Tackling Social Exclusion

Abstract

The opening words of the 1999 report of the government's Social Exclusion Unit, Bringing Britain Together announced that it met its remit to report to the Prime Minister on how to: ‘develop integrated and sustainable approaches to the problems of the worst housing estates, including crime, drugs, unemployment, community breakdown, and bad schools etc.’ In other words the Social Exclusion Unit was instructed to take a problem-solving approach to the issue. This approach meant that the development of an inclusive society would be understood implicitly in terms of dealing with those areas that are perceived as problems. This seems to suggest that social exclusion ‘just happens’ to people who ‘suffer from’ a collection of problems. The agent or agents of this exclusion are rendered invisible by the very linguistic structure of the definition. This paper argues that it is vital to envisage the agents and victims of exclusion and to describe it in terms of the relationship of face to face. A critique drawing upon the insights of Emmanuel Levinas would refuse to allow us to reduce the otherness of the socially excluded to a project defined in the terms of those who exercise power in social relations. Nor would it allow a definition of social exclusion in terms of it being either ‘their’ problem or the consequence of some impersonal force. A theological critique might lead us to argue that the whole project of problem solving when applied to persons is in and of itself highly suspect. Thus the paper concludes by considering what shape might develop from the bringing of insights from philosophical and theological discourses to this perception of social exclusion. It seeks to argue for a radical passivity before the face of the Other (that is in this case those who live in urban housing estates) arguing that those who engage with social exclusion, the ‘name’ that has been given to this face, are first summoned by the Other to a relationship of total responsibility which rejects the reductionist project of the controlling ‘I’.