Reinhart Koselleck (1988) argues that the idea of crisis plays a central role in the self-understanding of Modernity. If sociology is to be taken as the science in charge of providing self-descriptions of modern society, then it should give a privilege position to its study. In this sense, Habermas (1984: 4) declares that, since sociology deals with the steering problems of the system and the anomic aspects of the social, it is ‘the science of crisis par excellence’. However, crises are complex phenomena that involve, according to Benhabib (1986: 123), two dimensions ‘corresponding to two distinct social epistemologies’: ‘lived crisis and systemic-functional crisis’. The ‘social-lived crises’ deal with the ‘emergence of feelings of exploitation, injustice, resentment, malaise, and the like’, ‘signal the breakdown of norms, values, and meaning structures incorporated in social action’ and, therefore, ‘need to be analysed from the internal perspective of the first and second person’; whilst ‘systemic-functional crises’ can be approached ‘from the perspective of the third person’ because they ‘signal the “malfunctioning” of objective contexts of relations’ (Benhabib, 1986: 126-7).
However, since she is signposting the path of critical theory that leads to Habermas, Benhabib (1986) considers that only social integration is endangered in a crisis at the social-lived level. Accordingly, the lived experience is reduced problems in the coordination among social actions. This is particularly curious since Habermas (1988: 1-8) advocates from the outset for a theory of crisis that cannot be separated from the victims’ inner view it. Thus, Habermas’ (1988: 3-4) aim is to propose a ‘social-scientific concept of crisis’ that ‘cannot be separated from the viewpoint of the one who is undergoing it’. For, ‘steering problems create secondary problems that do affect consciousness in a specific way’ and, hence, ‘only when members of a society experience structural alterations as critical for continued existence and feel their social identity threatened can we speak of crises’.
Yet, Habermas (1988: 3-4, emphasis added) reduces social-lived problems to social integration and adds that impingements of crises upon individuals – and their subjectivity, identity and consciousness – goes ‘precisely in such a way as to endanger social integration’ and, therefore, human existence is impacted ‘only to the extent that social integration is at stake, that is, when the consensual foundations of normative structures are so much impaired that society becomes anomic’. This is the consequence of Habermas’ (1992) conceptualization of the individual as an intersubjective achievement and not as an entity itself, thus conflating individual and intersubjective levels and to concluding that individuality cannot be damaged if is not through problems at the communicative-intersubjective level. Put differently, if ‘individuality forms itself in relations of intersubjective acknowledgement and of intersubjectively mediated self-understanding’, as Habermas (1992: 153) argues, then the analysis of the social-lived dimension of the crisis can be reduced to problems of social integration. Consequently, any conceptualization of the individual experience is written off because the individual is conceived as socially induced.
Accordingly, Habermas (1988) analyses the steering problems of the ‘administrative’ stabilization of the capitalist economy through the Welfare State. In general terms, the political system assumes a superordinate position vis-à-vis other social systems to administrate problems created by them. By filling the functional gaps of the market, the political sphere assumes and deals with crises of the economic sphere. Yet, politics recasts any problem in its own codes in a twofold manner. At the systemic level, steering issues take the form of rationality crisis – i.e. types of policy that ‘fit for purpose’ in specific times; while, at the social-lived level, problems are deployed as legitimation crisis – i.e. ‘communicative translation’ of steering problems that produces a perception of democratic shortfall, thus affecting social integration.
Undoubtedly, Habermas (1988: 4) shows the theoretical benefits of having a concept of crisis able to ‘grasp the connection between system integration and social integration’. However, it is short-sighted insofar as it does not include the actual lived experience of individuals: there is no trace of the subjective-individual level in which humans suffer. If it is to have any sense, social theory’s ultimate touchstone must be the human experience of the social world, particularly in moments of suffering when the vulnerability of humanity and the precariousness of the human sense of reality are at stake. This is not an empiricist claim since I am not arguing for deriving knowledge from sense-data of the experience of crises. Rather, I endorse the authenticity of the experience of crises and argue for developing conceptual tools to integrate in the theoretical scaffolding the actors’ own self-understanding of crises as moments in which things that they care about might not be faring, thus producing suffering.
