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Hence recognition must always take place between equals, mediated through social institutions which can guarantee that equality and thus produce the necessary mutual relations of recognition necessary for the attainment of freedom. It is precisely this last point that recent recognition theorists have seized upon and elaborated into comprehensive discussions of justice. However, it would be more accurate to say that Taylor awoke a general interest in the idea of recognition.
His short essay provides a series of reflections and conjectures which, whilst insightful, do not constitute a full-blown theory of recognition. However, its exploratory nature and non-technical language has helped install it as the common reference point for discussions of recognition.
He identifies such a demand as present in the political activities of feminism, race movements and multiculturalists for a critical discussion of this point, see Nicholson, Our individual identity is not constructed from within and generated by each of us alone. Rather, it is through dialogue with others that we negotiate our identity. The idea that our sense of who we are is determined through our interaction with others initiates a shift from a monologic to a dialogic model of the self. Deploying a brief historical narrative, Taylor argues that the collapse of social hierarchies, which had provided the basis for bestowing honour on certain individuals that is, those high up on the social ladder , led to the modern day notion of dignity, which rests upon universalist and egalitarian principles regarding the equal worth of all human beings.
This notion of dignity lies at the core of contemporary democratic ideals, unlike the notion of honour which is, he claims, clearly incompatible with democratic culture. However, he is quick to point out that the discovery of our authenticity is not simply a matter of introspection. Rather, it is through our interactions with others that we define who we are. Nor is there an end point to this dialogue. It continues throughout our entire lives and does not even depend upon the physical presence of a specific other for that person to influence us.
Consider, for example, the way an imaginary conversation with a deceased partner might influence how we act or view ourselves. The importance of recognition lies precisely in the fact that how others see might us is a necessary step in forming an understanding of who we are. To be recognised negatively, or misrecognised, is to be thwarted in our desire for authenticity and self-esteem. He identifies two different ways in which the idea of equal recognition has been understood.
The first is a politics of equal dignity, or a politics of universalism, which aims at the equalisation of all rights and entitlements. In this instance, all individuals are to be treated as universally the same through recognition of their common citizenship or humanity. The second formulation is the politics of difference, in which the uniqueness of each individual or group is recognised.
Rousseau bitterly noted that man, having shifted from a state of self-sufficiency and simplicity to one of competition and domination that characterises modern society, has come to crave the recognition of their difference Rousseau, For Rousseau, this desire for individual distinction, achievement and recognition conflicts with a principle of equal respect. Returning to Taylor, he notes that there is also a universal basis to this second political model insofar as all people are entitled to have their identity recognised: One consequence of this politics of difference is that certain rights will be assigned to specific groups but not others.
The two approaches can be summed as follows. Taylor defends a politics of difference, arguing that the concept of equal dignity often if not always derives its idea of what rights and entitlement are worth having from the perspective of the hegemonic culture, thus enforcing minority groups to conform to the expectations of dominant culture and hence relinquish their particularity. Failure to conform will result in the minority culture being derided and ostracised by the dominant culture.
Woman exists as a lack; characterised through what she does not possess or exhibit namely, male and masculine traits. This point was strongly made by Fanon , who detailed how racism infiltrates the consciousness of the oppressed, preventing psychological health through the internalisation of subjection and otherness. Axel Honneth has produced arguably the most extensive discussion of recognition to date.
He is in agreement with Taylor that recognition is essential to self-realisation. However, he draws more explicitly on Hegelian intersubjectivity in order to identify the mechanics of how this is achieved, as well as establishing the motivational and normative role recognition can play in understanding and justifying social movements.
These are love, rights, and solidarity Honneth, It provides a basic self-confidence, which can be shattered through physical abuse. All three spheres of recognition are crucial to developing a positive attitude towards oneself:. For it is only due to the cumulative acquisition of basic self-confidence, of self-respect, and of self-esteem According to Honneth, the denial of recognition provides the motivational and justificatory basis for social struggles.
Specifically, it is through the emotional experiences generated by certain attitudes and actions of others towards us that we can come to feel we are being illegitimately denied social recognition. Certain emotional states, such as shame, anger and frustration, are generated by the failure of our actions. Conversely, more positive emotional states are generated through successful action. The experience of negative emotional states can, in theory, reveal to us that an injustice is taking place namely, that we are not being given due and appropriate recognition.
