The Desire for Mutual Recognition

Social Movements and the Dissolution of the False Self

Peter Gabel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138095274
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351602099
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Critical Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

The Desire for Mutual Recognition is a work of accessible social theory that seeks to make visible the desire for authentic social connection, emanating from our social nature, that animates all human relationships.

Using a social-phenomenological method that illuminates rather than explains social life, Peter Gabel shows how the legacy of social alienation that we have inherited from prior generations envelops us in a milieu of a "fear of the other," a fear of each other. Yet because social reality is always co-constituted by the desire for authentic connection and genuine co-presence, social transformation always remains possible, and liberatory social movements are always emerging and providing us with a permanent source of hope. The great progressive social movements for workers' rights, civil rights, and women's and gay liberation, generated their transformative power from their capacity to transcend the reciprocal isolation that otherwise separates us. These movements at their best actually realize our fundamental longing for mutual recognition, and for that very reason they can generate immense social change and bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice.

Gabel examines the struggle between desire and alienation as it unfolds across our social world, calling for a new social-spiritual activism that can go beyond the limitations of existing progressive theory and action, intentionally foster and sustain our capacity to heal what separates us, and inspire a new kind of social movement that can transform the world.

Chapter 1

The Desire for Mutual Recognition

The fundamental social desire of all human beings is the desire for mutual recognition.¹ This desire is an unmediated movement of being outward toward the other, emanating directly from my very center, that seeks to make contact with the being of the other. Thus coming-into-contact is a singular movement that has two experiential poles: my desire to recognize, and my desire for a reciprocating recognition. But you can’t have one without the other. What is aspired to and what occurs when it occurs is an indissoluble co-presence. And this co-presence made manifest through mutual recognition is the realization of our social being, a social being that pre-exists our realization of it—if we are out of contact, we are actually in flight from that contact rather than truly “disconnected.” The inherent mutuality of our social being is always pulling us back toward each other—in every moment, the desire for the immediacy and co-presence of mutual recognition pulses through us, moves us out toward each other, and seeks to realize, reciprocally and through the draw of a mutual magnetic pull, our inherent social nature.

Consider the color portrait of a woman by photographer Robert Bergman, located at www.therobertbergmanarchive.org/photo-color-portraits-14.html, and presented here in black-and-white (Figure 1.1).

In looking at this portrait in its full color presence, at first you might only see the face of a woman. Most likely, you will start out looking at her “from a distance,” as one often looks at a portrait or really at any object in the world, and she might at first appear to you as sad, or troubled, or thoughtful, and perhaps also resilient in carrying life’s burdens. Her freckles might stand out, or you might notice particularly the redness of her dress and hair against the red light behind her. But if you allow yourself to stay with her for a full thirty seconds and don’t pull away or allow her image to simply glance off your gaze, you may suddenly encounter her directly as a fully present human being. At first you may have this disturbing, disorienting encounter through her right eye as her gaze penetrates the shield of your normal distance as a withdrawn observer. But if you stay with her and don’t avert your own gaze, you will see that you are experiencing her presence as a totality and not only through the eye, as a radiant energy manifesting her living being as a whole social person. And at the same moment, as you are pulled into relation with her, you will feel your own presence that you did not feel an instant before. You were “lost in thought,” floating inside the withdrawn mental space of your head. And now you are for a moment, or for longer if you can tolerate it, fully present in relation to another human being.

Figure 1.1
© Robert Bergman. All rights reserved. Courtesy of Robert Bergman.

I have described this as disorienting and disturbing, and this is so because the photograph has the uncanny power to dissolve the withdrawnness and accompanying distance that we ourselves have learned to construct to protect us from a vulnerability to the other that, due to our conditioning, frightens us. We have all learned to fear this vulnerability to the other, just as in Freudian terms the ego fears and defends itself against the impulses of the id. And what we fear is the loss of the mediating “moat” that we have learned to lay down in the interspace between ourselves and others, a moat that co-exists with and is monitored by our moment-to-moment mental activity, the anxious monkey-mind of thought. But while it is therefore disorienting and disturbing to have that moat suddenly erased as we encounter the woman in red, we also experience relief. She graciously and beautifully brings us back into contact with the other, with others, with the entire social world, with ourselves as social beings. She reminds us of the potential that exists in the next moment; she gives us hope; she makes us want to change the world so that what we experience in encountering her can become real for our social lives and for social life as a whole. Right this moment, if you have been or are regarding the portrait and if you have allowed yourself to encounter her, you will feel your heart beating faster.

What makes Robert Bergman a great artist is not something unique or special that he has “added” to the portrait of this woman, but rather that he has revealed her as the true presence-in-the-world that she actually is as she lives her existence from within her own experience. His portrait brings forth the person behind the outer appearance, the being who actually inhabits the eyes that we otherwise experience as ocular globes. Through his way of capturing her in a single moment, he is reminding us all of the presence that we actually are, and he is calling upon us to emerge from our isolation, to gain the confidence that we are really all here together, to release ourselves from the imprisonment of our separation, and discover the beauty of our co-present collective humanity, not as a collection of individuals, but as an interconnected unity of differentiated social being.

