by Irene Martínez Marín, Aesthetics PhD Candidate (Uppsala University/Visiting researcher KCL)

Dom Lopes presented at the annual Mark Sainsbury Lecture a novel and promising framework from which to better understand cases of aesthetic injustice: the cosmopolitan theory. The goal of this theory is to capture what is special and sometimes problematic about our engagement with other aesthetic cultures. Lopes started the talk by characterizing justice as goodness in the arrangement of social life. From there, social arrangements of social life are aesthetically unjust when they harm people or communities in their capacity as aesthetic agents, which capacities serve two interests: value diversity and social autonomy. A well-known scenario of aesthetic injustice is cultural appropriation. Lopes’ strategy was to apply his theory to this form of injustice in order to show how there is more to cultural appropriation than “violation of the source culture’s property rights, misrepresentation, disrespect or assimilation”. Using the example of a Haida artwork, ‘Black Canoe’ Lopes convincingly showed that aesthetic cultures also ask for “recognition of the right kind”.  By focusing on how the members of an aesthetic culture coordinate and collaborate around their aesthetic profiles, Lopes concluded that this expertise and interaction can be undercut and harmed. And, that is precisely why cultural appropriation is problematic, because it prevents such capacities. The talk was followed by a lively discussion. Some of the issues that came up in the Q&A: how to draw the line between insider/outsider of an aesthetic culture? Who is aesthetically responsible for acts of aesthetic injustice? Are some artistic developments (those that made other artistic forms disappear) to be characterized as cases of aesthetic injustice? How are we to understand ‘aesthetic value’ within the cosmopolitan theory? The conference was attended by an international audience of over one hundred people, including KCL staff and students.

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Would you like to post a review on the King’s philosophy blog? If so, then please get in touch with vanessa.brassey@kcl.ac.uk

by Mari Maldal, 2nd year Philosophy & War Studies

This year’s Mark Sainsbury lecture was given by Professor Dominic McIver Lopes. The topic of which was what he described as a cosmopolitan theory of aesthetic injustice. I have not personally studied philosophy of art, and I am therefore not going to attempt to give a precise account of the theory. I think Professor Lopes did a great job at that himself.

I will however write about my initial thoughts on the conversation. I found Lopes’ conception of aesthetic injustice as a phenomenon separate from cultural appropriation very interesting. The idea that too much attention can limit one’s capacity as an aesthetic agent was something I’d never considered before. Despite being a newcomer to this subject of philosophy, Lopes’ lecture was clear and easy to follow, and like most pieces of great philosophy, it left me with questions I didn’t even know I could ask.

By Winnie Ma (PhD candidate)

Dominic Lopes, philosopher of aesthetics at the University of British Columbia, spoke at the Mark Sainsbury lecture about a new kind of injustice, aesthetic injustice, which will be the subject of his forthcoming book, Aesthetic Injustice: A Cosmopolitan Theory. This notion may be reminiscent to many of us of epistemic injustice, which has recently been an extremely salient and widely discussed topic in epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy.* According to Lopes, an aesthetic injustice is a large-scale social arrangement that harms people in their capacities as aesthetic agents, which capacities serve interests in value diversity and social autonomy. Lopes applied this notion to the cases of contact between different aesthetic cultures (such as contact between indigenous Haida and mainstream Canadian culture), and spoke about cases of cultural appropriation, the weaponization of the aesthetic, and what Haida artist Yahgulanaas dubbed the “Medusa Syndrome”, whereby outsiders to an aesthetic culture can petrify the aesthetic capacities of cultural insiders, presumably via many of the same kinds of mechanisms that work in stereotype threat (which can also lead to epistemic injustices). We eagerly await Lopes’ forthcoming work on aesthetic injustice, which promises, like the notion of epistemic injustice, to be extremely fruitful and salient in discussions about cultural equality and intercultural respect, and in our everyday lives.

* Miranda Fricker originated the term “epistemic injustice”. But, importantly, Rachel McKinnon notes that minority ethnic feminist philosophers had been working on issues of epistemic injustice for quite some time before its more recent widespread uptake.

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This is our first review of Dom Lopes’ presentation for the Mark Sainsbury Lecture, Tuesday 16th March 2021. Did you attend? Would you like to submit a review? If so, please contact vanessa.brassey@kcl.ac.uk.

by Mari Maldal (2nd Year Philosophy & War Studies).

In Albert Camus’ book, The Plague, Camus describes the unfolding of an event that has become very familiar to us during the last year; an epidemic. I want to start with highlighting this section of the book, which describes the lockdown ending:

“[O]f all those days and weeks and months of life lost to their love made them vaguely feel they were entitled to some compensation; this present hour of joy should run at half the speed of those long hours of waiting.”

Like most of us, I had many plans for 2020. My friends and I were going to travel around the UK, go to concerts, work our way through the entire menu at Spoons, and eat crappy meal deals at the Maughan while complaining about how much work we have to do, while doing absolutely nothing. I had finally discovered the free coffee machine in the Philosophy building and I was planning to make that international tuition fee worth it. This all came to a sudden halt when the world got put in a time out.

What I believe I lost the most, beside all of these exciting events, was time. Just time. Time with my friends. Time to finally being independent. Time to grow, and to create, and to be. Your student years are supposed to be some of the best years of your life, and they were finally here. It seems like a cosmic joke to get five months of it, only for it to be ripped from your hands, and end up back in your childhood room. It certainly feels like something was taken from me. Was it?

If we buy into the idea that the future exists in a similar sense as the present, it seems reasonable to me to claim that the only future that is real, is the one that is actualized. Therefore, saying “we were robbed” is a sentiment that acknowledges the feeling of being wronged, but can we really be robbed of a future that was never going to happen?

It may seem counterintuitive to suggest this. Naturally something was taken from us. If a robber steals my computer, the court would not tell me that the future in which I kept my computer was never going to happen, so I might as well accept my new computer-less existence. Of course the virus could have been avoided. Had we prepared more, had we listened to the scientists, had things unfolded differently…

But this didn’t happen. What I am questioning here is whether the future, an unfolding of a state of affairs, can really be thought of as a material possession. Was the covid-free future taken from me, if that possible future was never going to be actualized in the first place? If a person buys a computer from the store, do I get to claim it was stolen from me, because I had the intention of buying it?

I guess what I am trying to do here is to rationalize the notion that a covid-free future was never really mine in the first place. I only ever had the idea of it. Perhaps this is just an attempt to make myself feel better, to accept the current situation as solidified in reality. What has been one of the hardest things for me about this last year, besides the sickness itself, is the memory of how things used to be. Camus describes the feeling perfectly here:

“A loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.“

Perhaps all this talk about being robbed doesn’t matter. Perhaps, while it may be irrational to say we were robbed of a covid-free 2020, we can simply say we were robbed, period. A big part, if not most, of the human experience is not rational at all. This last year has been incredibly hard, we have all gone through something very painful, and we have experienced our hopes and plans for the future taken away. This is a wrong indeed.

And yet, someday, not too far from now, we will meet again. We will step out of our bubbles and into the world, feel the sun on our faces, and smile. It will be alright. For while that hope of the future may have been taken from us, the crime committed is perhaps more closely described as an involuntary loan, rather than a permanent theft.

We are approaching the finish line, and we can see, in the distance, if we look hard enough, a little, bright thing with feathers.

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Please get in touch with vanessa.brassey@kcl.ac.uk if you would like to reply to this post or post something on a topic you have been thinking about.