Abstract
Stressing his importance, a number of writers have endeavoured to explain Emmanuel Levinas’s complex philosophy to a social work readership. In contrast, this article takes a much more critical stance and remains wary about Levinas’s gradual incorporation into the profession’s literature. It begins by briefly sketching his biography and outlining the case made for Levinasian social work. After illuminating some of his main themes and concerns, four interrelated conceptual problems are identified. First, the encounter with the ‘Other’ seems to take place in a vacuum drained of social, economic and political content. Second, Levinas’s antipathy to Marxism and the conflating of Marxism with Stalinism is redolent of the politics of the Cold War. Third, his usefulness as a resource for ‘critical social work’ is eroded because he fails to adequately account for the operation of the state. Finally, Levinas often appears to valorise ‘charity’, rather the ‘welfare state’, with the recipient ‘Other’ frequently evoked as merely an abject and passive figure.
Keywords
Introduction
Zygmunt Bauman (2000: 5) unequivocally advises that Emmanuel Levinas was the ‘greatest ethical philosopher of our century’. Within the social work literature, some authors have stressed the advantages of Levinasian imbued practice (Tascón, 2010). Amy Rossiter has argued that Levinas can be used to bolster the theorisation of ‘critical social work’. Moreover, the ‘foundational social work value of the dignity and worth of the individual can be seen through the lens of Levinasian ethics’ (Rossiter, 2011: 993). Adital Ben-Ari and Roni Strier confidently maintain that Levinas ‘creates a new framework for working across differences’ (Ben-Ari and Strier, 2010: 2159). Likewise, writers situated in kindred areas, such as psychotherapy, adumbrate that Levinas’s ethics can beneficially impact on encounters with those having recourse to the helping professions (Worsley, 2006).
The article will begin by sketching a brief biographical of Levinas. Next, in order to examine the assertion that Levinas’s philosophy may aid social workers, it will be maintained that there is a need to focus on how he himself spoke about his distinctive ethical approach. Levinas’s work is complex and multifaceted and here the aim is simply to concentrate on what might be perceived as his main preoccupation – engaging with the ‘Other’. This core concern also gives rise to his dwelling on the centrality of the ‘Face’ and on the implications of inhabiting a world where we are surrounded by multiple ‘Others’. In addressing this issue, he also introduces the idea of, what he terms, the ‘Third’. The discussion section of the article expands on criticisms of Levinas’s contribution which have, thus far, been neglected by his social work advocates (see also Garrett, 2016).
Making social work more Levinasian
Born in Lithuania in 1906, Levinas came from a financially comfortable Jewish family, and his childhood, under czarism, was to remain a ‘happy and harmonious’ memory (Levinas, in Robbins, 2001: 25). 1 At the age of 17, in 1923 he left to study in Strasbourg and immersed himself in the German philosophy of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Both were to remain important to Levinas’s philosophy throughout his life, with the latter, despite his association with Nazism, remaining for him the ‘greatest philosopher of the century, perhaps one of the greatest philosophers of the millennium’ (p. 176).
Levinas lived through the ‘uninterrupted despair which was the Hitlerian period in Europe’ (p. 39; see also Levinas and Hand, 1990). Naturalised as a French citizen in 1930, in 1939 he joined the French army. The following year, he was captured. Because of his status as an officer, he was not sent to a concentration camp but had to undertake forced labour, first in France and then in Germany, where he was part of ‘Forestry Commando Unit’ specifically assembled for Jewish POWs (Critchley, 1996: 54; see also Caygill, 2009). Two of his brothers and some other close relatives were murdered in Nazi-occupied USSR, but he conceded that his own time as a POW was spent ‘under the surveillance of guards who were without brutality – from the point of view of culture, the time was not wasted’ (p. 41). He read Hegel and Proust and even commenced writing his first book Existence and Existents published in 1947 (Levinas, 2001). An account of his life during this period is contained in a series of notebooks currently unavailable in English translation (Caygill, 2009). After the Liberation, he remained in France producing what tends to be perceived as his two great works: Totality and Infinity in 1961 (Levinas, 1969) and Otherwise than being, or, Beyond essence in 1974 (Levinas, 1998). He died in 1995.
