Thoughts on After Evil

This response focuses on Robert Meister's After Evil. Posting on what i've read thus far....

Themes brought up: time (especially the now/present), physical bodies, pain, framework of victim/perpetrator/beneficiary, recognition, different kinds of justice, affect, subjectivity.....

1) Meister's discussion of the genre of human rights discourse as a narrative is really interesting, and I think it's pretty clear to see what he's talking about just by watching in particular the TV show Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU). Let me first just say that I love this show with its characters and the questions it raises, but the narrative and how it raises its questions are things to consider, since I have always seen it as a spectacle, a pornography of rape, incest, abuse, and victimization. The subjects of this drama are women, children, immigrants, people of color all cast as victims deemed 'special' and are interrogated by the police investigators and district attorneys to tell their stories of pain and horror, often repeatedly. We often don't see the actual rape or crime occur, but see its aftereffects. Thus, "the victim's original torture is narrated as a secret humiliation and defeat and its public exposure as a dramatic reversal of fortune that brings about eventual moral victory. Such narratives take place against a scene of private darkness followed by one of public light. (Past torture had to be done in secret--it could not have been broadcast; the description of that torture has to be public, it cannot be covered up if healing is to occur)" (Meister 67). As Meister further says, "It is thus not bodily pain itself but the narrative genre used to depict it that creates moral feeling in the audience. If accounts of physical pain used the conventions of pornography or eschatology, they might evoke feelings in their audience of moral superiority or moral vulnerability or both" (67). SVU is sort of like a miniature, individualized version of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Meister talks about that makes it seem more privatized and individual than an institution or human rights culture, as Meister puts it. SVU also takes up the role of victim and perpetrator, as well as beneficiaries, trying to expose others as part of the crime but also incorporating us, the viewers into the narrative. We are the "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" (63-4).
I'm just thinking through SVU here to think about how this new Human Rights Discourse can be seen in our everyday lives.


2) Some interesting connections or points brought up with the pastness of evil, guilt, blame, appropriateness, confession, compassion, and overcoming.
I find that the word "overcoming" is used a lot in conversations about discrimination or disadvantages that people must get over, and Meister mentions it when he says "the historical victims of slavery could never claim to be a national majority and now claim to have finally 'overcome' only as a consequence of Barack Obama's election as president" (83), where "overcome" is used as a way to prolong transition, deferring "closure in order to make permanent the project of national recovery" (83). Meister further says that "national recovery from a history of racial oppression requires both a continuing awareness of the dangers of relapse and a constant vigilance against the repetition of past patterns and practices. This argument implies that we can never recover from our past unless we believe ourselves to be in permanent recovery--that we are never in greater danger of reviving racism than when we believe ourselves to have overcome it" (101). This is never more perfectly said and embodied in the idea of "post-race." If social justice discourse sets itself up as overcoming injustices (or evils), isn't this a continuation of the postponement of justice? how do we frame our discourse differently so that we are not caught in a cyclical battle?


3) What is justice/just/justness? What does justice look like, and do we all have the same definition of justice? There is justice-as-struggle and justice-as-reconciliation, but what do these justices mean, and are they different?


4) the perpetrator/victim/beneficiary appear to be unstable categories--people can straddle many areas and sometimes are privileged depending on the situation (see 33, 53). meister primarily associates this with identification with a certain category. these categories can be useful but also can be turned around, with the perpetrators/beneficiaries identifying as victims. it still seems to go back to the melodramatic good vs evil, wrongdoer vs wronged--how do we get out of this?