Consciousness-Raising: Camila Lobo
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Sara e Tralha / untitled
Consciousness-Raising : Camila Lobo
1. Introduction Consciousness-raising is commonly represented as a set of radical meaning-making practices that are employed in a wide range of contexts dedicated to some form of political education. This family of practices shares the general assumption that the perspectives of marginalized individuals and groups are made invisible by the conceptual and epistemological frameworks that dominate our political lives. Hence, consciousness-raising is primarily recommended as a collective methodology that enables marginalized subjects to make sense of their social experiences by locating them in broader systems of domination. Since advocates of consciousness-raising are also committed to the idea that marginalized perspectives are able to illuminate larger features of our common world, they further insist on the need to bring marginalized experiences into view in a manner that challenges and expands the dominant political vocabulary and imagination. Notwithstanding this general understanding of consciousness-raising, its specific methodology remains highly contested, lending itself to disparate interpretations of the role of shared identity, difference, epistemic authority, affectivity, deliberation, and other points of debate. In this piece, I do not aim to provide an exhaustive overview of the literature on the topic, but to foreground a particular point of tension that arises from the tendency to approach consciousness-raising as an epistemic project. To be sure, if it is to challenge dominant conceptual and epistemological frameworks, the practice cannot evade the task of articulating oppositional bodies of knowledge that take seriously marginalized lives and perspectives. Indeed, one way to conceive of consciousness-raising is to treat it as a resistant epistemology that instantiates standpoint theory’s distinctive “inversion thesis,” according to which subjects who are socially and politically marginalized may inversely hold a privileged position to access certain aspects of the world. At the same time, the quest for certainty that often characterizes these epistemic projects threatens to reenact the foundationalist commitments of traditional epistemology, narrowing the possibilities of emancipatory knowledge production.1 As Audre Lorde and bell hooks suggest, in feminist practice, this epistemological quest has often been associated with identity-based versions of consciousness-raising that fail to recognize the territory they operate in as one embedded in a world of ideological practices, power relations, and separateness. Facing up to that threat, I propose that consciousness-raising can productively be regarded as a project of acknowledgment, one that does not relinquish a claim to knowledge, but is nonetheless committed to a perpetual reassessment of its practical investments. This reorientation of consciousness-raising projects to the plane of separateness and acknowledgment evokes Stanley Cavell’s appeal to the experience of skeptical deflection as a necessary step on the path toward self-knowledge. While the promise is one of epistemic, moral, and political gain, deflection entails a step toward epistemic and conceptual loss, a form of exposure to reality that must be accepted if we are to acknowledge otherness and sustain the liberatory promises of consciousness-raising. 2. Consciousness-Raising in and beyond Feminism In 1976, Sandra Bartky wrote that “to be a feminist, one has first to become one.”2 By putting down these words, Bartky meant to momentarily turn her reader’s attention away from ongoing debates about “differing sets of beliefs about the origins and nature of sexism and thus quite different prescriptions for the proper way of eliminating it” into that experience of “profound personal transformation . . . which goes far beyond that sphere of human activity we regard ordinarily as ‘political.’”3 Writing in the context of the North American women’s liberation movement, Bartky’s suggestion was not that this “profound personal transformation” is indeed outside the scope of the political, but rather that the “sphere of human activity we regard ordinarily as political” may be too narrow. As is well-known, resistance to the ordinary perception that personal affairs are and ought to stay separated from political discourse and the public sphere—a move best expressed by the famous slogan “the personal is political”—was a core driving force of so-called second-wave feminist movements. This meant not simply bringing to the fore experiences and concerns that had not previously been thought of as political but developing a methodology that allowed for their politicization, that is, for their transformation into objects of common concern. That methodology came to be known as “consciousness-raising.” As Catherine MacKinnon described it, in consciousness-raising groups,
The central role of consciousness-raising in the 1960s and 70s feminist movements, coupled with the fact that women liberationists themselves coined and popularized the term, has resulted in its strong association with feminist politics in the popular imagination.5 This is despite the fact that many feminists at the time openly acknowledged that the practice had precedents in other movements and discussed how those earlier experiences had shaped feminist adaptations of consciousness-raising.6 Indeed, the feminist consciousness-raising practice—or rather, its many variations—shares a family of resemblances with other transformative processes in liberatory social movements across different contexts. Just as “to be a feminist, one first has to become one”, so the formation of other revolutionary subjectivities requires setting in motion a process through which individual experiences of suffering, discontent, or alienation come to be collectively understood as products of larger systems of domination. As Sheila Rowbotham pointedly put it, “every mass political movement of the oppressed necessarily brings its own vision of itself into sight.”7 On a general level, it is hard to conceive of a revolutionary movement for which counter-hegemonic knowledge production has not been a central concern. From workers’ movements to anti-colonial struggles, the battle for knowledge has long been regarded as a way of restoring marginalized, repressed, or criminalized perspectives deemed crucial to a given group’s emancipation and developing new theoretical resources that can assist in the struggle against dominant ideologies. Relatedly, various models of political education have historically been key instruments in the production and sharing of resistant forms of knowledge that accompanied larger projects of social transformation.8 Hence, consciousness-raising may be said to be one among many educational tools developed in times of political unrest as an attempt to challenge dominant conceptual and epistemic frameworks. But even while consciousness-raising practices may share the social transformation purposes of other political education practices with which they often overlap and are jointly employed, they stand out in a distinctive light in important respects. