Taylor: The Politics of Recognition

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Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments (1995)
Notes, Questions & Answers & #12: "The Politics of Recognition"

1. In association with essays #11 & #13, what is the context for "the politics of recognition"? That is, which discourse community is implicitly addressed for its recognition?

the law
the church
the market & money
the public sphere?

Feminists & "the politics of multiculturalism" (225) fight legal/political battles within the institution of #1, but they really address #4 in hopes that the General Will will endorse their agenda as valid/important. This must be the case if we accept T.'s priority in essay #13, which says that "the right" (or ends) is articulated in the public sphere & that the legal/political professionals are instruments valuable only as a means to implement the end decided by the General Will. This is also necessitated by "the collapse of social hierarchies, which used to be the basis for honor," 226.

2. Is a concern for class inimical to "the public sphere" & the General Will?

"In those earlier [European] societies, what we would now call identity was largely fixed by one's social position," 229. As Americans we usually oblivious of class. Much of what we discussed under the topic of the American "public sphere" does not exist in England where you are minutely analyzed for class identity before you begin to speak.

I recall talking to an English colleague about the movie Howard's End, which was popular a few years ago & which was based on the novel of the same title by E. M. Forester. We agreed that very few Americans would be sensitive to the pervasive theme of class, which is what the novel is about. I told him that I was reading the novel in an airplane when the stewardess, who had recently seen the movie, asked me to support her judgment, that it was "a girl movie, not a guy movie." Apparently her American boyfriend didn't have much interest in it. I recall another series of conversations on Cyprus with an English merchant mariner who had a summer home there. We drank Turkish beer together at a run-down beach-side bar. Class distinctions never entered my head. I was happy to speak English with a native speaker. As an American I was impressed by the thick gold jewelry and expensive watch he wore and the fact that he had two houses. A third party informed me of how minutely he had analyzed our conversations for evidence of class presumption; a university professor talking with a sailor. Americans rarely analyze their social experiences in such class sensitive terms. We are more attuned to race & money.

3. If my point about class prejudice is true, why doesn't T. more forthrightly identify "the public sphere" as a distinctly American social value?

My answer is that to do so would involve losing too much ground to Utilitarianism. In these essays, T. argues Edmund Burke's outlook against the radical notions of Jeremy Bentham. These two positions are historically easily identifiable with England and America. At the very least, it would be confusing for T. to switch positions even at the theoretical distance of talking about illustration.

Your turn; add to this (1).

4. "We don't just learn the languages in dialogue & then go on to use them for our own [unilateral] purposes. * * * We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us." ". . . Discovering my own identity doesn't mean that I work it out in isolation, but that I negotiate it through dialogue," 231. Explain how this language theory affects political theory.

You do this one (2).

5. Attempt to sort out how communities #1 (law) & #4 (public sphere) interact & conflict on the familiar social issues suggested on 234.

"With the politics of equal dignity what is established is meant to be universally the same, an identical basket of rights," 233. This is obviously grounded in Rousseau's requirement that for a social contractual democracy to operate, the deepest commitment or faith must be to the identity conferred by citizenship, which makes every citizen equal & justice blind to all supposedly innocuous distinctions such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, religion etc.
"For it [groups based on race, ethnicity, gender, etc.] asks that we [the public sphere] give acknowledgment & status to something that is not universally shared," viz., the value claimed by the sub-group: African ancestry or heritage, being female, being a white male, etc. This is a slippery proposition. The public sphere does this -- or seems to do this -- e.g., admiring Alex Haley's Roots or the music of Duke Ellington or the prose of Langston Hughes as African-American literature instead simply as literature. Read T.'s next sentence: ". . . we [in the public sphere] give due acknowledgment only to what is universally present -- everyone has an identity -- through recognizing what is peculiar [exotic] to each," 234. This doesn't exactly fall on the mark specified by Rousseau (which offers a very abstract legalism). Is it not the case that Alice Walker or Langston Hughes wish to claim to be just like everyone else even while offering evidence that both illustrates that claim & yet also illustrates the opposite; that their life experience is uniquely African-American? The universal part of this dichotomy is well grounded in T.'s pragmatic claim (not Rousseau's theoretical claim) that what unifies us all is embodied experience; and that the next most inclusive community is more difficult to define, but fairly easy to recognize, American-ness. The African-American characteristics come third.
How does this get tangled? "Where the politics of universal dignity [grounded in the public sphere] fought for forms of nondiscrimination [explicitly formulated in law] that were quite 'blind' [suggesting the irony that what was a virtue -- blind justice -- now becomes a vice: "I don't see you"] to the ways in which citizens differ . . . ." This should end up with real equality on the streets & in everyday encounters. That was the intent of appealing to the public sphere to do (or recognize) the right thing & of recourse to law. Ironically, here is the rest of the sentence: " . . . the politics of difference [dedication to sub-communities based on race, ethnicity, etc.] often redefines nondiscrimination as requiring that we make these distinctions the basis of differential treatment" as in Affirmative Action quotas & political correctness, 234. This is a kind of reverse prejudice that hopes to render justice -- on what model?

6. If it is possible, how does T. escape the contradiction: that attempting to offer equal opportunity & blind justice requires legal means that make racial, ethical & other distinctions glaring & socially unforgettable?

You do this one (3).