We have the same experience of discovery when we encounter newborn children, at least once they are old enough to make eye contact with us. Like the woman in red, the newborn child suddenly pulls us out of our distanced mental selves, surrounded by the moat, into the fullness of his or her presence. Not having learned to be wary of the other, or to develop “stranger anxiety” to use the term through which psychology currently naturalizes as an inevitable stage the laying down of our alienation, the child makes us burst into a smile when we encounter him or her. Like the woman in red, the newborn child instantly relieves the suffering of our normal spiritual imprisonment and helps us to return, momentarily, to who we really are. This is why every newborn child brings us the possibility of salvation from the suffering of separation, from the paralytic self-reproducing distance that blocks our capacity to fully recognize each other.

But like Martin Buber, who sought to capture the aspiration to unmediated relational encounter in his famous book I and Thou, I have thus far presented the desire for mutual recognition in a way that might suggest I am mainly speaking about a psychospiritual relation between two people. This then could give the impression that the world can be understood through the lens normally used by psychology, as an infinite series of private encounters. But while I do mean to say that authentic mutual recognition can occur between two people—a couple falling in love, for example, or in an encounter between any two people who are able, by intention or accident, to break on through to the other side of the learned experiential boundary that has divided them—while I do mean to affirm that possibility, the fact is that the desire for mutual recognition and the fear of the other that opposes it undergirds the entire nexus of intersubjectivity that we call the social world. Thus when transformative social movements “emerge” and “break out,” what actually takes place is a ricochet of recognition in which millions of people can sometimes become suddenly present to each other in a new way and in which the sedimented layers of separation that had divided people into discrete, alienated social pockets are emulsified very quickly by the movement’s rising force.

In the late 1960s, for example, the fusion of the civil rights, women’s, and anti-war movements, along with the generative creativity of the worldwide 60s counterculture, led to a ricochet of recognition that leaped like a flame from one city in the world to another very quickly, from Berkeley, to Mexico City, to Prague, and to countless other locations. The “rising force” that generated this experience of movement was actually the desire for authentic mutual recognition gaining the social confidence to erupt across vast social spaces, creating a new social ground for millions of people to stand on, an unmediated, radiant ground of joyful co-presence. No matter what the roles and customs and identities that these masses of people had felt allegiance to and had been conditioned to be bound by prior to the movement’s emergence, “something in the air” allowed people to leap forward toward each other and become present to each other on a new ground of being that transcended the particularities of their previous conditioning (at least temporarily—much more than the hot moment of a movement’s emergence is required to solidify a new ontological ground like this). And we will return to this later in this book.

But the point to be emphasized here in this first chapter is that the desire for mutual recognition is a social force that radiates throughout and across the social fabric of the world, as a vector emerging (as a force and a longing) out from the center of each person as a pole of social being toward each other person. Insofar as the world precedes our birth and acculturates us to a conditioning—by gender, race, nationality, economic status, and many, many other forms of conditioned particularity—that conditioning provides a vast differentiated envelope of identity that we must conform ourselves to because it is the vehicle of the recognition by which we become social at all. To take myself as an example, when I became “conditioned” in my childhood, I became all at once male, white, upper middle-class, half-Jewish (actually three-quarters), a child of actors, American, somewhat tall, and was conditioned in countless other ways. All of these elements of my conditioning were transmitted to me through the way I was recognized by others. All of these elements were impossible to resist had I even wanted to because they provided in significant part the channel to my actually being able to exist at all as a social person, and had something kept me from properly identifying with the way I was recognized, I would have become schizophrenic or died from failure to thrive. And at the same time, all of these elements of my conditioning linked me to the wider social world by virtue of who shared my identifications and who did not share them, by the cascade of interlocking, intersubjective recognition that actually constitutes the social world and brings it into being.

The desire for mutual recognition both supports our social conditioning (since we must seek the recognition of our parents and other adults who are here to receive us if we are to realize our social nature) and transcends our social conditioning insofar as our conditioning is alienated, insofar as it does not actually make possible the realization of the fully present interhuman encounter. In our being, we seek the direct, unmediated co-presence to which Bergman’s portrait aspires—this is the life-force that moves the social world forward and also makes true Martin Luther King’s statement that “the moral arc of the universe … bends toward justice”. But in our conditioning, we are bound by the conditions of how we are actually recognized from birth, with all its limitations, with the fear of the other that it transmits and contains. Yet because the longing for authentic mutual recognition always exerts a transcendental pressure on the limitations of our conditioning, we are only bound by our conditioning so long as the web of recognition that produced it remains stable, remains more or less the same from an ontological point of view. The possibility of going beyond those limitations, and the constant unconscious search to go beyond them, exists at all times, and is our source of hope.