Simon Critchley (2004: 172) refers to an ‘explosion of interest … From the relative obscurity in which his work languished until the mid-1980s, Levinas is now widely seen as a great philosopher whose influence extends far beyond the professional confines of philosophy’. However, even his supporters and promoters concede that his work presents considerable challenges. In terms of content, he often presumes that readers will be familiar with the history of philosophy and the contributions of canonical figures such as Husserl and Heidegger. Moreover, in relation to his style of writing, Levinas can be difficult. While on occasions his prose is accessible, lucid and even beautifully evocative, it often appears to be riddled with ‘captious textual games that keep the reader disoriented whenever he or she might be satisfied with an impeccable power of interpretation’ (Hutchens, 2004: 3). Davis (1996: 5), a far from unsympathetic commentator, refers to the ‘enigmatic nature of Levinas’s textual practice’ and ‘notoriously difficult texts’. The same author compares his prose to the movement of the sea, perpetually lapping against the same shore, a way of writing that can ‘appear at once both tediously repetitive and intriguingly or irritatingly elusive’ (p. 37). In contrast, in interviews, such as those assembled across a number of years by Robbins (2001), his conceptualisations are relatively accessible and his political orientation more transparent. These exchanges provide, in fact, a rich source of information and insight.
Bauman (2000) stresses that awareness of Levinas’s philosophy might prompt practitioners to think more deeply about how to challenge the evolution of soulless e-working and arid proceduralisation functioning to distract the profession from the ‘original ethical impulse’ (p. 9). Social work, ‘whatever else it may be, is also the ethical gesture of taking responsibility for the fate and well-being of the Other’ (p. 10). He goes on,
Clarity and unambiguity may be the ideal of the world in which ‘procedural execution’ is the rule. For the ethical world, however, ambivalence and uncertainty are the daily bread and cannot be stamped out without destroying the moral substance of responsibility, the foundation on which the world rests. (p. 10)
Levinas can, therefore, fulfil a significant role in helping to forestall an undue emphasis on this ‘procedural execution’ and arid forms of bureaucratised rationality (Bauman, 2000: 10). Elsewhere Bauman amplifies core Levinasian ideas relating to how one should respond to the ‘Other’:
my relationship to the Other is…non-symmetrical; that is, not dependent on the Other’s past, present, anticipated or hoped-for-reciprocation [and] begets an essentially unequal relationship; this inequality, non-equity, this not-for-asking-reciprocation, this disinterest in mutuality, this indifference to the ‘balancing up’ of gains or rewards – in short is organically ‘unbalanced’ and hence non-reversible (Bauman, 1997: 48-49).
Bauman is keen to stress that how the self responds to the ‘Other’ is not, according to Levinasian ethics, based on reciprocity:
I am for the Other whether the Other is for me or not; his being for me is, so to speak, his problem, and whether or how he ‘handles’ that problem does not in the least affect my being-for-Him (as far as my being-for-the-Other includes respect for the Other’s autonomy, which in turn includes my consent not to blackmail the Other into being-for-me, not interfere in any way with the Other’s freedom). Whatever else ‘I-for-you’ may contain, it does not contain a demand to be repaid, mirrored. (p. 50)
Signature Themes: ‘Other’, ‘Face’, ‘Third’
As we have seen from Bauman’s articulation and amplification of Levinas’s work for practitioners, interaction with the ‘Other’ is vital, with Levinas stating that those ‘patronizing slogans “being good,” “being nice,” which one smiles about, I take seriously. They must be thought to the limit, with rigor and acuity’ (p. 55). The ‘Other’ takes priority and renders one’s own interests and dispositions secondary. To be human is unequivocally relational, and this means to accept responsibility for the ‘Other’: ‘I am responsible for the other man’ (p. 66). Indeed, with Levinas it is invariably a man, and it has been maintained that his philosophy of self and ‘Other’ amounts to an ‘assertion of male privilege’ (De Beauvoir, 1997 [1949]: 16).
