Aesthetic injustice

ABSTRACT

In this article, the author advances the concept of aesthetic injustice, which denotes any harm done to someone specifically in her capacity as an aesthetic being, and explores four dimensions of this new philosophical concept. First, the author appeals to the notion of colonial mentality presented by Amílcar Cabral in order to show how aesthetic injustice is experienced differently by the oppressors and the oppressed. Then, the author engages critically with Augusto Boal’s The Aesthetics of the Oppressed and underscores the mutual influence between aesthetic injustice and epistemic injustice. Next, the author suggests how both types of injustice may be resisted by dint of an analysis of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and The Rainbow of Desire. The author concludes by examining how aesthetic injustice is inimical to democracy and by explaining why a democratic regime requires aesthetic justice, a normative concept according to which all citizens are equally entitled to have their way of seeing and feeling about public issues taken into account in political deliberation.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetic injustice
• Augusto Boal
• Amilcar Cabral
• epistemic injustice
• aesthetics of the oppressed
• theatre of the oppressed
• rainbow of desire
• democracy

The development of man’s capacity for feeling is, therefore, the more urgent need of our age.

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

Ismael: “The coffin is leaving! Won’t you cry? Don’t you have tears?”

Virginia: “I can’t! I try, but I can’t.”

Ismael: “That’s because he’s black. Black.”

Nelson Rodrigues, Black Angel (1946)

Superiority? Inferiority?

Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other?

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

Aesthetic injustice and colonial mentality

Contemporary philosophers and political theorists have been felicitous in developing the concept of epistemic injustice, which denotes any harm done to someone specifically with regards to her epistemic capacities.¹ None of them, however, have paid sufficient attention to aesthetic injustice, which denotes any harm done to someone specifically with regards to her aesthetic capacities. This neglect is troublesome because, as I will argue, epistemic injustice feeds on aesthetic injustice. So if one aims to adequately understand and resist epistemic injustice, one need also examine the modus operandi of aesthetic injustice.

By aesthetic capacities, I mean our abilities to feel and imagine something. Such abilities can be called “aesthetic” insofar as “aesthetics” designates the realm of what can be felt and imagined. In ancient Greek, “aiesthétós” meant “perceived by the senses” (Boal 2009, 25). Aesthetics encompasses our “imagination,” that is, “the power each sensory being has … to represent things … in his brain” (Voltaire 1818, 217). As we will see in the next section, our aesthetic capacities are essential to our abilities to think and know—that is, they are essential to our epistemic capacities.

Like epistemic injustice, aesthetic injustice is intimately related to oppression, a social practice that is exercised, inter alia, through the superior vs. inferior dichotomy.² As a process of social stratification that classifies citizens into “inferior” and “superior” camps, oppression entails: (i) the creation of a series of differences between the (inferior) oppressed and the (superior) oppressors; (ii) the valuation of these differences to the advantage of the oppressors; (iii) the affirmation of these differences as immutable attributes that justify the perennial subaltern position of the oppressed. These three processes bring to the fore the constructive force of oppression. By systematically dividing citizens into different groups, oppression constructs political identities.³ As I explain shortly, oppression is not only repressive but also productive. By conjuring the “us” vs. “them” dichotomy, oppression works as a glue that produces salient political identities.

Like epistemic injustice and oppression in general, aesthetic injustice is a relational concept and affects both the socially privileged and disadvantaged.⁴ Albeit detrimental for the aesthetic capacities of both, aesthetic injustice has different effects on the oppressor and on the oppressed. While the affective numbness caused by aesthetic injustice increases the self-esteem of the oppressor, it diminishes that of the oppressed. To underscore this point, I will compare the ways in which aesthetic injustice unfolds within the psyches of the oppressed and of the oppressor by dint of an analysis of what anticolonial theorists call colonial mentality.

Colonial mentality has a twofold meaning. In its literal sense, it means the mentality that a colonial state imposes upon its people in order to legitimate colonialism. Put differently, colonial mentality designates those affects and beliefs incrusted in people’s minds that are favorable to colonialism, the psychological reflex of colonial exploitation that makes the colonized more docile and the colonists more at ease with their role as oppressors. In a less literal sense, colonial mentality refers to an oppressive mental framework that hierarchizes people into “superior” and “inferior” groups. Thus understood, colonial mentality can be used to designate the domination suffered by postcolonial societies, that is, societies that are politically autonomous and formally independent of foreign rule. Likewise, it may be used to designate the internal oppression of minority groups within a given state.

The first sense of colonial mentality is the one we find in Amílcar Cabral’s Return to the Source.⁵ One of Africa’s foremost anticolonial leaders, Cabral (1973, 45) contended that European colonialism was carried out in Africa not only through material means but also through a certain “mentality,” an epistemic and affective way of relating to the world that was forged by European colonists in order to justify colonialism. This mentality, which legitimized the oppression of the colonized with the argument that the colonists were “superior” and the colonized “inferior,” was adopted by the colonized and thus produced what Cabral (1973, 45) called “cultural alienation.”

Cultural alienation happens when members of an oppressed group deliberately turn away from their culture, which includes their traditions, institutions, history, art, language, indigenous knowledge, etc. As a manifestation of the colonial mentality, cultural alienation causes aesthetic and epistemic numbness. The oppressed become uninterested in and numb to the art and knowledge produced by their own people, which in turn arrests the development of their cognitive and aesthetic capacities. That is why, as Nigel Gibson (2013) has explained, Cabral identified colonial mentality and oppression with the atrophy of “the creativity of cognition.”⁶

Cabral claims that, besides expelling European colonists from Africa, the struggle for African liberation requires overcoming cultural alienation. That is what he names “return to the source,” a process that occurs when Africans stop being complicit in their own domination and are no longer prey to the colonial mentality (Cabral 1973, 59). Only then will the colonized Africans be able to surmount the “frustration complex” and low self-esteem that the adoption of the colonial mentality makes them feel (Cabral 1973, 62).