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Paulo Freire developed his widely celebrated critical pedagogy through his work with impoverished peasant communities in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America, whom he observed to be not only materially disempowered but living in what he described as a culture of silence. He attributed this condition to the “banking” model of education—an understanding of education as an act of depositing, “in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.” Freire believed that the teacher-student contradiction reenacted the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, with the teacher justifying their existence by presupposing the absolute ignorance of the student. This relation, he argued, harmed knowledge production itself. By hindering the generative, creative, and transformative potential of education, the banking model served the material interests of dominant groups by perpetuating the alienation of the student masses.9 While such a model of education expresses the dominant class interests, Freire noted that revolutionary leaders too have often “ended up using the ‘educational’ methods employed by the oppressor” in their attempts to politicize the oppressed.10 Since these methods continued to treat individuals as passive recipients of information, they neglected the liberatory potential of the perspectives of the oppressed, contributing to their disempowerment. Against this model of education, Freire proposed a dialogical educational praxis that turned oppressed subjects into active participants in their liberation and privileged the development of analytical tools capable of challenging dominant perceptions of the world. Importantly, the point of such dialogical encounters was to induce a collective process of conscientização, or consciousness-raising, “by means of which the people, through a true praxis, leave behind the status of objects to assume the status of historical Subjects.”11 Instances of consciousness-raising practices as advancements in political theory and practice can be found in other revolutionary movements worldwide. The contemporary Kurdish Freedom Movement similarly regards continuous participatory theory production as a central part of its struggle for liberation and radical democratic citizenship. Paradigmatically, the so-called “mentality revolution” in Rojava Kurdistan has led to the creation of popular academies across the territory, which present privileged locations for educational practices that may adequately be regarded as employing consciousness-raising methodologies.12 In particular, autonomous women’s academies appear to play a crucial educational role in the broader liberation movement by creating environments in which women’s marginalized perspectives and experiences are taken seriously as rigorous locations from which to begin examining the world. As Kurdish scholar and sociologist Dilar Dirik explains, the academies enable women with little to no formal education to revalue previously neglected practices and collectively “come up with new concepts of knowledge based on lived experiences.”13 Autonomous women’s academies in Rojava are closely related to the Kurdish Women’s Movement and the development of Jineolojî or “the science of woman and life.” Similar to the case of women’s liberationists, theoretical production in the context of the Kurdish Women’s Movement also seems to be inseparable from a form of radical pedagogy that brings the personal to bear on the political. Indeed, according to Dirik, Jineolojî should not be conceived simply as a set of philosophical ideas or scientific results, but as “a struggle for meaning-giving, and an organizational effort.” With its essentially anti-positivist stance, Jineolojî derives its knowledge from a myriad of approaches, taking seriously the emotional and subjective experiences of marginalized women in broad networks of “solidarities, friendships, and . . . organizational relations.”14 Not only do such interactions result in a theoretical understanding of the conditions of women’s oppression—important as theory is for the production and circulation of materials such as books, pamphlets, magazines, etc.—but in enhanced self-knowledge and a sense of collective liberation. As considered in these contexts, consciousness-raising methodologies represent radically democratic meaning-making practices that strive toward the liberation of the subject, a state that involves “new ways of being as well as new ways of perceiving.”15 Crucially, then, liberation seems to depend on the collective development of resistant epistemological projects that challenge traditional, detached notions of objectivity. By bringing the subject of knowledge to bear on the object of knowledge, consciousness-raising sets out to generate oppositional bodies of knowledge that contrast with the professed neutrality of dominant representations of the world. This is often achieved via the mobilization of affective resources traditionally neglected by dominant epistemological projects, such as storytelling, emotionally-charged testimonies, and physical interactions. Hence, these practices allow participants to make sense of experiences that dominant conceptual schemes and epistemic frameworks are unable to capture, while retaining a claim to objective forms of knowledge production. In some versions of consciousness-raising, the practice is further regarded as a process whereby my experiences gain significance through the identification with others who are “made to suffer in the same way I am made to suffer.”16 Surveying historical accounts of