Title: Objectivity's Politics

Abstract: Anyone with an ear for political trends will be aware that objectivity-talk is frequently taken to be politically injurious. There is a dialectic, well established in our public culture, that starts from the idea that some claims to objectivity aid oppression by disguising it and proceeds to the conclusion that the epistemic ideal picked out by the word “objectivity” can be re-envisioned to illuminate structural injustice and so serve justice. Questions about what objectivity is like, and about what falls under it, are the purview of philosophy, yet mainstream work in analytic philosophy offers little support for this familiar liberating pattern of thought, instead favoring the kinds of views about what objectivity amounts to that inspire complaints about its oppressive potential. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that there must be compelling philosophical considerations for such views about objectivity. In fact, it is not obvious that the views owe their acceptance primarily to their philosophical merits. A notable body of social theory represents received understandings of objectivity as encoded in core capitalist structures—structures that some social theorists take to predictably cause the very forms of oppression that appeals to the relevant understandings of objectivity shroud. This raises the prospect that there are different, interrelated reasons for regarding the apparently unremarkable philosophical task of rethinking objectivity as an exercise of political resistance, a step toward a language of politics better suited not only for shedding light on grave injustices but for finding routes to more just forms of life.