When they are under the grip of colonial mentality, members of oppressed groups deliberately refuse to engage with their own culture and seek at all costs to mimic the colonists’ cultural practices. Yet it does not take long for them to realize that, no matter how hard they try to emulate the white master, they will never be considered his equal. Even if Africans do their best to eradicate all the cultural traces that identify them as Africans and learn, for instance, to speak the colonist’s language so well that they no longer speak it with an accent, they will still be seen as “inferior” subjects. Their eagerness to adopt the colonist’s way of life and erase every attribute that may single them out as African simply confirms for the European his belief in white supremacy. It is because black people are “inferior” that they try at all costs to act as if they were white.

In short, the internalization of the colonial mentality by the colonized demeans them and, as Cabral’s work shows, gives them a low self-esteem, a poor assessment of their cognitive and aesthetic capacities that dissuades them from producing and interacting with their own knowledge and art. Now, as regards to the oppressor, the opposite effects are observed. Whereas aesthetic injustice decreases the self-respect and confidence of the oppressed, it inflates the self-esteem of the oppressor. Aesthetic injustice limits the development of the aesthetic capacities of both the oppressed and the oppressor, but it does so in different ways.

Consider, for instance, Ina von Binzer’s Os meus romanos. This collection of letters written in the 19^th century by a German educator who lived in Brazil is particularly useful for our purposes, for it shows quite explicitly how colonial mentality and its attendant aesthetic injustice can be a source of high self-esteem for the oppressor. Binzer’s colonial mentality falls under the second sense of the term highlighted in the beginning of this section. To be sure, Binzer’s letters disclose that she always approached Brazilian culture through the lenses of an oppressive mental framework that hierarchized different ethnicities into “superior” and “inferior” groups.

Binzer’s colonial mentality precludes her from appreciating the art made by people of color, while at the same time reinforcing her sense of superiority and pride for being white. In a letter she wrote to Grete, her sister who lived in Germany, Binzer acknowledges she is incapable of ascribing any value to the cultural practices of the “Latinos”:

Then, a very fat woman with very dark eyes sat in front of the piano … Some people had told me she played masterfully and hence I allowed myself to listen to her attentively. Ach! Grete! Am I too Germanic that I can’t find these Latinos talented or interesting? I couldn’t feel otherwise and to me those quick fingers didn’t say anything. Her face had the color of yellow wax and black eyes that looked like paint blur … All the faces in the audience were filled with admiration by that “impeccable” performance, all but one. It’s been a few days since a young Italian architect arrived in this house … the poor thing seemed to feel the same way I did. I looked at him and smiled, for our common European sensibility makes us apprehend the things done here in the exact same manner. With an expression infinitely sarcastic, he rolled his eyes (Binzer 1994, 29).

Binzer’s colonial mentality prevented her from deriving any aesthetic pleasure from Latin American music. This point is reinforced in another letter she wrote to Grete in which Binzer (1994, 39) describes the music played by “the poor Negroes [negros]” on the streets of Rio as “deafening” and “insipid.” She refuses to call their art “music” because, according to European standards, the “noise” they made was “disharmonious” (Binzer 1994, 39). In the next letter she writes to Grete, Binzer proceeds with her criticism of Afro-Brazilians and surmises that they are doomed to lack “culture”:

If, as a famous professor from Berlin has affirmed, every man of culture seeks to live secluded in his house, then we are led to the conclusion that, when it comes to culture, we are here in the same condition Abraham was in relation to the righteous in Sodom. The idle blacks are always on the street smoking and spitting (Binzer 1994, 66).

Afro-Brazilians cannot reach the status of “men of culture” because, according to Binzer’s colonial mentality, “culture” has a univocal sense, one which finds its sole example in the European way of life. Since Afro-Brazilians are always socializing on the street, they do not follow the precept that the famous professor in Berlin had found to be constitutive of culture. Argal, this reasoning goes, Afro-Brazilians will never develop their own culture.

Particularly interesting to us is the way in which Binzer’s inability to appreciate the art made by Latinx and black people reinvigorates her self-worth. It is because she is from a “superior” ethnic group that Binzer cannot understand the cultural practices made by “inferior” Brazilians. Binzer doubtless suffers from aesthetic injustice. Indeed, her colonial mentality damages her capacity to feel the aesthetic phenomena surrounding her and dwarfs the development of her sensibility. Yet nowhere in the book does Binzer feel frustrated with her incapacity to grasp the artistic practices she sees in Brazil. To the contrary, every time she experiences aesthetic injustice is simply another occasion for her to reinforce her belief in white supremacy. Hence the different ways in which aesthetic injustice resonates among the oppressor and the oppressed: while aesthetic injustice tends to increase the self-worth of the socially privileged, it tends to decrease that of the socially disadvantaged.

By claiming that aesthetic injustice affects both the oppressed and the oppressors, we do not mean to imply that the former should be accused of also committing some kind of injustice to the latter. After all, the racist lens that European colonizers used when approaching non-European cultures was of their own making. The injustice of aesthetic injustice is created by the oppressor, not the oppressed.⁷ Oppression has deleterious effects on both the oppressed and the oppressors and cannot produce self-development and virtues (Cabral 1974, 38). Binzer’s epistemic and aesthetic limitations are due to her experience with aesthetic injustice, a type of injustice of which she is an active perpetrator. Although it resonates differently among the oppressed and the oppressors, aesthetic injustice is a relational event that dwarfs the aesthetic and epistemic capacities of both groups.

