Ontology, recognition, and politics: A reply

Polity

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 28-39

  Markell, Patchen ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

Author keywords

Acknowledgement; Action; Identity; Misrecognition; Ontology; Politics; Power; Recognition

Indexed keywords

EID: 31144440240     PISSN: 00323497     EISSN: 17441684     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300050     Document Type: Review

References (30)

1. Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 195n7. Hereafter cited in parentheses and abbreviated BbR. Citations to the essays by Vázquez-Arroyo, Cocks, and Sheth in this volume are in parentheses by page number.
2. While on the subject of Hegel: although Vázquez-Arroyo is right to insist that the moment of the "abdication of independence" I identify at the end of the struggle for recognition is momentary, and that an orientation toward some more "concrete" form of independence survives in subsequent parts of Hegel's story, including his account of the self-consciousness achieved through servile labor (not to mention his later account of the place of the idea of sovereignty in the structure of objective spirit), I had not intended to suggest anything to the contrary in Bound by Recognition: my focus on that moment, and on the way in which the master-slave relation survives in the face of its own inner contradictions, was presented precisely as a reading of Hegel against himself.
3. I draw the term "fold" from Stephen K. White, Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), whose distinction between "strong" and "weak" ontology informed and inspired my use of the concept.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 68.
5. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 106.
6. See Sheldon S. Wolin, "Democracy Difference, and Re-cognition, Political Theory 21 (August 1993): 464-83. It is not clear to me that Wolin uses the term "re-cognition" to mean something like the overcoming of "misrecognition" in Bourdieu's sense. When Wolin finally comes close to defining the term near the end of the essay, he says that "re-cognition" involves "a radical revision in the culturally produced representations of a familiar being" (480); he sometimes seems to associate "re-cognition" with the form of recognition demanded by what he sees as recent, identitarian, and "exclusivist" forms of pluralism organized around "difference" as opposed to those organized around mere "diversity" (465, 467); and he concludes the essay by emphasizing that there is "a political paradox in the re-cognition of difference," since demands for re-cognition both "presuppose a strong State" capable of protecting vulnerable citizens and tend to erode the political power on which they depend by "rendering suspect the language and possibilities of collectivity, common action, and shared purposes" (480).
7. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 188.
8. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations 172, 181.
9. For example, Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 25-29, 135-41
10. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 69.
11. Patchen Markell, "Recognition and Redistribution," in The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory ed. John Diyzek, Bonnie Honig and Anne Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). As I note there, things are somewhat different among Hegel specialists and in the tradition of twentiethcentury French Hegelianism, where "recognition" is more often treated as a general medium of intersubjectivity through which social relations are constituted, maintained, and transformed.
12. Crucially, one of the effects of breaking out of this more conventional frame is that it lets us see that the "politics of recognition" in this broader sense is not something practiced "exclusively by those people and groups who are already socially marked as 'particular' " (BbR 6). The book is thus not, per se, a critique of what Vázquez-Arroyo calls "politicized identity;" it is a critique of one way of conceiving of the purpose, justification, and effects of the politicization of identity whose power arises in substantial part from the recognitive imperatives of states and their normative citizens (BbR 6, 23-24, 185-86).
13. Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas, with a new afterword (New York: Owl Books, 2005), 13-27.
14. On the ironies fed by this frame see Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas.
15. Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas, 245.
16. For a critique of Frank on this point and an alternative view see Lauren Berlant, "Unfeeling Kerry:' Theory & Event 8, no. 2 (2005) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v008/8.2Berlant.html (August 2, 2005).
17. See Judith Butler, "Merely Cultural," Social Text 15: (Fall-Winter), 274;
18. Markell, "Recognition and Redistribution."
19. Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas, 9.
20. I actually think Sheth's account of the state's "dual agenda" conflates two slightly different distinctions: first, between the state understood as a mediating institution among its citizens, and the state understood as concerned with its own survival, and thus as the institutional expression of national unity (see especially 23-24); and, second, between the state understood as guided by the realistic and responsible evaluation of its' citizens needs and safety, and the state understood as guided by its (officials') own search to preserve and expand its (their) power (see especially 26-27). Sheth is right, I think, to see these distinctions as roughly parallel, but they are not quite identical.
21. I discuss this dynamic in BbR, 25-32 and chapter 5.
22. For an excellent account of the pattern of oscillation between these views of the state that characterizes the disciplinary history of political science, see John G. Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity: Political Science and the Discourse of Democracy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).
23. It is important to emphasize that the point of this "release" is not necessarily to render action in general more fluid, contingent, or unpredictable: the theoretical subordination of action to identity is problematic not only because it abets normalization but also because it misunderstands the phenomena of continuity and stability, treating them as though they could only be produced through the enforcement of a rule given in advance.
24. I discuss this example briefly in BbR, 169, 172-73,
25. focusing on the controversy over the wearing of headscarves by three schoolgirls in Creil, France in 1989, which became the focus of a national debate over laïcité, religious freedom, feminism, and Islam, and was often discussed in international scholarship on nationalism and multiculturalism through the 1990s. On the Stasi Commission's report and the 2004 law, see Jane Kramer, "Taking the Veil," The New Yorker (November 22, 2004): 58-71.
26. Kramer, "Taking the Vail," 62.
27. The tensions internal to secularism are not unrelated to what Sheth calls the "dual agenda" of the state: on the one hand, insofar as the state is understood as a mediating institution, its role is simply to facilitate the private liberty of conscience of its citizens; on the other hand, insofar as the state is understood as the (universal) supplement whose existence unifies an otherwise fragmented multitude into a people, the state is perpetually threatened by the very religious particularity it facilitates and secures. See Marx, "On the Jewish Question," The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 26-76.
28. Cocks broaches a similar question for different reasons; and I think she is right that the idea of "acknowledgment" does not generate a political ideology, since it describes something close to a "condition of practical wisdom" (14).
29. On this uncanniness see Bonnie Honig's treatment of politics in the gothic genre in Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
30. The conclusion to Bound by Recognition gestured briefly in these directions in its discussion of democracy; in my current work on the conceptions of rule, power, and activity that inform democratic theory and practice, I aim to deepen this gesture, asking, in effect, how the acknowledgment of practical finitude might be seen and experienced affirmatively, as an enabling condition of democratic political activity.