In this regard, crisis is a moment of rupture in the experience in which the world around and within us become problematic and loses its apparent natural flow and unity. Crises, then, must be conceived as objective forces that deprives individuals of their ‘normal’ life by creating situational logics in which they are deprived of the institutional means for living according to what they care about. This experience is lived in terms of moral sentiments which are an important source of information about our sense of well-being and comprise feelings of suffering, injustice, humiliation and malaise that can impair our sense of reality and ourselves. Consequently, any account of social-lived crises must include the analysis of the subjective level, in which individuals’ suffering and changes in world-orientations are at play. Notwithstanding its rhetorical inflation or its heuristic capacities, the sociological concept of crisis has left unpacked this dimension: the impingements of a crisis upon subjectivity and how individuals engage with what is perceived as a shattered world.
Experiences of suffering and humiliation as well as feelings of malaise and injustice can be derived from multiple objective situations and social arrangements, and are not exclusive of moments of crisis. However, crisis situations provide an exceptional case in which dissapointments are disseminated throughout society and social suffering becomes recurrent. Furthermore, such a perspective sheds new light on our understanding of crisis because more than providing a structural account of the causes of the fissures of the social world, it focusses on how subjects live these occurrences, how they engage with such situations, the effects they have for the development of their identity, the states of injury towards their humanity, etc.
To study this dimension is necessary a theory of suffering that allows us to understand such situations in a phenomenological first-person approach. In this dissertation, I will attempt to develop such a theory and to show its explanatory performance by applying it to testimonies of the Great Depression in the United States. In the first part (1), I will show how social suffering is treated in critical social theories (Marx, Adorno and Bourdieu). It will be argued that, despite its privilege place as a topic of study, these theories cannot get to grips with social suffering because they operate with an impoverished concept of human in which individuals are presented as faceless (i), voiceless (ii) and heartless (iii) beings: (i) without properties on their own – therefore, without the capacity to flourish and the susceptibility to suffer; (ii) without the capacity of expressing authentically their malaise – hence, without the capacity of experiencing suffering without it being always already ideologically concealed; and (iii) without any normative orientation in their engagements with the world – namely, without aspirations of self-realization or self-worth that can be blocked in a crisis and then be a source of emotional and moral responses.
Consequently, they present a disfigured image of man in which he is incapable of his own human properties. As Dahrendorf (1973: 59) remarks, ‘sociology has paid for the exactness of its propositions with the humanity of its intentions, and has become a thoroughly inhuman, amoral science’. In contrast to this image, condensed in the homo sociologicus, the second part and third part (2, 3) draws upon contemporary philosophy (Harry Frankfurt, Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth) and critical realist sociology (Margaret Archer) to address the questions of how to theorize human confrontations with the world as normatively-driven engagements that have at its core notions of self-realization and self-worth as relations-to-self. This implies acknowledging that (i) human subjectivity is dependent on strong evaluations, (ii) that these strong evaluations create ultimate concerns and virtual social identities that set the normative framework within which individuals evaluate inwardly their engagements with society, and (iii) that these intrasubjective evaluations of our engagements encompass moral sentiments as responses to plights and disappointments that can spoil our identity and damage our lives by impairing relations-to-self. The last part (4) unpacks testimonies of the aforementioned crisis according to the concepts developed in order to give an account of how such negative social experiences affects subjectivity by producing suffering and altering world-orientations. Conclusions examine new directions opened up by this perspective and explain that crises should be understood as a set of situational logics towards which individuals react in moral-emotional terms because they deprive of the means of sustaining a world and of making their way through it.
1. The subjective experience as the neglected aspect of social suffering in Critical Social Theory
One of the key elements of the so-called critical theories is the critique of negative social experiences, broadly understood as social suffering. As Honneth (2007: 68) remarks, the link between critical social theories and social suffering is indissoluble because it provides an objective foothold in a pre-theoretical sphere ‘through which critique can ground its normative standpoint within social reality’. However, in its different iterations, critical theory explains suffering from a third-person perspective by trying to uncover its structural causes. Put differently, critical theory has focused on the objective production and not on the subjective experience of social suffering. Thus, it lacks the concepts to listen the voice of suffering individuals, and to articulate negative social experiences as subjective and moral experiences in which identity, and a sense of the self and reality are at stake.