The mutual feedback between aesthetic injustice and epistemic injustice

Having shown how aesthetic injustice is experienced differently by the oppressed and the oppressors, I shall now underscore the process of mutual feedback that exists between aesthetic injustice and epistemic injustice. In order to do this, I resort to Boal’s The Aesthetics of the Oppressed. Published in 2009 shortly after Boal’s death, The Aesthetics of the Oppressed proceeds on the assumption that oppression changes the way people feel things.⁸ Oppression is perpetuated not only through material means but also through a constellation of affects and beliefs, internalized by the oppressed, which ends up co-opting them into active perpetrators of their own oppression. Boal submits that oppression can only happen if the oppressed are complicit with it. “If a man loves liberty more than life, he will never be oppressed, though he might be killed. We are oppressed because we are somehow willing to make concessions” (Boal 1999, 289). Oppression cannot survive without some degree of consensual validation. If the oppressed refuse to believe in the social hierarchy invented by the oppressor to demean them, oppression cannot sustain itself. Oppression is an exercise of power that is both repressive and productive: by making the oppressed internalize certain norms, it produces a series of beliefs and behaviors while at the same time repressing and constraining the free development of their epistemic and aesthetic capacities.

Boal (2009, 17–8) explains in the beginning of the book that oppression

builds symbolic barbed wires in the minds of the oppressed, embalming their thinking and erecting forbidden zones to intelligence. It establishes sensitive channels that confine the oppressed to non-contestatory obedience, imposing political and social codes, rituals, and behaviors … that perpetuate domination.⁹

The “barbed wires” mentioned above can be associated with aesthetic injustice insofar as they ossify the aesthetic perception of the oppressed and make it difficult for them to diagnose the oppression they suffer.¹⁰ Hence, aesthetic injustice confines the oppressed to non-contestatory obedience and hinders the development of social critique. In addition, it manipulates the aesthetic capacities of the oppressed in a way that numbs them to other types of art, thus producing what we have referred to as affective numbness. By camouflaging oppression, aesthetic injustice limits the imagination of the oppressed and deadens their critical capacities.

The Aesthetics of the Oppressed reveals that aesthetic injustice is inextricably bound up with epistemic injustice. When art, culture, and other aesthetic practices are manipulated by the oppressors to ensure that the aesthetic perception of the oppressed becomes strategically anesthetized, the oppressed’s epistemic capacities are also marred. Aesthetic injustice and epistemic injustice are mutually reinforcing, for the aesthetic perception also contains epistemic properties. As Boal (2009, 26) defines it, aesthetics is the realm of “sensitive knowledge.” The aesthetic perception informs people’s knowledge about the phenomena surrounding them. Therefore, an individual is bound to experience epistemic injustice whenever her aesthetic capacities are harmed.

Our capacity to know, judge, and think depends upon our senses. That is why Boal claims that the regulation of the visible and audible field is crucial to the survival of any oppressive regime.

Take for instance “neoliberal capitalism,” which in Boal’s (2009, 140) book is identified as a major source of aesthetic injustice and, by the same token, of oppression. By turning competitive individualism into the ultimate reason behind every human behavior, neoliberalism makes it hard, if not impossible, for us to feel affects that are dissonant from its competitive-individualistic logic. Thus it comes as no surprise that for many oppressed subjects it is unthinkable to imagine a world where the competitive-individualistic logic is not the guiding norm of every human relationship.

Resistance against aesthetic injustice requires that we learn “to see what we look at” (Boal 1999, 172). Aesthetic injustice distorts our perception in ways that make us accept oppression. When we see, for instance, a homeless person sleeping on the street on a night so cold that by early morning she might be dead, what we actually look at is a human being. The oppressive discourses that have shaped our society and ourselves, however, can easily make us feel otherwise, as if the homeless person we see is not human.

The ways in which we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend social and political phenomena determine our opinions. A significant part of our moral responses and actions is shaped by aesthetic and epistemic frameworks that are socially constructed.¹¹ These frameworks condition our feelings and knowledge of the world. They divide “superior” from “inferior” lives fundamentally through our senses and cognition. Oppression sustains itself through acting on our aesthetic and epistemic capacities, crafting them to apprehend the world selectively, and constraining our sensibility and cognition in ways that are favorable to it. A struggle must thus be waged against those forces that seek to shape our affects and knowledge in order to keep oppressive practices going on.

Resisting aesthetic and epistemic injustice in practice

Since they are mutually reinforcing, aesthetic injustice and epistemic injustice ought to be resisted in tandem. The interlocking character of these two types of oppression makes it highly unlikely that either of them can disappear entirely without the other being overthrown. Boal knew that resistance against injustice is both an intellectual and affective enterprise, and that is why he invented the theatre of the oppressed and the rainbow of desire technique. Whereas the former seeks to confront the corporal oppression provoked by aesthetic and epistemic injustice, the latter aims to resist the manipulation and limitation of the imagination and desires of the oppressed that both injustices cause.