liberation movements, it is certainly hard to deny that the recognition of a shared experience of oppression and identity has played a crucial role in some of these emancipatory processes.17 However, in setting out to achieve knowledge through practices of identification, consciousness-raising has often presupposed a sense of affinity among its participants in an unreflective manner, effectively reproducing a foundationalist logic characteristic of traditional epistemology. In this context, the foundational belief in a shared identity or common oppression becomes the self-evident base for the emancipatory project, which is deprived of critical puissance and the capacity for self-scrutiny. As various commentators have argued, while shared experience is an important driving force of liberatory movements, the emphasis on identity shields relatively dominant subjects from doing the “dirty work” of confronting their own privileges and acquiring greater reflective awareness about their position in society.18 Writing about the largely white feminist consciousness-raising groups from the 1960s and 70s, Audre Lorde forcefully denounced that:
One must note that this categorical representation of consciousness-raising within the women’s liberation movement is contested by recent scholarship that reveals the revolutionary origins of the practice, its early commitment to a form of ideology critique that ruthlessly interrogated all aspects of experience, and considered the fallible nature of radical theorizing.20 However, Lorde’s account of consciousness-raising should be taken seriously as a critique of identity-based versions of the practice, reflecting her broader condemnation of white feminism’s failure to develop theories and practices accountable to the conflicts and differences among women. This inability to deal with difference, she claimed, produced consciousness-raising groups as spaces that protected racial hierarchies, sanctuaries for white women who did not have to confront their privileges and complicity in regimes of domination, sites built on attitudes of defensiveness that destroyed any real possibility for communication and growth. At the same time, Lorde warned against guilt as an adequate response to such failures. While there is no creative use for guilt, she claimed, anger can be mobilized in a way that expands our world, invites learning, and fosters self-knowledge through self-scrutiny. And yet, anger necessarily destroys before it reconstructs. Within the epistemological quest for knowledge, the sense of discomfort and loss that Lorde associates with anger may seem like too heavy a burden to bear. On the road to self-knowledge and liberation, loss can seem to have a paralyzing effect. But deflecting from it essentially betrays the liberatory promises of consciousness-raising, leading us back down to ignorance, where we “accept only the designs already known, deadly and safely familiar.”21 Where consciousness-raising appeared as the condition of possibility for the revolutionary process, Lorde is here seen as questioning the conditions of possibility of consciousness-raising itself. Borne out of a longing for words where silence reigned, for intelligibility where unintelligibility prevailed, for collectivity where isolation was the rule, consciousness-raising finds its limits in its own quest for knowledge—or, we would like to say, for power. Whether consciousness-raising can live as a project of knowledge now seems to hinge on whether it can simultaneously appear as one of acknowledgment. 3. Consciousness-Raising as Knowledge Acquisition In Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, MacKinnon wrote about the conditions of possibility of the feminist consciousness-raising groups formed in the U.S. throughout the 1960s and 70s:
Theorizations of consciousness-raising often attribute the “ripeness of conditions” to the “contradictions,” “conflicts” or “instabilities” of a specific historical moment.23 One way to make sense of this claim is to turn to standpoint theory’s account of how the contradictory forces that shape the situated perspective of the marginalized may give place to a reflective standpoint. Drawing on the development of Hegelian dialectics by Marx, Engels, and Lukács into the notion of the “standpoint of the proletariat,” standpoint theorists hold a distinctive “inversion thesis” according to which subjects who are socially and politically marginalized may inversely hold a privileged position to know certain aspects of the world.24 Their starting point is the observation that, in hierarchically organized societies, dominantly situated subjects and non-dominant subjects acquire fundamentally different, if not opposing, views. As Sandra Harding explains, standpoint theorists go on to argue that, in such societies, “the activities of those at the top both organize and set limits on what persons who perform such activities can understand about themselves and the world around them,” whereas, in contrast, “the activities of those at the bottom of such social hierarchies can provide starting points for thought—for everyone’s research and scholarship—from which humans’ relations with each other and the world can become visible.”25 The inversion thesis thus points to what is possibly standpoint theory’s most contentious point: that marginalized people hold some form of epistemic advantage when it comes to making sense of the social world and, concretely, of the position they occupy in such a world. Non-dominant subjects are, it could be said, ripe for the development of a critical consciousness in a way that dominant subjects are not. This line of argument is thoroughly explored by Patricia Hill Collins, who speaks of the condition of the “outsider-within” to name the contradictory material reality that informed the development of a distinctive Black Feminist standpoint in the United States.26 Collins refers both to the conditions of Black women domestic workers and Black women intellectuals in academic settings to describe how these subjects’ marginalized social positions inversely afforded them epistemically privileged positions from which to evaluate the social world. Since they were prevented from “becoming full insiders” in any of these contexts, “Black women remained in outsider-within locations, individuals whose marginality provided a distinctive angle of vision.”27 The point had previously been admirably captured by bell hooks’s picture of the railroad tracks as a symbol of marginality:
