I Can Only Imagine: Empathy as Kinesthetic Act
Catherine Heiner, Middle Tennessee State University
As the sun sets on a gray, drizzly Seattle evening, I plod along with a small gaggle of graduate students across the University of Washington. Scott Magelssen, the professor who has been leading us on an informal “dark tour” of campus, stops us under a tree by the Suzzallo and Allen libraries in front of an unassuming block of granite. It stands about two feet high from the ground, and Scott goes on to tell us that it’s an art installation. “It’s called Blocked Out,” he begins. “This piece is meant as an acknowledgement of those who have been historically excluded from academic spaces.” He pauses, leaning over to flick rainwater out of the two footprints imprinted on the top of the block. “These footprints evoke multiple perspectives—the space that should have been made for BIPOC populations at the university, as well as the historical reference to slavery auction blocks, as well as the minoritarian bodies put on display during the World’s Fair in 1902. By placing this art piece here, you can imagine what the vantage point might offer by when a person is standing on these footprints. What might you see differently when standing on the block?”
The small step attached to the side of the block seems to invite the act of climbing onto the installation, but even without the physical act Scott’s provocation proves useful in imagining the possible sensations. Tonight, the granite is particularly cold and unforgiving, and I shiver to think how it might feel under my feet. As I consider Scott’s description of the installation, I return to its original purpose—creating a space for the communities who feel excluded within the realm of the university. Linking the sensory elements of the rain, the stone, and the vantage point, with its metaphorical meaning, Blocked Out requires a level of engagement and reflection from those who encounter it. I argue here that Blocked Out provides an opportunity for the onlookers to engage empathy in a way that appeals to the physical and the sensory in addition to the intellectual exercise of empathizing. Rather than relying on an act of the imagination to appeal to the audience’s empathy—to imagine what another person must be thinking or feeling—the sensory experience of Blocked Out suggests a physical, kinesthetic response. What does it mean to stand on this block, and what kind of space does it create?
Installed in 2005 on the University of Washington campus, Blocked Out initially began as a collaboration between students Jaebadiah Gardner and Sumona Das Gupta as a recognition for the ways they felt excluded within the university. Nearby the site that Blocked Out would come to occupy stands Suzzallo Library, perhaps one of the most recognizable buildings on campus, a building which includes eighteen terra-cotta figures of significant scholars. “All men,” Gardner reflected in a UW publication. “Virtually all European. All people who have been canonized within academia. […] This is what everybody sees when they come to campus for the first time. Every tour stops in front of Suzzallo—‘Here it is. What do you think?’ And I think ‘I’m not in here. Or my family, or my friends.’” (McHenry, 2005).[1] Kurt Kiefer, the campus art administrator at the time spoke to Gardner and Gupta about the campus not feeling comfortable or welcoming to students of color. In addressing their concerns, Kiefer asked “is this about image-making—about the fact that there aren’t images of significant people of color on campus? Or is it about place-making? Is it that there aren’t enough places that are comfortable?” (qtd. in McHenry, 2005, n.p.).
This line of questioning speaks to an approach based in the sensory in an attempt to clarify what students of color see in addition to the affect of spaces that they occupy. The discomfort of students of color that Gupta and Gardner identified shaped the creation of Blocked Out, and the administration attempted to articulate how to best navigate that affect. Empathizing with students of color on the UW campus required not just intellectually imagining into their situations, but also considering the physiological discomfort of existing in these academic spaces. Often evoked in conjunction with sympathy, empathy reframes the dynamic between two parties in sharing emotion. Sympathy requires that individuals “feel for” or “feel with” another, but as argued by Sara Ahmed, it is predicated on personal emotional awareness “insofar as one feels ‘about’ their feelings in the first place” (Ahmed, 2014, 41n9, emphasis in original).
