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INTRODUCTION
Recognition, conflict and the problem of ethical community
Recognition has become a key theme in contemporary political, social and international relations theory. Its centrality to social life appears almost self-evident given that how we recognise others and are recognised by others is fundamental to both the identity of individual subjects and the relations between self and other in ethical community. It follows that recognition is also central to political life: nominally, as a necessity in the formation of self-identity and therefore something properly basic to relations between self and other; expansively, as a normative foundation for ethico-political relations concerned with the mutual recognition of all members of society (both individuals and groups), the actualisation of their capacities, respect of their identity, and esteem of their social contribution.
It was Hegel (1977, §178) who first situated recognition as essential for self-consciousness, claiming famously that self-consciousness can exist only when it is recognised by another self-consciousness. In this way, recognition can be defined most simply as a relation between recogniser and recognisee, an intersubjective relation in which agents place value in the recogniser as capable of recognition and the recognisee as worthy of recognition (Ikäheimo 2002, 453–455). Recognition is both a responsive act, as in the recognition of pre-existing features of a subject or what it is to be recognised as a subject, and a generative notion that may confer specific characteristics or a certain status onto subjects. As such, recognition pertains to both individuals and groups/collectives and their respective identities, rights and value. Literature in the social sciences has been weighted towards the former, which is hardly surprising given that Hegel’s phenomenology of the struggle for recognition in the Master/Slave dialectic became increasingly concerned with the formation of individual subjectivities or wills, leading to Kojève’s existential reading of this relation, something taken up further by Sartre and others that have since overemphasised the individualised subject in the processes of recognition (Kojève 1969, 7; Sartre 1956, 471–534).1 This is not to suggest, however, that group or collective recognition has not been accounted for. Hegel placed recognition as foundational to ethical life (Sittlichkeit) through formal expressions of right and in the ethical relations of the family, civil society and the state (Hegel 1980; see Smith 1989, 3–18). Similarly, Honneth’s discussion of successful struggles for recognition and the social, practical and institutional forms of recognition in society (1995, Chapter 5) and Taylor’s defence of multiculturalism and communitarian ethics (1994, 25–73) clearly articulate with the fundamentality of recognition in group/collective relations.
Developments in the theory and politics of recognition since the mid-1990s have been led by the pioneering work of both Taylor and Honneth, inspiring an ever-expanding list of supporting scholarship primarily focused on struggles for recognition within states and local communities.2 This has been met with a growing interest, particularly in recent years, regarding the question of recognition in international relations with many scholars now concentrating on the processes of recognition between nation states.3 What have yet remained under-theorised are the processes of recognition that are not framed by or within the state, that is, recognition processes between different individuals and groups across, between and over the state (Brincat 2013). Nevertheless, the primary thrust and analytical purchase of recognition theory is that it places intersubjectivity at the centre of ethical, sociopolitical life. This is far removed from the philosophy of the subject and atomistic/individualist doctrines that have dominated political philosophy in the modern period (see Macpherson 2010), just as it offers an alternative to the most common theories of justice (i.e. distributive, procedural, retributive or restorative models).4 For recognition theory, such individualistic ontologies possess a sociopolitical naïvety, for rather than nominalism, atomism or rational choice, recognition theory holds that the individual subject – in both their identity and the articulation of their freedom – is a social achievement, something that can be formed only though successful acts of recognition in society. Hegel, Taylor and Honneth each show that intersubjectivity is a precondition for individual identity formation and, as such, look to the development of genuine subjectivity through, and with, others – or what Hegel cryptically referred to as ‘being with oneself in one’s other’ (Hegel 1980, §7A). At the ontological level – and why recognition is deemed, by some, to possess a universally emancipatory character – is because all humans are believed to require recognition as a ‘vital human need’ (Taylor 1994, 26) at both psychological and sociological levels for the stable construction of identity. For Honneth, there is an inherent interest in all individuals for recognition, as he claims; ‘the reason we should be interested in establishing a just social order is that it is only under these conditions that subjects can attain the most undamaged possible self-relation, and thus individual autonomy’ (Honneth in Fraser and Honneth 2003, 259).
Offering one of the most systematic and fully developed accounts of a theory of recognition, Honneth explains its achievement through the tripartite social structures of recognition in ‘love, rights and solidarity’. Here, subjects affirm essential aspects of their individual identity through three interrelated patterns of recognition, namely: self-confidence (in their primary relations through which subjects are socially recognised as the bearer of unique needs), self-respect (in society and formal relations where subjects are socially recognised as a person of equal responsibility and agency) and self-esteem (in sociocultural life where subjects are socially recognised as a bearer of something unique or something of social value). Expressed alternatively, it is through these social achievements that each individual is recognised in their neediness, their equality and agency and their social contribution to society (Honneth in Fraser and Honneth 2003, 170–171). While not presented in a systematic fashion as Honneth’s theory, for Taylor, the centrality of recognition to identity is reflected in loving care, the politics for equal dignity and the politics of difference. While the first is not considered by Taylor as a matter of public contestation, the politics of equal dignity aims at the recognition of the common humanity in each individual. In contrast, the politics of difference focuses on the individual and specific uniqueness of each subject and group (1994, 37–39). While both hold an inherent universalism, it is the latter that is seen to express and preserve the particular. However, Taylor suggests that what is considered equal dignity is defined by the dominant social group and is therefore a form of hegemony (1994, 66) and he implores us to be open towards other cultures and see in these traditions something valuable (1994, 68–71). Honneth offers a different interpretation, one that is widely regarded as being more positive, even optimistic (see Connolly 2010). For him, disrespect is the experiential content from which social struggles for recognition are formulated and which offers the potential for either an expansion of the circle of those recognised in society or the qualities to be socially esteemed or valued (Honneth 1995, 110, 121–122).
