Ways of (Not) Seeing: (In)visibility, Equality and the Politics of Recognition

ABSTRACT This article explores the theorization of (in)visibility in Honneth, Ranciere, Cavell and Tully. It situates the work of Honneth and Ranciere against the background of Wittgenstein's account of continuous aspect perception and aspect change in order to draw out their accounts of invisibility and the aesthetic character of transitions to visibility. In order to develop a critical standpoint on these theoretical positions, it turns to Cavell's concept of soul-blindness and investigates the form of invisibility through the example of racism as addressed by Gaita, Fanon and Memmi. This analysis provides the basis for a critical evaluation of the strengths and limitations of Ranciere's and Honneth's approaches and leads to the proposal that Tully's public philosophy provides a more adequate way of addressing the issues of struggle and uptake that are central to the transition from invisibility to visibility.

elaboration of Cavell's argument and clarify the centrality of fundamental equality to the theorization of invisibility.This discussion leads to reflection on the theorizations of struggle and of uptake in these accounts and identifies problems with each of Honneth's and Ranciere's approaches.It then argues that these problems can be overcome by turning to the mode of "public philosophy" developed by Tully as offering an alternative way of reflecting on struggles of recognition.I conclude by reflecting on the import of this discussion for the topic of (in)visibility and the necessary aesthetic dimension of politics.

(In)visibility I: Honneth, Ranciere and Seeing Aspects
A helpful route into this topic will be to start by distinguishing between seeingthe apprehension of a visual fieldand seeing asthe conceptually articulated apprehension of a visual field in which we see something as something.Wittgenstein's discussion of seeing-as is, in the first instance, a critique of the empiricist view that seeing-as involves two acts: a pure act of visual data reception plus something else, for example, an act of interpretation.In advancing this critique, Wittgenstein introduces the term "aspect" and the related terms "aspect-perception", "aspect-dawning" and "aspect-blindness" to discuss a set of perceptual phenomena that develop out of Gestalt psychology. 2 The most famous of these images is Jastrow's duck-rabbit; a picture that can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit, but not as both simultaneously.Wittgenstein refers to those types of schematic images as "picture-objects" in which we relate to the image as the object that it pictures and our seeing a picture-object as a picture of x is manifest in our expressive reactions to it. 3A main concern of Wittgenstein's remarks is with what Mulhall labels the "inherent paradoxicality" of aspect-perception 4 : "I see that [the face] has not changed; and yet I see it differently". 5Wittgenstein argues that what changes when one perceives a different aspect is one's attitude towards the picture object. 6By "attitude", Wittgenstein is referring to a practical relation to the picture-object, that is, a relation of practical engagement with it, and not simply one of knowing or believing or thinking about it.In order to explicate this phenomenon, Wittgenstein introduces several different terms in the first half of Philosophical Investigations section xi.He describes the self-conscious experience of seeing something as something as a case of "noticing an aspect". 7Dual or multi-aspect images such as the duck-rabbit picture draw attention to the fact that our relationship towards such picture-objects can change.The thought here is that we can be struck by the dawning of an (new) aspect, where "being struck" denotes the suddenness of this manifestation and its natural expression in spontaneous avowals such as "Now I see it!"Aspect dawning "is forced from us.-It is related to the experience [of a perception] as a cry is to pain", 8 it involves standing in an expressive relationship to a picture-object in terms of the object it depicts, seeing it as something (not merely as marks on paper from which we infer a representation of something) and, in the case of aspect change, as something other than what we have thus far seen it as (e.g. a duck rather than a rabbit). 9Wittgenstein's focus on aspect change thus draws attention to the otherwise overlooked phenomenon of continuous aspect perception which denotes the readiness-to-hand of the immediate description of the picture in terms of the object it depicts, where "this readiness-to-hand is a manifestation of the perceiver's taking for granted the identity of what he perceives". 10he salience of this focus on seeing-as, and Wittgenstein's discussion of aspectdawning and aspect change, for our purposes, emerges when we note that both Honneth's conception of a recognitive order and Ranciere's concept of "police" as constitutive of, and constituted by, "a distribution of the sensible" 11 can be best understood as referring to an order of continuous aspect perception.It is this which underwrites the sense in which Ranciere speaks of aesthetics as being at the core of politics.We can elucidate this point by drawing attention to two points.
The first is that Ranciere conceives of police in terms of an order defined by a mode of operation that structures perception (and the sensible more generally), police is a form of aesthesis: "a distribution of bodies according to their visibility and invisibility" 12 , while Honneth too acknowledges that in a recognitive order "perceiving is part of the fixation of the sensible; my gaze is part of what constitutes political order". 13In both cases, too, we find that the experience of invisibility is manifest as the absence of those forms of expressive reactions that mark out acknowledgement of the other.This is more stressed in Honneth's early discussion of invisibility 14 than Ranciere's but it is present in both of their accounts.
