Look Back? In Anger. The Working Classes in the 20th Century: Compassion, Resentment, Indignation

• Autores: María Gómez Garrido
• Localización: On Resentment.: An Interdisciplinary Workshop on The History of Emotions, 26,27, 28 October, 2011 The Louis-Jeantet Auditorium, Geneva / coord. por Dolores Martín Moruno, Javier Moscoso Sarabia, Bernardino Fantini, 2011, pág. 9
• Idioma: español
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• Resumen

  • A close look at post 19 th century uses of resentment places us in front of a series of difficult paradoxes that any representation of this emotional experience poses from a political point of view. Following Nietzsche and Scheler, ressentiment refers to bitter feelings of anger and hatred that are nevertheless repressed. This emotion emerges in a power relationship in which those below feel totally impotent and overwhelmed by their situation.

    Being unable to act, they repress those bitter feelings. Nietzsche and Scheler's definitions of ressentiment are anti-social - the situation of those below is due to their own (in)abilities and not to the dynamics of the social structure. Nevertheless, they touch on important questions that traverse social research and its understanding of resentment these days.

    Central to their definition is the idea of suppression. Theirs is therefore a post 19 th psychological understanding of a subject that it is divided between what (s)he feels, expresses and does. In contrast to the passive character of ressentiment, many sociologists of collective mobilisations and other actions like vandalism have presumed resentment as the bases of these. On the other hand, resentment is often presented as a latent feeling that under certain circumstances can be given form in political actions of denunciation, or in more violent expressions of anger.

    The question of giving voice to this feeling entails a political dimension. If in the hands of Nitzsche and Scheler, ressentiment becomes a degrading emotion that betrays the unworthiness of those who embody it, Hume and Smith had considered a condition of justice that those who had suffered offence experienced resentment and made us feel it. Throughout the 20 th century resentment has been associated to the question of how to make visible this suffering - whether it was associated to a past humiliation and hidden in the form of trauma, or an injury present in daily life but hidden from political representation (Sennet and Cobb, 1972).

    When the humiliation is not atrocious (as in the historical cases of slavery, shoa, or the brutal repression of those defeated in the Spanish Civil War), then the experience of suffering is relative to a culture that presents as legitimate a series of aspirations, whereas the dynamics of society do not allow certain groups to achieve them.

    Robert Merton (1938) and Walter Runciman (1966) used the term relative deprivation to refer to this distressful feeling. Many cases of 20 th century resentment as lived by the inhabitants of western democracies in periods of peace involve a feeling of relative deprivation accompanied with actual experiences of mistreatment. Resentment is here related not as much to a past offence, as to a present and a future of unfulfilled expectations. How to deal with this suffering and what expression is most suitable for it has been a common concern around the situation of the working classes at least throughout the two thirds of the century.

    Following Boltanski's (1999) analytic distinction between denunciation and compassion, I focus on two different representations of the working class in the 20 th century: the workers photographic movement of the 1920s and 1930s and a series of sociological works of the 1960s and 1970s that emphasised the suffering of the working classes in daily life. The first put the accent on physical suffering, connected to a situation of exhausting work and a life of economic privation. Many of these photographs also create comparisons showing other social groups that, living in the same town, enjoy a world of richness. The sociological works of the 1960s and 1970s shift to a narration in which the "unpleasant and painful inner visceral sensations", as Scheler put it, are verbalised. These two forms of representation, which try to create a link between the individual bodies and the social states (Kleinman and Kleinman, 1994) show how fragile the line between denunciation and tenderheartedness compassion can be. When the suffering of a group is emphasised, there is an inflation of sentiments that can lead to immobilise both the victims (Antze and Lambeck, 1996) and the observers. On the other hand, a narrative of suffering and resentment can play a fundamental role in the constitution of a collective identity, as it has been common ground for ethnic minorities (Eyerman, 2004). This latter option, however, is hardly available to "the working class", as it lacks a founding narration, a mythical past associated to the persecution of a particular cultural group. The transformation of their suffering in indignation depends necessarily on investigation that can identify the persecutor - in other words, the active cause of their situation.