Engagement with the ‘Other’ is ‘older than any other deliberation we can remember and … is constitutive of the human’ (p. 175). Levinasian ethics circulate, therefore, around the idea that the ‘Other’ who is ‘strange and indifferent to you, who belongs neither to the order of your interest nor to your affections, at the same time matters to you. His alterity concerns you’ (p. 48). According to Levinas’s framing, the response to the ‘Other’ spans a continuum stretching from the politely mundane to a preparedness to sacrifice one’s life: ‘I am the hostage’ of the ‘Other’ (p. 132). Hence the requirement to yield to the ‘Other’ the ‘first place in everything, from the après vous [after you] before an open door right up to the disposition … to die for them’ (p. 47). This obligation stems, he argues, from the biblical exhortation, featured in the book of Deuteronomy, to ‘love the stranger’ (p. 134). Indeed, there is ‘something divine in this appearance of the human capable of thinking of another before thinking of himself’ (p. 183).
As Bauman explained, the interaction with the ‘Other’ is neither symmetric nor rooted in any form of reciprocity because accepting responsibility for the ‘Other’ is not a form of conduct discharged with the explicit or implicit understanding that a similar response will be forthcoming. It does not, in short, imbue the ‘Other’ with any sense of obligation or indebtedness within the moment of the encounter or in future. Levinas contrasts his thinking with that of Martin Buber (2004) who laid particular emphasis on the need for reciprocal exchanges within all relationships. According to Levinas, however, I am ‘indebted to someone from whom ‘I’ have not borrowed a thing’ (p. 192). What is more, this ethic of responsibility is founded on the idea that difference, a key trope within social work and related spheres in recent years, must be respected (Cocker and Hafford-Letchfield, 2014). The difference of the ‘Other’, their alterity, cannot be collapsed or encased within the known and pre-existing categories. In relation to the ‘Other’ there can be no fusion. As Rossiter (2011: 285) cogently summarises, the encounter with the ‘Other’ is invariably an ‘encounter with utter uniqueness’ and I ‘must refrain from treating the other person as an extension of my categories, my theories, my habitual or learned ways of perceiving others’. Many contemporary ‘moralists emphasize the need to draw the human circle wider and tighter, so that nobody is left out’, but Levinas chooses to ‘respect with awe the terrible distance between us’ (Alford, 2014: 260). In this sense, he can be interpreted as producing a philosophy which runs starkly counter to often simplistic ideas associated with ‘social inclusion’ (see the critique in Winslow and Hall, 2013; see also Dobbernack, 2014).
Within this scheme of thinking, the ‘face’ is immensely significant (see also Ponet, 1985). Levinas is the ‘theorist of the face’ (Alford, 2014: 250); it is the ‘hallmark of Levinasian philosophy’ (Rossiter, 2011: 983). Confusion, however, surrounds his use of the word because its deployment reaches beyond our everyday understanding. Despite the interpretation of a number of commentators, it is apparent that he is not referring to the visible countenance of another individual and he made this plain in books, articles and interviews (p. 144). The face, is ‘not the order of the seen, it is not an object’ (p. 48). As Levinas elliptically concedes, it represents a name for what cannot be named (p. 191). Still, on occasions, he edges toward implying that the ‘face’ is the actual face:
To meet another, one must first welcome a face. This means more than looking at the features of the other face, or the color that characterizes the surface of his skin, or the iris of his eyes – as if in doing so one could perceive, grasp, know. Is not the face first of all expression and appeal, preceding that datum of knowledge? Is it not the nakedness of the other – destitution and misery beneath the adopted countenance? (p. 191)
However, ordinarily Levinas does tend to define the ‘face’ by ‘traits’ lying ‘beyond vision’ (p. 48). It connotes how the ‘Other’ enters into my ambit of responsibility in all its ‘strangeness’, ‘misery’ and existential and abject vulnerability (p. 48). In the ‘face’, a human life is ‘most naked’, exposed, elemental and helpless. It demands, therefore, unqualified compassion (p. 127). Moreover, God ‘comes to me, when I encounter the face’ (p. 135).