A collection of essays written between 1962 and 1973, Theatre of the Oppressed is a book that uses theatre as a weapon against oppression and as a tool for freedom:

[M]an must, first of all, control his own body, know his own body, in order to be capable of making it more expressive. Then he will be able to … free himself and … cease to be an object and become a subject … the objective is to make each person aware of his own body, of his bodily possibilities, and of deformations suffered because of the type of work he performs (Boal 2005, 188–90).¹²

The theatre of the oppressed (TO) brings to the fore the fact that our bodies are oppressed.¹³ Our gender roles, the work we perform, the type of transportation we use, the cities where we live—all of these in one way or another can be conduits for oppression and constrain our corporal movements. They further aesthetic and epistemic injustice insofar as they cramp our ability to feel and know our bodies. A worker who cannot feel some muscles of her body because she is forced to remain seated most of the day is a victim of aesthetic injustice. Her atrophied muscles constrain her bodily movement and perception, the limitation of which are “social” because they are provoked by social mechanisms (Boal 2005, 188).

The first stage in the struggle for liberation carried out by the TO consists in exposing that several of our putatively spontaneous and idiosyncratic movements are actually coercive deformations that “the combination of roles that a person must perform imposes on her” (Boal 2005, 191). The first stage of the TO is thus mainly deconstructive, for its aim is to “‘undo’ the muscular structure of the participants. That is, to take them apart, to study and analyze them” so as “to raise them to the level of consciousness. So that each worker, each peasant understands, sees, and feels to what point his body is governed by his work” (Boal 2005, 191–92). Albeit necessary, deconstruction is not a goal in itself; the deconstructive stage ought to be followed by a constructive one in which citizens are encouraged to use their bodies in novel ways, to construct new movements in order to expand their body perception and knowledge. For Boal (2005, 192), this second stage cannot do without the first one, for the first step to resist oppression and design more liberated ways of conducting our bodies is to become aware that oppression exists. Needless to say, if the oppressed believe their corporal deformations are merely natural results of their personal habits, they will never act in concert in order to struggle and protest against oppression.

Whilst Theatre of the Oppressed emphasizes how oppression constrains the knowledge and aesthetic perception of the body, The Rainbow of Desire grapples with a different kind of aesthetic and epistemic injustice, one that deforms the psyche of the oppressed and harms their imagination and capacity to know themselves and their desires. Originally published in 1990, The Rainbow of Desire introduces the figure of “the cop in the head,” a metaphor which is so central to the book’s arguments that Boal initially considered it as his title. In the introduction, Boal (1996b, 23) explains that “the rainbow of desire” was a technique he devised in the 1970s after fleeing from the military dictatorship in Brazil and becoming an exile in France.

Having come from a Latin American military dictatorship where police violence was rampant, Boal was surprised when several French citizens told him they were also oppressed. “I would always ask myself, ‘Ok, but where are the police?’ For I was used to working with concrete and visible oppressions” (Boal 1996b, 23). The surprise led him to realize that overcoming aesthetic and epistemic injustice demands paying attention to the corporal as well as the psychological aspects of oppression.

“I organized in Paris a workshop that lasted almost two years called Le Flic dans la Tête (the cop in the head). I proceeded on the following assumption: the cop is in the head. We need to discover how he entered there and devise mechanisms to expel him” (Boal 1996b, 23). The rainbow of desire is a technique that investigates how the “kaleidoscopic” multifariousness of human desire has been crippled and impoverished by the myriad forms of oppression internalized by subjugated social groups (Boal 1996b, 115). These internalized oppressions that hamper the free development of citizens’ cognition and affects are tantamount to what Boal calls “the cop in the head.”

The rainbow of desire “has gnoseological [gnosiológicas] properties, that is, properties that stimulate knowledge and discovery” (Boal 1996b, 34). It allows the oppressed to diagnose epistemic and aesthetic injustice by showing them that the epistemic and aesthetic framework they use to structure their desires and imagine different life plans is, to a significant extent, a source of domination. Like their self-knowledge in general, their ability to know their desires and to imagine different possibilities for the future has been damaged by powers that were once external, but that now are part of the very psyche of the oppressed. Once they come to grips with the fact that they suffer aesthetic and epistemic injustice—a predicament that cries for resistance—the oppressed gain the opportunity to formulate their own desires autonomously and develop themselves freely.

I italicize opportunity because simply becoming aware of injustice is not enough for overcoming it. Take for instance the case of internalized homophobia, a prime example of how aesthetic and epistemic injustice can cramp self-development (Fricker 2007, 163–64). Even though the topic of homophobia is not addressed in The Rainbow of Desire, it is not difficult to understand why Boal’s technique has been appropriated by some LGBTQ activists. The reason it takes so long for sexual minorities to fully explore their affective lives is because in most societies, if not all, everybody is trained from a very early age to adopt a heteronormative epistemic and affective framework. Those who are not heterosexual are therefore disadvantaged, for they lack the hermeneutical resources to comprehend their desires and affects.

The rainbow of desire can help sexual minorities know themselves and feel their desires without guilt or shame. As a political activist and artist has explained, the rainbow of desire allows sexual minorities to fight against aesthetic and epistemic injustice by confronting the cops in their heads, whereupon they are granted the gift of “self-discovery” (Sarapeck 2015, 37). Yet, as Helen Sarapeck testifies, when it comes to internalized homophobia, resistance to aesthetic and epistemic injustice can be quite difficult. Even when they realize that their desires were manipulated by the heteronormative mental framework that oppresses them, some homosexuals are not able to resist homophobia. To drive this point home, Sarapeck mentions a case she witnessed while working with GHOTA (Grupo Homossexual de Teatro do Oprimido), a theatre company who uses the rainbow of desire technique to resist homophobia.

In order to fight against the cop in the head, Boal’s (1996b, 54) technique first adumbrates the psychological mechanism by which oppression is internalized by the oppressed subject, which he calls “osmosis.” As its name indicates, osmosis is a quasi-automatic psychological reaction of virtually everybody who lives in a society where oppression exists—that is, where social groups are treated unequally because some are hierarchized as somehow worthier than others. Osmosis happens “everywhere, in all cells of human life” (Boal 1996b, 54). Nevertheless, different types of oppression thrive in different settings, and what Boal’s technique does is to invite the oppressed to revisit their past in order to select the places where a certain type of osmosis took hold of them.

