'The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Social Media' by William Davies in (2021) 128 New Left Review comments
In the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, critical theorists paid renewed attention to what Charles Taylor famously called ‘the politics of recognition’. The demand for recognition, Taylor suggested, was linked to modern notions of identity—a person’s understanding of their fundamental defining characteristics, of who they are. Since our identity is partly shaped by others’ recognition, people can suffer real damage if society mirrors back a demeaning image of themselves. Thus, women in patriarchal societies may be induced to internalize a sexist self-image, to suffer the pain of low self-esteem. White rule has for generations projected a demeaning picture of black, indigenous and colonized peoples, saddling the oppressed with crippling forms of self-depreciation. In this respect, due recognition was a vital human need. Taylor saw the uncertain quest for recognition as linked to the 18th-century emergence of individualized identities, premised on a concept of inner authenticity. Meanwhile Axel Honneth’s Kampf um Anerkennung (1992) outlined a moral theory in which recognition, achieved via political struggle, was constitutive of personhood. Nancy Fraser developed a dualistic rejoinder, later in critical dialogue with Honneth, which balanced recognition with redistribution in the quest for equality.
The timing of this turn towards recognition was significant. It coincided with the triumph of capitalist globalization, when the conceptual foundations of critical theory and emancipatory politics were deeply contestable and contested. Just as the collapse of state socialism undermined the confidence of Marxist critique, so the aggressive market universalism that followed produced some hesitancy with regard to Kantian critique. For different reasons and in different ways, Taylor, Honneth and Fraser all attended to the critical link between the two traditions: Hegel. Recognition, in its concrete, cultural and historical varieties, was to be a constitutive part of justice. The dialogical dimensions of subjectivity, underplayed or ignored by both Marxism and liberalism, would become integrated within critical theory and radical politics.
A key reason for taking the politics of recognition seriously was that it had its own empirical and historical momentum. The demand for recognition had become integral to what Fraser termed ‘folk paradigms of justice’—the moral vernacular of the social movements that emerged after the 1960s. Multiculturalism was a sociological fact. Despite considerable differences between these theorists, one reason why they deemed recognition philosophically and politically important was that it palpably mattered to political and moral actors themselves. The renewed theorization of recognition was therefore a continuation of what Luc Boltanski had identified as a longstanding problematic: how to register the everyday suffering and demands of ‘lay’ actors with the meta-critique offered by theoretical scholarship. ...
My intention here is to come at the current explosion of recognition demands from a different perspective: to consider how transformations in the public sphere have led to a mutation in how recognition is demanded and supplied. The key condition for this is the digital platform, which has ushered in a new era of public participation in which recognition of status is never adequately achieved by anyone, so injustice feels ubiquitous. In the attention economy of social media, public actors may long for recognition, but have to settle instead for varying quantities of ‘reputation’, or simply the ‘reaction’ of immediate feedback. The task, I suggest, is to retain some loyalty to how everyday critiques and expressions of suffering articulate themselves, but also to arm ourselves with critical resources against the latest tricks pulled by what Jodi Dean terms ‘communicative capitalism’. The rise of platform capitalism has occasioned a new phase which needs to be understood, if critique is not to be ensnared by a platform logic of rating and trolling.
Critical theories of recognition start from the intuition that misrecognition is a form of moral harm that undermines self-esteem and the capacity for full personhood, but which also motivates the struggle for justice. Drawing on Hegel’s inter-subjective theory of moral agency, Taylor and Honneth both argue that individual selfhood develops through social relations, with respect to the family, civil society and the state. For Taylor, the problem became acute with the advent of modernity, because recognition could no longer be established through tradition or ritual alone. Individuals were expected to develop themselves in a distinctive and autonomous fashion, but then discovered that they depended on others to recognize their authentic self. There was a precarious dimension to modern subjectivity, in that truth must emerge from within, yet its validation must be granted socially. ‘What has come about with the modern age’, Taylor argued, ‘is not the need for recognition but the conditions in which the attempt to be recognized can fail’.
For Taylor, this precarity was a symptom of the bourgeois public sphere, which usurped earlier valuation systems built upon honour. It was organized around two potentially conflicting ideals. On the one hand, individuals entered it as equals, without bringing any prior status with them. In the language of recognition, this involves respecting the equal dignity of all human beings (but in practice only property-owners). On the other hand, its great achievement was to establish new gradations of value on the basis of criticism, opinion and deliberation, rather than on the basis of honour. Under liberal democracy, much of the value of recognition—as an artist, politician or entrepreneur—derived precisely from the fact that it is not equally distributed but won on some principle of merit. Honneth referred to this approvingly as the individualist achievement principle, which ensured that recognition could not be taken for granted. Everybody received equal recognition for having cultural potential, but not for the use they make of it.
A key challenge lies in how this balance between recognition of equality and recognition of inequality is handled. Honneth’s ambitious theory of justice-as-recognition offered one response. Honneth articulated three domains in which recognition is accorded in different forms: within the family as love, within the legal system as rights, and in civil society and the public sphere as esteem and solidarity. It is the task of the legal system to allocate equality of rights, but the task of civil society and the public sphere to differentiate cultures, merits and identities. Honneth’s challenge to Marxism, and to Fraser in their exchange, is to suggest that even class conflict and demands for redistribution are fuelled originally by the injury of misrecognition, for example that the contribution of the worker to production is not adequately recognized by the labour market.
Honneth’s main goal was to bridge the divide between ‘a moral theory going back to Kant, on the one hand, and communitarian ethics, on the other’. The constitutive psychological function of recognition supplied the universal-normative principle, while the conditions and struggles for recognition were historical and local. But they also had the effect of democratizing the articulation of injustice, such that moral and critical agency could stem from the person who experienced misrecognition, and not simply the one who observed it. By anchoring his understanding of misrecognition in social psychology, specifically the work of George Mead, Honneth hoped his theory was broad enough to encompass the manifold non-public and ‘non-political’ ways in which recognition is withheld, for instance within the home, at considerable cost to the person.
