximity of the circumstances and our active participatory involvement with them, their salience is intensified and presented to us as unrelenting and inescapable. This exploitation of salience effects appears more potent in works that focus on addressing inclusion, rather than activating inclusion. Bony’s The Worker’s Family takes on a critical stance towards socioeconomic exploitation, division, and injustice, made prominent by its being undertaken within the confines of the artworld’s white cube. In this way, the artworld’s ‘middle-class elite’ are pitted face-to-face with the realities of socioeconomic division and injustice. In addition, this is presented to them with substantially greater salience than their everyday encounters with the same circum- stances. Unfortunately, it appears empathy for those less economically viable is more efficacious when observing them being exploited in an art gallery compared to our everyday passing encounters. Participatory art’s exploitation of the salience bias of empathy points to a positive character art possesses over objective discourse identified by Simoniti. In these works, we are proximately and saliently placed into a relationship with real individuals that JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 73 serves to “foreground the experience of oppressed and culturally underrepresented social groups”. Art has a better time retraining our empathic preferences in these circum- stances just insofar as it can address them on this individual level, something objective discourse might be unable to access due to generalisation and essentialization. These participatory works remove generalizations and essentializations that serve more fre- quently as epistemic obstacles in other spheres, instead demanding a proximate, salient confrontation with the exclusions and our supposed justifications for them. Substantiating this phenomenologically: through affectively salient encounters with the lived experience of others, we gain an understanding of their experience through the participatory artwork, rather than a mere explanation as offered by objective discourse. This, as Englander suggest, is a crucial phenomenological focus of empathic concern and training. Moreover, participatory artworks of this nature present another advantage over other art forms such as fiction and painting, as noted earlier: these individuals are real, active members of the groups they represent. Consequently, Simoniti’s suggestion that art’s specificity is beneficial to epistemic progress through our following of individual characters is compounded with the reality of these circumstances as presented through participatory art. The reworking or utilization of empathy’s biases allows individuals to address their reflective and re-iterated modes of empathy beyond the proximate sensorimotor entail- ments of participatory art. On the secondary, cognitive level, these works can elicit a reflection on the other’s circumstances. The generation of inclusion may stimulate the recognition of a similarity serving empathic resonance; how these circumstances are for them is like how it is for me. As such, participatory artworks can generate cohesion amongst participants through experiential alignment, complemented by this alignment being in the context of shared values. Developing from the starting point of, and continuing to have, shared motivations and values, the other is more likely to be absorbed into subjecthood and, resultantly, mutually positive relationships between participants can develop. Alternatively, placing us into salient, proximate encounters with others we may normally have excluded can demand a cognitive reflection on the other’s circum- stances and values in contrast to my own, where we otherwise may not have undertaken such reflection. Resultant of such reflection, we may scrutinize the grounds upon which we had excluded, or at least failed to empathically recognise, these others. Take again The Worker’s Family (1968). Bishop notes the audience’s reaction was “largely adverse and horrified” owing to the child’s inability to be still and the overall desperation of the Fernandez family. The Fernandez family represent themselves on an individual level, but also the wider social, working class in a more symbolic sense. Engaging with this work appropriately requests an empathic understanding of the participant family via a reflective engagement, one that extends towards the wider class to which the spectator thinks they belong. One must reflect upon what it is like for the family, their desperation for finances extending to exhibiting themselves in banality on a plinth, and the conditions befalling them in their wider lives. In such a way, this work, and others, of medium participation may exemplify those specialised instances wherein perspective-taking and simulation are used to stimulate empathic concern, for which the phenomenological proposal allows. There is a compound effect here upon successful engagement. We have a lived, bodily relation with the family, coupled with a reflective state of empathic concern which, as Schramme notes, already is infected with elements of 74 H. DRUMMOND sympathy. Subsequently, the initialisation of sympathy, conceived of as empathy, concern/care, and disposition to act, invites the audience to potentially manipulate the work itself by interacting with the family. Or, in the absence of interaction, the spectator may use sympathy to ground, or as motivation for, a scrutiny of their (lacking) empathy for the family and symbolised group. Again, the circumstances are proximate; the audience is met with the conditions in a here-and-now presentation that is unavoidable and must be encountered. Unlike in everyday encounters, we cannot escape without at least acknowledging, but hopefully also reflecting upon it. In addition, the circumstances are addressed to the audience with salience: this, here, is the level of financial insecurity present in the working class. The cultural setting, too, allows for proximity bias to be accentuated. Operating in simulta- neity with the aesthetic experience, then, is a utilisation and exploitation of empathy’s biased character. As the participants, representative of their class, are proximate, salient, in-group members, empathy is more likely to be efficacious and successfully reached resultant of the work. Fuchs’ notion of re-iterated empathy may serve to facilitate and complement the cognitive work encouraging social and empathic progress. As the audience approaches the family, they are encountered as viewing subjects who need not undergo this partici- patory practice to render themselves financially viable. What it is like for the family on the plinth is substantially different to what it is like for the audience, provoking as mentioned a reflection on differences that has been served by secondary empathic perspective-taking. However, in re-iterated empathy, the self is aware of themselves as on the other side of the self-other differentiation. The family stares back. The audience are therefore able to recognise themselves as subjects of otherness, which generates a self- awareness of the kind of empathic thresholds they hold for empathic recognition of others, and the kind others hold to empathise with them. Indeed, this re-iterated perspective may involve aspects of shame, perhaps instigating the artworld-audience’s contribution to the systemic difficulties faced by others in the symbolic group, hence serving as the “wake-up call” Zahavi proposes shame can be. The work thus invites the audience to re-evaluate their empathic stances and thresholds, looking at the reasons for exclusion based on socioeconomic class and assessing whether such exclusion is in fact justified. Engendered is a reflection on our empathic thresholds, requiring us to engage in critical reasoning about them. Indeed, the addressing of self via the other is crucial for the ethico-political efficacy of Kester’s dialogical aesthetics. As Hegenbart puts it, “[for Kester], participation establishes a dialogue among the participants, which allows the subjects to view themselves from the perspective of others. This contributes to self-reflection and a critical refinement of each individual’s identity”. The adoption of the perspective of others is a crucial component of empathy in these cases, allowing us to access the circumstances at hand from a perspective different to our own and evaluate the differences therein. Again, participa- tory art not only serves as an empathic intervention mechanism, but is a fruitful illustration of where specialised modes of ‘mindreading’ – which the phenomenological proposal does not exclude – occur. In re-iterated empathy, “the self-reflection and critical refinement” stems from the perspective of the other involving their perspective about me, potentially causing self-reflective attitudes and affective states such as shame and com- passion. In this way, the evaluation of participatory artworks is directly connected to the JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 75 cognitive processes and progress made in re-evaluating exclusion and inclusion through reflective and re-iterated empathy. A work of participatory art can only be deemed successful should it facilitate and realise significant reflection on the individual’s behalf of their own and other’s agency, including empathy-based exclusion and inclusion. This latter point is important, for the success should be seen as deriving from positive empathic gain. Indeed, my conclusions regarding participatory art’s effects thus far are of a positive, near-optimistic tone. It might be the case, on the contrary, that presenting an excluded group with proximity and salience cements the discriminator’s attitudes. Not only does the discriminator retain their unjust empathic preferences, but the participa- tory work may heighten them. I do not deny that such instances can, possibly do, occur, but do deny that this will be anything other than a minority response, especially in the case of accentuation. Indeed, in the next section I’ll argue that some works of participa- tory art are ethico-politically stagnant. Notwithstanding, the burden of proof would, I think, fall upon the sceptic to substantiate the claim that further exclusion results from participatory art, rather than at least a decrease in exclusion, but more so an increase in inclusion. 