Performing Empathy with Neoliberalism, or Kendall Jenner on the Streets, Thomas Gradgrind in the Sheets: A Response to Lauren Weber

Abstract

The literary imagination helps broaden our ethical horizon. Engaging that imagination through reading draws on politics and emotion, as exemplified in the pedagogical approaches of Martha Nussbaum and Megan Boler. Lauren Weber has noted that these practices can also become bound up in the demands of neoliberalism. I argue that neoliberalism encourages us to engage in a different form of ‘reading’: reading the text of the world as consumers. Ideas that threaten neoliberalism—such as empathy—are appropriated into its form of public pedagogy. However, these forms of ‘depoliticised’ politics can reveal the emptiness of neoliberal claims to be concerned with social justice. One such case is Pepsi’s ‘Live for Now’ campaign, which attempted to appropriate the imagery of Black Lives Matter and similar social movements. This chapter positions such thinned out readings of the world against forms of pedagogy that deal in affect, empathy, and uncanniness: practices that create room for thinking differently and ‘repoliticising’ education.