Alternatively, empathy addresses the ways that ‘feeling with’ another changes both parties, as it evolved as a term to “register a changing experience of physicality that, in turn, influenced how one felt another’s feelings” (Foster, 2011, 129). In conflating the two experiences, both sympathy and empathy are typically associated with the imaginative practice of stepping into someone else’s shoes. In a 2018 article, The New York Times even included potential activities to practice and try being more empathetic since this cognitive approach frequently fell short (Miller, 2018). I similarly engage the sensory and kinesthetic approaches to empathy to recontextualize the experience of empathizing with others. Wanda Strukus defines kinesthetic empathy as “the feeling of sharing another person’s movement, or vicariously experiencing another person’s movement simply by watching” (2011, p. 89), and Dee Reynolds suggests that it “can have the function of facilitating a mutual understanding, for example, by mediating interpretation of another’s thoughts or motivations” (2012, p. 124). Kinesthetic empathy relies on the audience’s experience of their own embodied nature, where witnessing the action of another body results in “an automatic, involuntary, kinesthetic response of one body to another” (Strukus, 2011, p. 89). Although we may experience affects and feelings within ourselves as individuals, the transmission and flexibilities of these sensations often come as a result of our communities and relationships. The result—Blocked Out as an art installation that remains on campus eighteen years later—similarly evokes the sensory and kinesthetic aspects of empathy though the potential reorienting of bodies and objects in space.
In this essay, I place kinesthetic empathy in conversation with sensory rhetoric in order to further develop connections between the physical experiences of emotions—including those that move us with, towards, or alongside others—and the cognitive processes of imagining into an experience that is not ours. Being able to articulate the physical experiences and sensations that come along with empathy allows for a more nuanced understanding of how empathy can bridge the divide between communities. Blocked Out functions as a useful way to consider empathy as something that is both cognitively imagined (considering who is represented and honored with the installation) as well as kinesthetically experienced (in the invitation to interact with the art to change one’s physical orientation).
Moved by Others
In order to think around empathy, it is useful to consider the ways feelings, emotions, and affects themselves function and circulate. For the purposes of this piece, I borrow from Theresa Brennan’s definition of these terms, wherein “feelings” refer to sensory stimuli and the interpretation of these reactions, resulting in “sensations that have found the right match in words” (Brennan, 2005, p. 5). On the other hand, Brennan defines affects (or synonymously, emotions) as related to “the physiological shift accompanying a judgement” (2005, p. 5). Affects, as argued by Brennan, “are material, physiological things,” making them deeply tied to the physical sensations of having a body (2005, p. 6). It is only after we process these sensations and link them with language that they transition toward feelings. Although we experience affects and feelings within the individual, Brennan identifies that “the transmission of affect means that we are not self-contained in terms of our energies. There is no secure distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘environment’” (2005, p. 6). For students of color on the UW campus, a pervasive affect of discomfort of a lack of belonging would ultimately impact the overall environment among the student body. Or, as one team member who participated in creating Blocked Out observed, “the numbers reflect the fact that if your campus has a better climate for people of color, they’re more likely to come and more likely to stay” (qtd. in McHenry, 2005, n.p.).
As we experience affects as individuals, these sensory experiences can also impact how we feel in relation to our communities and how we attach within these communities. Debra Hawhee makes a similar argument in relation to the sensorium of rhetoric, suggesting that the sensorium, “that excitable point of conjoining, is the corporeal limn that guides sensory perception,” which further “names a locus of feeling, and yet that locus is not confined to presumed bodily boundaries” (2015, p. 5). In addition to experiencing stimuli through physical means—including touch, sight, or hearing—the sensorium can also be impacted by the transmission of affect. Not only does affect permeate the individual and the environment, but Sara Ahmed suggests that emotions both cause movement and attachment. Ahmed observes that “what moves us, what makes us feel, is also that which holds us in place, or gives us a dwelling place. Hence movement does not cut the body off from the ‘where’ of its inhabitance but connects bodies to other bodies: attachment takes place through movement, through being moved by the proximity of others” (2014, p. 11). Movement becomes both literal and figurative in relation to the affective, making it something that we can experience internally through emotions and physically by how we navigate the world.
The question of empathy becomes a particularly sticky point of contact for affects, however, due to both the imaginative leap of extending oneself into the experience of another, and the sensory experience that may stem from such an act. Unlike sympathy, that suggests connection could be achieved with judgment and social generosity but requires no physical dimension between humans, empathy speaks to the ways art can “pull the observer into a direct experiencing of them” (Foster, 2011, p. 308). Empathy began as a sensory act, one that the observer experiences physically and cognitively in order to relate more deeply to what they witness. As an artistic piece, Blocked Out follows in this tradition by creating a space on campus on behalf of students of color, as well as a literal, physical drawing in by inviting onlookers to interact with the piece.