One way to read hooks’s words is to think about marginality as providing the conditions for the development of what standpoint theorists sometimes describe as the “strong objectivity” of a standpoint. To be sure, by arguing for an inversion thesis where otherwise marginalized subjects may be said to hold a privileged position from which to develop a critical consciousness, standpoint theorists directly challenge received notions of objectivity. In particular, they challenge the idea that objective claims about the world require observer neutrality, arguing instead that greater objectivity may be achieved when we start investigations by attending to historically neglected experiences, interests, or needs. In that sense, standpoint theorists radically do away with positivist conceptions of objectivity and go beyond empiricist approaches that would justify their claim to start thought from marginalized lives as an attempt to correct for the biases of “bad science.” Instead, they reject the notion that objectivity has ever been or could ever be increased by an appeal to epistemic ideals of neutrality. Starting with the premise that the subject of knowledge is always part and parcel of the object of knowledge, they “have made the move from declaiming as a problem, or acknowledging as an inevitable fact, to theorizing as a systematically accessible resource for maximizing objectivity the inescapable social situatedness of knowledge claims.”29 Standpoint theory further shifts the focus of knowledge-production practices, particularly scientific ones, from the context of justification to that of discovery. Critical of dominant scientific practices’ neglect of the context of discovery, standpoint theorists highlight the embeddedness of justification in a world of values and interests that are left untouched (and invisible) by those same practices. Where the context of justification is already approached from within a rigidly rule-bounded language-game, attention to the context of discovery seeks to render visible the values guiding the articulation of our research questions and problems. But the distinctive standpoint claim is not simply that, once made visible, dominant values and interests should be dispelled in order to make room for greater (value-neutral) objectivity in research practices. Instead, standpoint theorists advance the stronger claim that situatedness is a precondition for knowledge and make a critical commitment to start thought from what they regard as the “most favorable historical locations” to generate new questions of research.30 Standpoint theory thus echoes hooks’s famous claim that marginality is “much more than a site of deprivation . . . that it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.”31 Where in earlier work hooks had described the margin as a concrete physical and geographical reality inhabited by oppressed, exploited, and colonized people, she later comes to conceive of it as a space that exceeds predetermined social locations and emerges as a permanent position of resistance. In that sense, marginality can no longer appear as something “one wishes to lose,” as it were, through a process of consciousness-raising that transforms a situated perspective into a reflective standpoint or, similarly, an inchoate experience into a critical consciousness. Instead, marginality ought to be conceived “as a site one stays in, clings to even because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist.”32 In that sense, the margin no longer represents something to acquire knowledge about, to build on and overcome, but the very site of struggle and possible alliances. Hence, she extends an invitation to all those radical thinkers who have failed to enter that space to “surrender their power to act as colonizers . . . to bear witness, to give testimony.”33 To be sure, while standpoint theorists maintain that certain perspectives are distinctively suited to the development of more objective accounts of the world, they too are generally sensitive to the need to continuously attend to the multiple, heterogeneous, and contradictory nature of subjects of knowledge. When starting thought from women’s lives, feminist standpoint theorists take on “the challenge of learning to think from the perspective of more than one life when those lives are in conflict with each other”—a challenge that is, in any case, “familiar to anthropologists, historians, conflict negotiators, domestic workers, wives, mothers—indeed, to most of us in many everyday contexts.”34 But hooks’s articulation of the stakes of such a challenge best gives us a sense of the difficulty of the struggle it encompasses. Indeed, this is not a challenge that can be brought out by narrowly focusing on commonalities of experience or by insisting on a notion of consciousness-raising as a process that is exclusively carried out by the critically disinvested outsider-within, as some proponents of standpoint theory suggest.35 Here, the challenge of consciousness-raising emerges with the realization that we must start thought from a location that is itself already embedded in a world of ideological practices, power relations, and separateness. This contradictory reality makes a much more demanding claim on us, encouraging us to accept discomfort and conflict as productive forces in the emancipatory process of developing a critical consciousness. Hence, both marginalized people and their allies must ultimately grapple with their own attachments to systems of domination if they are to enter that “space of radical openness” where one discovers not just differences to be bridged into a coherent whole, but a fragmented social order “that reveals more fully who we are, who we can become, an order that does not demand forgetting.”36 4. Consciousness-Raising as Conceptual Loss and Acknowledgement I have emphasized how marginalized perspectives can be mobilized to the formation of a standpoint through a process of political and philosophical struggle by which we gain knowledge, concepts and words to speak about social reality. But I would now like to conceptualize hooks’s invitation to the space of marginality as entailing a step toward epistemic and conceptual loss. Much like Lorde’s discovery of the uses of anger, hooks’s invitation is not primarily a generative act, but a reminder that may lead us to seriously reevaluate our investments in systems of