Soul-blindness, police orders and Black Lives Matter:
Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Rancière
Soul-blindness, police orders and Black Lives Matter:
Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Rancière
What does it mean to see someone as human, as a member of humankind? What kind of call for justice is it to demand that a group be seen as human beings? This article explores a fundamental kind of injustice: one of perception and how we respond to our perceptions. Drawing on Cavell, Wittgenstein and Rancière we elucidate “soul blindness” as a distinct and basic form of injustice. Rancière’s police orders and Cavell’s soul blindness are mutually constitutive; the undoing of police orders entails a politics of soul dawning. Soul dawning entails acknowledging the humanity of others without erasing difference. In the concluding section we consider white obliviousness to the Black Lives Matters (BLM) movement as a case of soul blindness. Part of the political import of BLM is its capacity to illustrate how practices of soul blindness in the U.S. constitute whiteness in a racialized police order.
739-763
Havercroft, Jonathan
929f9452-daf9-4859-9f59-88348846949a
Owen, David
9fc71bca-07d1-44af-9248-1b9545265a58
1 December 2016
Havercroft, Jonathan
929f9452-daf9-4859-9f59-88348846949a
Owen, David
9fc71bca-07d1-44af-9248-1b9545265a58
Havercroft, Jonathan and Owen, David
(2016)
Soul-blindness, police orders and Black Lives Matter:
Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Rancière.
Political Theory, 44 (6), .
(doi:10.1177/0090591716657857).
Abstract
What does it mean to see someone as human, as a member of humankind? What kind of call for justice is it to demand that a group be seen as human beings? This article explores a fundamental kind of injustice: one of perception and how we respond to our perceptions. Drawing on Cavell, Wittgenstein and Rancière we elucidate “soul blindness” as a distinct and basic form of injustice. Rancière’s police orders and Cavell’s soul blindness are mutually constitutive; the undoing of police orders entails a politics of soul dawning. Soul dawning entails acknowledging the humanity of others without erasing difference. In the concluding section we consider white obliviousness to the Black Lives Matters (BLM) movement as a case of soul blindness. Part of the political import of BLM is its capacity to illustrate how practices of soul blindness in the U.S. constitute whiteness in a racialized police order.
Text
SoulBlindnessPTFinalAcceptedVersion.pdf
- Accepted Manuscript
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Accepted/In Press date: 1 June 2016
e-pub ahead of print date: 3 August 2016
Published date: 1 December 2016
Organisations:
Politics & International Relations
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 396238
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/396238
ISSN: 0090-5917
PURE UUID: 7d692b5e-5483-4ca3-bff2-a09a4db94539
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Date deposited: 06 Jun 2016 11:00
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 05:37
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