Levinas’s perspective is also alert to how the dyadic relationship with the ‘Other’ becomes complicated by the appearance of the ‘Third’:
if there were only two of us in the world, you and I, then there would be no question, then my system would work perfectly. I am responsible to the other in everything … But we are not only two, we are at least three. Now we are a threesome; we are a humanity. (p. 133)
The appearance of the ‘Third’ destabilises, distracts and prompts shifts from the binary relationship simply founded on the ‘Other’ and I. The arrival of the ‘Third’ results in the need to reorient and modify because choices need to be made about where my prime allegiance and responsibility should lie. As Herzog (2002: 209) maintains, ‘the ‘Third’ tends to ‘trouble’ in that s/he introduces and superimposes a comparison, calculation’. Thus, I am prompted to sift and weigh competing pleas and claims. In approaching
in charity the first one to come along, the I runs the risk of being uncharitable toward the third party, who is also his neighbour. Judgment, comparison, are necessary. One must consent to comparing incomparable beings: the I’s, all of them unique. One must be able to classify their uniqueness without chaining them to it. (p. 230)
Levinas articulates this as follows:
I don’t only live in a world in which there is but one single ‘first comer’; there is always a third party in the world: he or she is also my other, my neighbour. Hence, it is important for me to know which of the two takes precedence … Must not human beings, who are incomparable, be compared? … Every other is unique [yet] at a certain moment, there is a necessity for a ‘weighing’, a comparison. (p. 166)
How, therefore, can we assess Levinas’s potential utility for social work? In the following Discussion section, while recognising that there are advantages which might accrue in engaging with his difficult philosophy, it is argued that there are also a number of very substantial political and conceptual obstacles. Furthermore, it is vital to examine these because they are presently being elided in the mostly uncritical response to Levinas within the profession’s academic literature. In this context, the four areas identified earlier will be examined.
Discussion
Levinas and the lack of attentiveness to social and political structures
Following the death of Levinas, a small square on Paris’s left bank was renamed Place Emmanuel-Levinas. France is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, yet every summer I see the same homeless man sleeping on the pavement adjacent to this location. Were he still alive, how would Levinas react to this man? Led by his philosophy, predicated on the acceptance of responsibility for the ‘Other’, would he be proactive and approach him to inquire about his needs and endeavour to assist him? This question seems fair because a good deal of Levinas’s work suggests that the presence of the ‘Other’ is interruptive in that it is he who makes the initial approach and overture. If the homeless man failed to approach Levinas, would he fall beyond the parameters his ethics of responsibility? What of France’s 142,000 homeless sleeping in the proliferating temporary shelters and tents scattered around Paris (France 24, 2015)? As Eagleton (2009: 241) inquires, what of those, more generally, confronting circumstances of oppression or exploitation ‘who fall outside the numinous circuit of self and Other?’
Such sociologically orientated, and pressingly practical, inquiries are pertinent because we find little in Levinas’s work illuminating how abstract philosophising might impact on practical conduct and strategies in relation to the ‘Other’ in particular situations. Without seeking a reductive blueprint or series of arid examples, is there not a need for a little more guidance if, as his social work promoters assert, he is to be of relevance to the profession? Who judges and assesses if ethical responsibility has been adequately discharged, I or ‘Other’? Moreover, what form of collective social organisation and political structures should this ethics produce and nurture?
Levinas furnishes no overarching context for the encounter with the ‘Other’ and appears to imply that the interaction will always transcend the historic, social and economic situations in which it occurs and unfolds. Unlike the writers of the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) code of ethics, he frames the ethical in ‘non social terms, in a language so aloofly indifferent to community, consensus, equality, civil rights, legality, universality, reciprocity … that he makes it well-nigh impossible for himself to conjure a politics from it, beyond the most banal of liberal pluralism’ (Eagleton, 2009: 241). However, returning to Amy Rossiter’s comments mentioned at the beginning of this article, can any human encounter truly be free from categorisation and ‘habitual or learned ways of perceiving others’? This idea risks appearing sociologically unconvincing because, as recognised by theorists as diverse as Gramsci and Foucault, dominant hegemonic orders and institutional ways of seeing and perceiving inescapably impinge on, and shape, individual responses (see also Foucault, 2008; Hoare and Smith, 2005).