domination. While the promise is one of epistemic, moral and political gain, the practice it engages us in is one of exposure to reality, one which may first be experienced as a form of skeptical deflection. In order to illuminate the significance of loss in consciousness-raising processes, I turn to Stanley Cavell and his lifelong reflections on self-knowledge and skepticism. Taking his cue from an understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy as an effort to bring to light the nature and power of skepticism, Cavell’s thought reveals how a certain “epistemological quest” might hinder the liberatory promises of such a project. This exercise may only be pursued through an analogy between consciousness-raising and philosophy itself, for it is in philosophy that Cavell finds the temptation to succumb to that “all but unappeasable craving for unreality” that is contained in our longing for metaphysical foundations for our modes of understanding and knowing. Such craving might similarly be directed towards a sense of belonging—say, to an identity, a project of knowledge, a form of social organization—that one wishes would rest in something more than the ordinary “sharing, and maintaining, [of] our human forms of life.”37 The “threat of skepticism,” as Cavell describes it, appears as a response to that “human compulsion to over-intellectuality . . . a demonic will to measure every relation against that of knowing.”38 What the skeptic discovers is that we lack rational (read: epistemic) justification for some of our most ordinary beliefs: that the world exists, that other people are sentient, that we directly perceive them. But while the discovery of the groundlessness of our thought moves her away from an arresting picture of language guided by the proverbial “logical must”, the skeptic is now captured by a paralyzing sense of being chronically expatriated from that same language.39 This form of skeptical deflection expresses “the capacity, even desire, of ordinary language to repudiate itself, specifically to repudiate its power to word the world, to apply to the things we have in common, or to pass them by.”40 As an epistemic project, consciousness-raising similarly runs the risk of becoming enthralled, even if unwillingly, in an uncontrollable search for purity.41 In its quest to “project its own image into history . . . to discover its own identity as distinct from that of the oppressor . . . to become visible to itself,” to use Rowbotham’s words, the successful political movement creates a new context of justification that conceals that of discovery.42 Its newly achieved power gives it the means to determine, if only partially, the conditions of possibility of a new reality. There is, indeed, a sense in which that is its political purpose. But just as it does so, the movement betrays its own commitment to the ever-oppositional location of the outsider-within, its focus on the context of discovery, the promise of a consciousness that bears the mark of contradiction and so can see beyond the already-familiar. An intervention—indeed, an invitation—is needed to interrupt this epistemological quest. We may once again hear hooks’s words: “Enter that space. This is an intervention.”43 A reminder, as Wittgenstein would put it, to “bring back words from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”44 But just as one is confronted with such intervention, one is faced with the skeptical discovery that the objectivity of our oppositional knowledge also lies in less than stable ground. Summoning the skeptic into a project of social transformation is risky business. Affiliated as it is with the fantasy of the autonomy-obsessed, individual and isolated knower in the modern philosophical tradition, the skeptic may seem to only deflect us further from the contradictory forms of life we ought to grapple with if we are to honor the promise of self-knowledge and collective liberation.45 But isn’t that just what I mean? That hooks’s intervention may result in what ordinary language philosophers often describe as an experience of exposure? The experience, that is, of making contact with a reality that our old concepts cannot encompass and so try to refuse. And, indeed, the threat it poses to our conceptual world speaks to the difficulty of our situation. It is a difficulty experienced as a sort of vertigo—the vertiginous feeling of losing one’s world—and compensated through deflection, that distinctively skeptical attitude Cavell has described as the “avoidance of love” or, later on, “the avoidance of acknowledgment.”46 To Cavell, however,
To be sure, the skeptic is unsuccessful in her attempts to make the world present. While her old concepts cannot make sense of the new reality that is suddenly presented to her, she is not prepared to give them up. The result is a sense of world-loss whereby I am drawn back from language, paralyzed in thinking, unable to go on with a project of self-knowledge as I deflect from acknowledging others who are not already myself. Hence, the Cavellian skeptic is one for whom the conditions of possibility of knowledge have been lost in the face of an experience of exposure to reality—not because she has been discursively persuaded, but because she has been led to feel herself “being shouldered out of how one thinks, how one is apparently supposed to think, or to have a sense of the inability of thought to encompass what it is attempting to reach.”48 It is to the extent that skepticism motivates the collapse of our conventional ways of thinking that it is both threat and possibility.49 In the absence of a strictly rule-bounded set of criteria with which to judge the world, the skeptic’s quest is no longer an epistemological one, but a moral or, indeed, a political one. This is not to say that Cavell’s attitude towards skepticism is one of endorsement. His gesture simply expresses recognition for the sense of possibility contained in the skeptic’s discovery that our relation to our lives and the world is not an epistemic one. As suggested in the epigraph above, skeptical doubts about the external world—that is, about others—do not originate from ignorance understood as a lack of knowledge. Instead, skeptical doubts are the result of denial or avoidance of that which may have always been before our eyes—an attitude Cavell consistently represents as “a function of my not letting myself be known, and to myself.”50 What surfaces from this crisis is an eminently public picture of self-knowledge as dependent on the acknowledgment of otherness. Indeed, for Cavell, the teaching of skepticism is