Reflecting on Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man, and the efforts of the protagonistnarrator to elicit recognition, Honneth comments: To be sure, if a subject can confirm his own visibility only by forcing his counterpart into actions that affirm his own existence, this means conversely that the subject can establish his invisibility only through the absence of such types of reactions: from the perspective of the individual affected, the criterion according to which he ensures his visibility in a figurative sense is an expression of specific ways of reacting that are a signan expression of taking notice of something or someone in a positive sense.Consequently, the absence of such forms of expression is an indication of the fact his is not visible socially for his counterpart in this specific sense. 15is sense of "the absence of such forms of expression" is also registered by Ranciere in his famous discussion of the plebian secession in which he illustrates the position of the nobles through the speech that Ballanche attributes to the Consul Appius Claudius (who favoured using force to crush the plebians) concerning the report of Menenius that words were issuing from the mouths of the plebs when logically the only thing that could issue forth was noise: They have speech like us, they dared tell Menenius!Was it a god that shut Menenius's mouth, that dazzled his eyes, that made his ears ring?Did some holy daze take hold of him?… He was somehow unable to respond that they had only transitory speech, a speech that is fugitive sound, a sort of lowing, a sign of want and not an expression of intelligence.They were deprived of the eternal word which was in the past and would be in the future'. 16 Rancière observes: This verdict does not simply reflect the obstinacy of the dominant or their ideological blindness; it strictly expresses the sensory order that organizes their domination, which is that domination itself. 17 a factual report, Menenius' account cannot mean anything determinate to the patricians.Hence Claudius' felt requirement to offer an explanation of this senselessness that is compatible with the order of continuous aspect perception that the patricians inhabit.
Visibility and invisibility are manifest in the presence and absence of certain expressive reactions, and the forms of action to which these give rise.
The second point is that "politics" in Ranciere's sense and "the struggle for recognition" relative to invisibility in Honneth's theory require aspect change.In the case of Ranciere, consider his insistence that politics is "primarily conflict over the existence of a common stage": It must first be established that the stage exists for the use of an interlocutor who can't see it and who can't see it for good reason because it doesn't exist.Parties do not exist prior to the conflict they name and in which they are counted as parties. 18e staging of politics requires aspect change in order that what is seen as natural, necessary or obligatory can appear instead as a form of domination or injustice and, in so doing, constitute the parties to this dispute as parties to a dispute. 19Aspect change is the necessary condition of the constitution of a common world within which the claim of injustice becomes intelligible as such a claim.Politics in this sense, for Ranciere, always appears to involve a double movement in eliciting aspect changeboth (1) a dis-identification of "the part of those with no part" 20 with the existing order of continuous aspect perception and (2) the exemplification of a world in which the distinction between those who have a part and those who have no part is erased.It is for this reason that Ranciere remarks that "politics is both argument and opening up the world where argument can be received and have an impact". 21n the case of Honneth, struggles for recognition similarly involve a dis-identification with the existing order of recognition, but they need not involve the prefigurative enactment of another world in which mutual recognition is established.Rather they exhibit a potentially diverse range of ways of seeking to elicit recognition from those who dominate and oppress, where success is marked by aspect change.For example, in his early essay on invisibility, Honneth notes that in Ellison's novel the first-person narrator attempts over and over again to counter his own invisibility though an active "striking out" that is aimed at prompting others into [re]cognizing.Even that which is described in the texts as striking out "with his fists" is most likely meant in a figurative sense and is probably supposed to describe the core of the various practical efforts through which a subject attempts to make himself noticed. 22ch struggle is integral to transformation of the order of recognition, but the form that struggle takes is not defined by prefiguration.
Given the contrast between Ranciere's "method of equality" and Honneth's "critical theory", this difference between their approaches is perhaps unsurprising, but it is also an important difference for our concerns to which we will return.For now, and following the recent exchange between Rancière and Honneth in Recognition or Disagreement, we can sum up this initial opening of the topic by noting that we have shown that: (1) A police order is an order of recognition and politics is a struggle over (the terms of) recognition.(2) (In)visibility is a phenomenon that is tied to such a police/recognitive order as an order of continuous aspect perception.
(3) The experience of invisibility is manifest as the absence of those forms of expressive reactions that mark out acknowledgement of the other.
However, in order to construct a critical standpoint from which to address the difference between Honneth's and Ranciere's approaches, we need to develop the analysis of (in)visibility further by drawing on a broader range of theoretical engagement with this topic.
(In)visibility (2): On "Soul-Blindness" To develop our enquiry further, I want to turn to Cavell's use of Wittgenstein's remarks on seeing aspects to elucidate the concept of "soul-blindness" as another related way of registering invisibility in the sense with which we are concerned.