Indeed, in contrast with Levinas’s weightless evocation of social relations, a range of other theorists, introduced into the social work literature over recent years, provide more robust and nuanced accounts. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, uses his overarching theoretical framework and main conceptual tools to focus on questions of naming, classification and categorisation (Bourdieu, 1991; see also Bacchi, 1999). For him, the notion of ‘symbolic violence’ is crucial to our understanding of how forms of social diminishment and disparagement are not simply confined to language, utterances and verbal exchanges; they are apt to infuse all forms of engagement involving interactions between the dominant and the dominated. This is, in fact, an invariable consequence of an unequal social order and an asymmetrical distribution of power. Bourdieu’s conceptualisation also illuminates the ‘mundane nature of suffering’ taking the form of petty, daily humiliations which comprise ‘routinized types of misery’ (McNay, 2014: 34-35; see also Garrett, 2007a; 200b).
Often rooted in material poverty, ‘symbolic violence’ is not so much an ‘identifiable event or specific injury but rather a diffuse and persistent background state of affairs’ (McNay, 2014: 34). Impinging on everyday life, it is insidious and can prompt in the victims ‘feelings of shame, boredom, hopelessness’ (p. 29). It colours the social world and embeds what Raymond Williams (1965) terms the ‘structures of feeling’ and entrenched psychological dispositions. This social suffering generated by ‘symbolic violence’ becomes incorporated into the bodily characteristics and dispositions of its victims and is evoked in Charlesworth’s (2000) Bourdieusian ethnography of life in parts of post-industrial Rotherham in the United Kingdom. His respondents, and those he observed around him, were surplus to capital’s requirements; casualties, ‘people so vulnerable and atomized that they carry the marks of their impoverishment in their bodies as oddity and illness’ (Charlesworth, 2000: 9).
This Bourdieusian theorisation is, therefore, much richer and furnishes a much fuller account of social interactions than that promoted by Levinas. On account of such gaps in exposition, a harsh critic might conclude that the philosopher’s perspective can, in fact, appear banally platitudinous.
Levinas and Marxism
Unlike a number of philosophers located in France in the post-war period, Levinas ‘abjured revolutionary activism’ (Hutchens, 2004: 2). Jacques Rancière (1999 [1995]) and Alain Badiou (2001), both beginning to feature within social work’s academic literature, were involved in the events of 1968 and continue to be theoretically and politically inspired by the ‘spirit’ of those times (Boltanski, 2002). During the weeks of insurrection all social and economic relations seemed like they could be transformed (Ross, 2002). Levinas, however, kept his distance from the inchoate revolutionary turbulence of the era and viewed the activism of students and workers with conservative disdain. Then in his early sixties, and of a somewhat older generation than those embroiled, he later reflected that this time was not among his ‘happiest memories’ and he was especially concerned that French universities, ‘institutions with a great and sacred, even consecrated steadiness’, came under attack (p. 196). On the whole, the movement seeking to destabilise these elitist institutions and practices ‘seemed rather ordinary … not much nobility or great ideas’ (Ross, 2002). The ‘young people who had devoted themselves to all sorts of amusements and disorders went at the end of the day to visit the striking workers at Renault as though they were going to prayer’ (p. 225).
Levinas appeared to frown on any hint of political radicalism. Writing in the 1930s, for example, he asserted that Marxism stood ‘in opposition to European culture’, breaking, if not definitively, the ‘harmonious curve of its development’ (Levinas and Hand, 1990: 67). Elsewhere, he maintained that the Marxism which turned into Stalinism was the ‘greatest offense to the cause of humanity, for Marxism carried a hope for humanity; this was perhaps one of the greatest psychological shocks of the twentieth century’ (p. 217). His dominant tendency, however, was to crudely equate Marxist socialism with totalitarianism, Stalinism and the degenerated workers’ states of Eastern Europe which imploded before his death in 1995:
The end of socialism, in the horror of Stalinism, is the greatest spiritual crisis in modern Europe. Marxism represented a generosity, whatever way in which one understands the materialist doctrine which is its basis. There is in Marxism the recognition of the other; there is certainly the idea the other must himself struggle for recognition, that the other must become an egotist. But the noble hope consists in healing everything, in installing, beyond the chance of individual charity, a regime without evil. And the regime of charity becomes Stalinism and [complicitous] Hitlerian horror. (p. 81)
Strikingly, he has little to say about the actual functioning of such states or the adversaries which they had to deal with in the global order as it then existed. Neither do we find any discussion on the economic exploitation or inequality which is at the root of Marxist analysis (Garrett, 2009; 2010). Repeatedly, his engagement with Marxism and his account of its perversion is via literature and, more precisely, Vasily Grossman’s (1905–64) novel Life and Fate (Grossman, 2011).
