Oppression and Responsibility: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory
168
Oppression and Responsibility: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory
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Overview
Combating homophobia, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination and violence in our society requires more than just focusing on the overt acts of prejudiced and abusive individuals. The very intelligibility of such acts, in fact, depends upon a background of shared beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that together form the context of social practices in which these acts come to have the meaning they do. This book, inspired by Wittgenstein as well as feminist and critical race theory, shines a critical light on this background in order to show that we all share more responsibility for the persistence of oppressive social practices than we commonly suppose—or than traditional moral theories that connect responsibility just with the actions, rights, and liberties of individuals would lead us to believe.
First sketching a nonessentialist view of rationality, and emphasizing the role of power relations, Peg O’Connor then examines in subsequent chapters the relationship between a variety of "foreground" actions and "background" practices: burnings of African American churches, hate speech, child sexual abuse, coming out as a gay or lesbian teenager, and racial integration of public and private spaces. These examples serve to illuminate when our "language games" reinforce oppression and when they allow possibilities for resistance. Attending to the background, O’Connor argues, can give us insight into ways of transforming the nature and meaning of foreground actions.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780271075792 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penn State University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/05/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 168 |
| File size: | 547 KB |
About the Author
Peg O'Connor is Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies and Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College and is coeditor of Feminist Interpretations of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Penn State, 2002).
Read an Excerpt
Oppression and Responsibility
a wittgensteinian approach to social practices and moral theoryBy peg o'connor
the pennsylvania state university press
Copyright © 2002 The Pennsylvania State UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0271022027
Chapter One
The Necessity of Practices and BackgroundsBackgrounds and Foregrounds
Recently, I visited a small museum that is part of the Smithsonian complex. The museum was featuring a special exhibit on using wood ecologically. I found myself drawn to a table with a top made of small squares of very dark wood. In the center of all these dark squares was one single square of very light wood. This square stood out beautifully against the darker background. I was enchanted with this table, especially the contrast between all the dark wood and the lone square of light wood. My eyes kept returning to that one light square because I thought it was the most beautiful piece of wood I had ever seen. I thought to myself that, of course, the artist must have intentionally highlighted this one piece of wood because it was the most beautiful, rarest, and probably the most expensive, too.
Or not. When I finally read the small placard about the artist and his motivation for this work, I knew I had taken it all hook, line, and sinker. My beautiful light wood was, in fact, birch, which is one of the most common woods in the United States. The dark wood, whichsurrounded this one common wood was mahogany, a valuable tropical hardwood. In making this table, the artist was intentionally playing with the viewers' assumptions about what is the most significant or striking or valuable aspect of a work. This work challenges us to see value differently in wood. Birch became valuable by its scarcity. The darker wood, by virtue of its framing the lighter wood, did not seem as valuable. I assumed the artist was highlighting the beauty of one piece of wood rather than highlighting the beauty of the dark wood. After reading the artist's own description of the table, I went back to continue looking. This time I did not see the dark wood as the backdrop framing the single square in the foreground, but as the foreground itself.
Nothing about the table had changed, but everything about it had changed. It was no longer a table in which only one piece of wood was highlighted; it was a table in which all the pieces but one were highlighted. The light piece could highlight the darker ones just as much as the darker ones could highlight the light one.
This experience struck a chord; it resonated with some of my philosophical work, which has focused on locating particular actions and beliefs against broader contexts. Backgrounds usually are taken to be those that set foreground objects in relief. Once thrown into relief, these items occupy our attention. The reason objects stand out, it is supposed, is that these objects have some value or significance which breaks out or goes beyond the background.
The relationships between foregrounds and backgrounds are not always clear; some things seem to move from the background into the foreground, while others fade into the background. We often think that what stands out in the foreground must be the most striking and significant, and therefore the most valuable. An object's movement into the background is sometimes seen as a reduction of value or significance. What is obscured or is not the center of attention is not as important as the objects in the foreground.
Throughout this book, I will work to show that backgrounds are significant because they provide the conditions of possibility and intelligibility. The account of intelligibility I advance is derived from the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In perhaps one of his most famous formulations, he asserts that meaning is use. On this view, words are animated with meaning by their use, and their use is fundamentally tied with the social practices of which they are a part. These social practices form nexuses, and these nexuses are what constitute our form of life or stream of life. Many of these social practices are oppressive, and in this book I examine some of these practices and the roles they play in our communal life. The rash of burnings of African-American churches in the South, and the meanings of these acts of terrorism, can only be understood by attending to the historical and contemporary context in which they occur. All acts of racism-ranging from the more overt to the subtle and "harmless"-must be taken together as forming an almost seamless background. This background of racism makes these burnings possible, gives them their meanings.