While she worked with GHOTA, Sarapeck (a heterosexual cisgendered woman) observed that most gay men named the family, the church, and the workplace as fertile sites for the osmosis of homophobia. After tracing the historical genesis of the osmosis that implanted the homophobic cop in their head, the members of GHOTA then followed the second step of Boal’s technique: they shared real life experiences of such osmosis with others who were also its victims, and were encouraged to write a short script where osmosis was blocked through resistance. Next, they were asked to perform the script in front of the group. The performance aimed to prepare them to confront their oppressors in real life—something which for Boal was crucial for the destruction of the cop in the head and, consequently, for the elimination of aesthetic and epistemic injustice. “The cops are in their heads, but the headquarters of these cops are in the external reality. It is necessary to locate [and resist] both the cops and their headquarters” (Boal 1996b, 35; see also 2006, 5–6).

Sarapeck recounts the story of Chuchu, a young man who had to dramatize a bad experience he had with homophobia at a job interview. Having been familiar with Boal’s technique for some time, Chuchu knew he was a victim of aesthetic and epistemic injustice. He learned that the shame he felt when he encountered homophobia came from the cop in his head, and that the only way to expel that shame was to speak up against the embodiment of that cop, which in that particular scene corresponded to the man playing the employer. When he was dramatizing the scene in front of his peers, however, Chuchu could not resist:

[W]e were waiting for Chuchu’s line that would signalize the reaction of his character [against the homophobic job interviewer]. Chuchu turned his face down and we thought: “now is the time, he is remembering the script.” We were wrong. Chuchu was crying … we waited one or two more minutes until, without knowing whether I was right or not, I entered on stage and hugged Chuchu. The scene ended there … . In my ear, Chuchu whispered: “I just can’t” (Sarapeck 2015, 38).

By being refused the job he wanted once again, Chuchu was, just like the first time, overwhelmed with a mixture of sadness and shame. The fact that now, unlike then, he believed being gay was nothing to be ashamed of did not preclude him from feeling shame again, which explains why he could not pluck up the courage to resist the homophobic job interviewer. Chuchu experienced what Fricker (2007, 37) calls “residual internalization,” a phenomenon that occurs when “a member of a subordinated group continues as host to a sort of half-life for the oppressive ideology, even when her beliefs have genuinely moved on.” Fricker maintains that residual internalization makes one’s affective states lag behind one’s epistemic beliefs. Her description of residual internalization can be applied to Chuchu’s case because, though he no longer believed homosexuality was shameful, Chuchu still felt shame when identified as a homosexual. To put it in the terms deployed in this article, residual internalization is what occurs when an oppressed subject overcomes a certain kind of epistemic injustice without resisting its attendant aesthetic injustice.

Residual internalization demonstrates that effectively resisting oppression requires overcoming both epistemic and aesthetic injustice, a process that, as Chuchu’s case shows, is far from easy. Aesthetic injustice and epistemic injustice are perpetuated through collective ways of imagining that demean some social groups while dignifying others; the depreciation of some and the overvaluation of others are two sides of the same coin. Collective ways of imagining social groups are deeply entrenched in our cognitive and affective apparatus and frame our interactions with others quasi-automatically (Boal 1996b, 54; Fricker 2007, 38). That happens not because they are natural, but because they have been enforced over a long period of time. It took time for them to grow roots in us, and so it is no wonder that our uprooting them also takes time. No one is born, for instance, a homophobe. Like other forms of internalized oppression, homophobia is learned. And since it is learned, it can be unlearned.

Witness the case of Flavio Sanctum, one of the oldest members of GHOTA. Sanctum’s (2015) poignant account of how he overcame “self-repression” with the rainbow of desire technique shows that expelling the cop in the head is a process that does not happen in one day. Even after getting rid of the belief that homosexuality was shameful, Sanctum still felt ashamed of taking pictures with GHOTA members. He tells how he would hide his face under a big hat for fear of being recognized by family members in case the photo ended up being published somewhere (Sanctum 2015, 23). Yet as his training with Boal’s method increased, his feelings were by-and-by put in sync with his beliefs, and nowadays Sanctum is no longer ashamed of being identified as gay (see Sanctum 2015, 34).

Since epistemic injustice feeds on aesthetic injustice, resisting both of them is an intellectual and affective enterprise. That is why Boal’s technique, besides encouraging the oppressed to discuss their problems collectively, asks them to produce affective images that portray the feelings they had when they came face to face with their oppressors (Boal 1996b, 56). As each image is dramatized, it is imperative that the oppressed scrutinize it several times in such a way as to orchestrate subversive strategies that will change their affects and feelings the next time they run up against their oppressors (Boal 1996b, 57). Although feelings and affects are doubtless impossible to be completely mastered, Boal’s method seeks to give the oppressed some command over both of them: by playing artistically with the affective images caused by her oppression in front of other similarly oppressed subjects, the individual learns to modify her affects as regards to her own oppression (Boal 1996b, 77). Shame can be morphed to indignation, and complicit silence can be replaced by noisy defiance. As they rehearse possible strategies of resistance in front of their peers, the oppressed “multiply the points of view through which each [oppressive] situation can be seen” (Boal 1996b, 58). The multiplication of perspectives allows them to resist oppression by constructing plans of action for their collective problems.

