Abstract
Calls for police and prison abolition are typically regarded as an unrealistic diversion from more realizable reforms, grounded in an overly idealized vision of society, out of touch with everyday reality, including in poor communities of color experiencing devastating levels of violence. Against this characterization recognizably Wittgensteinian themes illuminate – and are illuminated by – the radically “ground-bound” nature of the abolition movement. Three such themes are: groundedness as a form of radical critique and transformative vision that rejects foundationalism and ideal theory; the importance of seeing-as, of what different ones of us see when we “just look”; and the ways in which caring, notably in the context of “the extraordinary ordinary,” guides the paths toward radical change. These themes are evident in the writing of abolitionists: the emergence of radical vision from on-the-ground, everyday struggle; the importance of acknowledging how the world appears from the perspectives of those targeted by racism; and the necessity and transformative potential of attentive care.
I will set out on this journey, although I do not know the way.
(Jennifer Finney Boylan, “The First Time I Said, ‘I’m Trans’”, New York Times 23 January 2020, https://nyti.ms/3aHIaeS)
The sickness of a time is cured by an alteration in the mode of life of human beings, and the sickness of philosophical problems could be cured only through a changed mode of thought and of life, not through a medicine invented by an individual.
(Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, p. 57)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The term is Talia Mae Bettcher’s. Bettcher is a trans philosopher whose work has informed my own, notably in helping me see the ways in which understanding follows from, rather than being a precondition for, immersion in a world of sense that upends what one has taken to be ordinary. See especially Bettcher 2019.
- 2.
The term “extraordinary ordinary” is mine (See Scheman 2015), but the concept of the ordinary under dire conditions is explored in depth, especially in relation to Wittgenstein and Cavell, in the work of Veena Das (2020), and exemplified and theorized in the writing especially of Black feminists (See, for example, Nash 2019, Sharpe 2016, and Woodly 2021).
- 3.
- 4.
On ideal vs non-ideal theory, see Mills 2005.
- 5.
Along with many others in the U.S. academy, especially in the 1990s in what was then women’s studies, I experienced this judgement not as a matter of arguments by particular theorists, but rather as a pervasive sense that we were not among the cool kids – not, that is, as truly radical as those who eschewed not only bedrock but also grounding of any sort.
- 6.
For a critical discussion of these ways of seeing Wittgenstein, see Lugg 1985.
- 7.
See especially the work of María Lugones and, influenced by her, José Medina and Talia Mae Bettcher.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
This is an insight I have always associated with María Lugones, though I cannot find any specific reference. For the general background to this insight see Lugones 2003.
- 11.
I started thinking specifically about paths as the result of a conversation I had in 2015 with Fan Zhao, then a graduate student at Beijing Normal University, where I was giving a series of lectures on Wittgenstein in the present-day world. Fan Zhao told me of a frequently cited quote from the early twentieth-century left-wing writer Lu Xun: “Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like paths across the earth. For actually the earth had no paths to begin with, but when many people pass one way, a path is made.” Lu Xun was making a point about hope, and paths were a useful way of making that point: it is presumably obvious that there are no paths prior to their being trodden, but they are no less real for that, and those who would lament pathlessness ought rather to start walking. But Fan Zhao told me this story not to make a point about hope but to note that the point about paths is interesting in its own right – as I have very much found it to be (See Scheman 2016a, b).
- 12.
My discussion is specific to the U.S., notably grounded in the historical role of carcerality in the afterlives of slavery. The question of the future of policing and incarceration elsewhere is beyond both the scope of this paper as well as the competence of its author.
- 13.
For a theoretically rich and personally devastating discussion see Allen 2018.
- 14.
For a discussion of a “linguistic manifesto” by prison activist Eddie Ellis, making the case for replacing dehumanizing, essentialising language, such as “inmates”, “convicts”, etc., with language that refers to people in certain confining circumstances, without confining them to those circumstances, see McConnell-Ginet 2020, 252–256.
- 15.
For a discussion of the politically salient complexities around what we see when we “just look” see Scheman 2016b.
- 16.
- 17.
Nash is drawing here on Judith Butler, 2016, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London: Verso.
- 18.
For some articulations of abolitionist perspectives, see Critical Resistance, http://criticalresistance.org/; Families for Justice as Healing, https://www.justiceashealing.org; and MPD150, https://www.mpd150.com
- 19.
For reflections on Wittgenstein and the inability to feel at home, see Scheman 1996.
- 20.
There are, of course, many other, diverse, efforts at building radically alternative forms of life. For a discussion that connects with abolitionism see Dean Spade on mutual aid (Spade 2020)
- 21.
