Today's post comes from Professor Dominic McIver Lopes:
Aesthetic Injustice attempts to spotlight an overlooked variety of injustice. One way to get a fix on it contrasts it with what I call ‘weaponized aesthetics’. Another is to consider a case study of aesthetic injustice that targets disabled people. A nice feature of this case study is that it highlights the relationship between aesthetic injustice and epistemic injustice.
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| Cover for Aesthetic Injustice |
Let’s start with the contrast between aesthetic injustice and weaponized aesthetics.
Weaponized aesthetics is well known to philosophers and other scholars. Unjust treatment of members of identity groups often harnesses stereotypes, some of which are propagated by elements of aesthetic culture, especially visual images and narratives. For example, some movies portray disabled people as helpless and pitiable – or as villainous. Buts of aesthetic culture serve as tools of social injustice.
An aesthetic injustice is a social arrangement that harms people in their aesthetic capacities, such as capacities to appreciate, make, curate, or collect. These capacities are exercised in social practices: Impressionism and social media memes are two different aesthetic practices. So, in aesthetic injustice, participants in aesthetic practices are harmed as makers, appreciators, and the like. Since harm is not sufficient for injustice, the book argues that harms are unjust when they cut against interests in the diversity or the autonomy of aesthetic practices.
That puts it all rather abstractly; an example would help. Consider tactile pictures used by blind people. That last sentence might surprise you. An impressive suite of studies by the Canadian psychologist John M. Kennedy showed that blind people correctly interpret drawings where raised lines trace objects’ contours. They can also make raised-line drawings, and some of Kennedy’s subjects figured out on their own how to render scenes in perspective. This came as a surprise not only to sighted people but also to blind people. Everyone had internalized a conception of vision and depiction that made the very idea of ‘tactile pictures used by blind people’ seem absurd.
The neglect of tactile imaging is arguably an aesthetic injustice. It harms blind people by depriving them of access to a field of aesthetic engagement in ways that cut against an interest in there being diverse imaging practices and also an interest in there being an imaging practice where blind people are at home. The argument is hardly simple; it must navigate some tricky obstacles. You’ll have to read Aesthetic Injustice for more details!
There’s something that the book doesn’t emphasize. Recall that an aesthetic injustice is a social arrangement that harms people in their aesthetic capacities. This account leaves opens the means by which aesthetic injustice is produced. One might think that the very idea of tactile pictures seemed absurd as a result of epistemic injustice, specifically what Miranda Fricker called ‘hermeneutical injustice’.
Hermeneutical injustice is not the same as aesthetic injustice. Distinguishing them equips us to study how they interact. As I write in the book, different kinds of unjust social arrangements ‘cling to each other like burrs’.
Dominic McIver Lopes FRSC is University Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. He works mainly in aesthetics, and has published books on the meaning and value of images, new technologies in the arts, the nature of art, and aesthetic value.
His most recent book, Aesthetic Injustice, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024.