Overcoming the skeptical doubt, then, does not require explanation or the acquisition of knowledge, but that which could be described as an “experience of conversion, of being turned around.”52 Such is the purpose Cavell attributes to ordinary language philosophy. One that should, furthermore, be enacted at each point of its procedure, whether or not it is able to strike the philosophical imagination. This is a procedure for which separateness, not commonality—say, the feeling of not being able to know in advance what is there in the experience of the other—is the real condition of possibility. Only through this form of radical relationality—with the other that is not already myself—can I fully engage in a project of self-knowledge in which I come to make sense of myself, my position in systems of domination, through concepts that come to make a claim on my life. This requirement of continuous exposure to the oddity of the everyday world is, furthermore, something that Cavell thinks ordinary language philosophy shares with his preferred version of moral perfectionism, namely, a perfectionism that “specifically sets itself against any idea of ultimate perfection.”53 To be sure, beginning from a less than perfect position in the world, moral perfectionist projects always strive to judge what there is by reference to what there may be, and are in that sense committed to a measure of improvement of the present state of existence. Cavellian perfectionism, inheriting as it does from a range of variations of this project, and particularly indebted to Ralph Waldo Emerson, is no different. It presents a position of “disappointment with the world as it is”, one that seems to emerge from a dialectical relation with “a demand or desire” for a transfigured world.54 In that sense, the moral perfectionist certainly seeks to liberate herself from the senseless forms of life that prevent any serious transformation of the world and to pursue some form of improvement from a previously undesirable situation. The distinctive mark of Cavell’s moral perfectionism, however, is not so much its place of arrival, but its site of departure. Where the major moral theories, usually represented by Kantian deontology, on the one hand, and utilitarianism, on the other, presuppose some moral notions as fundamental, he claims, moral perfectionism begins with a sense of moral urgency on the part of the disappointed or cynical agent who has come close to giving up on the aspiration to a meaningful life.55 On the face of such crisis, the subject is not called upon to decide what she ought to do, to decide between two or more explicitly laid out alternatives, but to reflect on what kind of person she wants to be in relation to her culture and to others. While it is not inimical to the epistemological projects implied by the standard moral theories, perfectionism concentrates on a moment that the former are unsuited to capture, namely, the realization that we cannot make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others. Writing about Cavellian perfectionism, Martin Gustafsson suggests that the moment of crisis that marks the beginning of the perfectionist project indicates a heterodox methodology that “starts from a sense of being lost and involves the exploration of genuinely unknown territory.”56 Contrary to the standard theories, this moral exercise does not require that its endpoint be made intelligible in advance, its standards agreed upon, but that they are discovered in the process of improving ourselves and the world around us. Such is the mark of Cavell’s rejection of ideological modes of thought: were morality to begin only after intelligibility is achieved, the means by which we have “succeeded” in making ourselves and others intelligible would remain hidden from view. Hence, perfectionist transformation is presented as the very process by which we render ourselves intelligible anew, an end in itself, rather than a precondition for substantial moral work. In fact, for the Cavellian perfectionist, the condition of possibility of transformative action is not an already intelligible conception of justice or good, but unintelligibility itself, now understood as a willingness to explore new moral conceptual territory. Cavell famously presents friendship as the exemplar moral relationship capable of guiding us, not to a final state of perfection, but through an ongoing effort to improve ourselves and the world around us.57 The exemplarity of the friend is not ideal in the sense of offering transcendental criteria with which to evaluate our moral conduct and make isolated judgments about particular moral problems. A friend is not someone with whom we generally walk toward well-defined end goals, and our relationship is not primarily characterized by certainty. Instead, friendship expresses the moral life as “a life whose texture is a weave of cares and commitments in which one is bound to become lost and to need the friendly and credible words of others in order to find one’s way.”58 The model provided by the friend does not impose on us as a rule, so much as a challenge. Her friendly words are as caring as they are difficult: they encourage us to consider how the example applies to our particular situation, how it matters to us, how it coheres with and disagrees with our presently held commitments. In that sense, the friend leads us not to transcend, but to transgress our situatedness, and to effectively engage in forms of self-disobedience. This transgression, however, begins from a position of unintelligibility. As Gustafsson puts it:
Cavellian perfectionism presents an opportunity to think analogously about a politics for which intelligibility is not merely a precondition, but a substantive aim. Where the consciousness-raising process had previously appeared as the condition of possibility for politics, it now emerges as an ongoing political effort that challenges us to transform anger, discomfort and loss into acknowledgement and self-awareness. In other words, it endeavors to transform a certain kind of unintelligibility into intelligibility, even while it conceives of such an endeavor as an endless effort to resist deflection and return to a common world. That such an effort cannot be carried out by the isolated individual, unable as she is to expand her conceptual world without the help of an other, expresses the consciousness-raising commitment to liberation through collective practices of affective communication and reflection. Only now we take responsibility for that project as one of permanent risk that requires the acceptance of an exposure—or, we would like to say, of an invitation—that teaches us something about ourselves. The risk consists of something as simple as it is difficult: “that my knowledge of others may be overthrown, even that it ought to be.”60 And, indeed, the Cavellian appeal to exposure echoes Lorde’s conception of coalitional forms of consciousness-raising as involving an inevitably painful process of growth through which “we sharpen self-definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals.”61 If this seems plausible, then consciousness-raising would no longer be primarily a project of knowledge, but one of acknowledgement, one that requires a perpetual commitment to inhabiting a space of marginality that expands our world, bursts our imaginations open, motivates transformative action. It is not, I want to stress, a project that relinquishes a claim to knowledge or to power, namely, to the power to word the world. However, as a project of political perfectionism, consciousness-raising abandons the quest for an ultimate standpoint that is shielded from further scrutiny, as well as the need to begin from a position of intelligibility that conceals those aspects of our lives that are not already seen as political. By challenging us to attend to what presently remains unintelligible, practices of consciousness-raising allow the world to continuously reappear as political, even as they simultaneously build on the historically available means of making sense. If philosophy is to be of help here, it must appear as more than a discipline with a distinct epistemic aspiration. Attending to the position of crisis that sets the perfectionist project in motion, philosophy too must emerge as a method of world-disclosure that invites us to rearrange our habits of thought and attend to those aspects of the world that have been hidden “in plain view.”62 Organized around the central figure of the friend—or, similarly, the ally—the process of philosophical disclosure has the power to conceptually expand our world in a manner that brings previously occluded aspects of reality into focus. However, this conceptual expansion will at times confront us with the limitations of our old ways of thinking, inviting us into a journey that is simultaneously threatening and liberating. To accept this invitation is to accept world-loss as a condition for philosophical progress—a progress that is no longer bounded by the “logical must” of the epistemological quest. Hence, to the extent that this reorientation of thought may involve a radical departure from the world as we know it, philosophy must be willing to accept the risk of loss entailed by its method. As difficult as this picture of philosophy as loss may be, it puts us in the way of a radically liberatory picture of consciousness-raising that may guide our political lives: one that makes self-knowledge depend on “acknowledgement of otherness” which, in turn, demands “a willingness for the experience of horror.”63
Published on January 31, 2026 * Camila Lobo * 1. I borrow the idea of a “quest for certainty” and “epistemological quest” from Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 225.↩ 2. Sandra Bartky, “Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness,” in Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), 11.↩ 3. Sandra Bartky, “Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness,” 11.↩ 4. Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of State (London and Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 86.↩ 5. In a memoir in which she recalls her experiences as an activist during the 1960s and 1970s North American women’s liberation movement, Susan Brownmiller explains the term “consciousness-raising” was coined by Kathie Sarachild at a meeting of the New York Radical Women (see Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution [New York: Dell Publishing, 1999], 21).↩ 6. For some of these discussions, see Kathie Sarachild, “Consciousness Raising: A Radical Weapon”, in Feminist Revolution (New Paltz, NY: Redstockings, 1975) and Carol Hanish, “Impact of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the Women’s Liberation Movement” (speech delivered at the New School for Social Research in New York on December 14, 1996). For a comprehensive and rigorous study of the history of feminist consciousness-raising and the traditions of struggle that influenced it, from the civil rights movement to the New Left and the student movement, see Lazz Kinnamon “‘We stayed up all night rapping’: Toward a History of Feminist Consciousness-Raising, 1964-1986,” Signs 50:1 (2024).↩ 7. Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (London and New York: Verso Books, 2015), 27.↩ 8. In a recent issue of The Funambulist, “Schools of the Revolution” (issue 49, 2023), editors Sónia Vaz Borges and Léopold Lambert bring together a set of contributions on practices of political education across different locations, geographies, and historical times, with a focus on pedagogical practices that challenge the “rules and values of colonial capitalist hegemony.”↩ 9. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (London and New York: Continuum, 2005), 72–74.↩ 10. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 68.↩ 11. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 160.↩ 12. Dilar Dirik, “Stateless Citizenship: ‘Radical Democracy as Consciousness-Raising’ in the Rojava Revolution,” Identities 29:1 (2022), 27–44.↩ 13. Dilar Dirik, “Stateless Citizenship:‘Radical Democracy as Consciousness-Raising’ in the Rojava Revolution,” 37.↩ 14. Dilar Dirik, The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice (London: Pluto Books, 2022), 77–80.↩ 15. Sandra Bartky, “Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness,” 12.↩ 16. Sandra Bartky, “Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness,” 15.↩ 17. The Combahee River Collective Statement stands as a testament to the power of identity politics for consciousness-raising practices. (see Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa [Boston: Persephone Press, 1981], 210–218).↩ 18. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984), 46.