Attending to the backgrounds entails that parts of them stand out in clear relief. Parts of these backgrounds can stand out in relief when we look more closely at particular objects in the foreground. It is a mistake to attend to one to the exclusion of the other.
The Nature of Backgrounds
How should we understand the nature of backgrounds? Backgrounds, as Wittgenstein describes them in On Certainty and Philosophical Investigations, consist of various "facts of nature" (objects don't disappear when I turn my back on them, gravity will pull objects to the Earth), propositions ("The Earth is more than one hundred years old"), and practices, which I will discuss more explicitly below. They are the systems in which particular actions have their lives. For example, Wittgenstein discusses learning to count and being able to continue a sequence correctly. So, when given the command, "Add 2 beginning at 0," with a degree of confidence I start counting off "2, 4, 6 ... 1,000, 1,002...." If someone were to ask what I'm doing, I could say that I am counting by two. My actions would be understandable to that person. Similarly, if I worked in a cheese store and someone asked for a half pound of Robiola Lombardia, I would be able to cut that amount and set the appropriate price. In the background, making these activities possible and intelligible are practices dictating that we measure cheese by weight rather than square area and determine price by weight.
Wittgenstein's discussion of backgrounds is remarkably apolitical, which is partly a function of the kinds of examples he chooses (cheese, counting, reading) and the degree to which he develops them. But his examples can, with a bit of tweaking, become political. After all, fixing a price on an item only makes sense against a capitalist economy in which goods are bought and sold rather than bartered. As any Marxist will tell you, capitalism is predicated on the exploitation (and dehumanization) of workers.
These backgrounds as I am describing them are, in part, sets of power relations. These power relations are manifest in formal and informal social institutions as well as in personal relationships. Consider Wittgenstein's question and answer: "How could human behavior be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed together. What determines our judgments, our concepts and reactions is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see any action" (Z §657). This "hurly-burly" is infused with power relations that are in no way simply given. They are created, implemented, utilized, and deployed through our practices. Sexual abuse, battering, racism, homophobia, marital rape, and being closeted as queer are all practices that are part of this hurly-burly. These practices and the beliefs about them are parts of the background. The ability of Trent Lott to say that gays and lesbians are morally corrupt, deviant sinners who rank right up there with murderers and pedophiles, and many people's ability and willingness to hear (and agree) is a function not only of Lott's power as a U.S. senator but more importantly is a function of the power of homophobia. Homophobia and heterosexism have many forms of expression; their power has many faces. To subvert and change them, we must have a clear sense of how they work and constantly reinvent themselves.
When trying to make sense of a particular action or judgment, Wittgenstein warns us not to be overly myopic by focusing on it to the exclusion of the broader context-background-in which we make judgments and act. The intelligent Martian (who is still popular with philosophers) could not make any sense of my actions when I am working at the cheese counter. Furthermore, to choose a nontrivial example, the charges made by African-Americans that the church burnings in the South were the product of a racial conspiracy make little or no sense to people who are unfamiliar with the workings of racism in the United States, including many white people living in the United States.
Backgrounds are, quite importantly, plural; that is, there is not one seamless context against which all actions are to be understood. There are multiple, shifting backgrounds that change over time and place, sometimes rapidly, sometimes imperceptibly slowly. Furthermore, backgrounds are overlapping, gapped, and fissured; there are places in which more than one background framework is in place, and places where there seems to be no recognizable background against which to understand a foreground action. Backgrounds are weaves of practices; the design of the weave can change as its threads change.
The line between foregrounds and backgrounds is not absolute. What is background for some groups of people may be foreground for others. As I discuss in the next chapter, there are shifts between the categories.
The background, in short, is indeed the "rough ground" of which Wittgenstein speaks; it is bumpy, uneven, changing, yet stable. It is, above all, ripe with possibilities for transformation, for revisioning and reshaping. The background has such revolutionary potential precisely because it is a human construction; it is nothing apart from human social practices. We are always engaged with these backgrounds, and in attending to them we can clearly see the need for them to be transformed.
Attending to Backgrounds
What does it mean to turn our attention to the backgrounds-and why should we do it? Such a move is difficult for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they are often hidden from us in plain sight. As Wittgenstein says, "The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden from us because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something-because it is always before one's eyes.)" (PI§129). Day-to-day navigation in the world requires that we take much for granted-the meaning of stop signs, object permanency, and the nature of ostensive definition, for example. When, for some reason, we choose to pay attention to these utterly familiar features of the background, we are often left stymied, baffled, unable to go on. We have called into question the very ground on which our movement is made possible.