Grossman witnessed ‘the end of a certain Europe, the definitive end of the hope of instituting charity in the guise of a regime, the end of socialist hope’ (pp. 80–81). In Life and Fate, the ‘only thing’ remaining is ‘individual goodness’ (p. 81). In this context, he endorses one of the statements by the character Ikonnikov: ‘There is neither God nor the Good, but there is goodness’ – which is also my thesis’ (p. 89). However, Levinas also draws on the novel to comment, in a more encompassing way, on the problems which result, for him, if the state – any state – intervenes in the ‘lifeworld’ (Hayes and Houston, 2007). He shares what he views as Grossman’s understanding that
the little act of goodness (la petite bonté) from one person to his neighbour is lost and deformed as soon as it seeks organization and universality and system, as soon as it opts for doctrine, a treatise of politics and theology, a party, a state, and even a church. (pp. 206–7)
This perceived dynamic results in his being ‘very cautious about ideological socialism’ (p. 136). When an interviewer suggested that the ‘rule of money and the extension of business values’ might serve to contaminate the relationship with the ‘Other’, Levinas merely retorted that there is an ‘ethical significance to money and … it can contribute to a humanization of the world’ (p. 184). His preferred form of society appears to be a capitalist ‘liberal society’ rhetorically aspired to by those opposing ‘totalitarianism’ during the period of the Cold War (p. 185).
Levinas and the under-theorisation of the State
Levinas is willing to envisage the state playing a role in assisting our determining the priority of competing claims. Who is the prime ‘Other’ is not always readily apparent and immediately discernible in a world of multiple and conflicting demands and desires. Hence, it is implied that the state can help the ethical actor in arriving at appropriate determinations as to where responsibility should lie. For example, if this understanding is attached to social work with children and families, practitioners are frequently confronted by a plethora of often competing perspectives on how to address a particular difficulty. Although, it does not tidily resolve ethically complex matters, the state seeks to structure and hierarchize the nature of engagements in child and family social work by laying down that practitioners should be guided by the understanding that the welfare of the child is ‘paramount’. If matters are placed before the courts, judges decide what is in the best interests of the child because the law dictates, in effect, that the child is the focal figure, the key ‘Other’. More mundanely, if ‘case’ allocation and ‘case’ weighting systems are administrative devices informed by risk and rationing discourses, they are also, in part, ethical exercises partly driven by the need to ascertain who is the prime ‘Other’.
However, the state – in the shape of, for example, social work – is not merely a technical and neutral apparatus which becomes operative to simply resolve ethical quandaries. The wider and rooted imperatives of the state, and the nature of its authority and legitimacy, are embedded in historical contexts and are determined by the interests which it ultimately serves (Bourdieu, 2014). In the current period, for example, the state tends to act as a vehicle to maintain the interests of neoliberal capitalism (Harvey, 2005; Garrett, 2013). In our contemporary world, the state is also responsible for othering – creating, sustaining and maintaining an array of ‘Others’ who exist in various forms of chronic marginality (Wacquant, 2007). The state is, in short, an engine of structural discrimination and this is apparent in how it intervenes to delineate how particular ‘Others’ will or should be responded to and dealt with. For example, since 2010, the French state has banned the ‘dissolution of the face [so central, as we have seen, to Levinas’s philosophy] in public space’, and this has specifically restricted, as it was intended to, the cultural and religious choices of some female followers of Islam (Mondon, 2015: 16).
