Pepperell

 Guilt, denial and epistemologies of ignorance

Mills (2007) usefully problematizes the common opposition of ignorance and Enlightenment, arguing that “Ignorance is usually thought of as the passive obverse to knowledge, the darkness retreating before the spread of Enlightenment” (13). When trying to understand the cognitive impacts of structural inequalities, however, Mills argues that it is better instead to 'Imagine an ignorance that resists. Imagine an ignorance that fights back. Imagine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated, an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly— not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge'. (13; original emphasis) For Mills, structures of racial and gender privilege generate “epistemologies of ignorance” – forms of knowing that produce untruths and systematic blind spots alongside knowledge (23–29). Mills’s concept resembles Michel Foucault’s (1980, 37–54) argument that all forms of knowledge implicate determinate power relations. Foucault has been criticized, however, for performative contradiction – for offering a critique whose standpoint is never explained within the critical analysis (Habermas 1990, 238–265). Mills (1997, 2007, 23–28) emphasizes the need to account for a standpoint of critique in a way that can also demonstrate how we can know that active forms of ignorance are incorrect.

Nicole Pepperell