Soul-Blindness, Police Orders and Black Lives Matter

• Date: 01 December 2016
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591716657857
• Author: David Owen,Jonathan Havercroft
• Published date: 01 December 2016
• Subject Matter: Race

657857PTXXXX10.1177/0090591716657857Political TheoryHavercroft and Owen
research-article2016
Race
Political Theory
2016, Vol. 44(6) 739 –763
Soul-Blindness, Police
© 2016 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permissions:
Orders and Black Lives
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0090591716657857
ptx.sagepub.com
Matter: Wittgenstein,
Cavell, and Rancière
Jonathan Havercroft1 and David Owen1
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 United States constitute whiteness in a
racialized police order.
Keywords
Cavell, Rancière, Wittgenstein, soul-blindness, aspect perception
1Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton, Southampton, United
Kingdom
Corresponding Author:
Jonathan Havercroft, Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton, School
of Social Sciences, Building 58 Highfield Campus, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK.
Email: j.havercroft@soton.ac.uk

---

740
Political Theory 44(6)
It is sometimes imperative to say that women or children or black people or
criminals are human beings. This is a call for justice. For justice to be done, a
change of perception, a modification of seeing, may be called for. But does it
follow that those whose perceptions, or whose natural reactions, must suffer
change have until that time been seeing women or children or black people or
criminals as something other than human beings?
—Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason1
I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never
looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin
caused in other people.
—James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son 2
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? Cavell argues, and Baldwin implies, that justice in these instances
requires that those in a hegemonic position must change how they perceive,
how they naturally (i.e., spontaneously) react, to members of such groups.
These types of calls for justice are responses to a fundamental injustice: one
of perception and how we respond to our perceptions. Such injustice involves
what Cavell calls “soul blindness.” By this term, Cavell means the failure to
see “others or ourselves as human” not in the sense of Homo sapiens as a
biological kind but in the sense of humanity as an ethical kind.3 In this article,
we draw on the work of Cavell, Wittgenstein and Rancière to elucidate “soul
blindness” as a distinct and basic form of injustice. Our central thesis is that
“police orders” (a term that we take from Rancière) and soul blindness are
mutually constitutive and, as such, the undoing of police orders entails a poli-
tics of soul dawning—that is, of coming to see a person or group of people as
human. In order to unpack this claim and its political implications, we first
examine Cavell’s concept of soul blindness in the context of Wittgenstein’s
work on seeing aspects that frames Cavell’s development of this concept. The
second section argues that Rancière’s work on politics and police orders can
be productively read as elucidating the political implications of Wittgenstein’s
and Cavell’s work. In particular, we argue that a politics of 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. Our claim in this sec-
tion is that difference-blind approaches to politics—as exemplified by politi-
cal responses to #BlackLivesMatter such as #AllLivesMatter—instantiate

---

Havercroft and Owen
741
the very condition of soul blindness to which BLM seeks to draw attention.
Part of the political import of BLM is its capacity to illustrate how practices
of soul blindness in the United States constitute whiteness in a racialized
police order.
I
Wittgenstein initially introduces the term “aspect” and the related terms
“aspect-perception,” “aspect-dawning,” and “aspect-blindness” to discuss a
set of perceptual phenomena that develop out of Gestalt psychology.4 The
most famous of these images is Jastrow’s duck-rabbit: a picture that can be
seen as either a duck or a rabbit, but never both at the same time. Wittgenstein
refers to those types of schematic images that can be taken as objects—such
as the famous duck-rabbit image, a triangle, the three dimensional cube, the
black-and-white cross image—as “picture-objects.”5 These images are of
interest because they are instances in which we take the image as the object
that it pictures. The key discussion on aspects in the Philosophical
Investigations is in Part II xi whose main concern is with what Mulhall labels
the “inherent paradoxicality” of aspect-perception:6 “I see that [the face] has
not changed; and yet I see it differently.”7 Wittgenstein argues that what
changes when one perceives a different aspect is one’s attitude towards, not
one’s opinion about, the image.8 By “attitude,” Wittgenstein is not referring
to a cognitive relation but to a practical relation to the picture-object, that is,
a relation of practical engagement with, and not simply knowing or believing
or thinking about. In order to explicate this phenomenon, Wittgenstein intro-
duces several different terms in the first half of section xi. He describes the
self-conscious experience of seeing something as something as a case of
“noticing an aspect.”9 Dual or multi-aspect images such as the duck-rabbit
picture draw attention to the fact that our attitude towards such picture-
objects can change. The thought here is that we can be struck by the dawning
of an (new) aspect, where “being struck” denotes the suddenness of this man-
ifestation and its natural expression in spontaneous avowals such as “Now I
see it!” Aspect dawning “is forced from us.—It is related to the experience
[of a perception] as a cry is to pain”.10 It involves standing in practical rela-
tion to a picture-object in terms of the object it depicts, seeing it as something
(not merely as marks on paper from which we infer a representation of some-
thing). Continuous aspect perception denotes the readiness-to-hand of the
immediate description of the picture in terms of the object it depicts or repre-
sents, where “this readiness-to-hand is a manifestation of the perceiver’s tak-
ing for granted the identity of what he perceives.”11 Conversely “aspect
change” denotes that form of aspect dawning which occurs when a person

---

742
Political Theory 44(6)
shifts from seeing a picture-object under one aspect to seeing it under
another.12 Finally, Wittgenstein introduces the term “aspect blindness”13 to
describe someone “lacking in the capacity to see something as something.”14
The aspect-blind person is unable to experience the picture-object as the
thing that it depicts. As such, the aspect-blind individual is unable either to
experience continuous aspect perception—that is, to see a picture-object as
something—or to experience aspect dawning.15
Wittgenstein’s analysis of seeing aspects is of particular importance for
Cavell’s subsequent development and investigation of the phenomenon of
soul blindness.According to Cavell’s reading, aspect dawning involves three
inter-related activities: (1) connecting together different things; (2) realizing
the significance that grows out of these connections; (3) making the behavior
real to myself. Cavell describes this third activity as “bearing the right inter-
nal relation to others.”16 Soul blindness, in Cavell’s sense, is however much
more specific than aspect blindness; it does not entail that that the soul-blind
person cannot see another as something (continuous aspect perception) nor
that they cannot move from seeing another as x and then as y (aspect change).
It entails only that they cannot see the other as human, that is, as en-souled,
where the concept of “soul” draws attention to the character of human beings
as beings whose conduct gives expression to the inner lives that they have.
What is at stake in soul blindness? Cavell considers the case of slavery,
arguing that the failure of the slave-owner to take the slave as human demon-
strates that the slave-owner “is . . . missing something about himself, or rather
something about his connection with these people, his internal relations with
them, so to speak.”17 The idea of bearing an internal relation with others as
being an important part of one’s humanity is key here. One should not be
misled by the use of the phrase “internal relation”. It does not refer to an inner
mental process (knowing, believing, thinking) but rather to an attitude
towards the other as...