3. Exclusive Inclusion Conceiving of ethico-politically charged participatory art in terms of empathy expansion and retraining allows us to substantiate a significant criticism levelled by Bishop against works of relational aesthetics. This criticism can, I suggest, be extended towards other forms of participatory art seeking out sociopolitical ends through generating inclusion, rather than criticality of exclusion. As with the strong-weak distinction, this is a methodological spectrum. Inclusion-focussed works are those such as Tiravanija’s, placing participants into amicable states of affairs of relationship fostering and construc- tion. Exclusion-focussed works are provocative works that target, and make salient, the excluded persons and/or group by generating an unavoidable confrontation. Sierra’s and Bony’s relationally antagonistic works are prototypical exclusion-focussed works. Bishop’s charge is this: inclusion-focussed works – relational aesthetics, socially engaged art, etc.– do not adequately contribute to sociopolitical discourse nor pragmatic progress as they do not rectify antagonistic social relations, those relationships that require addressing. Instead, these works promote and sustain relationships of extant common- alities, offering a “cosy form of artistic practice that reproduces logics of ‘social inclusion’ rather than challenging the structural causes of exclusion”. These works, then, generate empathy where it is already present. They do not address those empathic barriers to others that are different, of whom we are scared, or that we do not like; the kind of empathy that needs retraining. In fact, we might suggest works falling within this category not only sustain but accentuate attitudes of exclusion in virtue of their intensification, or reproduction, of exclusive inclusion. Tiravanija’s makeshift kitchens, for example, are constructed for artworld regulars to have cosy-catchups with one another. These participants operate within a common ground that generates further common ground, lacking penetration of structural and unjustified exclusion, and instead promoting it. Fostering relations between the middle-class elite of the artworld sustains that artworld being dominated by the middle-class elite, rather than addressing the structural issues excluding others. 76 H. DRUMMOND Common ground is not produced, that is, for those in antagonistic relations; those relations that lack empathic recognition. Ruitenberg is right to claim, therefore, that “offering people the opportunity to participate within the existing order [. . .] may be simply a pacifier that prevents them from enacting more radical change”. Yet not only are inclusion-focused works banal – and perhaps detrimental – for ethical and political progress because of their reproduction of ‘exclusive inclusion’, but also because of their pre-determined outcome. As Higgins suggests, artworks requiring reflection rather than adherence to determined outcomes have a greater efficacy; to reach an ethico-politically gainful conclusion, cognitive work is required on behalf of the participants. Tiravanija’s works not only trade on the biases they (supposedly) seek to rectify but sustain their dormancy through the lack of reflective cognitive processing required in pursuit of the outcome. As we have seen, it is their demand for primary empathic interaction – affective experiences of the lived bodies of others – that grants participatory artworks their unique phenomenological and pragmatic force. However, empathic recognition is as much about cognitive, re-iterated reflection as it is immediate common ground and sensor- imotor engagement. If we want to get anywhere, that is, we need to do some cognitive work that will provoke the scrutinization of preferences or promote further action. Consequently, those works of participatory art that use the primary intersubjective encounter to facilitate and accentuate secondary and re-iterated empathic modes, via the various biases of empathy, should prove most penetrative of our biases. It is criticality of exclusion, I suggest, rather than reproduced exclusive inclusion that will engender this phenomenological richness, cognitive work, and empathic gain. After all, if empathy is an inherently affective experience directed towards the other’s experience, then rectifying social relations requires getting at the other’s experience that is unknown or alien, rather than repetitively engaging with known, familiar others and their experiences. For empa- thy to be recalibrated, the intentional content needs to be the foreign experiences that do not fall within the extant calibration. Instead of merely placing us into immediate pre-determined empathic relations, then, participatory artists should construct scenarios within which we are unavoidably pre- sented with proximate, salient encounters with socially excluded groups. In this way, not only are all levels of empathy previously identified facilitated, which in itself may lead to the more appropriate cognitive work required of recalibrating our inclusions, but so too are activated affective states such as sympathy, shame, and compassion. Recall, the immediate affectivity of empathy does not preclude further affective states. These further states are much more likely to engender a scrutiny of our preferences given their being experiences with an other-directed phenomenological “sense of depth” and “bite”. When works such as The Worker’s Family lead to an encounter with suffering others, the intentional content is not just the other but the other and their suffering , legitimating a move to compassion. Compassion and empathy’s basis as a form of understanding may then elicit a reflection on the roots of the other’s suffering, which in the case of economic depravity exhibited in the artworld might lead to shame. For example, the middle-class artworld spectator may view themselves as seen by the Fernandez family, in re-iterated empathy, subsequently feeling shame as themselves being a potential con- tributor to systemic financial struggle. As such, the spectator could experience a “disrupt [ion in their] self-complacency, modif[ication in their] self-understanding, and in the JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 77 end, motivate [themselves] to reorient [their] way of living”. Without a focus on exclusion, these kinds of action-activating, self-motivating modes of empathy and fellow- feeling would not arise. If such motivation and activity ensue, the participatory work has successfully and efficaciously proven itself. A potential rejoinder might claim that Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, and associated inclusion-focussed practices, focus on the immediate construction of micro-utopias towards incremental change, rather than overreaching towards utopia through structural penetration. We should strive for modest accumulation rather than hyperbolic revolution. Although this might appear convincing, it is hard to see how and why such slight incremental change might lead to the structural change required of the circumstances participatory art seeks to rectify. That is, “no matter how many of them there are, such local practices will necessarily remain insufficient in challenging capital- ism [. . .] The absence of an imminent revolution [. . .] is no reason to abandon structural critique”. More importantly, incremental practices, as we have seen, do not service the empathic recalibration, and associated fellow feelings, required of significant structural repair. Instead, they re-justify and accentuate extant empathic preferences and social (dis-)orders. Indeed, this lack of progress is compounded by their over-modesty. That art-gallery-goers can talk to one another in a makeshift kitchen over a plate of Thai food has no bearing on the homeless person’s predicaments, nor the female artist’s entry into a cultural world dominated by white middle-class males. For the latter, Tiravanija’s work will only cement the fortifications against her entry. Hence, we should not abandon the pursuit of criticality and should actively seek out those participatory artworks that require our cognitive reflection concerning to whom we extend empathy and, derivatively, exclude and include: those works that do not take fostering inclusive relations as “an end in themselves, but serve to explore and disen- tangle a more complex knot of social concerns about political engagement, affect, inequality, narcissism, class, and behavioural protocols”. Through exhibiting represen- tatives of underrepresented and discriminated groups with salience and proximity, participatory artists can grant the audience “reason to make a voluntary effort to imagine vividly the suffering of these individuals”. The reflective work, meshed with self-critical fellow-feeling, facilitates scrutiny of the justifications for empathic bias and preference, questioning their legitimacy or whether the targeted individual is responsible. We can then extend empathy beyond the confines of the individual participants towards overall judgement of, and empathising with, the group in question. Exclusion- focused works can facilitate the movement from “those who are ‘spatially near’ – at the expense of those who are strangers to us, or beyond the reach of our senses”, by way of reasoning, rational reflection, and expansion, towards the collective group. This is precisely because exclusion-focussed works activate empathy as a mode of understanding others developing from and accentuated by primary empathic engagement, whereas inclusion-focussed participatory works are only of service to the latter. Empathy at the individual level provides the “emotional spur” we require to critically reassess our preferences and stimulate a more encompassing set of empathic thresholds. Generalising from particularised others, such as the Fernandez family in The Worker’s Family, can move to broadening our empathy to groups, such as the Argentinian working class the Fernandez family represents. As an intervention strategy for adjusting and recalibrating our preferential and biased empathy, participatory artworks, particularly 78 H. DRUMMOND exclusion-focused works, overcome the hurdle of empathy’s narrow character by trigger- ing our reflective empathic mechanisms to extend from individual to collective. 