This draws us directly to the optimistic or pessimistic appraisal of recognition processes, a question that pivots on the emancipatory potential of mutual recognition or the potential for domination within the established forms of recognition within a given society. What is a matter of extreme contention here is what can be best described as the regulative character of recognition, that is, does recognition serve to enable forms of self-identity or does it restrict these to established social patterns? Is there some almost transcendental quality to struggles of recognition by which individuals and groups may push against the status quo – a normative ‘surplus of validity’, as Honneth calls it, that may bring about ‘an increase in the quality of social integration’ (Honneth in Fraser and Honneth 2003, 184–185) – and which confirms an inherent emancipatory quality to recognition processes? Or is recognition a form of domination or cultural hegemony circumscribed by the structures (institutional and cultural) of ethical life as it is?
On the pessimistic side of this debate, what is at stake is what Levinas (1969) would have called the danger of reducing the other to a recognised form in our own subjective terms, thus negating the other’s absolute difference. This problem can be traced as far back as the first articulation of the Master/Slave dialectic by Hegel in the System of Ethical Life where the relation is portrayed as a particular antagonism in which a ‘living individual confronts a living individual’ and because their power (Potenz) is ‘unequal’ ‘one is might or power over the other’ (Hegel 1979, 125). On this darkside of recognition, what is emphasised is the assimilationist tendency within recognition that works on at least two levels: the individual psychological and social. The first, as we have been introduced to, is where recognition takes place between two (or more) subjects and is regarded as a battle to dominant and normalise the other by reducing them to oneself. The second refers to the view of recognition as a form of social hegemony that privileges certain subjectivities and excludes or denigrates others.
Along the lines of the first critique, Judith Butler views the primary relation that constitutes every self-identity to be exclusion. For her, the Hegelian ‘self-recognitive model’ violently internalises the other as a unity with the ‘I’, thus leading to a permanent separation of subjects (see esp. Butler, Laclua, and Zizek, 2000, 172). This separation means that the Hegelian promise of mutual recognition is a false and unobtainable ideal. Hegel’s notion that recognition cannot remain one sided (i.e. the domination of slave/Bondsman as a form of misrecognition) but must be transcended through genuine reciprocity is a psychological impossibility for subjects. On a related point, Nancy Fraser has argued that because of the ‘excessively personalised’ injury that constitutes disrespect and denigration, that rather than an emancipatory struggle for recognition the subject may actually internalise the shame or disrespect, thus negating any emancipatory potential under an overarching hegemony of established recognition patterns (Fraser and Honneth 2003, 204).
In terms of the second critique regarding socially situated forms of recognition, Althusserian interpellation would suggest that subjects suffer preconscious definition of identity because they are caught within a fixed horizon of the forms of recognition that are socially possible. So too, Bourdeieu’s notion of habitus suggests that we are framed by the forms of power through which the intersubjective relations of recognition take place. Any move beyond this social context of recognition would render the ideal of mutual recognition purely transcendental. Taking up this viewpoint in a sustained critique of recognition theory, Markell (2003) has posited that there is little space in either Taylor or Honneth’s optimistic approaches for the individual to resist the dominant recognitive norms or institutionalised processes of one’s ethical community. As such, demands for the recognition of one’s identity are merely the reflection of the power and interests of the status quo rather than some authentic drive of selfhood towards actualisation. As shown by Butler, if forms of identity are governed by specific ethical norms, that is, processes and institutions that frame specific thought and actions in subjects, then there can be no ontology of identity but mere essentialised notions that are in fact exclusionary categories that cannot be used for solidarity (Butler 1992, 14–15). These are what Connolly, Leach, and Walsh describe as the ‘circumstances that may corrupt our need for recognition, producing desires for forms of recognition that may well function to reproduce social inequalities’ (2007, 3).
In distinction to these pessimistic interpretations of the possibilities of recognition, what lies at the centre of optimistic readings is the potential for mutuality and struggle. In regard to the former, mutuality is typically depicted as the ideal outcome of the recognition process in which neither party dominates the other but is recognised freely and equally by, and as, a unique subject. Indeed, mutuality forms both the normative and explanatory core of the recognition theoretic. As Hegel stressed, recognition is ‘the double process of both self-consciousnesses… action from one side only would be useless, because what is to happen can only be brought about by means of both’ (1977, 230–231). Without mutuality, recognition would be only partial, one sided, and thereby not only radically incomplete but a form of misrecognition: an error that not only harms or disrespects the misrecognised subject but also corresponds to a reduction in the possible freedom of the dominant subject. Mutuality, then, is nothing less than a ‘precondition for self-realization’ (Anderson, in Honneth 1995, x) in which it follows that ‘legitimate recognition is always mutual’ (emphasis added, Tully 2000, 474). This, in part, explains the ‘vital necessity’ of mutual recognition for all individuals and also its universally emancipatory quality for the social totality.
Borrowing from Honneth’s framework once again, mutuality is premised as essential for each stage of stable identity formation, just as it is for the normative institutionalisation of a just and free social order. Initially, mutuality in the sphere of primary relations (‘love’) prepares the ground for the type of relationship-to-self of basic self-confidence that is considered ‘conceptually and genetically prior to every other form of reciprocal recognition’ (Honneth 1995, 107). Such individual self-co...