Cavell introduces this topic with a puzzle: It is sometimes imperative to say that women or children or black people or criminals are human beings.This is a call for justice.For justice to be done, a change of perception, a modification of seeing, may be called for.But does it follow that those whose perceptions, or whose natural reactions, must suffer change have until that time been seeing women or children or black people or criminals as something other than human beings? 23 see how he negotiates this puzzle, it is important to return briefly to Wittgenstein and the concept of aspect-blindness which refers to the condition of not being able to notice an aspect, to see something as something.This concept can be used to mark either a general condition, that of not being able to see any something as a something (e.g, visually apprehending marks on a piece of paper but being unable to see either duck or rabbit), or a specific condition, that of not being able to see X as Y (e.g.duck as rabbit).Cavell's use of the concept of soul-blindness refers to aspect-blindness primarily in the specific sense.Soul blindness thus entails a failure to be struck by the other's humanity in a way that is analogous to Wittgenstein's discussion of the individual who lacks the ability to notice an aspect.Cavell imagines the slave-owner saying of the slaves that they are "not human beings" and ask what he could mean by this, given that "[e]verything in his relation to his slaves shows that he treats them as more or less human": When he wants to be served at table by a black hand, he would not be satisfied to be served by a black paw.When he rapes a slave or takes her as a concubine, he does not feel that he has, by that fact itself, embraced sodomy.When he tips a black taxi driver (something he never does with a white driver) it does not occur to him that he might have more appropriately patted the creature fondly on the side of the neck. 24vell's response is that the slave-owner "means, and can mean, nothing definite":  25 What the slave-owner thereby denies, as Gaita puts it, is CRITICAL HORIZONS: A JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL THEORY that the slave has his kind (the slave-owner's kind) of individualitythe kind of individuality that shows itself in our revulsion in being numbered rather than called by name and that gives human beings the power to haunt those who have wronged them, in remorse. 26 is helpful here to consider Gaita's elaboration of Cavell's argument in respect of racism: Racism of a certain kind -not all kinds, for racism is a complex phenomenon, but the kind usually connected with skin colouralmost always involves as an incapacity on the part of racists to see that anything could go deep in the lives of their victims.For racists of that kind it is literally unintelligible that parenthood or sexuality, for example, could mean to 'them' (the victims of their racial denigration) what it does to 'us' -unintelligible in the same sense in which it is unintelligible that we could see in a face that looked to us like the Black and White Minstrel Show's caricature of an Afro-American face, for example, the full range and depth of human emotion.We could not cast someone whose face looked to us like that to play Othello.Not even God could see in a face that looked like that the expressive possibilities that are necessary to reveal the magnificence and the misery of Othello. 27ita's elaboration of Cavell's argument is reinforced by considering two further connections.
The first is its consonance with the phenomenological experience of such racism recounted by the narrator in Fanon's essay L'Expérience vécue de l'homme noir (The Lived Experience of the Black Man).In this reflection, Fanon's narrator recalls the experience of encountering himself through eyes of the other (here, a child) as an object -"Look (ostensive pointing)a Negro!" as akin to "Looka dog!" or "Looka statute!".Fanon's protagonist (referred to as le Noir) is here identified by pure exteriority but the text in reporting this provides us with his interior reaction to being so identified and thereby sets up his point that the external world denies him the expression of his subjectivity.Recoiling from this experience of self as object, the protagonist looks to others to confirm his subjectivity, but finds himself sealed in a world without reciprocity predicated on the hierarchical construction of the black man as the inferior other of the white man: "The white gaze fixes blackness, marking it with a racial slur and epidermal character, thus sealing blackness into itself". 28Defined by his skinhe is thus a type not an individual; a type encoded with all the white representations of blackness "and above all, above all else: Y a bon Banania!" (that is, the kind of caricature of an Afro-American face to which Gaita refers).Fanon's narrator reports precisely the experience of being structurally denied acknowledgment as one who exhibits the expressive possibilities that mark out human individuality ("the expressive possibilities that are necessary to reveal the magnificence and the misery of Othello" as Gaita puts it) and being seen as a generic type defined by his epidermal blackness. 29As James Baldwin would later remark in this vein: "I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one's skin caused in other people". 