↩ 19. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019), 123, my emphasis.↩ 20. On this point, see Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–80 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), Michaele Ferguson, “Dead Dogma and the Limits of Feminist Political Imagination: Thinking #Metoo as Consciousness-Raising,” Theory & Event 25:2 (2022), as well as Kinnamon’s aforementioned piece..↩ 21. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, 124.↩ 22. Catharine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of State, 85.↩ 23. Sandra Bartky, “Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness,” 13.↩ 24. Of particular significance here is the third part of Lukács’s famous essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in which he writes: “Of course, the knowledge yielded by the standpoint of the proletariat stands on a higher scientific plane objectively; it does after all apply a method that makes possible the solution of problems which the greatest thinkers of the bourgeois era have vainly struggled to find and in its substance, it provides the adequate historical analysis of capitalism which must remain beyond the grasp of bourgeois thinkers. However, this attempt to grade the methods objectively in terms of their value to knowledge is itself a social and historical problem, an inevitable result of the types of society represented by the two classes and their place in history. It implies that the ‘falseness’ and the ‘one-sidedness’ of the bourgeois view of history must be seen as a necessary factor in the systematic acquisition of knowledge about society” (György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics [Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1968], 163–164).↩ 25. Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What is ‘Strong Objectivity’?,” The Centennial Review 36:3 (1992): 442–443.↩ 26. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and The Politics of Empowerment (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).↩ 27. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and The Politics of Empowerment, 12.↩ 28. bell hooks, Feminist Theory, preface.↩ 29. Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology,” 458.↩ 30. Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology,” 441.↩ 31. bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Possibility,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36 (1989): 20.↩ 32. bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Possibility,” 20.↩ 33. bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Possibility,” 22.↩ 34. Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology,” 454–455.↩ 35. It is not uncommon for standpoint theorists to ground the formation of political standpoints in strategically identified commonalities of experience among marginalized subjects who have no investment in maintaining the dominant worldview. See, for instance, Alison Wylie, “Why Standpoint Matters,” in Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophies of Science and Technology, eds. Robert Figueroa and Sandra Harding (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 40.↩ 36. bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Possibility,” 19.↩ 37. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, Updated Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), xix–xxi ↩ 38. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, xxxvi.↩ 39. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, xxiii.↩ 40. Stanley Cavell, “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values (April 3 and 8, 1986), 84, https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/c/cavell88.pdf, accessed March 2024.↩ 41. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, xxiii.↩ 42. Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, 27–28.↩ 43. bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Possibility,” 22.↩ 44. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1958), § 116.↩ 45. For a critical feminist account of the skeptical tradition, see Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), esp. Chapter 4.↩ 46. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, xxvii.↩ 47. Stanley Cavell, “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” 110.↩ 48. Cora Diamond “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 1:2 (2003), 12.↩ 49. Stanley Cavell, “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” 84.↩ 50. Stanley Cavell, “Reply to four chapters,” 286.↩ 51. Stanley Cavell, “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” 109.↩ 52. Stanley Cavell, “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” 96.↩ 53. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3.↩ 54. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words, 2.↩ 55. The relevant moral notions are, according to Cavell, those of right, in the case of Kantian deontology, and good, in the case of utilitarianism or, as he puts it, “teleology” (see Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words, 9).↩ 56. Martin Gustafsson, “What is Cavellian Perfectionism?,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 48:3, 2014), 101.↩ 57. Cavell often presents friendship through the “allegory” of marriage and, in particular, through the theme of remarriage as it appears in a range of Hollywood comedies to which he dedicates a great deal of his work. However, he explicitly distinguishes the kind of relationship that interests him in these movies from the institution of marriage: “So many terrible charges can be brought against the institution of modern, or say, bourgeois, marriage, that it can sometimes seem a wonder that sensible people who have a choice in the matter continue to seek its blessings and accept its costs.” Instead, for Cavell, comedies of remarriage provide important expressions of the moral encounter understood as an effort to render the other intelligible to oneself and “hence with an opportunity for self-knowledge” (see Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words, 16–17).↩ 58. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words, 16.↩ 59. Martin Gustafsson, “What is Cavellian Perfectionism?,” 109.↩ 60. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 439.↩ 61. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, 116.↩ 62. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §89.↩ 63. Stanley Cavell, “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” 90.↩ |