As Bourdieu (1991: 236) adumbrates, in the ‘labour of categorization’ and the delineation of, for example, social problems, the state fulfils an especially significant and pivotal role. He explains that each ‘society, at each moment, elaborates a body of social problems taken to be legitimate, worthy of being debated, of being made public and sometimes officialised and, in a sense guaranteed by the state’ (in Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2004: 236, original emphases). In
reality and in people’s minds [the state] imposes all the fundamental principles of classification – sex, age, ‘competence’, etc – through the imposition of divisions into social categories … It is the source of symbolic efficacy … [It] sets up durable and often definitive symbolic differences, universally recognized within its area of authority. (Bourdieu, 2000: 175)
If we briefly revisit the issue of homelessness, it is clear that in the United Kingdom the state’s primary political actors have worked hard to create and consolidate the idea that homeless people are responsible for ‘anti-social behaviour’ and an array of other threats to civil order within public places. Much of this antipathy has circulated around the figure of the ‘beggar’. Over 20 years ago, the Conservative Prime Minister John Major endeavoured to focus attention on the behaviour of those who were, it was maintained, unsettling, even harassing members of the public. Later, his successor Tony Blair singled out beggars for criticism, censure and sanctions (Home Office, 2003: 47). Elsewhere, in his classic City of Quartz, Mike Davis (1990) charted how the use of civic space was shrinking for homeless people in Los Angeles and other Californian cities. Aided by local state planning strategies and private financing initiatives, architecture – and even the design of park benches – was purposefully crafted and styled in ways to prevent homeless citizens from resting, sleeping and sheltering. Subsequently, such techniques, along with more punitive attitudes and forms of behaviour management, have become more common in cities elsewhere. The phenomenon of ‘defensive’ or ‘disciplinary’ architecture can be interpreted as ‘a sort of unkindness that is considered, designed, approved, funded and made real with the explicit motive to exclude and harass’ (Andreou, 2015: 5).
The state is also empowered to constrain and limit the ability of social workers and related professionals to foster more equitable and democratic spaces for progressive social change. Perhaps this dimension is insufficiently emphasised in Amy Rossiter’s thoughtful articulation of Levinas’s work. She maintains that his philosophical perspective could make social workers more attentive to the ‘utter uniqueness’ of specific encounters with service users (Rossiter, 2011: 985). This means that
I must refrain from treating the other person as an extension of my categories, my theories, my habitual or learned ways of perceiving others … I must refrain from seeing the person through any system of human thought because when I use my categories to ‘know’ the other person, I treat him or her as an extension of my knowing.
Clearly, such radical receptiveness and openness might imbue social work interactions with new insights and capacities to promote more democratic practices. Such orientations might also prompt fresh approaches to marginalised populations, such as ‘birth mothers’ who are routinely and unreflectively subject, again and again, to the same form of punitive interventions (see also Broadhurst et al., 2015). Nevertheless, in terms of the lived realities of day-to-day practices, particularly during a period of emboldened neoliberalism, such approaches have to confront an array of obstacles. More fundamentally, a core aspect of the social work task is to assess and to situate people within ‘existing conceptual schema’ (Rossiter, 2011: 985). The more stultifying character of such endeavours has become more marked in recent years because of social work’s ‘electronic’ or ‘e’ turn (Garrett, 2005) and the proliferation of templates and schedules across a range of practice settings (White et al., 2009). In court settings also practitioners have to present ‘cases’ in which the intention is to extinguish ambiguity and call for judgments, relating to children, which are rooted in pre-existing state definitions circulating around categories such as ‘abuse’ and ‘neglect’. Courts are likely to be puzzled by the perspective, propounded by Ben-Ari and Strier (2010: 2160) in their promotion of Levinas, that the ‘relationship between myself and the “Other” is infinitely beyond my comprehension’. Indeed, a core function of the social work task is – in the form of assessments – to try to comprehend.