30e can give this point further specificity by taking up a meaningful coincidence of argumentation that arises between Memmi and Gaita.In Memmi's The Coloniser and the Colonized, his discussion of the racialized and racist structures of colonial seeingas leads to a reflection on the dehumanization of the colonized subject.He notes a characteristic feature of this "depersonalization": "The colonized is never characterized in an individual manner; he is entitled only to drown in anonymous collectivity ("They are this"."They are all the same".)' 31Memmi is then drawn to ask "What is left of the colonized at the end of this stubborn effort to dehumanize him?"He responds: He is surely no longer an alter ego of the colonizer.He is hardly a human being.He tends rapidly toward becoming an object.… The extraordinary efficiency of this operation is obvious.One does not have a serious obligation to ward an animal or an object.It is then easily understood that the colonizer can indulge in such shocking attitudes and opinions.… Even a native mother weeping over the death of her son or a native woman weeping for her husband reminds him only vaguely of the grief of a mother or a wife.Those desperate cries, those unfamiliar gestures, would be enough to freeze his compassion even if it were aroused. 32is passage can be brought into dialogue with Gaita's recourse to the colonial example of James Isdell, Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia in the 1930s, who administered a programme in which children of mixed blood were (typically forcibly) removed from the Aboriginal mothers "and placed in circumstances in which (it was hoped) most of them would have children with lower class whites": Responding to the question, how did he feel taking children from their mothers, Isdell answered that he 'would not hesitate from a moment to separate any half-caste from its Aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic her momentary grief might be at the time'.They 'soon forget their offspring', he explained. 33 Gaita remarks, these words, coming from Isdell, 'marked his sense of the kind of gulf that existed between "them" and "us"."Our" children are irreplaceable; "theirs" are not'. 34Isdell was not ignorant of the facts concerning the victims of his actions, rather "he suffered a kind of blindness to the meaning of what they did and suffered": Although the grief of the women who had lost their children was visible and audible to him, he did not see in the women's faces or hear in their voices grief that could lacerate their souls and mark them for the rest of their days.It was literally unintelligible to … Isdell that sexuality, death and the fact that at any moment we may lose all that gives sense to our lives could mean to 'them' what it does to 'us'. 35dell could not see that "their" loves, griefs, joys, and desires go deep in "them" and have depth in the same way that they do for "us", that "their humanity is defined, just as ours is, by the possibility of ever deepening responses to the meaning of those big facts that define the human conditionour mortality, our vulnerability to fortune and, of course, our sexuality". 36It is not that Isdell necessarily lacks a general capacity for sympathy, it is rather that he cannot see the suffering of these Aboriginal women as having the same kind of claim on his sympathy as the suffering of, for example, White Australiansand this is failure is a constituted by his perception of these women as multiple iterations of a type of being, of their being-as-type, to whom individuality is constitutively denied.
The category of "soul-blindness" thus denotes a practical relation to the other as a kind of human being who is invisible in precisely the sense that "they" cannot appear as individuals, as marked by the kind of individuality that "we" possess.Cavell writes: It could be said that what he denies is that the slave is "other", i.e. other to his one.They are, as it were, merely other; not simply separate, but different.It could also be said that he takes himself to be private with respect to them, in the end unknowable by them. 37o be "merely other; not simply separate, but different" is to appear as a being who is merely (and completely) a typeand it is for just this reason that the soul-blind slave-owner takes himself "to be private with respect to them, in the end unknowable by them" because "they" lack the individuality that is a condition of possibility of his being knowable to them.
The centrality of this point is critical to Cavell's concept of soul-blindness and the related concept of soul-dawning, of coming to see the other as "other to his one", and draws attention to the connection with Ranciere and, in certain respects, Honneth in highlighting the centrality of the aesthetic to ethics and politics as setting the frame within which normative justifications operate.Introducing Cavell's argument also allows me to address two further points.
The first is a point that matters for thinking about invisibility which is underplayed in Honneth's and Ranciere's accounts, namely, the compatibility of invisibility with hypervisibility.Invisibility in the sense with which we are concerned can be, and often may be, combined with (and reinforced by) the hypervisibility of those we do not acknowledge as marked by individuality.In taking "them" as alien others, we may become hyper-alert to their presence, especially if the picture we have of them is one linked to frames of danger and threat.Thus, the framing of the black male as criminal, as dangerous (especially to white women), has the effect of making the presence of any and all black men into beings of which those who think of themselves as white are acutely aware in social spacebut this hypervisibility is not in tension with invisibility; on the contrary, it is a constitutive part of it.
