Mutual Recognition

Discussion

Richard Gunn and Adrian Wilding:

" In the last twenty years, the term ‘recognition’ has received widespread attention from mainstream political theorists. During the 1990s, it became a watchword under which liberalism extended its scope to encompass multiculturalist issues.[12] Later, from the 1990s onwards, Axel Honneth published a series of works arguing that ‘recognition’ may lie at the centre of a revitalised Critical Theory tradition.[13] Our claim is that both multiculturalist and Honnethian understandings of ‘recognition’ are seriously defective. Multiculturalism (so we maintain) makes its peace with forms of alienation which a more searching account of recognition subjects to critique. Its fundamental difficulty is that it tends to equate recognition with respect for pre-given social identities; in our view, by contrast, free and open-ended interaction – interaction where nothing is pre-given – is crucial to how recognition is to be seen. Regarding Honneth, our response comes in two stages. First, we agree with Honneth that a vital and challenging critical theory must place the notion of recognition at its core. Honneth’s proposal that a ‘”normative monism” of recognition’[14] is to be defended meets with our wholehearted support. Second, however, we point to weaknesses and fatal difficulties in Honneth’s view of recognition. In various of his works, he distinguishes between three ‘spheres of recognition’[15] – love (rooted in familial relations), respect (whose home is the legal system) and achievement (whose home is the state). And he regards an emancipated society as one where such distinctions are made more consistent but never challenged in a root-and-branch way. The outlines of a multiculturalist view of recognition reappear in Honneth’s discussion: in place of a focus on free interaction, respect for social identity based on bourgeois society’s chief institutions – the family, civil society and the state – governs Honneth’s theoretical claims.

No doubt, more can be said about multiculturalist and Honnethian views than the present short paper attempts. Elsewhere, we have discussed such views in greater detail[16] and do not repeat this detail here. Our chief concern for the present is to warn a reader that currently-widespread understandings of recognition and our own understanding are fundamentally distinct.

In place of a detailed consideration of recent political theory, we offer a sketch of what, in our view, ‘recognition’ means. We propose that it is fundamentally more radical than the version which appears in the multiculturalist or the Honnethian outlook. The view of ‘recognition’ which we favour is one which sheds light on Occupy-style initiatives and which opens on to not only a critical but a revolutionary perspective.

The starting point of our sketch is uncontroversial. In common with numerous theorists,[17] we view recognition as social acknowledgement. Controversy enters the picture, however, when we respond to the questions: “Just what is acknowledged?” and “What does acknowledgement entail?”

Regarding the first of these questions: what is acknowledged is, in our view, individuals’ freedom – understanding freedom in terms of self-determining action. An individual is, for us, free through the actions which he or she performs.

Regarding the second of these questions: the key point to bear in mind is that, in our view, recognition (or acknowledgement) has not merely a cognitive but a constitutive force. This distinction, which may have a complicated appearance, is in reality straightforward. Recognition is cognitive when something is found to be an object of a familiar kind (as then an individual advances through a misty landscape and exclaims “Ah! This ghostly figure turns out to be only a tree!”). Recognition is, by contrast, constitutive when something is made what it is through the recognition concerned (as when performing the locution “I promise…” brings a new obligation into existence). Our claim is that recognition in the sense which concerns us is intrinsically constitutive. Without remainder, an individual’s identity is made what it is through the recognition it receives. Stated differently, it depends entirely on how he or she is seen.

Standing back from our answers, we note ways in which they depart from conventional wisdom. In focusing on freedom, we prise recognition as a concept away from notions of group-defined identity; instead, we launch discussion where self-determination – ultimately, as we shall see, interactive self-determination – is the stake. Issues of identity are indeed raised, because what one is depends on how recognition takes place; but they are raised in a secondary fashion and in the context of debate on how non-alienated freedom may obtain. In focusing on constitution, further, we cast notions of fixed and unchanging personal identity – in a word, essentialist identity – to the winds. In place of spectral invocations of what used to be termed the “soul”, we turn to a picture where individuals are endlessly at issue in recognition’s play.[18]

Are our answers compatible? The importance of this enquiry, or potential objection, can scarcely overestimated. At first sight, it may seem that incompatibility must be admitted. How can freedom – and, especially, self-determining freedom – count as freedom, if it depends on recognition by other people? Although our account of recognition turns on freedom, does it not undermine the notion of freedom itself? Our reply is that, despite appearances, our answers are compatible. But a caution must be introduced. Our answers are compatible if, and only if, the following condition is present: if individuals who are recognized recognize those who do the recognizing, then and only then can the requirements of freedom as self-determination and recognition as constitutive be fulfilled. Both sets of requirements are fulfilled because (a) recognition is recognized as freely given and (b) individuals’ freedom is constitutively recognized as real. Summing up these formulations, we may say: freedom qua self-determination and recognition in its constitutive meaning flourish together, and exist in and through one another, on a terrain where specifically mutual recognition exists.

How may mutual recognition be pictured? We know of no other way than to picture it as unconstrained interaction – by which we understand interaction which is open to all comers and where any issue whatever may be raised. The to and fro rhythm of unimpeded interaction and the mutuality of mutual recognition seem to us to go hand in hand. If interaction is made to flow in pre-established channels, the rhythm that is intrinsic to it (the rhythm of a “good” conversation which is open to all comers and which “follows the argument wherever it leads”[19]) seems to us to be interrupted. If recognition ceases to be mutual, in the sense just indicated, it adopts a distorted or self-contradictory – in a word, an “alienated” – form. Ending the to and fro flow of open-ended interaction and mutual recognition has momentous consequences. Not merely does recognition deny itself, but so too does the freedom (the self-determination) to which mutual recognition is linked.[20]

An attempt to follow through these all-too-brief comments on our understanding of recognition might, with advantage, explore contradictory or “alienated” forms of recognition present in the world today." (http://www.heathwoodpress.com/occupy-mutual-recognition/)

Source: Occupy as Mutual Recognition. By Richard Gunn and Adrian Wilding [1]