4. Conclusion Prinz and Bloom’s rejection of empathy’s necessity for morality rests on the idea that its biased and manipulable character can only serve to facilitate exclusion, rather than being reworked to serve inclusion. However, the latter takes on significant theoretical and empirical attestation. As such, intervention methods that can retrain and expand empa- thy, which may indeed require using or employing these supposedly ‘negative’ character- istics, provide a good chance of increasing inclusion, or at least decreasing exclusion. I have argued that participatory artworks rework our empathy by using and exploiting its biased and manipulable character. By always proceeding from embodied-affective empa- thy, they stand in a unique position amongst artistic practices, with this primary empathy complementing secondary and re-iterated forms. If these levels of empathy are com- pounded by the elicitation of empathy-related affective states – as exclusion-focussed works prompt – such as sympathy and shame, then works of the social turn can ignite considerable ethical and political progress of both a cognitive and pragmatic nature. Notes 1. Fuchs, “Empathy, Group Identity, Exclusion,” 244; Prinz, “Empathy Morality,” 225. 2. Zahavi “Empathy: A Phenomenological Proposal,”; Gallagher, Action and Interaction. 3. Zahavi, “Empathy: A Phenomenological Proposal,” 547. 4. Gallagher, Action and Interaction, 183. 5. Ibid., 100. 6. Ibid., 174. 7. Zahavi, “Empathy: A Phenomenological Proposal,” 550. 8. Fuchs, “Levels of Empathy,”; Fuchs, “Empathy, Group Identity, Exclusion,”; Gallagher, Action and Interaction. 9. Skirke, “Shame as Fellow Feeling,” 189. 10. Zahavi, “Shame,” 355. 11. Fuchs, “Empathy, Group Identity, Exclusion,” 239. 12. Ibid., 245. 13. Prinz, “Empathy Morality,” 225. 14. Fuchs, “Empathy, Group Identity, Exclusion,” 244. 15. Bloom, Against Empathy; Prinz 2011, “Empathy Morality.” 16. Prinz, “Empathy Morality,” 226. 17. Ibid., 227. 18. Ibid., 227. 19. Persson and Savulescu, “Moral Importance Reflective Empathy.” 20. Morris, “Empathy on trial: response,” 527. 21. Passos-Ferreira, “In defense of empathy.” 22. Passos-Ferreira, “In defense of empathy,”; Valentino, Sirin, Villalobos, “Social Political Group Empathy.” 23. Bishop, Artificial Hells. 24. Bishop, Artificial Hells; Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 36. 25. Bishop, Artificial Hells. 26. Read, “Empathy and Common Ground,” 460. 27. Ibid., 461–2. JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 79 28. Bishop, Artificial Hells, 124. 29. Persson and Savulescu, “Moral Importance Reflective Empathy,” 188. 30. De Jeagher and Di Paolo, “Participatory Sense-Making,”; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, “Making Sense in Participation,”; Gallagher, “Two Problems of Intersubjectivity.” 31. Englander, “Empathy Training Phenomenological Perspective,” 21. 32. Gallagher, Action and Interaction. 33. Ramos, “Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics, Crisis,” 4. 34. Simoniti, “Art as Political Discourse.” 35. Ibid., 569. 36. Englander, “Empathy Training Phenomenological Perspective,” 12, 21. 37. Bishop, Artificial Hells, 113. 38. Schramme, “Empathy Cement Moral Universe,” 46. 39. Fuchs, “Levels of Empathy.” 40. Zahavi, “Shame,” 355. 41. Hegenbart, “The Participatory Art Museum,” 332. 42. Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 65–69. 43. Bell, “Politics of Participatory Art,” 77. 44. Svenaeus, “Empathy Online to IRL,” 88. 45. Ruitenberg, “Art, Politics, Pedagogical Relation,” 219. 46. Higgins, “Aesthetics in Identity Politics.” 47. Skirke, “Shame as Fellow Feeling,” 189; Rosan, “Varieties of Ethical Experience,” 162. 48. Breyer, “Empathy, sympathy and compassion,” 436. 49. Zahavi, “Shame,” 355. 50. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics. 51. Bell, “Politics of Participatory Art,” 80. 52. Bishop, Artificial Hells, 39. 53. Persson and Savalescu, “Moral Importance Empathy,” 188. 54. Ibid., 184. 55. Morris, “Empathy on trial: response.” Acknowledgements Thank you to Dr. Cain Todd and Dr. Vid Simoniti for their advice on earlier versions of this article, and to the anonymous reviewers for their stimulating and encouraging comments. Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Notes on contributor Harry Drummond is a PhD student at the University of Liverpool, researching the neglected roles of social cognition and social ontology in aesthetics from a “4E” perspective. He is also co-editor of the journal Debates in Aesthetics and is a visiting researcher at the University of Memphis during Fall 2022. ORCID Harry Drummond http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4225-9278 80 H. DRUMMOND Bibliography Bell, David M. “The Politics of Participatory Art.” Political Studies Review 15, no. 1 (2017): 73–83. DOI:10.1111/1478-9302.12089. Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110 (2004): 51–79. DOI: 10.1162/ Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, Bloom, Paul. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. London: The Bodley Head, Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Nachdr. Documents Sur l’art. Dijon: Presses du réel, Breyer, Thiemo. “Empathy, sympathy and compassion.” In The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion, edited by Szanto, Thomas, and Hilge Landweer, 429–440. Oxon: Routledge, 2020. De Jaegher, Hanne, and Ezqeuiel Di Paolo. “Participatory Sense-Making: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6, no. 4 (2007): 485–507. DOI: 10. 1007/s11097-007-9076-9 De Jaegher, Hanne, and Ezequiel Di Paolo. “Making Sense in Participation: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition.” In Enacting Intersubjectivity, edited by Francesca Morganti, Antonella Carassa, and Giueseppe Riva, 33–47. Washington: IOS Press 2008. Englander, Magnus. “Empathy Training from a Phenomenological Perspective.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 45, no. 1 (28 May 2014): 5–26. DOI: 10.1163/15691624-12341266 Fuchs, Thomas. “Levels of Empathy – Primary, Extended, and Reiterated Empathy.” In Empathy, edited by Vanessa Lux and Sigrid Weigel, 27–47. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Fuchs, Thomas. “Empathy, Group Identity, and the Mechanisms of Exclusion: An Investigation into the Limits of Empathy.” Topoi 38, no. 1 (March 2019): 239–50. DOI: 10.1007/s11245-017- 9499-z Gallagher, Shaun. “Two Problems of Intersubjectivity.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 16, no. 6– 8 (2009): 289–308. Gallagher, Shaun. Action and Interaction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Hegenbart, Sarah. “The Participatory Art Museum: Approached from a Philosophical Perspective.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 79 (2016): 319–39. DOI: 10.1017/ S1358246116000400 Higgins, Kathleen. “Aesthetics in Identity Politics: Cumulative Aesthetics, Emplotment, and Empathy.” AM Journal 22 (2020): 99–107. Morris, Stephen. “Empathy on Trial: A Response to Its Critics.” Philosophical Psychology 32, no. 4 (2019): 508–31. DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2019.1587911 Passos-Ferreira, Claudia. “In Defense of Empathy: A Response to Prinz.” Abstracta 8, no. 2 (2015): 31–51. Persson, Ingmar, and Julian Savulescu. “The Moral Importance of Reflective Empathy.” Neuroethics 11, no. 2 (2018): 183–93. DOI:10.1007/s12152-017-9350-7 Prinz, Jesse, “Is Empathy Necessary for Morality?” In Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Amy Coplan and Peter Golide, 211–229, Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Ramos, Maria Elena. “Some Relations between Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics in Contemporary Art in Times of Crisis.”: Dialogue and Universalism 29, no. 2 (2019): 9–27. DOI:10.5840/ du201929218 Read, Hannah. “Empathy and Common Ground.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24, no. 2 (2021): 459–73. DOI:10.1007/s10677-021-10178-4 Rosan, Peter J. “The Varieties of Ethical Experience: A Phenomenology of Empathy, Sympathy, and Compassion.” Phänomenologische Forschungen. no. 1 (2014): 155–90. https://doi.org/10. 28937/1000107781 . JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 81 Ruitenberg, Claudia W. “Art, Politics, and the Pedagogical Relation.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 30, no. 2 (2011): 211–23. DOI:10.1007/s11217-010-9216-5 Sartre, J. P. Being and Nothingness. London: Routledge, 2003 Schramme, Thomas. “On Emapthy as the Cement of the Moral Universe.” In On Moral Sentimentalism, edited by Neil Roughley and Thomas Schramme, 42–49. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press Simoniti, Vid. “Art as Political Discourse.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 61, no. 4 (2021): 559–74. DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayab018 Skirke, Christian. “Shame as a Fellow Feeling.” In Phenomenology of Sociality: Discovering the ‘We’, edited by Dermot Moran and Thomas Szanto, 187–201. Routledge, 2015. Svenaeus, Fredrik. “Empathy and Togetherness Online Compared to IRL: A Phenomenological Account.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 52, no. 1 (2021): 78–95. DOI:10.1163/ 15691624-12341384 Zahavi, Dan. “Empathy and Direct Social Perception: A Phenomenological Proposal.” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2, no. 3 (2011): 541–558. DOI:10.1007/s13164-011-0070-3 Zahavi, Dan. “Shame.” In The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion, edited by Szanto, Thomas, and Hilge Landweer, 349–357. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology Taylor & Francis

The “Social” in the Social Turn: Empathy, Bias, and Participatory Art

Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology , Volume 9 (1): 17 – Jan 2, 2022

