Schools are places where various cultures and identities must be recognized, yet there has been little research into what it means to recognize another person, identity, or culture. Drawing on the writings of Charles Taylor, Martin Buber, Judith Butler, and Jessica Benjamin, Schools of Recognition provides a rich picture of how recognition is negotiated in education.
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.
Schools of Recognition: Identity Politics and Classroom Practices
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. This is not an argument for the best framework of recognition, but rather an introduction to multiple perspectives, bringing out their strengths and weaknesses. The reader will become familiar with various iterations and become more adept at using them as tools to help analyze the problems educators face in our everyday efforts to value and appreciate our diverse students. A key feature of this idea is that the same applies in reverse — the other can only comprehend itself as free by being recognised as such.
Through this analysis, Fichte produced a thoroughly intersubjective ontology of humans and demonstrated that freedom and self-understanding are dependent upon mutual recognition. These ideas were developed in greater detail by Hegel. In his Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel Rather, understanding ourselves as an independent self-consciousness requires the recognition of another.
One must recognise oneself as mediated through the other. According to Hegel, it is through the intersubjective recognition of our freedom that right is actualised. Rights are not instrumental to freedom; rather they are the concrete expression of it. Without recognition we could not come to realise freedom, which in turn gives rise to right.
The work of Hegel consciously echoes the Aristotelian conception of humans as essentially social beings. For Hegel, recognition is the mechanism by which our existence as social beings is generated. Therefore, our successful integration as ethical and political subjects within a particular community is dependent upon receiving and conferring appropriate forms of recognition. Such a conflict is described as a life-and-death struggle, insofar as each consciousness desires to confirm its self-existence and independence through a negation or objectification of the other.
That is, it seeks to incorporate the other within its field of consciousness as an object of negation, as something which this consciousness is not, thus affirming its own unfettered existence.
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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. Only in this way, Hegel observes, only by risking life, can freedom be obtained. However, there is a key moment with this struggle.
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Namely, consciousness realises that it cannot simply destroy the other through incorporating it within itself, for it requires the other as a definite other in order to gain recognition. Thus, it must resist collapsing the other into itself, for to do so would also be to annihilate itself. It would be starving itself of the recognition it requires in order to be a determinate self-consciousness.
This co-dependency results in mutual relations of recognition which are the condition for understanding oneself as a genuinely free being, albeit a free being which acknowledges, and thus adjusts itself, to the freedom of others. Discussing the process of recognition, Hegel Hegel characterises this mutuality, which cannot be coerced but be freely given and received, as being at home in the other. Such a relation with another is the condition for the phenomenological experience of freedom and right. We see now how the master-slave dialectic of recognition is inherently unstable and unsatisfying.
The slave, realising that life as a slave is better than no life at all, accepts this relation of dominance and subservience. The recognition of the slave is ultimately worthless, for it is not the recognition of a free self-consciousness, which alone can grant the recognition on another required for self-certainty of existence and freedom. For Hegel, relations of domination provide a vicious spiral of recognition. They lead nowhere but to their own destruction. 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.
Schools of Recognition: Identity Politics and Classroom Practices -
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:.
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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.
Schools of recognition : identity politics and classroom practices, Charles Bingham
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. 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.
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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: In so doing, we place ourselves into the hands of others. Taylor mitigates his position and, arguably, eschews any form of essentialism, by arguing that we always work out our identity through dialogue with others. For example, Taylor However, he does not state to what we appeal to in this potential struggle with others.
If it is ultimately our sense of who we are, then this would seem to undermine the very conditions of intersubjectivity that Taylor wants to introduce into the notion of personal identity. For, if one is the ultimate judge and jury on who one is, then those around us will simply be agreeing or disagreeing with our pre-existent or inwardly-generated sense of self, rather than playing an ineliminable role in its constitution.
Again, it is unlikely that Taylor would endorse any form of subjectivism. Indeed, his turn towards intersubjective recognition is precisely meant to resist the idea that one simply decides who one is and demands that others recognise oneself in such a way.
Taylor would certainly seem critical of the existential tradition, which emphasised the need for one to define oneself and provide meaning to the world. Although Sartre deployed the language of intersubjectivity see V. Recognition, contrasted with this existential picture, theories seem well equipped to resist any accusation that they slide into subjectivism. However, they must provide a criterion from which to judge whether individual and collective demands for recognition are legitimate. For example, it cannot be the case that all demands for recognition are accepted, for we are unlikely to want to recognise the claims of a racist or homophobic group for cultural protection.
Hence he seems committed to respecting difference qua difference, regardless of the particular form this difference takes. But no matter how strongly the racist group insists upon their authenticity, we would be likely to resist recognising the value and worth of their identity as racists. Certain theorists have tended to cast recognition in a far more negative, conflictual light. Typically, they interpret Hegelian recognition as evolving an inescapable element of domination between, or appropriation of, subjects.
Perhaps the most notable of such thinkers is Sartre , whose account of intersubjectivity appears to preclude any possibility of recognition functioning as a means of attaining political solidarity or emancipation. According to Sartre, our relations with other people are always conflictual as each of us attempts to negate the other in an intersubjective dual.
The realisation of our own subjectivity is dependent upon our turning the other into an object. In turn, we are made to feel like an object within the gaze of the other. In this moment of shame, I feel myself as an object and am thus denied existence as a subject. My only hope is to make the other into an object. There are no equal or stable relations between people; all interactions are processes of domination.
Whereas Sartre focuses on the problem of being recognised, Levinas turns to the ethical issues attending how one recognises others. Levinas believes that the denying of such difference is the fundamental ethical sin as it fails to respect the other in their absolute exteriority, their absolute difference to us. In effect, to recognise someone is to render them the same as us; to eliminate their inescapable, unapprehendable and absolute alterity Yar, An alternative perspective on the self-other relationship can be found in Merleau-Ponty who argues that the other is always instigated within oneself, and vice-versa, through the potential reversibility of the self-other dichotomy that is, that the self is also a potential other; seeing someone necessarily involves the possibility of being seen.