Imagining Across the Boundary of Pain
After briefly explaining some of the background about Blocked Out to our little tour group, Scott pauses and invites us to take in the second element present in the installation. “Even if you’re not on the block, if you face that direction, you can see these curved, sort of, benches,” he tells us, gesturing toward the stone formations just in front of us. “Now, if you were looking from a different angle, from up above, like in a plane or helicopter, you would see that those benches actually make the shape of an ear, suggesting someone listening to whomever is on the block. So it’s not just the place to stand, but also, creating a space to listen and hear those messages.”
The challenge with seeking empathy often lies in the ability to effectively communicate pain and harm. To invite empathy is to articulate personal pain in a way that pulls the audience toward these emotional and physical experiences, despite how uncomfortable or distressing this might be for the listeners. Sarah Ahmed utilizes the term “sociology of pain” to describe the ethics that move us closer to others, where the surfaces between individuals can touch and feel “the trace of your pain on the surface of your body” (2014, p. 31). Ahmed goes on to explain that operating through the sociology of pain requires that “I must act about that which I cannot know, rather than act insofar as I know. I am moved by what does not belong to me” (2014, p. 31). Of course, this imaginative leap also opens up the possibility of uncertainty for those who empathize—if this is not our own pain, then can we truly relate to those that suffer? A lack of knowledge or first-hand experiences may cause our empathy to fall flat. Similarly, a paternalistic assumption that we can truly know the experience of another may simply result in further miscommunication and misunderstanding. Our attempts to move toward the pain of another may only result in skepticism about the validity of this pain, or as Elaine Scarry argues, “to have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.” (1985, p. 13). By attending to our own physical, kinesthetic, and sensory experiences, we can link the desire to feel on behalf of others while recognizing the limits of our first-hand knowledge.
Overcoming this doubt can make the desire for empathy feel isolating rather than considerate. In her memoir, playwright Sarah Ruhl (2021) describes moments when friends and colleagues would respond to stories of her struggles by stating, “I can only imagine.” While these reactions may appear on the surface to honor the burden of pain by indicating how difficult the burden is, the impact makes it quite isolating. Even worse, Ruhl points to responses of “I cannot imagine what you are going through” as particularly harmful—despite the fact that she lives through this pain, those she talks to cannot attempt to even imagine it. When attempting to express her frustration at these reactions, Ruhl questions “don’t we need to cross over? Is this not a moral imperative for art, but also for social discourse? Don’t we need to imagine people different from ourselves, people whose experiences we can only imagine?” (2021, p. 163). While the act of imagining functions as a useful starting point, relying on empathy as a cognitive act makes it difficult to fully engage in this sociology of pain. Without attending to our own bodies through the sensory, empathizing functions only as a thought exercise rather than an active attempt to be moved closer to others.
To further complicate matters, even attempting to fully describe or articulate empathy requires a negotiation among a number of emotional and cognitive phenomena. According to C. Daniel Batson (2009), empathy often arises as a response to two different questions—how one might know what another person is thinking and feeling, and what leads one person to respond with sensitivity and care to the suffering of another. In clarifying particular uses of the term empathy, Batson goes on to identify eight phenomena that in capacity have been defined as acts of empathy before relating them to these primary questions. When considering how one might know what another person is thinking or feeling, Batson suggests one approach that “by intuiting and projecting oneself into the other’s situation or by imagining how one would think and feel in the other’s place, one comes to feel as the other feels, and knowledge of one’s own feelings enables one to know—or to believe one knows—how the other feels” (2009, p. 9). This approach relies on the imaginative skill to project oneself into the situation of the other in order to ultimately relate to their feelings. (Or, framed in terms of Ruhl’s reflections on these situations, “well, you could try. You could try to imagine” (2021, p. 162).) On the other hand, Batson also identifies another proposal, that “by automatically adopting the posture or matching the neural responses of the other, one comes to feel as the other feels, which enables one to know how the other feels” (2009, p. 9). Rather than focusing primarily on cognition and imagination to access empathy, this proposal emphasizes the ways that embodied and physical reactions can cultivate a sense of empathy toward the other. Batson indicates a certain amount of skepticism with this approach, stating that these moments of “neural response matching” or “motor mimicry” as a source of all empathy “seems to be an overestimation of their role,” due to the fact that “neural representations do not always and automatically lead to feelings” (2009, p. 5).
