Said to function rather as an anti governmental

said to function rather as an anti-governmental technology, concerned with emancipation from particular systems of power, or from the effects of the deployment of particular techniques of
power.25 Alongside its staunch supporters, the politics of pity also has harsh critics who question its political potential.
Wendy Brown has insightfully warned
that a politics of pity ‘delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and
events as responsible’
.26 Social constructivists, emphasising that emotions are themselves shaped by social institutions, social systems and power relations,27 are also critical
of the transformative role that emotions can play. What suffering becomes recognised in the public domain is a question of struggle and construction and not of inherent ‘merit’. Even one of
the most astute defenders of a politics of pity, Luc Boltanski, felt it necessary to formulate its downsides: ‘emotions can be discredited as foundations and symptoms of a moral position due to
their circumstantial character—bound as they are with a particular situation in which they are tethered to the real or imaginary presence of a particular unfortunate—which does not enable or
construct a moral duty with general validity’.28 Yet, all these objections can be thought to function merely as warnings about the efficacy of a governmental intervention. In one of the most
cogent theoretical treatments of pity, Boltanski engages with several of the tensions and criticisms of a politics of pity and translates such theoretical objections into practical injunctions to
strategise pity. I shall therefore follow his cartography of practices of pity to understand how pity functions for human trafficking. Boltanski acknowledges that suffering is socially constructed
and that certain types of suffering have surfaced in various epochs, while others have passed unnoticed. He translates this insight into a practical task for those who convey suffering: to make it
recognisable , to include it in a so-called repertoire of recognisable suffering. Thus the social construction of emotions is translated into a political struggle with Bourdieuean
undertones.
Boltanski rightly points out that ‘[w]ithin the realm of political struggles the conflict of beliefs
supporting pity corresponds to a conflict over the identification of the unfortunates whose cause is to
be judged politically worthy’
.29
The politics of pity therefore needs to configure suffering
as recognisable, something the spectators can identify and sympathise with
.
This socially constructed
aspect of suffering and emotional response is important inasmuch as expertise plays an important role
in training our sensibility as spectators and our emotional imagination and responsiveness. The
accusatory mode implied by a politics of pity is actually meant to reveal ‘a defect, flaw, a disorder, a
chaos, either in the organisation of society or in the constitution of the individual’
.30 Boltanski does not explicitly tackle