I emphasize collective to rebut the critique that the rainbow of desire technique diverts attention from structural problems by reducing oppression to simply an individual psychological problem (see Dinneen 2013, 155; Österlind 2008). The rainbow of desire technique is a “political therapy” that refashions the affective disposition of the self in order to promote social transformation (Boal 2019, 131). Boal (1996b, 58) makes clear in The Rainbow of Desire that when “participants belong to the same social group … and are subjected to the same oppressions … the individual account of one person will resonate immediately: the oppression of each is the oppression of all.” The rainbow of desire technique strongly encourages the groups practicing it to be composed of individuals facing similar oppressions, because its purpose is to underscore the collective nature of individuals’ oppression.¹⁴ Familiarity with the oppression of others makes the individual participant at ease when she has to discuss her problems in the group and, moreover, facilitates the formulation of resistant tactics by the oppressed group that can bring about structural changes.

Sanctum’s testimony epitomizes this feature of Boal’s method remarkably well. In his account, Sanctum (2015) explains that the rainbow of desire technique was instrumental in helping GHOTA members to take action against a homophobic restaurant from which several of its members were expelled simply for being gay. After some debates, GHOTA members decided to dramatize the oppressions they faced in the restaurant in public, “right at the door of the prejudiced restaurant” (Sanctum 2015, 22). After the performance was over, bystanders were invited to suggest amendments to a petition that GHOTA members wanted to send to the Municipal Council.

The petition asked city councilors to enact a law creating a fine for restaurants that refused service to customers on the basis of their sexuality. It did not take long for representatives of the Municipal Council of Rio de Janeiro to enact a law based on GHOTA’s petition. The municipal law 2475/96, the first of its type in the country, would later serve as a model for a similar national law. This example proves that the rainbow of desire technique can trigger structural transformations that mitigate oppression, thus promoting resistance against aesthetic and epistemic injustice in real life.

Aesthetic injustice as the nemesis of democracy

Understood as the regime where all citizens enjoy equal freedom to participate in politics, democracy is opposed to aesthetic injustice. The society of equals that democracy comprises, unlike oppressive regimes that promote aesthetic injustice, refuses to segregate citizens into “superior” and “inferior” groups. Democracy is the regime that legitimatizes and fosters aesthetic multiplicity, that is, the regime where the different ways of perceiving and feeling political phenomena are not only respected but also deemed indispensable for the formulation of laws. Democracy requires that all citizens be equally entitled to have their way of seeing and feeling about public issues taken into account in political deliberation. It requires that citizens learn to interact with human diversity without turning difference into a matter of ranking. In short, it requires aesthetic justice, which comes about only when the majority of citizens stop seeing their differences as a matter of being “worse than” or “better than.” Democracy is related to aesthetic justice because it refuses to allow difference to become a justification for hierarchy.¹⁵

In the wake of Boal, I use the word “democracy” to convey not only a form of government where incumbents are elected through popular and competitive elections, but a form of social existence in which people have opportunity to develop their aesthetic and epistemic capacities. Far from being simply a neutral procedure that allows political opponents to succeed one another in power without appealing to physical violence, “democracy” designates here a mode of organizing collective life that bestows on each citizen the necessary resources for self-development—that is, for the process of human flourishing that cannot do without the cultivation of aesthetic and epistemic capacities.

Democracy “respects and values the individual, all individuals, with their opinions, needs, and idiosyncrasies” (Boal 2009, 131; see also 2003, 175–76). This appreciation of the singularity of each person—or what is the same, of human plurality—is intimately related with the creed that political issues can be analyzed from an infinite variety of perspectives:

Not all eyes see the same thing … . There is no pure eye … It is true that each thing has two sides; each side, other sides. Put them in front of each other and you get a hall of mirrors with each side multiplying ad infinitum … Replace now sides for opinions and apply the same thinking (Boal 2009, 31–2, 125).

When citizens are granted equal liberty to exchange and express their opinions in public, political views expand in innumerable, and often diverging, directions. It is for this reason that those who take part in democratic deliberation tend to develop a kaleidoscopic consciousness, which shows them that public issues can be seen from different angles. Citizens imagine and feel political affairs differently, and no single way of looking at them represents a “pure” or ultimately “superior” stance that everybody has to adopt. Therefore, no one is allowed to select their personal perspective as the sole basis for the making of a law that will apply to everybody else. As the regime of aesthetic multiplicity, democracy requires that laws be made through a deliberative process where the opinions of all social groups are equally considered.¹⁶

Since political affairs can be analyzed from multiple perspectives, one’s understanding of them will be more complete the more perspectives one takes into account. Democracy urges citizens to constantly enlarge their comprehension and knowledge of public issues through interaction with others and also through the use of the imagination. Democracy is the regime that maximizes critical thinking, for only in a democracy can citizens deliberate in public and “develop their capacity to … take a distance from the reality they must modify” (Boal 2009, 122). By inciting citizens to develop their imagination and feel political issues in a myriad of ways, democracy allows them to occupy different perspectives, which in turn grants them the ability to criticize the current perspective they adopt. One cannot critically judge a given perspective if one is not able to keep a distance from it.

When oppressed citizens resist aesthetic injustice, they acquire the ability to criticize and judge the perspective perpetuated by their oppressors and thus develop the capacity to imagine collective existence anew. Establishing new fields of vision, they disrupt the hegemonic distribution of what can and cannot be sensed.¹⁷ The net effect of this process is that citizens perceive social transformation is possible. Democracy discloses the truly historical character of politics: as a human artifice, the political world can be transformed for better if enough people act in order to do so. This incentive for transformative action pits democracy against oppressive regimes, which propagate popular apathy and resignation by mangling citizens’ aesthetic and epistemic capacities. Democracy becomes impossible when the oppressors monopolize the production of words and images—which are the two most basic means for aesthetic expression—in order to dwarf the capacity of the oppressed to know reality. When citizens’ capacity to feel and imagine their political existence is deliberately constrained and enclosed into narrow boundaries, one of the core passions that sustain the affective basis of democracy—namely, the passion for openness (Ferrara 2014, chap., 2)—withers away.

