Nils is a Humboldt fellow at the Universität Hamburg and an incoming assistant professor at Uppsala Universitet. Most of his work concerns the intersection of ethics and aesthetics.
A post by Nils-Hennes Stear and Robin Zheng
Suppose you visualize punching a colleague, indulge a risqué sexual fantasy, or engage in blackface. Suppose further that, in doing so, you mean nothing by it, doing so in a spirit of free play. Finally, suppose no harmful consequences ensue. One might nonetheless wonder: is there something inherently wrong with so imagining? This is the question we attempt to answer in ‘Imagining in Oppressive Contexts’.
Robin Zheng is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Her research addresses questions of responsibility, solidarity, and injustice, among other things.
Our claim, very roughly, is that where these sorts of imaginings contribute to oppressive structures, they’re intrinsically ethically flawed. Where they don’t, they’re, for all we argue, morally okay, however vile the imagining might seem for other reasons. In doing so, we carve a middle path between 1) moralizing and 2) laissez-faire ethical views of the imagination that have become entrenched in the literature. Of course, the claim that contributing to oppression is bad is hardly headline news. So, the paper’s interest consists in showing that imaginings do this and how.
Our central testcase is blackface, a somewhat misunderstood practice of perennial interest in ethical discussions, both academic and lay. We provide a detailed philosophical case study of blackface that anchors the theorizing. Given the limited space here, however, we have to jettison this anchor.
To establish our claims, we set up various bits of theoretical machinery. Here they are, in dazzling brevity:
First, by ‘imagining’ we mean something akin to ‘fiction’ as used by aestheticians at least since Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe (Walton 1990) appeared. As we use the term, a private fantasy is an imagining (in the head), a novel is one (out in the world), and a game of cops & robbers is one too (head and world).
Second, we distinguish intrinsic and extrinsic properties of artworks, as aestheticians commonly do. Intrinsic properties are those pertaining directly to the artwork, such as the harmonic properties of Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up, rather than ancillary to it, such as the torment caused by Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. Crucially, intrinsic properties can be context-dependent. Astley’s horrendum opus is of its time, a property it has partly in virtue of the way other songs in the mid-80’s sounded. We apply this distinction mutatis mutandis to imaginings, so as to delineate the ethical contours of imaginings as such, rather than, say, their harmful aetiology or empirical effects.
Third, we distinguish between imaginings that fictively deploy attitudes and those that endorse them. When we see Ash order Pikachu to fight some other Pokémon in glorious battle, we’re not prescribed to see this as an endorsement of animal fighting generally (not on a straightforward reading, anyway). The attitude of excitement this imagining deploys is nonserious, lacking assertoric force; it’s fictive in not purporting to tell us anything about the real world. When someone imagines from the inside jumping from a plane to understand what invading Normandy was like, by contrast, the imagining does have assertoric force, presenting the imagined experience as veridical. The significance of this distinction is, among other things, this: whereas we take it for granted that imaginings endorsing unethical attitudes are ethically flawed, we want to learn whether imaginings merely fictively deploying them are.
Fourth, we argue that imaginings are analogous, though not identical, to Austinian speech acts. Just as utterances can be broken down into their context-dependent locutionary, perlocutionary, and illocutionary dimensions, so we can often distinguish an imagining’s context-dependent propositional content, its downstream effects, and the acts that engaging such imaginings constitute.
Finally, we adopt the widely endorsed view that oppression consists of a system of interlocking disadvantages that apply to members of socially defined groups, rather than individual or even widespread acts of domination as such.
With these pieces in play, we argue that some imaginings are intrinsically ethically flawed in virtue of merely fictively deploying attitudes that do one of three things: realize oppression, normalize it, or license oppressive behaviour. We describe these mechanisms now.