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JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 2022, VOL. 9, NO. 1, 65–81 https://doi.org/10.1080/20539320.2022.2146874 The “Social” in the Social Turn: Empathy, Bias, and Participatory Art Harry Drummond Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK ABSTRACT KEYWORDS empathy; participatory art; Aesthetics and social cognition are two disciplines rarely merged, social cognition; politics; despite the penetration of artworks into social, moral, and political interaction; concerns. In particular, participatory artworks involve direct social phenomenological proposal interaction and perception, and are more often than not motivated by, and aim towards, ethico-political ends. In the following, I fuse considerations aesthetic with considerations intersubjective, arguing that participatory artworks engage and exploit empathy’s biased char- acter towards a recalibration of our social relationships, namely inclu- sion and exclusion. Although critics of empathy suggest that its biased, manipulable, and narrow characteristics are detrimental to its moral promise, I argue that participatory artworks are successful intervention methods just insofar as they use these characteristics for their ethico- political gain. This is stimulated by their facilitation of affective, primary intersubjectivity, something I argue is unique to participatory art. After detailing these operations, I suggest that works that seek to address exclusion, rather than those that facilitate inclusion, have a greater potency in addressing and recalibrating empathy, in part owing to their provocation of empathy-related emotions and forms of fellow- feeling such as shame and compassion. Introduction To assess the potential for, and efficacy of, art’s involvement with the ethical and political is essentially to gauge art’s penetration of the domain of interpersonal relations. It is therefore surprising that little, if any, literature in philosophical aesthetics has attempted to fuse considerations of politically and ethically charged art with contemporary research in social cognition. Recent research of the latter has shown that, for better or worse, empathy plays a significant role in our moral and political lives. As the basis of both exclusion and inclusion, it has an “ambivalent status”, or is a “double-edged sword”. If our moral and sociopolitical exclusions are based on our empathic preferences and extension of recognition to others, and art has some efficacy in ethico-political develop- ment, then there is a prima facie case to make that art exploits, expands, or retrains empathy. In the following, I make the claim that not only are participatory artworks effective through their reworking and recalibrating our empathic preferences by using the biased character of empathy, but also that they stand in a unique position amongst the arts owing to their utilisation of affective, bodily (primary) empathy. CONTACT Harry Drummond harry.drummond@liverpool.ac.uk © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 66 H. DRUMMOND As this paper is primarily targeted at aestheticians and philosophers of art, I commence in section one by drawing out some lessons from social cognition, focussing on the nature of empathy and its relation to inclusion, exclusion, and morality. Critics of empathy’s role in morality voice concerns about its bias, manipulability, and narrowness, suggesting that empathy should not ground our moral lives. In tandem with others, I suggest that empathy should be retrained rather than fully discounted, owing to its still being a significant mechanism for inclusion. In section two, after clarifying what I take participatory art to be – delimiting the notion’s stronger and weaker uses – I argue that participatory artworks draw upon the biases of empathy, such as proximity, common ground, and salience, to retrain and redistribute our empathy. In alignment with the multi-level, phenomenological proposal of empathy I adopt in section one, I then show primary, secondary, and re-iterated modes of empathy are engaged and facilitated by participatory artworks. Finally, in section three, I address the distinction between exclu- sion and inclusion focussed works. As works that take exclusion as a critical focus, rather than inclusion as a pragmatic goal, can provoke empathy-related emotions and forms of fellow-feeling such as compassion, sympathy, and shame, I suggest that they are more efficacious in recalibrating our empathic preferences. That is, although primary empathy represents a unique point of departure for participatory art from other artistic practices, retraining cannot be done by interaction alone. 1. Lessons from Social Cognition It is platitudinous that empathy is a contested concept, but generally it can be cast as our primary mode of social cognition: our understanding of the behaviour and mental goings-on of others. I endorse here a multi-level, phenomenological proposal about empathy following the likes of Gallagher and Zahavi, inspired by twentieth-century instigations of the immediate affectivity of intercorporeal (embodied) engagement. Our dominant mode of empathy and interpersonal understanding is itself an affective experience, intentionally directed towards the other’s experience, primarily engaged by second-person, sensorimotor, dynamical interactions where unobservable, inaccessi- ble mentality is expressed through observable, accessible, and expressive behaviour. From the outset, then, direct sensorimotor engagement, direct social perception, with others is laced with “relational affect similar to the feeling of solidarity”, having an inherent affective component in itself that stimulates a “feeling-with-another”, without precluding additional affective states like grief or elation. Importantly, commitment to the phenomenological proposal does not require a total abandonment of modes of empathy and social cognition endorsed by third-person approaches, such as perspective-taking or simulation. Instead, the phenomenological proposal can allow for a variety of empathic mechanisms ranging from the dominant sensorimotor-affective interaction, to specialised cognitive and reflective endeavours such as perspective-taking: empathy involves all manner of processes, but “it is not reducible to any one”. It is the multi-level phenomenological approach that allows us to incorpo- rate this variety of intersubjective resources available to us. A clear picture of this is painted by Fuchs’ approach to levels of empathy, which aligns neatly with Gallagher and Zahavi’s interactionist and phenomenological theories. These are primary (sensorimo- tor), secondary (cognitive, reflective), and re-iterated (self-referential). Primary empathy JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 67 refers to sensorimotor interactive engagement with others developing from early infancy, already laced and “soaked” with affect and emotion. We undertake action and reaction (interaction) loops with others, generating understanding and meaning with and through others in dyadic relations. Subsequently, when we develop reflective and cognitive capacities that allow us to form triadic relations between self, other, and environment, and reflect upon what it is like for others, we enter the stages of secondary, cognitive empathy. Although primary empathy is neither a prerequisite nor necessary for secondary empathy, it can serve to amplify and enhance secondary empathic understanding. As I will go on to show, I think this compounding effect gives participatory art a powerful, and unique, edge. In addition, this primary mode of intersubjectivity does not cease upon the development of secondary intersubjective capacities, instead serving to facilitate social cognition throughout our lives. As the phenomenological proposal endorses, it is instead the case that primary intersubjective engagement remains our dominant mode of social cognition. Fuchs then develops a further level of empathy as self-referential, self-judgement. Termed re-iterated empathy, this understanding is generated by the perception of oneself as the subject of otherness, that is, as empathically understood by the other. Sartre’s analysis of shame, and subsequent literature on the state, is useful here. We are only ashamed of ourselves insofar as we realise that we are the subject of otherness, of empathic understanding, for the other; an intentional content of ourselves vicariously. It is a “self-recognition [. . .] presented from a point of view that is not my own”, and as such can facilitate a scrutiny of one’s relations with others, as a “wake-up call”, including our reasoning for empathising with some but not all others. This level, then, is important for empathic recalibration. When we come to understand and recognise others, where this recognition refers to an encountering and treatment of the other as an autonomous, self-conscious, ‘worthy’ subject, we begin to establish divisions: groups of exclusion and inclusion. This affects with whom we empathise both categorically and by degree, alongside the ease and readiness with which we empathise. Recognition of the other is an achievement rather than something bestowed upon all others universally, naturally, and immediately. When others stand in a relationship of recognition based on similarities and the sharing of values, commitments, and beliefs, they form in-groups. However, where this empathic recognition fails to be extended to others based on dissimilarities and diverging commit- ments and values, out-groups are formed. As the other in these latter cases is deemed alien, political demerits ranging from hidden prejudicial and discriminatory attitudes to unjust and abhorrent action, arise. Fuchs, for example, views in- and out- group inclu- sion and exclusion as the source of atrocities such as genocide. Hence, empathy is a “double-edged sword”, its ambivalent status rendering it the process through which we both include and exclude others. It is this ambivalent status that invites not only Bloom’s and Prinz’s rejection of the necessity of empathy for morality, but also their claim that empathy can be harmful for our moral lives. This is surprising given that our intuitions would have us think that empathy is directly related to moral attitudes and prosocial behaviour. The core of their scepticism tracks empathy’s being biased, easily manipulated, and extended to indivi- duals rather than groups (narrowness). Prinz identifies numerous modes of bias. Arbitrary bias can generate the permissibility of what otherwise would be considered 68 H. DRUMMOND immoral, for example, when lauding one’s favourite boxer for clobbering their opponent. Proximity bias shows we are likely to extend empathy to geographically and culturally proximate others and, inversely, less likely to extend empathy to those of cultural and geographical distance. Salience bias causes those events that are salient to us to be more likely to gather our empathic response than events that dissipate in salience. Consider, for example, the level of empathy extended to victims of a newsworthy terrorist attack over AIDS, hunger, and poverty crises that have had their salience dispersed throughout a temporally extended period. And, of course, immediately empathy suffers from in-group bias; those we consider to be included in groups