For instance, in Capital (1999), Marx explains the functioning of capitalism from the perspective of a thinker-observer and any negative social experience of malaise, isolation or exploitation is conceived exclusively in terms of its causes in the functional logic of the mode of production. The crux of his argument is that the production of suffering is part and parcel of the emergence and the systemic law of reproduction of capitalism. In Marx’s (1999: 361) words,
within the capitalist system all method for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer […] they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil.
Thus, suffering is explained exclusively in terms of consequences of the systemic law of capitalism to increase surplus value and the material deprivation it causes in one pole of society. In Marx’s (1999: 351) words, ‘it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant population of labourers’. Accordingly, Marx (1999: 360) argues that the ‘demoralised and ragged’, ‘people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation’, ‘the mutilated, the sickly’ – in one word, a mass of superfluous and suffering population – are ‘a condition of the capitalist production and of the capitalist development of wealth’.
In few excerpts, Marx turns to the worker. However, the voice of the worker is not his voice, but an imputed voice by a thinker-observer that ascribes interests and ideas to agents. Therefore, the experience of the worker is not grasped with a phenomenological first-person approach, because individuals are regarded as ‘personification of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class interests’ that can be uncovered with a third-person approach (Marx, 1999: 7). For example, in chapter 10, which deals with the working-day and its potential unlimited expansion in capitalism because of its tendency to ‘absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour’, Marx (1999: 149-150) writes:
suddenly, the voice of the labourer, which had been stifled in the storm and stress of the process of production, rises: The commodity that I have sold you differs from the crowd of other commodities, in that its use creates value, and a value greater than its own. That is why you bought it. That which on your side appears a spontaneous expansion of capital, is on mine extra expenditure of labour-power […] By an unlimited extension of the working-day, you may in one day use up a quantity of labour-power greater than I can restore in three. What you gain in labour I lose in substance.
Thus, suffering – the ‘loss in substance’ – is simply conceived as an incidental operating expense of capitalism and not as a human susceptibility. Consequently, Marx is blind to other ways of suffering in non-economical spheres and conceives emancipation – the end of human suffering – as ‘the dissolution of all classes’ carried out by the proletariat because it is ‘a sphere of society which has universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general’ (Marx, 1972: 22). Honneth (2003: 125) has convincingly criticised this ‘historical-philosophical tendency to see the proletariat alone as the stand-in for all social discontent’ as ‘the fatal mistake Marxist theory made over and over again’. Marx is right in stressing the unequal structural production of misery and the accumulation of capital as a crisis-ridden process affecting individuals, but his mistake lies in conflating a human property (suffering) with structural properties (social positions and institutional performances). Hence, all conceptual efforts to understand the subjective experience of social suffering are nipped in the bud. Here is missing not only a conceptual account of how people suffer, but of why humans are liable to suffer – namely, to feel malaise and humiliation vis-à-vis social situations. In this sense, it is necessary a concept of person that do not present individuals as faceless entities without properties on their own, but as being able to flourish and, as an offshoot, to suffer. Otherwise, the subjective dimension of suffering remains unpacked in its black-box because of the lack of conceptual tools.
The centrality of the study of negative social experiences is also a characteristic of the Frankfurt School, but, in the Adornian version, it lacks the appropriate concepts to understand its subjective dimension because it still operates with an impoverished concept of humanity. Adorno considers that the highest cultural and civilizational achievements of Modernity have come at the cost of the progressive mutilation of human bodies through the enslavement to gigantic apparatus and the mechanization of life (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002). This is the ‘subterranean’ history that runs in parallel with ‘the known history of Europe’ and that ‘consists of the fate of the human instincts and passions repressed and distorted by civilization’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 192).
Honneth (1991: 72-3) argues that Adorno’s theory of society addresses three axes (‘political-economic reproduction, administrative manipulation and psychic integration’) with the same concept of total domination underpinned by a notion of absolute control and administration of the world. This notion of instrumental rationality ‘is tailored from the outset to an attitude that makes it possible to perceive the coercive mechanisms of social integration but not the latent boundaries of social conflict’. Consequently, Adorno conceives the culture industry as a motor for psychic integration of individuals to society that distorts any lived experience through an ‘identification with the status quo’ (Adorno, 1991: 164). In this sense, ‘enlightenment, that is the progressive technical domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into means for fettering consciousness’ (Adorno, 1991: 106).