Levinas, the welfare state the preference for charity
If Levinas ‘recognizes the necessity of the state’, his ‘endorsement is hardly wholehearted’ (Alford, 2014: 260). In terms of social policy, it often appears that his preference is for ‘charity’ rather than ‘welfare state’. Chronologically, charity precedes the state:
Charity is a Christian term, but is also a general biblical term: the word hesed signifies precisely charity or mercy. There is this appeal to mercy behind justice: this is how the necessity of the State is not able to exclude charity. (Original emphases, p. 69)
For Levinas, individual charity appears to promote a superior type of human interaction and is preferable to any generated by the state in the form of social or welfare provision (see also, in this context, Garrett, 2015c). The latter is considered a ‘supplement’ to forms of engagement sparked by acts of ‘interpersonal responsibility’ (p. 67). This form of reasoning appears to echo that of the German ordoliberals, who so captivated Foucault (2008), in their endeavours to define and limit the role of the state in the period following World War II.
Moreover, with Levinas, the ‘Other’ who is the recipient of charity is frequently and retrogressively depicted as a desolate, needy and stricken figure. The ‘Other is vulnerable, at one’s mercy’ (Korhonen, 2008: 461). Levinas often refers to the ‘widow, the orphan, the stranger and the beggar’ (Levinas, in Hand, 1989: 251) – in short, prime signifiers of abjection in charity discourses over centuries (Woodroofe, 1962). What tends, therefore, to be absent in his evocations is the ‘Other’ who is rebellious, resistant, and insubordinate. The ‘face’, in short, always seems to be passive and pitiful, bereft, lacking rights and entitlements. As he confides, the ‘Other’ concerns him ‘in all his material misery. It is a matter… of nourishing him, of clothing him. It is exactly the biblical assertion: Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty, give shelter to the shelterless’ (p. 52). Somewhat harshly, it could be argued that the philosophy of Levinas is a philosophy for the era of food banks (Perry et al., 2014); a body of ideas – an ideology – that risks providing comfort and gentle encouragement to those irritated by the continuance of a ‘costly’ welfare state and who would entirely prefer that the ‘poor’ be reliant on more personalised forms of charitable assistance provided by well-meaning, affluent and kindly individuals. This is a ‘politics of pity’ (McNay, 2014: 31), whereas as the IFSW code hints, what is required is a politics aspiring to eradicate economic inequalities.
Conclusion
Having briefly outlined a number of Levinas’s main ideas and themes, the discussion dwelt on four interrelated conceptual and political problems. First, although Levinas proposed the centrality of the ‘Other’ within his ethical framework, he provides insufficient detail in terms of how this might shape one’s behaviour. More fundamentally, the encounter with the ‘Other’ is untethered from economic and sociological moorings. In contrast, sociologists, such as Pierre Bourdieu, provide much more rounded accounts of human interactions. The second criticism suggested that Levinas’s promoters in the social work literature fail to examine and historically situate the philosopher’s own contribution. In this context, it was argued that his antipathy to Marxism and his conflating of Marxism with Stalinism is redolent of the politics of the Cold War spanning, with varying degrees of intensity, the years between the end of World War II until the late 1980s. A third objection to the usefulness of Levinas for ‘critical social work’ (Rossiter, 2011: 993) is the manifest under-theorisation of the state. Here, it was maintained that the state, serving particular class interests, does not simply aid the ethical actor in neutrally defining the prime ‘Other’, it is also a force which produces, regulates and sustains marginality (Garrett, 2015d). Finally, it is apparent that Levinas had only a tepid enthusiasm for the role of the state in alleviating hardship and material need. Indeed, his perceptions share certain affinities with neoliberal thinkers keen to restrict and limit the functions of the state. This is another factor elided by his proponents, but it remains highly problematic given most social work practitioners operate within presently embattled welfare states providing services to a multitude of people who are dependent on such support to safeguard their well-being. Levinas often appears to favour ‘charity’ and, within this discourse, his evocation of the ‘Other’ connotes a timeless, abject and passive figure. Rarely, do we have the sense that the ‘Other’ being a vibrant, resisting figure. Indeed, the ethics of Levinas are an ethics entirely attuned to the era of food banks, and complicit with neoliberal welfare retrenchment.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.