Thus understood, “democracy” is not a descriptive term that expresses a pre-given reality we already enjoy. Rather, it is a normative term capable of yielding yardsticks and standards that help us democratize the societies we live in. Like Boal (2009, 169), I assume that “a real democracy” is something we currently do not have, for a real democracy comes about only when citizens have “the conditions and means to develop their potentialities in all directions.” A democratic society can only spring forth and consolidate with developed citizens who know and feel their surrounding reality in a manner that permits them to make conscious choices and resist oppression.

I use the verb resist, not eliminate, insofar as oppression is inherent in social and political existence. In politics, each configuration of power creates a new underdog, a new group who would benefit from unsettling the prevailing decision. For even when political decisions are made after a democratic debate where members of different social groups are able to voice their ideas and vote on the final measure, it is possible that the decision reached ends up oppressing a few or some citizens. It is precisely because it acknowledges that politics entails exercising a collective form of power that inevitably winds up being oppressive for some people that democracy encourages political decisions to be reviewed and, if need be, altered. Rather than being associated with the complete elimination of oppression, democracy should be seen as the regime that brings oppression to a minimum by making exclusion visible and by recognizing the legitimacy of popular contestation.

The power that popular contestation and participation have to diminish oppression cannot work properly, however, when aesthetic injustice is widespread. Aesthetic injustice is anathema to democracy because, by constraining citizens’ ability to think differently and to imagine politics anew, it makes it difficult for them to adopt attitudes that are conducive to a democratic ethos, such as openness to difference and fallibilism. More than a form of government, democracy is a form of society that infuses in its citizens a specific type of “ethos” or “character” (Boal 2009, 246, 229). Different types of regime foster different types of subjectivities. Whereas in an authoritarian and oppressive regime the tendency is to find uncritical and dogmatic individuals, in a democracy citizens develop a proclivity for critical thinking and thus are constantly examining their political assumptions.

Democracy maximizes self-development because it reveals that there is a constitutive “multiplicity” both in human society and within the self (Boal 2009, 199). As a practice of resistance against aesthetic injustice, democracy brings to the fore the fact that each of us harbors multiple “identities that are not in use” (Boal 2009, 199). Since it diminishes aesthetic injustice, the exercise of democracy enables citizens to discover and develop their inner multitudinousness, which in turn allows them to expand their individuality, “to feel, think, and be in ways infinitely more varied than the ones they use every day” (Boal 1999, 293). Aesthetic injustice forestalls self-development, because it smothers the actualization of the inner differences that constitute the individuality of each human being. Like Freire, Boal maintained that human beings were endowed with a vital impulse to develop the potentialities latent in themselves. The aesthetic injustice promoted by non-democratic and oppressive regimes is dehumanizing, for it denies the defining feature of human beings: the vocation of becoming more (ser mais), of expanding and developing one’s self.

Concluding remarks

This article has advanced the concept of aesthetic injustice, which denotes any harm done to someone specifically in her capacity as an aesthetic being, and argued that the type of oppression this concept delimits ought to be placed under scrutiny. Contemporary philosophers and political theorists ought to further investigate the ways in which aesthetic injustice promotes epistemic injustice and hinders the consolidation of democracy.

Acknowledgments

Earlier drafts of this paper were presented in 2019 at Grupo de Estudos Espinosanos (Universidade de São Paulo) and at Atelier de Théorie Critique/Critical Theory Workshop (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales). I am grateful to the audiences for their helpful feedback. I have greatly benefited from discussions with Samantha Bankston, Douglas Ferreira Barros, Marilena Chaui, Katerina Elvén, Lorenz Hegel and Luís César Oliva, and from written comments by Dana Liljegren, Jennifer Ponce de León, Gabriel Rockhill, and Michael Rubin. The ideas presented in the article were discussed in a course I taught in 2019 at the Department of Philosophy at Universidade Estadual do Paraná. I am grateful to all students who participated in that course and to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work results from the research project Liberdade Democrática, which is sponsored by the Humanities Division at Universidade Estadual do Paraná.

Notes on contributors

Gustavo H. Dalaqua

Gustavo Hessmann Dalaqua is professor of philosophy at the University of the State of Paraná. A former visiting scholar at Columbia University, he holds a Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of São Paulo and coordinates the Coletivo Paulo Freire, which organizes Freirean culture circles in Paraná.

Notes

1. Ian James Kidd, José Medina and Gaile Pohlhaus’s (2017) The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice compiles several essays written by contemporary scholars who study epistemic injustice. The concept of epistemic injustice acquired prominence mainly through the work of Miranda Fricker (2007, 1), who coined the term to express any “wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.”

2. Needless to say, oppression is also exercised through material means such as economic exploitation and physical violence. On the distinction between material and psychological oppression, see Sandra Lee Bartky (1990, chap., 2) and Ann E. Cudd (2006). For an extensive analysis of psychological oppression, see Carl Ratner (2014).

3. Toni Morrison expounds on this feature of oppression in one of her latest books, The Origin of Others. She argues that political identities such as “white” and “black” are historical constructs that were fashioned through systematic oppression (Morrison 2017, 5–6, 15–6, 48–9). On the characterization of oppression as a social practice that divides people into different groups and creates collective identities, see also Gustavo Hessmann Dalaqua (2020), Paulo Freire (1974, chap., 1) and Iris Marion Young (1990, chap., 2).

