Social melodrama, social reconstruction, and justice

1)                  I am really interested in Bob Meister's second chapter titled "Ways of Winning," particularly the section in which he speaks about social melodrama and social reconstruction. Meister describes social melodrama as:

meant to be read by people who may want to feel bad about the conditions described but who would be made highly uncomfortable if the victim were portrayed as blaming them. In social melodrama the victim is always constructed as innocent (morally undamaged by suffering) so that the melodrama’s audience, which is likely to include beneficiaries of such suffering, can understand themselves as bystanders who are capable of feeling compassion without fear (64).

However, I am not sure what he means exactly by social reconstruction. He says that social melodrama is different to social reconstruction in that the latter “would exhort the bystander to confront his beneficiary position and ask why the victimary position should be allowed to exist” (64). It seems to me that literature of social reconstruction is more aggressive than that of social melodrama, but I am not quite sure if I am interpreting this correctly.

Meister follows this distinction between social melodrama and literature of social reconstruction by talking about pain. He says that “the moral victory available to victims of torture and atrocity is produced by the telling of their story in a way that makes readable the body in pain. This way of winning, however, raises an obvious question about the melodramatic conventions of the truth commission itself: to what extent should intentionally inflicted pain, especially physical pain, be privileged over other forms of injury in political discourse?”

I also have similar questions about what happens to other types of pain such as social and historical pain that are not necessarily as concrete as physical pain. Can social melodrama or social reconstruction deal with these other sorts of pain? And what effect does that have on the consumer of these stories? Would they feel as sympathetic, or would they disqualify the validity of the victims suffering due to the lack of concrete physical injury?

2)               In reference to Levinas on humanitarian intervention, Meister highlights a distinction between ethics and justice. He explains that for Levinas:

 Ethical responsibility has nothing to do with either virtue or justice as other philosophers commonly understand these terms. Its ultimate product, according to Levinas, is simply the postponement of death and suffering in others. If nothing is worse than useless suffering – not even injustice – then a politics that puts good (or justice) first would be inherently unethical, according to Levinas. Peace is thus the highest aim of ethics – and not justice in any sense that might require breaching peace (46).

It seems as though here the words good, justice, and politics are being conflated together and stand for a similar concept which stands in direct opposition to peace or ethics. Does justice retain the same meaning for Meister throughout the book? And if so, is justice then something we should not strive for? Maybe I am again misinterpreting here, but hope we can address his conception of “justice” vs. “ethics” during class.