The second point concerns a more fundamental theoretical issue.For Cavell, the failure of the slave-owner to take the slave as human demonstrates that the slaveowner "is … missing something about himself, or rather something about his connection with these people, his internal relations with them, so to speak". 38The soulblind slave-owner does not (and cannot) deny that slaves are human beings as such.Instead, the slave owner denies the humanity of slaves by asserting "they are not purely human", instead "that they are kinds of human". 39The slave owner inscribes inequality of this sort by simultaneously acknowledging that the slave is a human (in the sense of being part of the species homo sapiens) and denying the slave's humanity (in the sense of saying that he is not part of the same ethical and political order).As Cavell observes, it is "to deny just this that Marx, adapting Feuerbach's theology, speaks of man as a species-being.To be human is to be one of humankind, to bear an internal relation to all others". 40There is then a concept of fundamental equality in play for Cavell in this issue, an equality that is prior to all specific inequalities of a social and political order.Equalityand a fundamental concept of equality that is prior to all and any inequalitiesis also at the heart of Ranciere's approach which highlights a formal notion of equality as "the pure empty quality of equality between anyone and everyone". 41Cavell's and Ranciere's invocations of a fundamental and unconditional equality are not identical.Ranciere's "method of equality" involves a more politically radical stance that emerges from his positing of equality as a structural fact of political society, but for our current concerns what is notable is that both Cavell and Ranciere take invisibility to be related to the denial of a form of fundamental equality.What of Honneth?Honneth's theory focuses on freedom as self-realization rather than equality as its central value but the kind of equality that Honneth is addressing when he makes this distinction between freedom and equality is equality in the sphere of respectrecognition.However, the fundamental form of equality to which Cavell's account draw attention is one that is basic to all of the three types of recognition (love, respect and esteem) that Honneth identifies since it pertains to being recognized as a human being in the way that calls forth the demand for recognition in each of its modern axes (for example, being loved as a pet rather than as a child or partner would be radical failure of recognition).Equality in this fundamental sense is the condition of being seen as a subject for whom mutual recognition is both a possibility and a necessity.Honneth's reflections on the concept of reification and his attempt to invoke an idea of ontological recognition, not least through appeal to Cavell's work, should be seen as a recognition of the place of this concept of fundamental equality in his work 42 and insofar as Honneth's recent work on reification can plausibly be seen as a development of his early work on invisibility, the centrality of a concept of fundamental equality emerges specifically in relation to his concern with invisibility. 43 Struggle and Uptake: Conditions of Aspect Change and Soul-Dawning We have seen that overcoming invisibility requires aspect change, that such change can be characterized as soul-dawning and that this expresses acknowledgment of a fundamental equality.So now let us consider the elements, conditions and theorizations of this overcoming.
Notice first that overcoming invisibility involves that those who are invisible dis-identify with the existing police order of recognition.Does this negative moment of refusal already require aspect change?It surely requires at least what I have described elsewhere 44 as freedom from aspectival captivity, of being held captive by a picture; that is to say, it requires acknowledgement of the possibility of seeing otherwise that underwrites the inchoate sense that one's suffering is not merely misfortune but injustice.Consider the Cavell's use of the example of Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House.In this play, Nora struggles to express, to bring to expression, her inchoate sense of injustice: "'I could tear myself to pieces'" and "'I must find out which is rightthe world or I'". 45The dilemma in which Nora finds herself is that to speak in the language of the moral consensus, represented by her husband Torvald, who has managed "for the eight years of their marriage, to control her voice, dictate what it may utter and the manner in which it may utter it", 46 is not be able to give expression to her conviction of injustice; while to find other, new, words and ways of speaking capable of expressing this conviction is to be held not to speak in terms which we are required acknowledge, that is, not to speak (in the relevant sense) at allas, for example, when Torvald responds to her need to know if she or the world is right "'You're ill, Nora -I almost believe you're out of your senses'". 47or, again, when he disqualifies her voice by claiming "'You're talking like a child'". 48What Cavell draws to our attention with the example of Nora (and Torvald) is the way in which the moral consensus of society denies Nora's (political) voice and, thus, leaves her out of the political conversationher (political) identity remains obscure because the terms on which she could make intelligible (i.e.express) her sense of injustice are denied to her.Thus, as Cavell puts it, Nora has been deprived of a voice in her own (political) history. 49Nora's final decision to leave her marriage marks the moment at which the dis-identification with the police order of recognition is fully realized and she becomes a political actor in Ranciere's sense.What the case of Nora shows, to advert to Honneth's terms, is that the struggle for recognition relative to invisibility is a struggle over the terms of recognition in which the process of struggle as the movement from an inchoate sense of injustice to a determinate sense of injustice is itself integral to giving focus and direction to this process.
Dis-identification is, however, only the first step.The second step is politics in Ranciere's sense.Consider, for example, Frederick Douglass' speech "What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?" which, as performance, exemplifies the erasure of the racial distinction between white men and black men and, as argument, makes clear that the grounds on which the erasure of the distinction is enacted are already conceded: Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man?That point is conceded already.Nobody doubts it.The slaveholders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government.They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave.There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of the same crimes will subject a white man to the like punishment.What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being?The manhood of the slave is conceded.It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read or to write.When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. 50uglass' rhetorical strategy in his speech is precisely designed to elicit aspect change; 51 it operates by drawing attention to aspects that are occluded by the dominant racist picture of "blacks as brutes".However, the brilliance of Douglass' rhetoricand his insistence that what is now needed is "scorching irony, not convincing argument"draws attention to a key point, and one that the construction of his speech demonstrates that Douglass is himself acutely aware of, namely, that aspect change (and hence, soul-dawning) is not an outcome secured either by the accumulation of more and more empirical evidence that underwrites the inference to an empirical generalization or by the logical necessity of the deductive movement from valid premises to valid conclusion, rather it must be elicited, the auditor must be struck by the noticing of a new aspect: "Now I see it!"Let us call this "the problem of uptake".We might note here Gaita's remark: We do not discover the full humanity of a racially denigrated people in books by social scientists, not, at any rate, if those books merely contain knowledge of the kind that might be included in encyclopedias.If we discover it by reading, then it is in plays, novels and poetry -not in science but in art. 52at Douglass and Gaita both recognize is that we are engaged with the aesthetic domain in seeking to bring about aspect change.This has two important implications beyond those already noted.