Things can be familiar in different ways. White people often cannot see racism and racist acts. Whites not having to see racism is a function of privilege; white people are not subject to oppression along race lines, and thus have not had to experience the harmful effects of a racist system. Rather, whites benefit from a racist system, though the privilege whites possess often makes itself invisible but not unfamiliar. As a friend bluntly pointed out to me while I was writing "Conspiracies and Connect the Dots," African-Americans were not the ones who needed to see the tape of Rodney King being beaten in order to be convinced that racism infuses many law enforcement agencies. White people needed such evidence to understand the ubiquity of racism. And even in the face of such evidence, many white people were eager to ask what Rodney King might have done to provoke such a reaction. This is evidence that whites' inability to see racism may not be so accidental and may, in some instances, be actively cultivated. Many whites who saw the riots in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the police officers took the riots to be evidence for the anger and fury of Black people, and not evidence for racism that fueled these violent outbursts. Racism became invisible for white people, replaced by images of the destruction wreaked by Black people on other Black people.
Other phenomena are familiar-thus invisible-for different reasons: they may be considered biologically necessary. Gender roles, including how one ought to act and which sex one ought to desire, are often taken to be natural in the sense that they are considered to be biological necessities rather than contingencies. Sexual dimorphism is presumed: one must be either male or female as well as either masculine or feminine. A person cannot be both male and female anymore than that person can be neither male nor female. But in fact, sex is no more a given than is gender. Babies born with ambiguous genitalia are often surgically "corrected" so that they can develop into the appropriate gender. One's sex must match one's gender. Acquiring a gender is an ongoing project in which one is constantly learning and internalizing a whole host of beliefs and judgments about the way a male or female person ought to be. These gender expectations are familiar because they are simply a given. We tend not to pay attention to that which is taken as fixed and therefore incapable of change.
Despite the difficulty, Wittgenstein argues that attending to the background is necessary because it enables us to understand the conditions for the intelligibility and meaning of our practices. I want to go further, to argue that attending to the background is necessary because many aspects of the background are anything but harmless and trivial; failing to challenge them means leaving the framework of oppressive systems intact. Oppressive practices are fused into the very framework of the background and are made invisible by their commonplace nature. Racism, sexism, homophobia, violence against women and children are all practices we are encouraged not to see, especially when doing so would reveal to us the relationship between oppression and privilege. One way Wittgenstein suggests one draw attention to the familiar is to make it strange. Politicizing and historicizing the familiar can make it strange; such undertakings shake up the fixed nature of certain systems like gender and race. Race, for example, has often historically been taken to have a biological basis, where skin color and other physical attributes are considered to be indicators of innate characteristics. This concept, however, has defied biological definition and verification. As Michael Omi and Howard Winant argue, race is "preeminently a sociohistorical concept. Racial categories and the meaning of race are given concrete expression by the specific social relations and specific historical context in which they are embedded."
Denying the biological underpinnings of race, while revealing the social elements of it, makes the notion of race no longer familiar in the way that it had been. Race is a political concept as well as an economic one, as is exemplified by the fact that Irish immigrants until the early twentieth century were classified as Black.
Another related way to make a phenomenon or practice strange is to take it out of its usual realm. The relations between husbands and wives often are said to belong in the private realm. Feminists have done much to challenge and undermine the public/private distinction and have located wife battering and marital rape against a broader social background in which sexism is pervasive. Marital rape and other forms of battering are economic issues as well. A woman who divorces her husband is likely to see her standard of living decrease significantly. In a custody battle with her husband, she may lose if she is deemed unfit. A woman can be unfit for a variety of reasons, including being a lesbian. In Ward v Ward, a 1993 custody case in Florida, a judge awarded custody of an eleven-year-old girl to her father, a convicted murderer, over her mother because she was a lesbian.
Drawing attention to familiar acts and practices is one way to make them strange, thereby politicizing them. Attending to these practices highlights parts of the background. Thus highlighted and revealed, these aspects of the background can be more thoroughly politicized in terms of how they make actions in the foreground possible and how this background is maintained and reinforced. Once politicized, it can be subverted and transformed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Oppression and Responsibility by peg o'connor Copyright © 2002 by The Pennsylvania State University
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Preface: Why Wittgenstein? | ix | |
| Acknowledgments | xiii | |
| Abbreviations | xv | |
| 1 | The Necessity of Practices and Backgrounds | 1 |
| 2 | The Stability of Rationality | 25 |
| 3 | Conspiracies and Connect the Dots: The Search for Motive in the Church Burnings | 41 |
| 4 | The Meaning of Assaultive Speech: Its Harmful Uses | 61 |
| 5 | Moving to New Boroughs: Transforming the World by Inventing Language Games | 81 |
| 6 | Lesbian Barroom Brawls: Racial Integration in the 1950s | 99 |
| 7 | If Everybody's Responsible, Then Nobody Is | 111 |
| Postscript: Contra Determinism and Fatalism | 135 | |
| Bibliography | 141 | |
| Index | 147 |