This crude theory of integration and manipulation becomes problematic when approaching to social suffering. Adorno (1973: 17-8) accepts that ‘the need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weights upon the subject; its most subjective experience, its expression is objectively conveyed’. However, if we simply accept that ‘the power of the status quo puts up the façades into which our consciousness crashes’ (Adorno, 1973: 17), then the expression of suffering and the voice of the individual are conceived as ideologically concealed through the ‘encroachment of institutionally planned modes of behaviour patterns on the ever-diminishing sphere of experience’ (Adorno, 2005: 62).
Paradoxically, this premise implies that, in their experience of the world, individuals are integrated to society and are not be able to recognize, let alone to utter, suffering or malaise. The impoverishment of humanity in Adorno’s (1973: 39) social theory goes to the extreme of contending that individuals do not have epistemic access to their own experience: ‘where the subject feels altogether sure of itself – in primary experience – it will be least subjective. The most subjective, the immediate datum, eludes the subject’s intervention’. Thus, when individuals speak about their suffering with the concepts they have at hand, ‘the rhetorical element is on the side of content’ (Adorno, 1973: 56): testimonies or narrations of the lived experience of suffering supresses the authenticity of the subjective experience through conceptualization and the eradication of the ‘non-identical’ – i.e. the part of the object that cannot fit under the concept. For, ‘authenticity itself becomes a lie the moment it becomes authentic, that is, in reflecting on itself, in postulating itself as genuine, in which it already oversteps the identity that it lays claim to in the same breath’ (Adorno, 2005: 154). Hence, when listening the voice of the individual who experiences suffering, his voice does not disclose, but conceals elements of his experience.
Like Marx, Adorno operates with a concept of voiceless individuals but in a more pessimistic way: the voice of the individuals is objectively generated by an over-integrated, controlled world that precludes any utterance of negative experiences. In this sense, Adorno dismisses layperson’s lived experience of the world and focuses on the objective forces that generates it, since ‘life in its immediacy’ is ‘the product of the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses’ (Adorno, 2005: 15). Thus, in Adorno’s social theory, it is not possible to find appropriate conceptual tools to understand the voice of individuals who experience suffering nor can the analysis utilize a phenomenological first-person approach to unpack the experience of the world within their narrations and testimonies.
Moreover, Adorno (2005) lacks a counter-image when doing his ‘reflections from damaged life’. Jaeggi (2005: 69) argues that ‘Adorno calls into question precisely the idea that the good life can be determined as such to serve as an atemporal, context-transcending standard’. The paradox of describing life as ‘damaged’ without a counterpart of human flourishing uncovers that Adorno’s negativism touches another limit when dealing with ontological questions about human life and normative questions about the good life (eudaimonia). In contrast to this position, I will argue that an understanding of suffering must include a conceptualization of what is a human being, his capacities to flourish and his susceptibility to suffer, since, as Andrew Sayer (2011: 239) claims, ‘some conception of flourishing is unavoidable. At the minimum, this is because, as vulnerable beings capable of flourishing and suffering and needing to evaluate our situations, we cannot suspend judgement for long’.
One of the most contemporary works on social suffering in ‘critical’ theories is The Weight of the World, a collective work headed by Pierre Bourdieu (1999). Here we find a multitude of reports and interviews that present shared cases of misery, experiences of humiliation and unfulfilled subjective aspirations. For example, regarding workers that have been permanently lay-off, Bourdieu says that ‘their reason for existence has disappear along with their fabrics’ (Bourdieu et al., 1999: 6). Accordingly, individuals in situations of suffering are ‘on the constant and relentless confrontation with a universe closed on all sides’ (Bourdieu et al., 1999: 62, emphasis added). Bourdieu acknowledges the complexities of approaching to lived experiences of negative confrontations with the social world. Thus, from the outset, Bourdieu (1999: 2-3) argues for getting rid of the ‘quasi-divine point of view easily adopted by observers’, and for trying ‘to understand their point of view [of individuals] without setting up the objectivizing distance that reduces the individual to a specimen in a display case’.