The first is that aspect change cannot be willed in the sense that it cannot be the subject of a decision.I cannot just decide to see differently and have that outcome as a direct and immediate outcome of that decision.The second is that once an aspect is noticed, I cannot just decide not to see it; a new aspect cannot be willed away.The significance of the first point is that it draws attention to the necessarily performative dimensions of the attempt to bring about aspect change and raises the question of the obstacles and obstructions to aspect change.The significance of the second point is to draw attention to the fact that once soul-dawning has occurred, it changes the form of the ethical relationship of those who were soul-blind to those who were invisible in ways that are consequential for their relationship, for example, as now being an argument about the form of, and appropriate responses to, injustice (but note that it also introduces the possibility of forms of bad faith in which injustice is treated as if misfortune.) Reflecting on these issues helps to bring out particular problems in the forms of theorizing advanced by Ranciere and Honneth.The first is that Ranciere's anti-subjectivist approach to theorizing leaves his approach struggling to address both the process by which those who are invisible come to embrace aspect change and the problem of uptake by those who are soul-blind.As Delanty remarks: The combination of anti-elitism and anti-psychologism leads [Ranciere] to take up a position that is precarious since it is difficult to see how one can dissociate claims from the experience that these claims arise from, hermeneutics from phenomenology.Political claims arguably arise as claims about aspects of social reality, and since these claims are made by agents themselves, some anchoring of politics within forms of experience seems inevitable. 53rther, Ranciere's stress on the prefigurative character of political action, the exemplification of a world in which the distinction generative of invisibility is erased, seems designed to try and bypass the problem of uptakeas if such an exemplification necessarily secures aspect change rather than being one tactic for eliciting aspect change.But prefigurative politics does not guarantee uptake because no performance can guarantee uptake.
If we turn to Honneth, we can find the resources for anchoring politics within forms of experience, more specifically in experiences of inchoate suffering (such as Nora's) that motivate the struggle to make sense of that suffering.Honneth, in other words, can account for why "the invisible man" of Ellison's novel can be motivated to question the authority of the racist picture that naturalizes his suffering, and to perform his humanity in and through the struggle for recognition.What though of the problem of uptake?Here Honneth's focus on struggle is important (and more important than he often recognizes) in its transformative dimension, that is, not simply as an instrumental process seeking an end but as a process through which both parties are brought to acknowledge each other as parties to a dispute."Struggle" in other words denotes the process of securing uptake; a struggle is complete or concluded only when uptake has been secured.
Yet, in contrast to Ranciere and Cavell, Honneth's approach is tied to an historical teleology in which European modernity represents a critical threshold 54and the worry that immediately arises here, as Allen has argued, 55 , is that this teleological reading of the history of struggles itself occludes the violence immanent to the ideals of Western modernity and renders invisible those for whom the constraint of expressing their sense of injustice within the framework of European modernity obstructs and distorts their claims.As Tully put the point in relation to indigenous peoples: How can the proponents of recognition bring forth their claims in a public forum in which their cultures have been excluded or demeaned for centuries?They can accept the authoritative language and institutions, in which case their claims are rejected by conservatives or comprehended by progressives within the very languages and institutions whose sovereignty and impartiality they question.Or they can refuse to play the game, in which case they become marginal and reluctant conscripts or they take up arms. 56 can put Tully's point in Rancierian terms by saying that the struggles of indigenous peoples are seen as struggles internal to the police order, visible to the settler colonial state only within the terms of the order of recognition that it instantiates.