of shared commitments, values, looks, beliefs, and so on, will more immediately receive our empathic recognition than those in out-groups who have dissimilar looks, beliefs, values, and commitments. That these biases are so easily alterable augments Prinz’s case for arguing we would be foolish to base our moral lives on empathic preferences and their training. This is compounded by empathy’s narrow character; it is something we extend to individuals not groups. I interact with you, take your perspective, feel your gaze as the instigator of shame, rather than every philosopher around the world. Training the racist or sexist to empathise with one member of the race or sex is great, but it won’t cause the discrimi- nator to retrain and subsequently extend their attitudes towards all members of those groups. As such, in ethico-political spheres, generating empathic understanding on an individual level is insufficient for the extension of empathy to the broader group. If empathy is not necessary for, and indeed can be detrimental to, moral and political inclusion, then surely any examination of participatory art’s effect(s) on empathy is unwarranted. If empathy can’t help us, then nor can manipulating or recalibrating empathy therein through participatory art. However, the claim Prinz and Bloom defend is this: empathy has certain negative characteristics, and so we should not use it as the basis for moral understanding or a system of morality. This does not discount that generating inclusion through empathy without, or through exploiting, these ‘negative’ characteristics constructs the inverse: empathy is good for morality. We should not endorse the claim that empathy is bad for morality tout court, but instead that empathy has some characteristics in virtue of which it can be bad for morality. If we can overcome, or indeed use, these characteristics for recalibration then empathy can be utilized for effective ethico-political gain. Indeed, much of the literature responding to Bloom and Prinz’s scepticism tends to focus on this claim that empathy is beneficial, despite some negative characteristics. According to such discussion, we should focus on retraining or overcoming these negative aspects. Persson and Savulescu, for example, argue that making voluntary adjustments to our biases and expanding empathy through reasoning away unjustifiable grounds for exclusion can retrain our empathy. Morris likewise suggests that we shouldn’t suppress empathy on the grounds of bias and manipulability, but retrain and expand empathy, drawing on recent empirical work showing its being a precursor to prosocial behaviour. In fact, Morris goes as far as to conclude that “it would not be unreasonable to think that empathy may be humanity’s best hope for overcoming the various social and political challenges that we face”; a conclusion of direct contradistinc- tion to Bloom and Prinz. Passos-Ferreira takes this prosocial effect to conclude that empathy can help transcend our individuocentric view of the world and generate moral JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 69 understanding, once again turning to empirical verification via social psychology such as Valentino, Sirin, and Villalobos’ study on empathy levels amongst different groups. I concur with these authors. That empathy can promote prosocial attitudes and behaviour is intuitively plausible and indeed convincing. Although empathy might be a “double-edged sword”, recalibrating and exploring it may serve to blunt the second, coarser edge of the blade. If we can retrain and expand empathy by way of manipulating, exploiting, or using its biased character, then the road to prosperous advancement within sociopolitical spheres looks of smoother paving. Rather than eradicating empathy, we should look to intervention mechanisms that use these characteristics for positive gain. One of which, I suggest, is participatory art. 2. Participatory Power Participatory artistic practices emerged with significance in early twentieth-century avant-garde movements such as Constructivism, Dada, and Futurism, meshed with Happenings and Situations that took on a variety of delineating characteristics across the globe. These caused an explosion of artistic methodologies that sought to dismantle art-life and artist-audience dichotomies, encouraging and necessitating participation from non-art agents. In particular, these works sought explicitly political ends. Constructivist theatre, for example, pursued an egalitarianism in its productions that would then seep into wider society, whilst Futurism incited revolutionary attitudes in participants that would leak into real-life revolution, thus in both cases overturning bourgeois dominance and bringing about ‘utopia’. Whereas their initial instantiations maintained semblances of traditional artistic form, despite perhaps lacking artistic quality due to omni-participation, more recent participatory practices such as relational aesthetics, socially engaged art, and relational antagonism, diverge radically from tradi- tional artistic values. These works, prominent since the 1990s, are a new phase of artistic practice that take interpersonal relations as the very form of the work. Denoted by Bishop as maintaining and accentuating the social turn, they withdraw from aesthetic-artistic tradition and aim towards micro-utopias formed through immediate “angelic programme[s]” of participation. Participatory art can be loosely classified as sets of actions or tasks to be performed by some person/s who is/are not professional art performers. These non-art performers can be the audience, a prescribed set of persons, or both. Resultantly, the literature (such as Bishop) absorbs works with and without audience participation into one category participatory art. As participation takes on these different forms, I think it is useful to propose a spectrum of participatory art, delimiting its stronger and thinner uses. Strong participation refers to works wherein audience participation or intervention is an essen- tial, constitutive component for the work’s realisation. Medium participation refers to works wherein there is at least a potential – perhaps prescribed, as in Abramovic’s The Artist is Present (2010) – for audience participation or intervention. Weak participation refers to those works for which the audience’s participation is neither necessary nor potential. These latter works maintain the ‘participatory’ label as typically non-art participants – as opposed to professionals, as in the performing arts – are used as performers, such as Sierra’s numerous tattooing works. 70 H. DRUMMOND As I focus here on the unique nature of participatory art’s relation to the multi-level phenomenological approach to empathy and I take the target of empathic recalibration to be the audiences of the works, I will focus on works that are participatory in mostly a strong sense, but also find works of medium participation illuminative. In these works, the audience’s intervention or participation is at least a potential, but ideally necessary for the realisation of the work. Paradigmatic examples of strong works include Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #5 (2008), where unsuspecting crowds in Tate’s Turbine Hall were subject to crowd-control techniques by mounted police; Tiravanija’s makeshift kitchen works, which invite gallery and exhibition visitors to eat and converse together; or Boal’s Forum Theatre, which reproduced works after their initial occurrence to allow for the addition and/or replacement of interventions. Medium participation includes works like Bony’s The Worker’s Family (1968), wherein a working-class family were paid to sit on a plinth for a working day. As the audience is present, regardless of potential interaction or participation, a relational, bodily affectivity can be processed that contributes to empathic relations with the performers. Our task, then, is to excavate where and how these stronger participatory works exploit the perceived ‘negative’ characteristics of empathy towards the generation of retrained or expanded empathic inclusion. From the outset, we see that participatory works place participants into an immediate setting and framework of shared commit- ments, values, and intentions. More precisely, they place us into scenarios of common ground. Read argues that common ground – “set[s] of shared beliefs, attitudes, values, and experiences” – can generate or be generated by empathy. Read cites a real-world case wherein a prominent leader of the civil rights movement and the head of the Ku Klux Klan were elected co-chairs of a committee addressing racial segregation in schools, which eventually led to amicable relations between them. Placing, then, even antag- onistic relations within a common ground and framework generated further common- alities, leading to empathic recalibration and recognition. Participatory artworks draw upon this feat: agents in participatory works share common goals and intentions just insofar as they desire the work to be realized. Gallery- goers eating and conversing within Tiravanija’s makeshift kitchen installation works immediately share this common setting, conversing and forming relations amongst themselves based on their commonalities within the artworld context. If an antagonistic pair found themselves mutually engaged in this work, we might find similar effects to Read’s civil rights case. Shared intentions and goals are seen most explicitly in Boal’s Forum Theatre, wherein works were reproduced after their first instantiation to allow for the addition and/or replacement of interventions. As such, explicit reframing of shared commitments and values took place. When individuals engage with a participatory work, they are always already in a position of having shared commitments, values, and inten- tions, that is, common ground. This common ground immediately generates similarities for empathic engagement, but also allows participants to uncover and excavate further common ground upon which empathically resonant relationships can flourish. In this way, exclusion is made less prominent and instead makes way for new modes of inclusion and recognition based on similar values and commitments. Insofar as these participants are interacting within the confines and parameters of the given participatory work, they are consequently placed into an in-group. Based on this immediate group, individuals are in some sense forced to