At first glance, Bourdieu seems to be addressing criticisms often made to his theoretical work according to which it reproduces determinism by overemphasizing the internalization of objective structures and converting them into unconscious motivational structures (habitus). Yet, a closer reading of The Weight of the World shows that, apart from some methodological prescriptions to ‘reduce as much as possible the symbolic violence’ of the interview relationship to create an ‘artificial environment’ of social proximity that puts in motion an ‘induced and accompanied self-analysis’ (Bourdieu et al., 1999: 613-4), it is not possible to find conceptual adjustments to his existing theory, but only a set of interviews reproduced at face value with contextualizing notes.
In fact, it is surprising how little his concepts of habitus or field – and other secondary concepts such as illusio, doxa, etc. – feature in this study. When they appear, they primarily operate in a descriptive mode and they remain untouched the few moments they play an explanatory role. For example, most of these people, Bourdieu (1999: 382-3) claims, ‘inhabit a world of contradictions’ and, therefore, possess ‘a system of dispositions that is itself contradictory and divided against itself’ which tends to create ambivalences. Nonetheless, these ambivalences are not related to subjective dimensions, such as relations-to-self, identity or world-orientations, but to the perpetuation of the past conditions of social fields or to the doxic experience of the social world that reinforces reproduction and adaptation. Even if individuals tend to be ‘constrained, in order to live or to survive, to practice a kind of self-analysis’, this ‘practical analysis’, due to the habitus, is carried ‘in a discourse aimed as much as covering up as uncovering’ (Bourdieu et al., 1999: 384, 511).
In an interview with Eagleton, Bourdieu clarifies his position: ‘a lot of suffering had been hidden by this smooth working of habitus. It helps people to adjust, but it causes internalized contradictions’ (Bourdieu and Eagleton, 2012: 277, emphasis added). The point of Bourdieu is that individuals can be adapted to suffering because of a doxic engagement with the world in which ‘invisible pressure’ conceals suffering from individuals: ‘in a sense they don’t know it, they lack the instrument to grasp it, to speak about it’ (Bourdieu and Eagleton, 2012: 273). Thus, the ‘confrontation’ of the individuals with a world full of contradictions takes the form of a mystified experience marked by internalization, and not of an actual confrontation, namely an engagement in which normative expectations are not met by specific social situations, producing thus disappointments that are key to explain future world-orientations and impingements upon subjectivity. By neglecting this dimension, individuals are presented as heartless entities with no moral or emotional human properties.
Therefore, while Bourdieu lends a voice to individuals to express how they live negative social experiences, there are no theoretical tools to understand their voice, to explain why they experience such situations as suffering or what dimensions of the person are affected. Furthermore, for Bourdieu (1999: 390, 614, emphasis added), the interview environment provides conditions ‘rarely encountered in everyday life’ with an ‘absolutely exceptional situation for communication’ that induces individuals ‘to say the things that are closer to their hearts’ that without the presence of the interviewer ‘might never have been spoken’. In contrast to this perspective, I will argue that individuals don’t have to be induced to talk about the things that are closest to their hearts, because they carry this dialogue constantly with themselves as well as with others.
The theoretical dilemma, to which all this normativeless and inhuman concepts of humanity leads, is obvious: although their theories seem to be addressing suffering, there is nothing in these theories to articulate suffering as suffering – i.e. a phenomenological, first-person approach that sheds light on how individuals experience their own lot. To do so, we need a concept of human capable of normative expectations, disappointments and capable of voicing them in moral terms. Consequently, I will argue for a position in which the individuals do not internalize contradictions but reflect upon them in the light of normative expectations, whose disappointment engender feelings of humiliation, injustice or grievance. Only by doing so, it is possible to unpack their voices and experiences in theoretical terms. Otherwise, as Sayer (2011: 2) argues, ‘if we ignore them or reduce them to an effect of norms, discourse or socialization, or to “affect”, we produce an anodyne account of living that renders our evident concern about what we do and what happens to us incomprehensible’.