Do you not see the reason for yourself? Political Withdrawal and the Experience of Epistemic Friction

Abstract

The epistemic friction that is generated when privileged subjects are confronted by different social perspectives is important for democratic politics since it can interrupt their active ignorance about oppressive social relations from which they benefit. However, members of oppressed groups might sometimes prefer not to accept the burden of educating the dominant. In circumstances of structural inequality, withdrawing from privileged subjects’ ignorance can be a form of self-preservation. But such withdrawal also has the potential to induce epistemic friction insofar as it depletes the opportunities for active ignorance to reproduce itself. Herman Melville’s tragicomic short story of Bartleby – the legal copyist who ‘would prefer not to’ – has been celebrated by philosophers as emblematic of such resistant withdrawal. Interpreting the story as a dramatisation of the epistemic friction encountered by its narrator makes vivid how such withdrawal can be political.