However, as Honneth points out, feelings of shame or anger need not indeed, do not necessarily disclose relations of disrespect ibid: What they provide is the potential for identifying the occurrence of an injustice which one is justified in opposing. The experience of disrespect is the raw material from which normatively justified social struggles can be formulated.
Presumably, disrespect in other contexts would lead to individual acts of retaliation or undirected violence, rather than coordinated resistance. This phenomenological approach to recognition thus locates the source and justification of social struggles in the experiences and expectations of recognition. Of course, as noted, it requires the further steps of a locating these experiences within a socially-generated framework of emancipatory discourse; and b the establishment of common experiences amongst individuals for these individual frustrations to develop into social struggles.
It is only through the failure of such expectations that recognition can be a motivational source, arising via negative emotional experiences. This assumption allows Honneth to assess societal change as a developmental process driven by moral claims arising from experiences of disrespect. Honneth is careful to specify that he is not advocating a single, substantive set of universal values and social arrangements. Here, Honneth is trying to retain a Kantian notion of respect and autonomy through identifying the necessary conditions for self-realisation and self-determination, akin to a Kantian kingdom of ends in which all individuals receive and confer recognition on one another.
Whereas there are broad areas of agreement between Honneth and Taylor, Nancy Fraser is keen to differentiate her theory of recognition from both of their respective positions.
Schools of Recognition: Identity Politics and Classroom Practices [Charles Bingham] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Schools are places. Drawing on the writings of Charles Taylor, Martin Buber, Judith Butler, and Jessica Benjamin, Schools of Recognition provides a rich picture of how recognition.
Fraser believes that this binary opposition derives from the fact that, whereas recognition seems to promote differentiation, redistribution supposedly works to eliminate it. Individuals exist as members of a community based upon a shared horizon of meanings, norms and values. Here, individuals exist in a hierarchically-differentiated collective class system which, from the perspective of the majority class who are constituted by a lack of resources, needs abolishing.
According to Fraser, both these forms of injustice are primary and co-original, meaning that economic inequality cannot be reduced to cultural misrecognition, and vice-versa. Many social movements face this dilemma of having to balance the demand for economic equality with the insistence that their cultural specificity be met. Whereas Honneth thinks a sufficiently elaborated concept of recognition can do all the work needed for a critical theory of justice, Fraser argues that recognition is but one dimension of justice, albeit a vitally important one.
The disagreement over whether or not distribution can be made to supervene on recognition arises from the differing interpretations of recognition. According to Fraser Fraser and Honneth Contra Honneth and Taylor, Fraser does not look to situate the injustice of misrecognition in the retardation of personal development.
Addressing injustices arising from misrecognition therefore means looking at the discursive representations of identities in order to identity how certain individuals are assigned a relatively inferior social standing. Instead, it should be conceived as an institutionalised relation of subordination. In effect, recognition is required in order to guarantee that all members of society have an equal participation in social life.
Because Honneth equates recognition with self-realisation, the derivative issues of redistribution are only generated to the extent that they inhibit this personal development.
For Fraser, injustice in the form of both misrecognition and maldistribution is detrimental to the extent that it inhibits participatory parity. Fraser considers two possible remedies for injustice, which transcend the redistribution-recognition divide by being applicable to both. Certain forms of inequality, including those of race and gender, derive from the signifying effect of socio-cultural structures. Thus, the solution is not simply a matter of revaluing heterosexual, female or black identities. The proposal made by Fraser, then, is the radical restructuring of society, achieved through transformative redistribution that is, socialism and recognition cultural deconstruction.
It should be noted that in her more recent work on recognition that is, Fraser ; , she resists offering any particular remedies, arguing instead that the required response to injustice will be dictated by the specific context.
In a very important discussion, Fraser and Honneth defend their respective theories of recognition see also Honneth, As noted in Section III, Fraser believes that recognition and distribution are two irreducible elements of a satisfactory theory of justice. This is to say, they are of equal foundational importance — the one cannot be collapsed into the other. Honneth, on the other hand, contends that issues of distribution are ultimately explained and justified through issues of recognition.
He begins justifying this claim through a historical survey of political movements and unrest amongst the lower classes during the early stages of capitalism. What marked such activities was the commonly held belief that the honour and dignity of the members of the lower classes were not being adequately respected. Summarising these findings, Honneth ibid: Any dispute regarding redistribution of wealth or resources is reducible to a claim over the social valorisation of specific group or individual traits. The division that Fraser makes between economic distribution and cultural recognition is, Honneth claims, an arbitrary and ultimately misleading one that ignores the fundamental role played by recognition in economic struggles, as well as implying that the cultural sphere of society can be understood as functioning independently of the economic sphere.