The contrast with Honneth can be spelt out by the way in which Tully's public philosophy leads him to foreground and contest two limits on our political reflection on struggles of recognition that he finds to be embedded in theoretical responses to these struggles such as Honneth's.The first relates to the use of the term "recognition" and emerges from Tully's reflection on Foucault's point that practices of governance are norm-governed activities in which the norms articulate the terms in which participants in the practice come to recognize each other as governors and governed, as standing in certain relationships, and form their practical identities on the basis of these practical relations of recognition.As Tully notes, "Norms of mutual recognition are a constitutive feature of any system of rule-governed cooperation, not just of formal political systems". 57The crucial insight being advanced here is that the scope of the notion of recognition is co-extensive with practices of governance (and resistance to them).The second point is that the approach taken here to struggles of recognition is not that of providing a theory of recognition.A key difference between theoretical and public philosophical approaches with respect to the working out of the form and content of recognition can be articulated as follows.For advocates of a theoretical approach, struggles by individuals or groups are seen as struggles for recognition in which the form and content of recognition is spelt out in terms of a theory of ethical life.By contrast, for proponents of a public philosophical approach, struggles by individuals or groups are seen as struggles over recognition in which the form and content of recognition is governed by the actual processes of deliberation and contestation in which citizens engage.The point here is not to deny that struggles for recognition involve the contestation of intersubjective norms; it is rather to re-orient our perspective towards struggles of recognition from a conceptualization of them as struggles for recognition to one as struggles over recognition.Thus, Tully holds that we should focus on the field of interaction in which the conflict arises and needs to be resolved.A conflict is not a struggle of one minority for recognition in relation to other actors who are independent of, unaffected by, and neutral with respect to the form of recognition that the minority seeks.Rather, a struggle for recognition of a "minority" always calls into question and (if successful) modifies, often in complex ways, the existing forms of reciprocal recognition of the other members of the larger system of government of which the minority is a member.In this respect, Tully's argument points to a problem with the teleological structure of Honneth's theory of recognition and can be seen as formally akin to Ranciere's non-teleological mode of theorizing, but Tully's approach has two significant differences from Ranciere's approach.
The first is that it shares Honneth's view of struggles as rooted in experiences of suffering.The second is that Tully's approach is an activist approach which locates its mode of reflection within the field of contest.The point could be put thus: in stepping back from general or specific struggles with the current police order, Rancière aims to re-orient our relationship to the terrain of political struggle as such by identifying democracy with the agonistic contestation of hierarchy and differential entitlements to rule in the name of an equality that cannot be codified.By contrast, in engaging in general or specific struggles, Tully aims to enable and enact "civic freedom", that is, agonistic contestation of the contemporary police order.Tully's approach is one of participation in struggles in which the resources of political theory are brought to bear on breaking down the obstacles to aspect change.
Let us return to the example of indigenous peoples.Integral to the settler state police order is the view that "modern constitutionalism" is the rational form of constitutionalism, a universalist framework for the just conciliation of groups with diverse outlooks and interests; alternative approaches, such as the traditional practices of indigenous peoples, are pre-modern and hence lack rational standing.Much of the work of Tully's analysis in Strange Multiplicity is concerned with showing that the emergence and development of the language and practices of modern constitutionalism is forged within, and intimately bound up with, European imperial and colonial practice and Tully concludes his genealogical investigation thus: While masquerading as universal [modern constitutionalism] is imperial in three respects: in serving to justify European imperialism, imperial rule of former colonies over indigenous peoples, and cultural imperialism over the diverse citizens of contemporary societies.When members of the authoritative schools today write about constitutionalism, whether they claim to be universal, historical or transcendental, they do so with the conventions of universality, history and transcendence of this captivating map of mankind.They . . .think that they are tracing the contours of humanity's constitutions, yet they are merely tracing round the 'splendorous' frame through which they look at them. 58odern constitutionalism" is thus presented by Tully as a regime of continuous aspect perception and the possibility of constructing a common stage requires getting free of the grip of this regime.Having weakened its grip by undermining our grounds for rational confidence in the authority of modern constitutionalism, Tully also reconstructs an alternative form of constitutionalism -"common constitutionalism"and attends to historical exemplars of this practice that have been rendered invisible by the hegemony of modern constitutionalism.Now one way of bringing what Tully is doing into focus in relation to Rancière's account of politics is to see Tully's role in Strange Multiplicity as occupying a position akin to that of a Menenius, after his acknowledgment of the plebians, who is attempting to bring the Senators to see the plebians as beings with logos.The problem confronted by indigenous peoples is not that they are not engaged in political struggles, that they dis-identify with the existing police order, and that, in their daily practices, they seek to exemplify an-other order in which the distinction that expresses their domination is erased.It is, rather, that, despite this, the failure of uptake means that their struggle is seen as a struggle for recognition within the terms of the existing police order rather than a struggle over the very terms of recognition that constitute this order.When Rancière considers the example of the plebian revolt in ancient Rome, the importance of this moment is registered but underplayed in this example since, on Rancière's reading, aspect change appears to be easily elicited.59 However, that is a specific feature of this example that does not generalize.Tully's central aim is to elicit such aspect change on the part of non-indigenous citizenry of the settler colonial state and, at the same time, to disclose a world to indigenous peoples in which their claims can be comprehended and thus to sustain the non-violent struggles in which they are engaged.By contrast, Ranciere's approach because it operates at the level of form does not lend itself to participation in democratic struggle.It identifies the problem of invisibility as a site where aesthetics and democracy are inextricably linked, but it does not engage in the aesthetic work required to address specific problems of invisibility.Ranicere, we might, say remains a spectator not an artist.By contrast, Tully's public philosophy takes up the hard aesthetic labour of trying to make visible "the part that has no part" and establishing the parties as parties to a disputethat he does so in the case of indigenous peoples by taking his starting point from a great work of art, Bill Reid's sculpture The spirit of Hadai Gwaii, is no accident.60 Public philosophy thus provides a way forward that overcome the problems and limitations of Honneth's and Ranciere's approaches.It provides an exemplar of civic action that in recognizing the entanglement of aesthetics and democracy does not remain at the level of the spectator or art critic theorizing (in)visibility, but enacts a critical artistry designed to engage in the practice of making visible.It is, in this respect, performativebut it also recognizes that nothing can guarantee its success, and hence public philosophy exhibits a commitment to engaging in a variety of forms of redescription that try different routes to eliciting aspect change.