Still, emotions—including empathy—are embodied experiences. We experience them in and through physical sensations. As Bill Hughs observes, there is “no escaping recognition of the currents of emotion that circulate our embodied social lives like the weather systems bombarding our experience with wind and rain and sun. Emotions are, of course, bodily forms of knowing, corporeal moments of sensation” (2021, p. 67). Despite Batson’s skepticism that motor mimicry alone provides the entire basis for empathy, attending to the sensory experience of empathizing through kinesthetic responses suggests a path beyond simply imagining the experience of the other. Or, as previously referenced in the work of Sarah Ahmed, kinesthetic empathy can offer the opportunity to “be moved by that which does not belong to me” in a physical sense—making it a more literal and embodied process.
Exclusion, Exploitation, and Empathy
In exploring this intersection between empathy as both imaginative act and physically experienced sensation, I return to Blocked Out. Given that the installation has been described as “a complex collection of symbols, inviting participation and interpretation,” (McHenry, 2005, np), at first glance it may seem unclear if Blocked Out invites any appeal toward empathy. Upon first glance, the installation is fairly unobtrusive, and had Scott not drawn our attention to it, I likely wouldn’t have noticed it at all. (Indeed, even framing it in the context of “dark tourism,” which typically includes a reorienting toward the unnoticed, the unexpected, and the uncommon, suggests that Blocked Out has been assimilated as simply part of the background on campus rather than an active site of engagement.) Still, there is something about the simplicity of it—the step placed next to the block, making it easier to climb up on it, the ear of rounded benches that one would face by standing on the footprints—that speaks to the urge to be moved by that which does not belong to me.
Should this collection of symbols appear unclear in their meaning, reading the dedication on the small plaque nearby assists in clearing up the goals of the installation. “Dedicated to those who are excluded from the house they were exploited to create,” it reads at the top. More than just image-making or place-making as the UW administration initially questioned of the piece, Blocked Out invites a kinesthetic engagement toward empathy. Who has been exploited from the “house” of higher education? Who has been exploited in order to establish this institution? And how might onlookers be moved—literally and figuratively—by Blocked Out?
In the description of the art installation, one UW publication associated the image of the block with “a base without a statue,” and “an auction block from which slaves have been sold,” and “a platform from which people have been displayed.” (McHenry, 2005, np). While the administration initially questioned how an installation would make students of color feel more comfortable, standing on the block seems to create the opposite sensory experience, particularly for individuals tasked with empathizing. In considering how this operates at a rhetorical level, Stephanie Larson (2021) argues that
when people use their bodies to articulate violence, however, they draw upon alternative communicative frameworks to express the experience of harm from a perspective grounded in these exact feelings. […] Language leaves felt residue; Belief is sensed in the gut; Persuasion is never an entirely rational operation that acts outside of the physical body (p. 14).
The language of the dedication, particularly the language related to exploitation and exclusion, offers one opening for onlookers to imagine and empathize. The alternative frameworks that Gardner and Gupta take up in this art piece highlight the sensory experience of taking up space after having been excluded. Actively considering this sensation in tandem with the dedication offers a sensory and kinesthetic reaction based in empathizing with those the installation is dedicated to. Furthermore, to interact with Blocked Out is to understand the ways that meaning is placed on bodies in specific contexts, and the meaning of this block changes dramatically depending on the identity of the onlooker who is moved to interact with it. Coupled with the dedication, Blocked Out becomes a site of possibility where empathy functions both as an act of imagination and a physical and kinesthetic act.
It would be possible to see Blocked Out as a successful site of kinesthetic empathy. By encouraging onlookers to participate in the sensory experience of the art piece, they open themselves up the possibility of being moved by that which does not belong to them. It might encourage a moment of reflection and imagining who the piece is dedicated to, and what communities continue to be exploited by institutions like higher education. But what else should empathy move us to do? Even as Gupta and Gardener initially began their project as a way to express their discomfort and hurt as students of color at a predominantly white institution, Blocked Out seeks acknowledgement of this pain.
Pain is often understood as a highly individual experience, as Sarah Ahmed (2014) describes that “it is because no one can know what it feels like to have my pain, but I want loved others to acknowledge how I feel. The solitariness of pain is intimately tied up with its implication in relation to others” (p. 29). In order to fully empathize, it is important to also fully recognize this pain—to feel, deeply and physically, the impacts of pain. In some cases, this pain can never be fully reconciled. Ahmed refers to these moments as “a demand for collective politics, as the politics not on the possibility of what we might be reconciled, but on learning to live with and beside each other, and yet we are not as one” (p. 39). Stephanie Larson makes a similar argument, suggesting that “witnessing the sensation of pain encourages us, or rather demands that we confront the inequity among bodies who move through public space. In other words, reckoning with justice and its limits requires moving beyond language” (2021, p. 17). The call to justice implicit in the dedication to Blocked Out asks onlookers to sensorily engage with the pain and discomfort for students of color in predominantly white institutions, and similarly confront the inequity of bodies within those spaces. Although this recognition may prove difficult for those of majoritarian identities (white, cis, heterosexual, Christian, etc.), the sensory components make empathizing more visceral and potentially more impactful.