extend empathy and JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 71 recognition towards one another, lest the work be left unrealised. A participatory artwork within which participants fail to empathically engage and collaborate with one another will not get very far. Participatory artworks therefore exploit the in-group bias of empathy. If we are prone to extending empathy preferentially towards those with similarities and in-group status, and participatory artworks place us into relations of similarity through the construction of groups of shared intentions and values, then participatory artworks are likely to generate efficacious empathic understanding amongst their participative agents. What is unique to participatory art, as I previously intimated, is its demand for participants to engage in sensorimotor, primary, intersubjective relations. As they are participatory, they generate interactive understanding amongst agents, such that mutually participative resonance can occur and serve to lower recognition thresholds. Simply in virtue of interacting with one another, especially in these contexts of shared commitments, enhanced levels of responsibility and, ultimately, empathy for each other are generated: a kind of “automatic” and/or “spontaneous empathy”. This points to an advantage participatory works have over other artforms, such as visual art or music, in ethico-political domains: if sensorimotor participation serves to foster empathic recogni- tion, in virtue of its being an immediately affective experience, then an art form that necessitates sensorimotor activity with others is likely to be more efficacious than that art form that does not, and cannot, require such activity. An analogy of this phenomen- ological advantage can be drawn here between participatory art vis-à-vis other artforms, and empathy in real life vis-à-vis online interactions. As “[t]he other person is not present in flesh in social media” we do not receive the affective resonance that is invited by intercorporeal perception. Similarly, when interacting in participatory art we gain the “robust and fine-tuned” empathy of relational bodies unavailable when running third- person simulations of depicted persons in visual artworks, or fictional characters. Indeed, that the others in participatory art are real serves to foster a kind of resonance that is also unavailable to empathic undertakings with fictional agents. We might look to the nature of participatory sense-making – the enactive conception of intersubjectivity that suggests individuals generate meaning with and through each other in states of autonomous, interactive coordination – to compound our understand- ing of the phenomenological advantage of participatory art. Through participatory sense- making, meaning and significance are generated through spontaneous action and feed- back: I can feel the tone of your grip on my arm as suggestive, fearful, or consolatory, and respond in an appropriate way. Consequently, via participatory sense-making, we are engaged in an understanding of “the other’s lived experience”, a rich understanding of how it feels for them as an embodied, living agent, i.e., the unique makeup of cognising agents. In the realm of fiction, we lack the understanding of living, embodied agents, resulting in a deficient encounter lacking the phenomenological richness of interaffective resonance as is present in participatory art. After all, our empathic relations need to be repaired regarding living, embodied agents, rather than fictional characters or depictions. This interactive understanding indicates that participatory works exploit the (spatiotem- poral) proximity bias Prinz identified as a negative characteristic of empathy. In turn, if it is the case that we are more likely to extend efficacious empathy towards proximate others, and our empathic understanding of others is enhanced by participating in 72 H. DRUMMOND a sensorimotor way, then participatory works can setup the conditions for generating empathically resonant relationships through proximate sensorimotor activity. For example, it is unlikely that in Tatlin’s Whisper #5 the audience-participators observed the actions of others, perspective-took through simulation and/or folk psycho- logical theory, before proceeding to move into different areas. Rather, participatory sense- making and interaffectivity provide a better explanation of the immediacy and ‘unspoken’ interaction and understanding of individuals. Participants within the work empathised through immediate sensorimotor engagement with one another, leading to the fulfilment of the work. Resultantly, participatory art’s placing agents into proximate intercorporeal relations can provide an immediate feeling for one another as autonomous agents with the ability to engage in coordinative behaviours. Bruguera’s work paradigmatically indicates that participatory art can facilitate primary empathy, exploiting the proximity bias. Additionally, the positive aspect of this proximity need not be confined to the spatiotemporal. Prinz argues that both spatiotemporal and cultural proximity bear weight on our empathic preferences and, subsequently, who we include and exclude. Participatory artworks might exploit the cultural bias in three ways. First, the artist can attempt to subsume participants under one culture, in particular one that is (typically) excluded. Second, the artist may seek to dismantle the idea that some cultural phenom- enon is a justification for exclusion. Third, the artist subsumes participants within the cultural framework of the artworld or artistic practice. These context effects can further serve to facilitate empathy insofar as empathic understanding carries with it the context of actions and intentions. Consider, for example, Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument (2002), which drew upon a marginalized community to construct a monument critical of capitalistic exchange and commerce, whilst allowing public access to the community through installations around the city. This work aimed to dismantle a juxtaposition of cultures by way of enveloping participants and the public into one participatory frame- work. In so doing, participants are absorbed into a cultural in-group bound by the parameters of the work, whilst reassessing exclusion premised on cultural juxtaposition. Simultaneously, participatory works introduce, or exploit, a salience into the circum- stances that is augmented by such proximity: participatory “art is saying here, now, this”. In virtue of the proximity of the circumstances and our active participatory involvement with them, their salience is intensified and presented to us as unrelenting and inescapable. This exploitation of salience effects appears more potent in works that focus on addressing inclusion, rather than activating inclusion. Bony’s The Worker’s Family takes on a critical stance towards socioeconomic exploitation, division, and injustice, made prominent by its being undertaken within the confines of the artworld’s white cube. In this way, the artworld’s ‘middle-class elite’ are pitted face-to-face with the realities of socioeconomic division and injustice. In addition, this is presented to them with substantially greater salience than their everyday encounters with the same circum- stances. Unfortunately, it appears empathy for those less economically viable is more efficacious when observing them being exploited in an art gallery compared to our everyday passing encounters. Participatory art’s exploitation of the salience bias of empathy points to a positive character art possesses over objective discourse identified by Simoniti. In these works, we are proximately and saliently placed into a relationship with real individuals that JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 73 serves to “foreground the experience of oppressed and culturally underrepresented social groups”. Art has a better time retraining our empathic preferences in these circum- stances just insofar as it can address them on this individual level, something objective discourse might be unable to access due to generalisation and essentialization. These participatory works remove generalizations and essentializations that serve more fre- quently as epistemic obstacles in other spheres, instead demanding a proximate, salient confrontation with the exclusions and our supposed justifications for them. Substantiating this phenomenologically: through affectively salient encounters with the lived experience of others, we gain an understanding of their experience through the participatory artwork, rather than a mere explanation as offered by objective discourse. This, as Englander suggest, is a crucial phenomenological focus of empathic concern and training. Moreover, participatory artworks of this nature present another advantage over other art forms such as fiction and painting, as noted earlier: these individuals are real, active members of the groups they represent. Consequently, Simoniti’s suggestion that art’s specificity is beneficial to epistemic progress through our following of individual characters is compounded with the reality of these circumstances as presented through participatory art. The reworking or utilization of empathy’s biases allows individuals to address their reflective and re-iterated modes of empathy beyond the proximate sensorimotor entail- ments of participatory art. On the secondary, cognitive level, these works can elicit a reflection on the other’s circumstances. The generation of inclusion may stimulate the recognition of a similarity serving empathic resonance; how these circumstances are for them is like how it is for me. As such, participatory artworks can generate cohesion amongst participants through experiential alignment, complemented by this alignment being in the context of shared values. Developing from the starting point of, and continuing to have, shared motivations and values, the other is more likely to be absorbed into subjecthood and, resultantly, mutually positive relationships between participants can develop. Alternatively, placing us into salient, proximate encounters with others we may normally have excluded can demand a cognitive reflection on the other’s circum- stances and values in contrast to my own, where we otherwise may not have undertaken such reflection. Resultant of such reflection, we may scrutinize the grounds upon which we had excluded, or at least failed