Conclusion
I have tried to show in this paper that we can see across a range of different theorists how the issue of (in)visibilities and the relationship of aesthetics and democracy are central problematicsand have tried to use this conversation to draw attention to some of issues confronted by the different philosophical approaches taken by Cavell, Honneth, Ranciere and Tully.More specifically, I have argued that the topic of (in)visibility can be helpfully approached through Wittgenstein's concepts of "continuous aspect perception" and "aspect-change" and, more specifically, addressed in terms of Cavell's concept of "soul-blindness".Attending to (in)visibility in this light, enables us to see not only how hypervisibility can be constitutive of invisibility and that the issue of invisibility is integrally tied to that of fundamental equality, but to identify the key issues of struggle and uptake as marking the transformation from invisibility to visibility.Providing an adequate account of struggle and of uptake serve as desiderata for an adequate critical theory, and I argue that both Honneth's and Ranciere's theories can only partially meet these requirements.Rather, I propose, Tully's public philosophy provides a way of addressing the issues of struggle and uptake that enacts and exemplifies the commitment to fundamental equality that the transformation from invisibility to visibility exhibitsand that it does so because it recognizes that civic agency is itself a form of aesthetic agency.
Notes 1.The work to which this article is, in some ways, a capstone includes Owen, "Political Philosophy"; Owen, "Cultural Diversity"; Owen, "Criticism and Captivity"; Owen, "Genealogy as Perspicuous Representation"; Owen, "Perfectionism, Parrhesia"; Owen, "Self-government and democracy"; Owen, "Reification, ideology"; Owen, "Tully, Foucault"; 60.An anonymous referee has raised a very interesting potential rejoinder to this reading: "From Rancière's perspective it is possible to argue that both Tully and Honneth accord the intellectual a privileged position.For Tully, the role of the intellectual is to serve as a translator of sorts, if we follow the author's claim that Tully is "occupying a position akin to that of Menenius."In my reading, Rancière refuses to play that role for two reasons: (a) giving the intellectual such a mediatory role inevitably assigns her a privileged positionit assumes that the intellectual is a figure comfortable in both words, and as such has the capacity to do what those who are no part cannot … i.e. attempting to bring those who are in power to see the marginalized as beings with logos.In doing so, it sets up an inequality here and now in the name of creating a more equal society in the future [and] (b) precisely because his conception of art (as discussed in his works on aesthetics) rejects a conception of political art whereby artwork is considered to have an automatic emancipatory power, opening the door to an aspect change by making people see things that they would not otherwise see, he does not think that the theorist, even working in a way similar to an artist, can play the role of a mediator whose actions can increase the chances of uptake.The issue here, I believe, is not that Rancière considers elicitation of uptake relatively easy or that he is not interested in taking part in contemporary struggles or that he is opting for a more formalistic account but rather that he has a very different conception of what the intellectual's role is and should be.This role is a rather humble one similar to that of the chronicler in Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History.Keeping a record of past struggles is important for Rancière not because we can learn from them different strategies of ensuring uptake but rather because the new worlds created in such struggles can serve as inspiration for new and different struggles.One can take issue with this limited conception of the role of the intellectual, no doubt, but underscoring it is important because it highlights that Rancière's lack of participation in contemporary struggles in a similar way to Tully does not emanate from a lack of interest in uptake but rather from a conscious decision to not to put himself in the privileged position of a mediator." This is an intelligent and intriguing objection but I think, regardless of the merits of its reading of Ranciere, it is mistaken as a reading of Tully since, on his view, the position of the intellectual is not a privileged position in the relevant sense in that this mediating role has no authority other than that granted it by the parties to the dispute.