Hard/Soft Infrastructure, Self-Making, Sympathy, and Empathy

As I read Fennell's work, I started to think about the social dynamics of infrastructure. Fennell's methodological and theoretical approach to infrastructure--by centering the aspects of affect, emotions, sentiments, etc. within the articulations of social life, publics, and the polity--seems to be an example of bridging what Brian Larkin's article before called 'hard infrastructure' and 'soft infrastructure'. By blending the two, we gain insights not only to the material embodiments of infrastructure (as its alive and deteriorating) but also of how affect fundamentally shapes cultural assumptions, subjectivities, and disciplinary techniques. I also found it really interesting how Fennell held historical inequalities and assemblage in productive tension, by not letting the novel aspects characteristic of assemblages overshadow and invalidate the history of racial and economic inequality. 

When thinking about how Fennell describes sympathy, empathy, and self-responsibility in Horner, I am reminded of Saidiya Hartman’s book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century. As a cultural historian, Hartman pays close attention to the continuities of racial subjection that African Americans experience during slavery and in its aftermath. Focusing on the quotidian experiences of domination, Hartman looks at liberal paradigms of will, consent, individuality, freedom, agency, and empathetic abolitionism as particular discourses that function to render nominally emancipated slaves constrained to positions of unfreedom and indebted servitude.

Of Hartman’s arguments, two come to mind that seem emblematic of what we see here in Fennell’s discussion. The first is the shifted focus on the burdened will of individuality during Reconstruction, whereby she discusses the shift in disciplinary actions on African American subjectivity from what she frames, “whip to will”—the freedman is thus burdened with the task of being self-responsible, so that he could maintain his autonomy, freedom, will, and agency. This is particularly useful in creating a particular genealogy of racialized thought and mechanisms of control especially for black bodies and subjectivities as constructed through political discourse. As such, seeing how cultural notions concerning the lack of self-responsibility were part Horner’s image, I am curious to see what kinds of arguments Fennell would articulate, if she were to trace a longer genealogy between slavery and contemporary histories of racialized housing projects. If not for the use of her project, how can we also come to understand the continuities and re-iterations of power’s encroachment that fundamentally seek to render race a neutral, descriptive category/analytic, and liberal notions of self-responsibility as part of the new means of social control? In the context of infrastructure, how does these liberal notions of personhood also structure how one understands infrastructure? How does this trouble the arbitrary divisions of infrastructure and human?

Her second argument that comes to mind is her discussion on empathy. As abolitionists used the prism of empathy to communicate across differences and to then legitimate the abolition of slavery, Hartman argues that such processes actually function to obliterate the black captive body. By feeling for another through the act of self-identification within the context of captivity, the abolitionists function to actually disavow any form of agency towards the captive body and the lived experience of what it means to be captive and instead makes the issue about the abolitionist and their ego. As such, Hartman does make it a point to say that empathy is a double-edged sword that can be productive in both processes of freedom and unfreedom; she also notes that this form of power is different from the captor’s power to obliterate the captive body in different ways. As such, I am reminded of Catherine Fennell’s discussion of the materialist concept of sympathy, which to her is not the same as empathy. Drawing on Hume, Fennell attempts to explain the contours of what this materialist concept of sympathy looks like. As someone who still is having trouble understanding the distinctions, I would like to hear how the class understands the differences that Fennell makes, because to me I wonder if the process of creating sympathetic bonds that Fennell creates just eventually functioned to obscure the material realities of struggle in these housing projects. We see that suffering became valorized as resilience. We also see that creating sympathetic bonds at one point worked, but now does not (as evidenced by her interlocutor’s quote in the Epilogue). What are the useful advantages to sympathy and empathy? What of its limits?