to empathically recognise, these others. Take again The Worker’s Family (1968). Bishop notes the audience’s reaction was “largely adverse and horrified” owing to the child’s inability to be still and the overall desperation of the Fernandez family. The Fernandez family represent themselves on an individual level, but also the wider social, working class in a more symbolic sense. Engaging with this work appropriately requests an empathic understanding of the participant family via a reflective engagement, one that extends towards the wider class to which the spectator thinks they belong. One must reflect upon what it is like for the family, their desperation for finances extending to exhibiting themselves in banality on a plinth, and the conditions befalling them in their wider lives. In such a way, this work, and others, of medium participation may exemplify those specialised instances wherein perspective-taking and simulation are used to stimulate empathic concern, for which the phenomenological proposal allows. There is a compound effect here upon successful engagement. We have a lived, bodily relation with the family, coupled with a reflective state of empathic concern which, as Schramme notes, already is infected with elements of 74 H. DRUMMOND sympathy. Subsequently, the initialisation of sympathy, conceived of as empathy, concern/care, and disposition to act, invites the audience to potentially manipulate the work itself by interacting with the family. Or, in the absence of interaction, the spectator may use sympathy to ground, or as motivation for, a scrutiny of their (lacking) empathy for the family and symbolised group. Again, the circumstances are proximate; the audience is met with the conditions in a here-and-now presentation that is unavoidable and must be encountered. Unlike in everyday encounters, we cannot escape without at least acknowledging, but hopefully also reflecting upon it. In addition, the circumstances are addressed to the audience with salience: this, here, is the level of financial insecurity present in the working class. The cultural setting, too, allows for proximity bias to be accentuated. Operating in simulta- neity with the aesthetic experience, then, is a utilisation and exploitation of empathy’s biased character. As the participants, representative of their class, are proximate, salient, in-group members, empathy is more likely to be efficacious and successfully reached resultant of the work. Fuchs’ notion of re-iterated empathy may serve to facilitate and complement the cognitive work encouraging social and empathic progress. As the audience approaches the family, they are encountered as viewing subjects who need not undergo this partici- patory practice to render themselves financially viable. What it is like for the family on the plinth is substantially different to what it is like for the audience, provoking as mentioned a reflection on differences that has been served by secondary empathic perspective-taking. However, in re-iterated empathy, the self is aware of themselves as on the other side of the self-other differentiation. The family stares back. The audience are therefore able to recognise themselves as subjects of otherness, which generates a self- awareness of the kind of empathic thresholds they hold for empathic recognition of others, and the kind others hold to empathise with them. Indeed, this re-iterated perspective may involve aspects of shame, perhaps instigating the artworld-audience’s contribution to the systemic difficulties faced by others in the symbolic group, hence serving as the “wake-up call” Zahavi proposes shame can be. The work thus invites the audience to re-evaluate their empathic stances and thresholds, looking at the reasons for exclusion based on socioeconomic class and assessing whether such exclusion is in fact justified. Engendered is a reflection on our empathic thresholds, requiring us to engage in critical reasoning about them. Indeed, the addressing of self via the other is crucial for the ethico-political efficacy of Kester’s dialogical aesthetics. As Hegenbart puts it, “[for Kester], participation establishes a dialogue among the participants, which allows the subjects to view themselves from the perspective of others. This contributes to self-reflection and a critical refinement of each individual’s identity”. The adoption of the perspective of others is a crucial component of empathy in these cases, allowing us to access the circumstances at hand from a perspective different to our own and evaluate the differences therein. Again, participa- tory art not only serves as an empathic intervention mechanism, but is a fruitful illustration of where specialised modes of ‘mindreading’ – which the phenomenological proposal does not exclude – occur. In re-iterated empathy, “the self-reflection and critical refinement” stems from the perspective of the other involving their perspective about me, potentially causing self-reflective attitudes and affective states such as shame and com- passion. In this way, the evaluation of participatory artworks is directly connected to the JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 75 cognitive processes and progress made in re-evaluating exclusion and inclusion through reflective and re-iterated empathy. A work of participatory art can only be deemed successful should it facilitate and realise significant reflection on the individual’s behalf of their own and other’s agency, including empathy-based exclusion and inclusion. This latter point is important, for the success should be seen as deriving from positive empathic gain. Indeed, my conclusions regarding participatory art’s effects thus far are of a positive, near-optimistic tone. It might be the case, on the contrary, that presenting an excluded group with proximity and salience cements the discriminator’s attitudes. Not only does the discriminator retain their unjust empathic preferences, but the participa- tory work may heighten them. I do not deny that such instances can, possibly do, occur, but do deny that this will be anything other than a minority response, especially in the case of accentuation. Indeed, in the next section I’ll argue that some works of participa- tory art are ethico-politically stagnant. Notwithstanding, the burden of proof would, I think, fall upon the sceptic to substantiate the claim that further exclusion results from participatory art, rather than at least a decrease in exclusion, but more so an increase in inclusion. 3. Exclusive Inclusion Conceiving of ethico-politically charged participatory art in terms of empathy expansion and retraining allows us to substantiate a significant criticism levelled by Bishop against works of relational aesthetics. This criticism can, I suggest, be extended towards other forms of participatory art seeking out sociopolitical ends through generating inclusion, rather than criticality of exclusion. As with the strong-weak distinction, this is a methodological spectrum. Inclusion-focussed works are those such as Tiravanija’s, placing participants into amicable states of affairs of relationship fostering and construc- tion. Exclusion-focussed works are provocative works that target, and make salient, the excluded persons and/or group by generating an unavoidable confrontation. Sierra’s and Bony’s relationally antagonistic works are prototypical exclusion-focussed works. Bishop’s charge is this: inclusion-focussed works – relational aesthetics, socially engaged art, etc.– do not adequately contribute to sociopolitical discourse nor pragmatic progress as they do not rectify antagonistic social relations, those relationships that require addressing. Instead, these works promote and sustain relationships of extant common- alities, offering a “cosy form of artistic practice that reproduces logics of ‘social inclusion’ rather than challenging the structural causes of exclusion”. These works, then, generate empathy where it is already present. They do not address those empathic barriers to others that are different, of whom we are scared, or that we do not like; the kind of empathy that needs retraining. In fact, we might suggest works falling within this category not only sustain but accentuate attitudes of exclusion in virtue of their intensification, or reproduction, of exclusive inclusion. Tiravanija’s makeshift kitchens, for example, are constructed for artworld regulars to have cosy-catchups with one another. These participants operate within a common ground that generates further common ground, lacking penetration of structural and unjustified exclusion, and instead promoting it. Fostering relations between the middle-class elite of the artworld sustains that artworld being dominated by the middle-class elite, rather than addressing the structural issues excluding others. 76 H. DRUMMOND Common ground is not produced, that is, for those in antagonistic relations; those relations that lack empathic recognition. Ruitenberg is right to claim, therefore, that “offering people the opportunity to participate within the existing order [. . .] may be simply a pacifier that prevents them from enacting more radical change”. Yet not only are inclusion-focused works banal – and perhaps detrimental – for ethical and political progress because of their reproduction of ‘exclusive inclusion’, but also because of their pre-determined outcome. As Higgins suggests, artworks requiring reflection rather than adherence to determined outcomes have a greater efficacy; to reach an ethico-politically gainful conclusion, cognitive work is required on behalf of the participants. Tiravanija’s works not only trade on the biases they (supposedly) seek to rectify but sustain their dormancy through the lack of reflective cognitive processing required in pursuit of the outcome. As we have seen, it is their demand for primary empathic interaction – affective experiences of the lived bodies of others – that grants participatory artworks their unique phenomenological and pragmatic force. However, empathic recognition is as much about cognitive, re-iterated reflection as it is immediate common ground and sensor- imotor engagement. If we want to get anywhere, that is, we need to do some cognitive work that will provoke the scrutinization of preferences or promote further action. Consequently, those works of participatory art that use the primary intersubjective encounter to facilitate and accentuate secondary and re-iterated empathic modes, via