maiaseyes

Struggles for Recognition

Prefatory comments: This post has been edited and recast in order to address a cultural issue that is front and center for many people today. The issue of transgender and the demand for recognition is one that must be understood not merely from superficiality. The underlying presuppositions and the explicit demand for recognition are philosophical. Certainly, there are cultural considerations but these are the effect not the cause. Please note “subaltern groups” is not the author’s term.

Many people have likely never heard the name Jürgen Habermas; certainly his writings are mostly relegated to those with a philosophical predilection. However, recent events both socially and politically may necessitate a closer inspection or at least a passing acquaintance with his philosophy. While a biography might prove helpful, suffice is to say that Habermas is associated with Frankfurt school of Philosophy. [1]

Again, the meaningfulness of this is likely lost but this school has been both exalted and vilified dependent upon the political and philosophical leanings of the person queried. Some on the “far right” whatever that means have vilified the Frankfurt school as the instigator of both Political Correctness and Cultural Marxism. On the “far left” the Frankfurt school is viewed as a corrected form of Marxism whereby Soviet socialism and Western capitalism have been critiqued for any number of reasons. My project is to embrace neither pole; rejecting both the conspiracy theory laden interpretation of the “far right” and the rather absurd notion that Marxism is anything less than fatally flawed.

It is my contention that Habermas may well have provided us with some interesting clues as to the implicit presuppositions of the new liberalism that have provided the catalyst for the seismic cultural shift that has overwhelmed both the mainstream media and of course social media over the last few years. Before turning to Habermas, it should be noted that the impetus for his comments are in response to Charles Taylor.

Charles Taylor and Recognition

It is Taylor who provides the main thesis for Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition and Habermas sees points of agreement but also offers several rejoinders along the way.  Taylor writes this in his opening remarks “A number of strands in contemporary politics turn on the need, sometimes the demand, for recognition” [2]  Taylor sees these strands as being comprised by minority groups or what he calls “subaltern” groups, some forms of feminism, and multiculturalism. [3]

He goes on to succinctly communicate the thesis by acknowledging that recognition is inexorably linked with our identity. Understood in this way, it seems that Taylor is asserting that recognition has both ontological and ontic significance. He writes “The thesis is that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the mis recognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.” [4]

Habermas and Dialectical tension

Habermas takes umbrage with Taylor’s dualistic conception of liberalism. The dialectical tension between individual rights and freedoms on the one hand and the collective cultural identity of the majority on the other lead to a tension between the two. Case in point, says Habermas is the francophone project of French speaking Canadians in Quebec. Using this and feminism as a touch point for recognition and the implicit ethical presuppositions of legal and cultural norms, we are left with an analogous situation with respect to other minority groups. Habermas asserts that creating a new national boundary merely trades one minority for another.[5]  The majority culture [English speaking] exchanges places with the minority culture [French speaking]. However, this does not necessarily address the difficulty of multiculturalism. Habermas takes up the mantle of deconstructing “fundamentalist” traditions that militate against the inclusion of other ethical presuppositions as related to the good. Habermas writes “”coexistence with equal rights for these forms of life requires the mutual recognition of the different cultural memberships: all persons must also be recognized as members of ethical communities integrated around different conceptions of the good” [6] In order for this hypothetical imperative to flourish, fundamentalist traditions must concede that various conceptions of the good must be considered equally valid and seemingly cannot transcend mere pragmatic conceptions of the good per se.

Objections to Taylor and Habermas

According to Taylor, nonrecognition “can” cause a parade of horribles such as oppression and a reduced mode of being. The operative word of course is “can” but this proposition is weak and cannot be demonstrably proven to follow by necessity.  Equally plausible is the notion that recognition “can” also cause diminished modes of being. Such could be the case when the majority culture and the minority culture reverse their status. A simple thought experiment can prove that nonrecognition cannot be thought of univocally. If in a culture the collective identity of (A) entails a conception of the good that disallows as unethical one of the main thrusts of (B)’s collective identity it simply cannot coexist in a merely correlative form, rather the entire conception of the good is called into question. In such a case the dialectical tension implicit in competing worldviews [i.e. collective identities] is only resolved through synthesis, which seems to be a diminished mode of being by way of recognition and not merely nonrecognition as Taylor asserts. The objection might be raised that in the quote from Taylor he mentions “recognition” as a potential source but contextualizing recognition as a source of oppression fails to obtain since he conjoins [non-and-mis] recognition with harm, oppression, imprisonment, and reduced modes of being.

Habermas on the other hand, wants us to accept the premise that conceptions of the good are conditioned by abstraction from the ethical community with which one identifies. The subjectivist nature of such a proposal entails nonrecognition of ethical communities that cannot accept an arbitrary conception of the good based merely on the implicit pragmatism entailed by competing ethical principles. Asserting a Utopian conception of multiculturalism based on co-equally ultimate conceptions of the good is a far cry from demonstrating how competing conceptions of the good can be resolved without embracing a synthesizing of the good for the greater good of multiculturalism.  A point that seems to be missed is that some collective identities are deontological rather than subjectivist. Is coexistence and recognition even possible univocally between a collective identity that embraces ethical subjectivism and one that embraces a deontological morality that transcends merely human conceptions of the good?

Subaltern Groups demand recognition 

Multiculturalism presupposes that certain groups will demand recognition. Certainly with issues of transgender we see this demand being played out in the public square. The dialectical tension between the ethical community that is based on traditional or in Habermas’ words a fundamentalist ethos must either grant recognition or deny recognition.

This tension cannot find resolution as it posits an untenable dichotomy. Once the majority ethical community gives way, they have now become oppressed in the sense that the good in such a community is compromised. If such an ethical community refuses to concede, the subaltern groups’ claims of oppression continue ad infinitum. The neoliberal solution to this dichotomy finds the synthesis in third party power structures i.e. government enforcement of measures that coerce recognition.

The majority will never have the same voice as a subaltern group in expressing a demand for recognition given that the ethical abstractions are based on the majority view. In other words, until a majority becomes a subaltern group by way of inversion (that is to say until the normative morality of the majority becomes the subaltern group) the demands of the subaltern group will hold more sway. Multiculturalism is cyclical in that there is a repetition of oppression and concession followed by oppression. No society can hold multiple conceptions of the good without a synthesizing of competing ethical communities.

[1] His association with the Frankfurt school is infamous. While some might say this association is spurious, a fair representation might be that his works are derivative or at least owe some level of homage to the Frankfurt School

[2] Charles Taylor, K. A. (1994 ). Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition . Princeton : Princeton University Press.

[3] Ibid

[4] Ibid

[5] Pg. 127

[6] Pg. 133