The ideal of participatory parity gives Fraser her normative component, for it provides the basis on which different recognition claims can be judged. In particular, she says, the idea that all social discontent has the same, single underlying motivation misrecognition is simply implausible. This can lead to the victim of oppression internalising the injustice or blaming themselves, rather than the discursive and material conditions within which they are situated as oppressed or harmed. There is no realm of personal experience that is not experienced through a particular linguistic and historical horizon, which actively shapes the experience in question see section V.
Honneth cannot invoke psychological experiences of disrespect as the normative foundation for his theory of recognition as they cannot be treated as independent of the discursive conditions within which the subject is constituted. In his response to Fraser, Honneth points out that she can necessarily focus only on those social movements that have already become visible. By analysing the ways in which individuals and groups are socially-situated by institutionalised patterns of cultural value, Fraser limits herself to only those expressions of social discontent that have already entered the public sphere.
In other words, there could be a plethora of individuals and groups who are struggling for recognition which have not yet achieved public acknowledgement and thus have not been implicated within positive or negative social structures of signification. There appears some weight to this criticism, for a successful critical social theory should be able to not only critique the status quo , but identify future patterns of social resistance. If, on Fraser's account, justice is a matter of addressing how subjects are socially-situated by existing value structures, then it seems to lack the conceptual apparatus to look beyond the present.
It is out of the frustration of individual expectations of due recognition that new social movements will emanate, rather than the pre-existing patterns of signification which currently hierarchically situate subjects. Despite its influence and popularity, there are a number of concerns regarding the concept of recognition as a foundational element in a theory of justice. This article cannot hope to present an exhaustive list, so instead offers a few of the most common critiques. Perhaps the one most frequently voiced criticism is that regarding the reification of group identity.
This risks producing intergroup coercion and enforcing conformity at the expense of individual specificity. Such expectations of behaviour can lead, Appiah notes ibid: Extrapolating from these concerns, Markell argues that Taylor conflates individual identity with group identity with the result that agency is rendered a matter of adopting the identity one is assigned through membership of one's community.
Consequently, the critical tension between the individual and community is dissolved, which leaves little if any space for critiquing or resisting the dominant norms and values of one's community see also Habermas, By valorising a particular identity, those other identities which lack certain characteristics particular to the group in question can be dismissed as inferior. This isolationist policy runs counter to the ideal of social acceptability and respect for difference that a politics of recognition is meant to initiate.
Reifying group identity prevents critical dialogue taking place either within or between groups. The result is a strong separatism and radical relativism in which intergroup dialogue is eliminated.
This can mask over the ways in which various axes of identity overlap and thus ignores the commonalities between groups. Underlying this critique is the idea that identity is always multilayered and that each individual is always positioned at the intersection of multiple axes of oppression. Similar to the concerns over reification, there is a concern that recognition theories invoke an essentialist account of identity. Critics accuse recognition theory of assuming that there is a kernel of selfhood that awaits recognition see, for example, Heyes, The struggle for recognition thus becomes a struggle to be recognised as what one truly is.
This implies that certain features of a person lie dormant, awaiting discovery by the individual who then presents this authentic self to the world and demands positive recognition for it. Although Taylor is keen to stress that his model is not committed to such an essentialist account of the self, certain remarks he makes do not help his cause. A more radical account of intersubjectivity can be found in Arendt Examining the processes by which the subject reveals who they are, she shifts the focus away from a personal revelation on the part of the agent and into the social realm: Using political theory, existentialism, queer theory, and psychoanalysis, Bingham shows that recognition can be fostered not only through the books that students read, but also through the ways that they learn to engage with other human beings.
Recognition depends not only on receiving acknowledgement, but also on giving acknowledgement. It depends not only on what we learn from others about ourselves, but also on what we are able to teach others about themselves. Subjection Chapter 5 Recognizing as being Recognized: Reciprocity Chapter 6 Thinking Through the Encounter: This is a provocative and important book that will give educators a way to talk about how we can help students develop their own voices and be recognized in the classroom. Using narrative and philosophical analysis, Charles Bingham weaves a carefully considered and personally connected introduction to recognition theory for educators.