the various biases of empathy, should prove most penetrative of our biases. It is criticality of exclusion, I suggest, rather than reproduced exclusive inclusion that will engender this phenomenological richness, cognitive work, and empathic gain. After all, if empathy is an inherently affective experience directed towards the other’s experience, then rectifying social relations requires getting at the other’s experience that is unknown or alien, rather than repetitively engaging with known, familiar others and their experiences. For empa- thy to be recalibrated, the intentional content needs to be the foreign experiences that do not fall within the extant calibration. Instead of merely placing us into immediate pre-determined empathic relations, then, participatory artists should construct scenarios within which we are unavoidably pre- sented with proximate, salient encounters with socially excluded groups. In this way, not only are all levels of empathy previously identified facilitated, which in itself may lead to the more appropriate cognitive work required of recalibrating our inclusions, but so too are activated affective states such as sympathy, shame, and compassion. Recall, the immediate affectivity of empathy does not preclude further affective states. These further states are much more likely to engender a scrutiny of our preferences given their being experiences with an other-directed phenomenological “sense of depth” and “bite”. When works such as The Worker’s Family lead to an encounter with suffering others, the intentional content is not just the other but the other and their suffering , legitimating a move to compassion. Compassion and empathy’s basis as a form of understanding may then elicit a reflection on the roots of the other’s suffering, which in the case of economic depravity exhibited in the artworld might lead to shame. For example, the middle-class artworld spectator may view themselves as seen by the Fernandez family, in re-iterated empathy, subsequently feeling shame as themselves being a potential con- tributor to systemic financial struggle. As such, the spectator could experience a “disrupt [ion in their] self-complacency, modif[ication in their] self-understanding, and in the JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 77 end, motivate [themselves] to reorient [their] way of living”. Without a focus on exclusion, these kinds of action-activating, self-motivating modes of empathy and fellow- feeling would not arise. If such motivation and activity ensue, the participatory work has successfully and efficaciously proven itself. A potential rejoinder might claim that Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, and associated inclusion-focussed practices, focus on the immediate construction of micro-utopias towards incremental change, rather than overreaching towards utopia through structural penetration. We should strive for modest accumulation rather than hyperbolic revolution. Although this might appear convincing, it is hard to see how and why such slight incremental change might lead to the structural change required of the circumstances participatory art seeks to rectify. That is, “no matter how many of them there are, such local practices will necessarily remain insufficient in challenging capital- ism [. . .] The absence of an imminent revolution [. . .] is no reason to abandon structural critique”. More importantly, incremental practices, as we have seen, do not service the empathic recalibration, and associated fellow feelings, required of significant structural repair. Instead, they re-justify and accentuate extant empathic preferences and social (dis-)orders. Indeed, this lack of progress is compounded by their over-modesty. That art-gallery-goers can talk to one another in a makeshift kitchen over a plate of Thai food has no bearing on the homeless person’s predicaments, nor the female artist’s entry into a cultural world dominated by white middle-class males. For the latter, Tiravanija’s work will only cement the fortifications against her entry. Hence, we should not abandon the pursuit of criticality and should actively seek out those participatory artworks that require our cognitive reflection concerning to whom we extend empathy and, derivatively, exclude and include: those works that do not take fostering inclusive relations as “an end in themselves, but serve to explore and disen- tangle a more complex knot of social concerns about political engagement, affect, inequality, narcissism, class, and behavioural protocols”. Through exhibiting represen- tatives of underrepresented and discriminated groups with salience and proximity, participatory artists can grant the audience “reason to make a voluntary effort to imagine vividly the suffering of these individuals”. The reflective work, meshed with self-critical fellow-feeling, facilitates scrutiny of the justifications for empathic bias and preference, questioning their legitimacy or whether the targeted individual is responsible. We can then extend empathy beyond the confines of the individual participants towards overall judgement of, and empathising with, the group in question. Exclusion- focused works can facilitate the movement from “those who are ‘spatially near’ – at the expense of those who are strangers to us, or beyond the reach of our senses”, by way of reasoning, rational reflection, and expansion, towards the collective group. This is precisely because exclusion-focussed works activate empathy as a mode of understanding others developing from and accentuated by primary empathic engagement, whereas inclusion-focussed participatory works are only of service to the latter. Empathy at the individual level provides the “emotional spur” we require to critically reassess our preferences and stimulate a more encompassing set of empathic thresholds. Generalising from particularised others, such as the Fernandez family in The Worker’s Family, can move to broadening our empathy to groups, such as the Argentinian working class the Fernandez family represents. As an intervention strategy for adjusting and recalibrating our preferential and biased empathy, participatory artworks, particularly 78 H. DRUMMOND exclusion-focused works, overcome the hurdle of empathy’s narrow character by trigger- ing our reflective empathic mechanisms to extend from individual to collective. 4. Conclusion Prinz and Bloom’s rejection of empathy’s necessity for morality rests on the idea that its biased and manipulable character can only serve to facilitate exclusion, rather than being reworked to serve inclusion. However, the latter takes on significant theoretical and empirical attestation. As such, intervention methods that can retrain and expand empa- thy, which may indeed require using or employing these supposedly ‘negative’ character- istics, provide a good chance of increasing inclusion, or at least decreasing exclusion. I have argued that participatory artworks rework our empathy by using and exploiting its biased and manipulable character. By always proceeding from embodied-affective empa- thy, they stand in a unique position amongst artistic practices, with this primary empathy complementing secondary and re-iterated forms. If these levels of empathy are com- pounded by the elicitation of empathy-related affective states – as exclusion-focussed works prompt – such as sympathy and shame, then works of the social turn can ignite considerable ethical and political progress of both a cognitive and pragmatic nature. Notes 1. Fuchs, “Empathy, Group Identity, Exclusion,” 244; Prinz, “Empathy Morality,” 225. 2. Zahavi “Empathy: A Phenomenological Proposal,”; Gallagher, Action and Interaction. 3. Zahavi, “Empathy: A Phenomenological Proposal,” 547. 4. Gallagher, Action and Interaction, 183. 5. Ibid., 100. 6. Ibid., 174. 7. Zahavi, “Empathy: A Phenomenological Proposal,” 550. 8. Fuchs, “Levels of Empathy,”; Fuchs, “Empathy, Group Identity, Exclusion,”; Gallagher, Action and Interaction. 9. Skirke, “Shame as Fellow Feeling,” 189. 10. Zahavi, “Shame,” 355. 11. Fuchs, “Empathy, Group Identity, Exclusion,” 239. 12. Ibid., 245. 13. Prinz, “Empathy Morality,” 225. 14. Fuchs, “Empathy, Group Identity, Exclusion,” 244. 15. Bloom, Against Empathy; Prinz 2011, “Empathy Morality.” 16. Prinz, “Empathy Morality,” 226. 17. Ibid., 227. 18. Ibid., 227. 19. Persson and Savulescu, “Moral Importance Reflective Empathy.” 20. Morris, “Empathy on trial: response,” 527. 21. Passos-Ferreira, “In defense of empathy.” 22. Passos-Ferreira, “In defense of empathy,”; Valentino, Sirin, Villalobos, “Social Political Group Empathy.” 23. Bishop, Artificial Hells. 24. Bishop, Artificial Hells; Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 36. 25. Bishop, Artificial Hells. 26. Read, “Empathy and Common Ground,” 460. 27. Ibid., 461–2. JOURNAL OF AESTHETICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 79 28. Bishop, Artificial Hells, 124. 29. Persson and Savulescu, “Moral Importance Reflective Empathy,” 188. 30. De Jeagher and Di Paolo, “Participatory Sense-Making,”; De Jaegher and Di Paolo, “Making Sense in Participation,”; Gallagher, “Two Problems of Intersubjectivity.” 31. Englander, “Empathy Training Phenomenological Perspective,” 21. 32. Gallagher, Action and Interaction. 33. Ramos, “Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics, Crisis,” 4. 34. Simoniti, “Art as Political Discourse.” 35. Ibid., 569. 36. Englander, “Empathy Training Phenomenological Perspective,” 12, 21. 37. Bishop, Artificial Hells, 113. 38. Schramme, “Empathy Cement Moral Universe,” 46. 39. Fuchs, “Levels of Empathy.” 40. Zahavi, “Shame,” 355. 41. Hegenbart, “The Participatory Art Museum,” 332. 42. Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 65–69. 43. Bell, “Politics of Participatory Art,” 77. 44. Svenaeus, “Empathy Online to IRL,” 88. 45. Ruitenberg, “Art, Politics, Pedagogical Relation,” 219. 46. Higgins, “Aesthetics in Identity Politics.” 47. Skirke, “Shame as Fellow Feeling,” 189; Rosan, “Varieties of Ethical Experience,” 162. 48. Breyer, “Empathy, sympathy and compassion,” 436. 49. Zahavi, “Shame,” 355. 50. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics. 51. 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Journal

Journal of Aesthetics and PhenomenologyTaylor & Francis

Published: Jan 2, 2022

Keywords: empathy; participatory art; social cognition; politics; interaction; phenomenological proposal

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