The Politics of Misrecognition by Majid Yar Simon Thompson

Author:Majid Yar, Simon Thompson [Majid Yar, Simon Thompson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409476443
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Published: 2013-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

Preliminaries (1): Two Senses of ‘Misrecognition’

There are two forms of recognition or misrecognition involved here. First, in the tradition deriving from Hegel, recognition is of persons and their worth, and concerns relations to others and to self. In appropriate forms, it is necessary for human well-being, both as a condition of our developing a sense of ourselves as subjects at all, and of our psychological well-being. We cannot develop a healthy relation to self without a healthy relation to others. Anyone who meets disrespect and hostility in most of their encounters with others is likely quickly to suffer. Here, ‘misrecognition’ suggests a denial of recognition to someone or some group, so that they are not treated as equal or independent, but rather as inferior and unworthy of respect or esteem; hence they are “denied the status of a full partner in social interaction” (Fraser 2010: 217; see also Honneth 1995; Schmidt am Busch and Zurn 2010; Taylor 1994). Misrecognition of this kind is both cause and effect of many inequalities. In an unequal society, recognition may be available only from those on the same level or within the same group, while misrecognition characterizes relations with those outside. Typically, misrecognition also provides spurious justifications for structural inequalities, attributing them to differences in individual or group worth.

Within this concept of recognition, following Charles Taylor (1994), we can distinguish between unconditional recognition of others simply as human beings, in virtue of their common capacities and vulnerabilities, and conditional recognition of people in response to their character and how they act. In everyday practice it is evident that not all are given equal unconditional recognition: some lives (and deaths) are regarded as more important than others. The distinction is a good deal more fuzzy in practice than we might wish from a normative point of view: those whose identity, character and behaviour are not valued are typically less valued simply as people. Nevertheless, it will be primarily conditional recognition that will be discussed here.

For Bourdieu, by contrast, “recognition”, is not specifically concerned with responses to others but something much more general: “the set of fundamental, pre-reflexive assumptions that social agents engage by the mere fact of taking the world for granted, of accepting the world as it is, and of finding it natural because their mind is constructed according to cognitive structures that are issued out of the very structures of the world” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1990: 168, emphasis in original). The ways of acting are based less on conscious reflection on what is and what could be, and more on an embodied accommodation to the way things happen to be for them, acquired through acting and living in certain conditions; thus, for example, a dominated group may acquire a disposition of deference.1 Misrecognition here is therefore not so much to do with the valuation of persons as to do with misunderstanding of the nature of social reality. It is particularly associated with relations of symbolic domination, where the misunderstanding is less a result of ideological ‘influence’ than of the objective situation in which they find themselves.

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