Thanks to the editors, Nora Hämäläinen, Salla Aldrin-Salskov, and Ondrej Beran for the invitation to engage with the volume’s project and for thoughtful comments and suggestions on an early draft. My only regret is not having been able to meet, as originally planned, on the ground in Pardubice. And thanks to my colleagues in SOFPHIA, especially Linda Nicholson, Karsten Struhl, Ann Ferguson, Richard Jones, and Larry Winters, for a challenging discussion of that draft. My comrades in the Boston Workers Circle committee, Acting for Economic and Racial Justice, especially Nickolas Faynshteyn, Lynne Layton, Madeleine Lourie, and Lily Ann Ritter have been inspiring fellow travellers as I try to understand and articulate abolition. The recent, untimely death of Charles Mills has made evident to me how much I had taken for granted his contributions to my conceptual toolbox: non-ideal vs ideal theory, the epistemologies of ignorance, and the importance of attending to how radically different the world looks when one centres the perspectives especially of Black people.
References
Allen, Danielle. 2018. Cuz: An American tragedy. New York: Norton, Liveright.
Baz, Avner. 2018. Stanley Cavell’s argument of the ordinary. Nordic Wittgenstein Review 7: 9–48.
Bettcher, Talia. 2019. What is trans philosophy? Hypatia 34: 644–667.
Cavell, Stanley. 2010. Little did I know: Excerpts from memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Das, Veena. 2020. Textures of the ordinary: Doing anthropology after Wittgenstein. New York: Fordham University Press.
Diamond, Cora. 1991. Wittgenstein and metaphysics. In The realistic spirit: Wittgenstein, philosophy, and the mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fisher, Berenice, and Joan Tronto. 1990. Toward a feminist theory of caring. In Circles of care: Work and identity in women’s lives, ed. Emily Abel and Margaret Nelson, 35–62. Albany: SUNY Press.
Jenkins, Katharine. Forthcoming. Ontology and oppression: Race, gender, and social reality.
Kaba, Mariame. 2021. We do this ‘til we free us: Abolitionist organizing and transforming justice. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Laugier, Sandra. 2015. The ethics of care as a politics of the ordinary. New Literary History 46: 217–240.
Lugg, Andrew. 1985. Was Wittgenstein a conservative thinker? The Southern Journal of Philosophy 23: 465–474.
Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 2020. Words matter: Meaning and power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Medina, José. 2012. The epistemology of resistance: Gender and racial oppression, epistemic injustice, and resistant imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mills, Charles W. 2005. “Ideal theory” as ideology. Hypatia 20: 165–184.
———. 2007. White ignorance. In Sullivan and Tuana 2007.
Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. 1981. This bridge called my back. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
Nash, Jennifer. 2019. Black feminism reimagined. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Rankine, Claudia. 2015, June 22. The condition of black life is one of mourning. New York Times.
Scheman, Naomi. 1996. Forms of life: Mapping the rough ground. In Cambridge companion to Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluga and David Stern, 389–416 (2nd edition, 2015). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2011. A storied world: On meeting and being met. In Stanley Cavell and literary studies: Consequences of skepticism, ed. Richard Eldridge and Bernard Rhie, 92–105. New York: Continuum.
———. 2015. Writers, authors, and the extraordinary ordinary. In The future of scholarly writing: Critical interventions, ed. Angelika Bammer and Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, 41–56. New York: Routledge.
———. 2016a. Looking back on queering the center. Transgender Studies Quarterly 3: 212–219.
———. 2016b. On Mattering. In Facts and values: The ethics and metaphysics of normativity, ed. Giancarlo Marchetti and Sarin Marchetti, 119–136. New York: Routledge.
Sered, Danielle. 2019. Until we reckon: Violence, mass incarceration, and a road to repair. New York/London: The New Press.
Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the wake: On blackness and being. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Spade, Dean. 2020. Solidarity not charity: Mutual aid for mobilization and survival. Social Text 38: 131–151.
Sullivan, Shannon, and Nancy Tuana, eds. 2007. Race and epistemologies of ignorance. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Woodly, Deva. 2019. Black feminist visions and the politics of healing in the movement for black lives. In Women mobilizing memory, ed. Ayşe Gül Altınay, Maria José Contreras, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca, and Alisa Solomon, 219–240. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2021. Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the democratic necessity of social movements. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Young, Iris Marion. 2011. Justice and the politics of difference. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Scheman, N. (2022). The On-the-Ground Radicality of Police and Prison Abolition: Acknowledgement, Seeing-as, and Ordinary Caring. In: Aldrin Salskov, S., Beran, O., Hämäläinen, N. (eds) Ethical Inquiries after Wittgenstein. Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98084-9_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-98083-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-98084-9
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)