Thus, the stakes for thinking pedagogically about organizing are that much greater. Pedagogy is often second nature in classrooms, whereas in other spaces, while just as important, it is a distant concern. Yet we are not the first to draw connections between what happens in classrooms and in movements. As noted above, critical pedagogy is deeply indebted to the work of Paulo Freire, whose approach to dialogue in popular education was not designed for schooling, but as a movement strategy for organizing Brazilian working class adults.
It was through this pedagogical approach to organizing that Ellsworth and her students reached coalition.
These activities helped to build relations of trust and mutual support without presuming that all students entered the classroom from the same position. Although Hegel has undoubtedly influenced the contemporary understanding of recognition more than any other philosopher, Hegel was himself inspired by the work of Johann Fichte see Williams, Of course, the other also tries to negate this consciousness, thus generating the struggle which results in affirmation of one self-consciousness at the cost of the negation or annihilation of the other. Using political theory, existentialism, queer theory, and psychoanalysis, Bingham shows that recognition can be fostered Pluto, [] Fichte, Johann G.
We find the Ellsworth example particularly helpful because it takes place in an educational institution where pedagogy is front and center, but her classroom is devoted to changing the relations of production at the institution in question. Coalition is a paradigm case of people establishing relations of activism while trying to change relations of production. They establish those activist relations positionally, taking seriously where each student comes from in the social structure, rather than erasing those differences in the name of some universal value.
In doing so, she shows us what thinking pedagogically about movements can reveal: We can apply this insight from classrooms to activist spaces by examining a recent proposal adopted by the Democratic Socialists of America. At the national convention in August , DSA members debated a controversial resolution calling for a rigorous program of organizer trainings. The resolution emerged from a plank of the Praxis slate of candidates for the National Political Committee. To be clear, this is not simply because of the focus on political education, but because it advances an approach to movement building that explicitly tackles the challenge of working together across difference in relations of activism.
The training strategy is national, encompassing the entire country, yet it is structured to provide tools for activists working from vastly different structural locations. Working from this perspective, the ideology of impasse outlined at the beginning of this essay — one that pits class struggle against identity politics — makes no sense. In the current political context, coalition is not only a crucial strategy for organizing across structural divides, but also a way of thinking beyond the dichotomy of class universalism vs.
Such a coalition would work toward a situated critique of universality, but remain ultimately oriented toward mass collective action. The work of organizing and movement building is deeply pedagogical. If we fail to recognize the specific histories that inform our own perspectives, as well as those around us, then we will encounter significant obstacles.
A pedagogical approach to collective action encourages us to think about how knowledge is produced through situated encounters, not only in our classrooms, but also in our homes, workplaces, communities, and movement spaces. Routines, activities, and ways of speaking were her bottom line. While she had been steeped in universalist discourses and practices, and while she was engaged in important reflection on them, she translated her thinking into action — how to listen, how to speak, and how to move forward given the struggles she encountered.
We offer her research as an example for contemporary movements, particularly those groups seeking ways to create coalition across difference, to emphasize that our bottom line should not only be an analysis of the problem we are fighting — such as exploitative working conditions, mass incarceration, or environmental racism — but also the quality of the everyday routines and practices in our movements as we fight to create the social relations and structures we want.
How will we listen? How will we speak? How will we plan agendas, facilitate meetings, and converse? Universality flattens the differences between us, while identity fragments us according to these differences. Neither is enough on its own for a theory-strategy towards change. Articulation is useful here because it challenges determinism and draws our attention to the conditions in which a particular connection occurs.
Articulation poses a challenge to determinism by looking at the contingent conditions in which a particular connection occurs — e. It is to put things together in ways that create unity out of difference, but using the existing difference as a starting point.
If Jennifer Daryl Slack is right in her interpretation , there is a problem for articulation: Our account of pedagogy can help here. We have conceived of pedagogy in movements as the material conditions of activism; it is the ritual practices involved in actual movement work. We would therefore claim that pedagogy enacts articulations in specific moments.
Consider the person who leaves the cave and then returns: Does she listen to each of them, develop relationships over time, then slowly bring them to a realization about the shadows?
Does she bring an axe and just chop the chains without talking? Does she constantly insist that because they are all chained they should therefore break those chains together and rise up? Whereas articulation gives her a theory for the first step, pedagogy gives her a strategy for the second step. Thinking pedagogically therefore might fill a gap for the theory of articulation: Pedagogy provides a mechanism for this process.