Now in order to more fully link this description with socio-historical interpretation and place these still seemingly psychological insights in relation to how we normally think about large-scale social processes, let me return to our description of the feudal lord of the middle ages. When Marxists or other socio-economic interpreters think of the feudal lord, they think of him in relation to his interests, as if he were a kind of cog in an external system of socio-economic relations. In this way of seeing, he might have had a psychological life, but it would have been understood as “on the side” in the way that everyone has a psychological or spiritual life—shaped, for example, by his family and by life circumstances. But his “real” existence in a social and historical setting would be understood in terms of his interests within the functioning of the whole system, as a member of the ruling class, overseeing his landed estate, appropriating the labor of the serfs and increasingly of wage workers (assuming we are again viewing him in the late feudal period of the fifteenth century), protecting those workers as an incident of fealty, and supporting and benefiting from the legitimacy of the monarchy and the church and the ideology that these prevailing political and religious institutions generated.

What I am proposing is that we revise this entire way of seeing the feudal lord and recover his lived existence through apprehending him as a living being desiring to fully recognize and be recognized by others—to be recognized by, for example, the person next to him—but with that desire also contradicted by the envelope of alienation and fear of the other that he by birth and social reproduction was thrown into. Thus, his “lordship” as a totality of mannerisms, style, pretense, beliefs, condescension and deference, dehumanization of his vassals (both as factors of production of agricultural goods and as imaginary “others” occupying a lesser place in the feudal hierarchy)—all of these and countless other ways of being-a-lord are shaped by and transcended by the conflict between desire and fear that actually incarnates him in relation to all others as a real, existential, living social being. Within this way of seeing the feudal lord, what drives the historical process forward is not his formal relationship to an external system (for Marxism, a division of classes pursuing their respective interests that are in contradiction under conditions of material scarcity), but the transcendent longing for mutual recognition organizing itself through not entirely predictable socio-historical “emergences,” which sometimes have a class character (as in the overall struggle of the rising merchant and capitalist class to break asunder the restraining feudal relations), sometimes have an ideological character (the eventual coalescing of Protestant revolts against the Catholic Church), and sometimes through cultural upsurges like the forms of dress, popular song and poetry, and liberatory sexuality that give voice to each rising “movement,” which we can now understand as a movement of social being seeking its own realization through transcendent and authentic community.

This is not to say the material factors shaping the feudal lord’s life are unimportant but rather that they refer to those aspects of the lord’s social existence that pertain to the survival of his body, and, under conditions of scarcity, provide an important channel for the longing of the desire for mutual recognition to express itself. When the peasants revolt, they are in fact starving, and they want to overthrow those who are depriving them of food, but if they lived in a beloved community, human beings would not turn on each other driven by material need. Thus there is a co-existing mutual influence of material and social-spiritual factors that must always be understood by linking the survival and health of the body, with the full social realization of our relational collective being. I will address this further in Chapter 6, but first we must fill out our description of the encounter of the desire for mutual recognition with the social envelope into which it is born and contained. How exactly does social desire that exists in everyone come to alienate itself in actual human relations?

Note

1Several other writers—notably G.W.F. Hegel in philosophy, Jessica Benjamin in psychoanalysis, and Alix Honneth in political theory—make use of the concept of “mutual recognition” in their work. From what I have thus far read of their writings, my use of this term is different from theirs because by the desire for mutual recognition I mean a desire for an unmediated co-presence with the other, with each other, that dissolves the false self that separates us and brings us into a pre-reflective and immediate social connection. The other writers to whom I refer seem to have a somewhat more developmental notion of “mutual recognition” as something to be achieved through historical, psychological, or political growth. As I indicate in the Preface, for me the desire for mutual recognition means the desire for the completion of our very social being that we aspire to from birth and that is realized through that mutuality of presence that is most palpable in social movements but that remains possible in every human encounter. The pull of that always-present desire is the silent anchor fostering all growth and development, whether personal or social.

Works Cited

Bergman, Robert. “Portrait of Cindy Tyler.” A Kind of Rapture. Pantheon, New York, NY, 1998.

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Touchstone, New York, NY, 1971.

Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 1990.

King, Martin Luther Jr. Wesleyan University Commencement, quoting Theodore Parker, 8 June 1964, Hartford, CT, Wesleyan Baccalaureate.

Chapter 2

The Denial of Desire, Fear of the Other, and Formation of the False Self

When the newborn child encounters an adult, one aspect of the encounter is certainly, in most circumstances, a radiant experience of love. The child spontaneously seeks to recognize and be recognized by the adult—in fact, the child spontaneously pulls the adult out of his or her “world” and into a direct, unmediated encounter with the child. By “unm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Desire for Mutual Recognition
• 2 The Denial of Desire, Fear of the Other, and Formation of the False Self
• 3 Humiliation, Authority, Hierarchy
• 4 The Imaginary Community: The Family, The Nation, and “Race”
• 5 Language, Thought, Ideology
• 6 The Economic System as a Network of Alienated Reciprocities
• 7 Politics as the Struggle Over Who “We” Are: On the Necessity of Building a Parallel Universe
• 8 Knowledge, Truth, and Understanding
• 9 The Movement’s Lack of Confidence in Itself: On the Necessity of Spiritualizing Social Activism
• 10 Social-Spiritual Activism: Activism that Thaws the False Self and Fosters Mutuality of Presence
• Glossary
• Acknowledgments
• Index