Empathy as Dialogic Act
Just before our little tour group trundles into the rain toward the next stop, Scott takes a moment and grins at us. “Now, there’s one last thing,” he mentions, walking closer toward the collection of stones that make up the ear. “If you look carefully, you might notice how the ground isn’t level here,” he tells us as he walks, and sure enough we can see the ridges in the grass that he’s currently stepping over, “this is because, again, if you’re looking from above, you can see the sound waves created by whomever is standing there, as they radiate outwards, and these waves in the grass represent the reverberation of the sound, of what they’re saying, and the lasting impact.”
So what is to be done once empathy has been achieved? Once empathy moves us toward the pain of others, how has it reoriented us? What are the lasting reverberations that we might feel as a result of kinesthetic empathy? In addition to considering empathy as an imaginative act, and a kinesthetic/sensory act, I offer one final observation on the function of empathy—as a dialogic act. Building on the work of Lindsay B. Cummings (2016), empathy as a dialogic act suggests that empathy should not be considered a final goal or endpoint of a process. Rather, empathy opens up the possibility of further reflection by considering “not whether or not we empathized, but what empathy has led us to think and feel, and why” (Cummings, 2016, p. 194, emphasis in original). Within this framework, empathy encompasses more than simply understanding the feelings and emotions of someone else. It is a question of how the act of empathizing has altered our own points of view and perspectives.
Making empathy a sensory and kinesthetic act rather than relying entirely on imagination and cognition may provide deeper insight toward what empathy causes us to think and feel. Just as Larson argues that persuasion is never entirely rational or operates outside of the physical body, the sensory and kinesthetic reactions when empathizing can be insightful. While we may feel the desire to keep the sensations of discomfort at bay—particularly when empathizing with painful or harmful situations—the visceral nature of these reactions might move us more immediately, more directly to a place of understanding. Gupta described the relationship between these elements by explaining the transformation of the block from an auction block to a speaker’s block “because you have to speak out against racism and you have to speak loudly to even be heard. With the weight of history, it creates waves within the earth to show the impulse waves and the impulse of history and the effects it’s had on people of color and women currently” (Blocked Out display, 2005). Blocked Out shows the weight of history through a physical manifestation—an alteration that impacts even the ground that we move across.
When reflecting on the creation of Blocked Out, Gardner noted that the intention of the piece was not to carry negative feeling with it forever. He described the cognitive dissonance of seeing children playing on the installation while knowing the block itself was meant to represent commodification and bondage throughout history. Despite this initial conflict, he ultimately viewed it as a positive change, and that “it hits home for me to see that these kids can step on this piece of history and have a good time with it and enjoy it and not always have it be a negative thing or a negative perspective” (Blocked Out display, 2005). For the college students who would encounter this installation on a more regular basis, Gardner considered Blocked Out as a site of recognition. Blocked Out meant more than a call to empathize with those who had gone before, those who had been exploited and excluded from the hallowed halls of higher education. It was also a call toward futurity and building upon this foundation of empathy toward a larger goal. “I felt like we did something,” Gardner stated, “like we accomplished something by having these kids here who will hopefully get to college and when they get here, start thinking about, ‘Oh, that’s what I was standing on. I as standing on history. I was standing in someone else’s shoes’” (Blocked Out display, 2005).
[1] Quotes from both Gupta and Gardner are documented in Eric McHenry’s coverage of Blocked Out in the September 2005 edition of the University of Washington Magazine.
References
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Catherine Heiner received her Ph.D. in Theatre History and Performance Studies from the University of Washington. She has presented research at the American Society for Theatre Research annual conference as well as the Mid-America Theatre Conference, and as a dramaturg, she has worked on productions of The Oresteia (Ellen McLaughlin), The Importance of Being Earnest, American Idiot, and the world premiere of An Evening with Two Awful Men. Her research includes analyzing staged moments of trauma utilizing theories of affect, and she currently teaches in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Middle Tennessee State University.