4. On the different ways in which epistemic injustice is experienced by the oppressed and the oppressor, see José Medina (2013, chaps. 1–2). As he points out, epistemic injustice concerns “not only the epistemic deficits that oppressed subjects have to endure, but also the epistemic excesses (excessive authority and credibility, excessive self-confidence, etc.) that privileged subjects enjoy and that spoil their epistemic character” (Medina 2013, 24).

5. The second sense of colonial mentality will be examined when we analyze Ina von Binzer’s Os meus romanos. Although he did not deploy the term, it is possible to affirm that Boal (1984, 96) investigated the oppression caused by colonial mentality when he addressed the issue of “cultural colonialism,” an expression he used to denote “the imposition of cultural values of one country over another” that leads the oppressed “to accept the values of one country as if they were superior values valid for all countries, to accept the values of one class as if they were in favor of all classes.”

6. On the importance of epistemic openness in Cabral’s theory, see Reiland Rabaka (2009, 271, 2014, 301), Cabral (1977, 161–63) and Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2019, 115–17). On the ways in which colonial mentality inhibits the development of the epistemic capacities of the colonized, see Rajeev Bhargava (2013) and Albert Memmi (1967, 28, 83).

7. That does not mean, however, that the oppressed cannot contribute to oppression by actively reproducing the demeaning standards the oppressors created to subjugate them (see section four of this article). As regards the question of whether a privileged subject can cease by her own initiative to perpetuate aesthetic injustice, one should answer that, although some privileged individuals might by their own effort self-correct their prejudices and aesthetic limitations, an effective transformation of a society’s aesthetic injustice requires that the oppressed themselves contest in public the oppression they suffer.

8. My page references are to the original version of the book, which was written in Portuguese and is considerably larger than the translated version published by Routledge.

9. The idea that the oppressors implant “barbed wires” in the minds of the oppressed so as to make them submissive had already been advanced by Paulo Freire (1994, 153), a philosopher who is cited in The Aesthetics of the Oppressed. On Freire’s influence over Boal, see Boal (1996a, 101–4), Deborah Mutnick (2006), Doug Paterson (2011), Schechner and Chatterjee (1998, 89–90) and Paolo Vittoria (2019).

10. It is one thing to affirm that oppression makes it difficult for the oppressed to diagnose the domination they suffer, and yet another to argue that, under oppression, it is impossible for any oppressed subject to perceive, no matter how inchoately, he or she is oppressed. Even under oppressive circumstances, the oppressed are able to device cultural practices that can help them expose and resist the domination they suffer. For a fuller account of this process, see Cabral (1975, chap., 3).

11. See Judith Butler (2010). An epistemic and aesthetic framework is a historically generated, collectively sustained system of meanings, by reference to which a group perceives, understands, and assesses its individual and collective life.

12. Boal’s use of the word “man” in this passage to refer to human beings in general was common in the Portuguese language when he wrote Theatre of the Oppressed. Such use does not mean, however, that he was unaware of the fact that one’s gender affects the way one experiences oppression.

13. As Phillip Auslander (2002, 124) points out, one of the main theses of the theatre of the oppressed is that the human body is “the primary locus of the ideological inscriptions” produced by oppressive social practices. For Boal, “the material life of the body is expressive of oppression because the body itself, its actions and gestures, are determined by ideological relations” (Auslander 2002, 129; see also Howe 2019, 76). Indeed, both aesthetic injustice and epistemic injustice can be associated with the concept of “ideology,” which Boal (2009, 211) defined as “sensorially received ideas by citizens that, albeit not conscious, determine their behavior: ways of speaking, acting, and thinking.” On the similarities between epistemic injustice and ideology, see Charles W. Mills (2017). On the aesthetic dimension of ideology, see Adolfo Sánchez Vásquez (1966, 26–8) and de León and Rockhill (forthcoming).

14. As Boal (2005, 229) had already remarked in Theatre of the Oppressed, “it is always necessary to understand the generic character of the particular case [of oppression] presented.” The act of unveiling the collective forces that lie behind each individual manifestation of oppression corresponds to what Boal names ascesis.

15. It is no surprise then, as I explain in the next paragraph, that “democracy” as used in this text designates a mode of existence we currently do not know. Given the oppressive character of our societies, we are trained to automatically reduce people’s differences into pre-given categories that reinforce social hierarchies. How would it be to approach human plurality without appealing to these categories? This is the question that the association of democracy with aesthetic justice invites us to pose.

16. This is not to say that political decisions in a democracy must include all existing views. For Boal that would be impossible, not only because citizens’ political opinions can contradict one another, but also because oppressive political views—i.e., views that seek to deny citizens’ equal liberty to develop themselves—should not be used as a basis for the formulation of political decisions. (That does not mean, however, that citizens should not be able to express whatever oppressive ideas they might have in the public sphere.) In Boal’s political theory, democracy is a normative, non-neutral concept that has oppression as its constitutive outside. Accordingly, a democratic regime that based its laws and public policies on oppressive views would act suicidally, for it would compromise its ability to consolidate itself over time.

17. As Gomes and Godar (2015) explain, Boal’s aesthetics seeks to promote democracy and combat oppression through a reconfiguration of what Jacques Rancière (2000) called “the division of the sensible.” On the similarities between Boal and Rancière, see also Sophie Coudray (2016), Susanne Shawyer (2019), Suzana Schmidt Viganó (2015) and Boal and Soeiro (2019, 101).