Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art

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There is a pathway that is created when we are able to visualize someone else's trauma or pain; it is through that pathway that empathy gives into an affective response. In this paper I will be arguing that Erika Andiola's use of social media, in particular her YouTube video, acts as a form of visual imagery that elicits an affective response from those who saw it, and in turn the people of this nation responded affectively to Andiola's video, were able to mobilize and stop the deportation of Erika Andiola's mother, Maria. I will be drawing comparisons between Andiola's YouTube video and Jill Bennett's analysis of Das' arguments in regards to the affective response that it elicited by art; specifically the art of Sandra Johnston and Doris Salcedo, from Bennett's third chapter of Empathic Vision, The Force of Trauma.

When someone is said to be highly empathetic, this typically means they are able to come along side those in painful situations and to some extent mourn with them. However, how strong the response is, it is typically gauged by how well we are familiar with the situation or person and how personally we are invested in that person or situation. Das poses a great question in the third chapter of Jill Bennett's book, Empathic Vision, in regards to this. “When Das asks, after Wittgenstein, how we might describe our pain by pointing to the body of another, it is not only the possibility of an embodied pain that is evoked but an imaginary in which pain is palpably conceived of as transferable. There is something innately uncontainable about the phenomenon of pain within representation. If is not transferable as a condition pertaining to a subject, it is apt to 'shock' us at the level of inducing an autonomic, prerefle...

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...l stories, real faces, and making them experience those feelings of pain and trauma along with the families that are being separated, interrogated and treated without dignity. The appeal to emotion is one that cannot go unrecognized, the power to mobilize and create change is at the hands of those who are able and prepared to extend that visual image of their pain and struggle to this world and wait for the, spectators, the secondary witnesses to respond according to affect.

References

Andiola, Erika. (2013). Why I'm Fighting to Stop Deportations Outside of Congress. Huffingtonpost.com.

Andiola, Erika. (2013). Erika Andiola's Family Separated. http://youtu.be/FVZKfoXsMxk

Bennett, Jill. (2005). The Force of Trauma. In Empathic Vision. Standford: Stadford University Press. 46-69.

Guggenheim, Davis. (2013). The Dream is Now.

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