Imaginings realize oppression, we argue, by quite literally constituting it. As many social theorists point out, social structures and systems comprise ‘material’ and non-material portions. Patricia Hill Collins offers a particularly rich account of such structures comprising four separate domains of power that privilege some and disadvantage others (Collins 1990/2000). In addition to material domains concerning, for instance, systems of surveillance, bureaucracies, interpersonal abuse, and the distribution of material benefits and burdens, Collins also identifies the hegemonic domain. This domain comprises a glue of ‘commonsense ideas’: beliefs, representations, stereotypes, etc. that stand in a justificatory relation to the rest of the oppressive system. The various domains interlocking with one another and drawing from this ideological fount is what makes an oppressive system oppressive, rather than just horrible. A significant portion of the hegemonic domain consists of what Collins calls ‘controlling images’—portrayals of oppressed social groups that function to make their oppression seem natural and unavoidable. We argue that imaginings fictively deploying attitudes of this kind without disavowing them (as, say, satirical imaginings might) instantiate controlling images, constitute the hegemonic domain, and, in that sense, realize oppression.
If realizing oppression is something that imaginings do in virtue of their content—their locutionary dimension, as it were—normalizing and licensing oppression are things that speak to the relevant imaginings’ illocutionary dimension. They’re things one does constitutively with imaginings.
It’s in virtue of the justificatory function controlling images serve that imaginings deploying them also normalize oppression. Such imaginings dispose participants to acquiesce to oppressive social conditions, often implicitly. But while this is a kind of effect of the imagining, it’s not a causal effect. It’s a constitutive one. When someone orders a croissant at the bakery, they constitutively make something true of the world—namely, that they ordered a croissant. They do not cause this to be true. We argue that something similar happens when a person engages with imaginative content containing controlling images: by merely doing so, she makes such portrayals manifest in actual social life; she contributes to making it a fact that a social group is viewed in the way corresponding to the controlling image. The ubiquity and availability of these images, even when merely fictively deployed, is what makes oppressive relations appear normal and in no need of justification. Such imaginings function, we suggest, much as a desire path across an overgrown meadow does. Each rambler treading the path further establishes its normative force, until following the trodden path presents as the proper, and tramping through the grass as the improper, way to walk.
Finally, we argue that imaginings can be intrinsically ethically flawed when they licence oppressive behaviour. Here we take our cue from Mary Kate McGowan. In various works, McGowan has convincingly argued that norm-governed activities like conversations are ones in which any participant can place demands on others merely in virtue of participating in the activity (McGowan 2003, 2018, 2019). If, for instance, someone asks you what you ate for breakfast, she thereby licenses a narrow range of utterances that can count as appropriate ways to continue the conversation. Answering ‘Cap’n Crunch’ would be appropriate. Answering with the opening lyrics to Never Gonna Give You Up, by contrast, wouldn’t.
McGowan argues that oppressive systems resemble conversations in setting general norms of unjust treatment. Further, these norms can be brought to bear on individual social interactions. In other words, specific actions are licensed by a general norm’s being applied to a particular micro-context. Someone reeling off sexist jokes in the workplace, for instance, thereby alters the norms governing that social interaction. He makes it appropriate for colleagues to demean women by, for instance, laughing or contributing jokes of their own. The joke-telling constitutes rather than straightforwardly causes oppression by enacting norms that render sexist treatment socially appropriate in that interaction. It does this regardless of whether his colleagues actually join in, or the jokes actually lead to unjust treatment. We extend this analysis to imaginings. By bringing the force of an oppressive system to bear on a particular micro-context, imaginings can similarly license oppressive behaviour.
Is it morally criticizable to engage in imaginings that merely fictively deploy unethical attitudes then? Yes and no. If the attitudes constitute part of an oppressive structure, normalize it, or license oppressive behaviour, then yes. If the attitudes aren’t like this then, for all we argue in the paper, there’s nothing to criticize and we’re free, morally speaking, to imagine as we please.
References
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990/2000).
Mary Kate McGowan, “Conversational Exercitives and the Force of Pornography,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 31 (2003): 155-189.
Mary Kate McGowan, “On Locker Room Talk and Linguistic Oppression,” Philosophical Topics 46 (2018): 165-181.
Mary Kate McGowan, Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)