7. Michel Foucault's Discipline & Punishment: The Birth of the Prison opens with this historical account of a kind of horrific pageantry:

On 2 March 1757 Damiens the regicide was condemned . . . [to be placed] on a scaffold . . . [where] the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers, his right hand, holding the knife with which he committed the said parricide, burnt with sulphur, &, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin . . . & then his body drawn & quartered by four horses, 3.

Foucault then provides the graphic details of how all this was done.

Why was it done? The sentence was not intended to rehabilitate the criminal, nor even to illustrate a determent. It was a gruesome ritual intended to rectify the huge imbalance in the objective supernatural order of things that had occurred through the act of killing the king. On the top of 240 T. quotes Rousseau's suggestion of substituting entertainment for ritual (which presumable has supernatural effects): "Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a square; gather the people together there, & you will have a festival. Do better yet; let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves . . . ." Provide contemporary American popular culture examples of each.

Hopefully you will have difficulty thinking of examples like Damiens. The assignation of JFK & before him of Lincoln come to my mind. Booth & Oswald were not treated like Damiens, but there were echoes that made us think of them as monsters whose crime was somehow even greater than the many murders committed by Ted Bundy or insane cannibalism of Jeffery Daumer. In one sense, 9/11 was comparable to trying to kill the king. If we had been able to catch Osama, would we have tortured him like Damiens? Of course not. Why not? Because even though the values that America stands for were attacked, these are located in the people, not in some transcendental.

Instances of the 2^nd sort are everywhere. Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame, however achieved, is claimed as art. This almost connects with T.'s perception that "Rousseau's unstated argument would seem to be this: a perfectly balanced reciprocity takes the sting out of our dependence on opinion, & makes it compatible with liberty," 240.

8. After reviewing the ways in which Am. society abandons the blueprints drawn by Rousseau for a social contractual democracy and by Kant for Enlightened dignity, T. tells us about the Quebec issue in Canada: "a society with collective goals . . . [which are] the survival & flourishing of French culture" (246), which of course cannot be attained except by social involvement. The more radical model is illustrated by "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia; somewhere in between by Northern Ireland. What does T. believe that Rousseau, in particular has to say about these?

"There is a form of the politics of equal respect, as enshrined in a liberalism of rights, that is inhospitable to difference, because (a) it insists on uniform application of the rules defining these rights, without exception [pure Rousseau], & (b) it is suspicious of collective goals," 248 believing that they mask special & ultimately individual desires - here is the Util. angle. Now follow what T. says in the next paragraph: "there are other models of liberal society" that apparently allow T. to overlook the formulas of Rousseau & Kant. I smell a rabbit coming out of a hat here: "They [these preferred but undefined models of improved & more sensitive democracy] are willing to weigh the importance of certain forms of uniform treatment [blind, procedural justice, grounded in the legal community, #1] against the importance of cultural survival [evidently grounded in the public sphere, community #4], & opt sometimes in favor of the latter. They are thus in the end [ultimately] not procedural models of liberalism [i.e., formulas from #1], but are grounded very much on judgments about what makes a good life," which puts it in the public sphere.

My question is where does this breaks down? Quebec is still part of Canada. Bosnia is not part of Yugoslavia. Sri Lanka, & Kashmir are suffering through lengthy, low-intensity civil wars to determine what citizens are most fundamentally commitment to. Let us go around the Am. circle. The special community (of race, ethnicity, gender, etc.) appeals to the public sphere (which involves every citizen) for recognition, validation, & approval for its special status. This cannot continue to occur if each such specialized community partially opts out. After a few rounds of this, who does the 98^th group - say the naked geezers in Berkeley (oh yes, there are such) - appeal to about "what makes a good life"? And why would they make such a low cost gesture (with nothing really at stake), since they are radically sure that their definition of the good life supersedes the notion of the once majority/consensus community?

9. On 252 the dilemma is restated as disinterested tolerance or relativism. Define this.

". . . The logic behind some of these demands seems to depend on a premise that we owe equal respect to all cultures"; which is obvious at odds with the liberal notion that everyone is committed to what is right. T. alludes to the liberation or erosion of the university curricula since the 1960s: "true judgments of value of different works would place all cultures more or less on the same footing." As we know from other essays, T. is not about to throw away his commitment to a liberal society whose focal point is on the good/right. He must reject cultural relativism. Here is how he does it, while hoping to retain much of the substance that motivated the project of seeking recognition from the public sphere: "On examination, either we'll [the public sphere] find something of great value in culture C, or we won't. But it makes no . . . sense to demand that we do so" in principle, 254.

Examine T.'s next move closely. T. paraphrases a position that says, "One doesn't, properly speaking, make judgments that can be [determined to be] right or wrong; one expresses liking or dislike, one endorses or rejects another culture," 254. In other words, it is a matter of taste. T. says the switch here is unconvincing. If ethnic sub-cultures are motivated to seek recognition/approval from the public sphere, the tepid response of eclectic taste is not enough. "Then the question is no longer one of respect, but of taking sides, of solidarity. This is hardly a satisfactory solution [T. might be seen to be addressing Richard Rorty here, who talks of solidarity as the basis for ethics], because in taking sides they miss the driving force of this kind of politics, which is precisely the search for recognition & respect," 255.

T. ends the essay without having tied up the loose ends. In my reading there are many points that could be taken up in conjunction with Rorty's work, especially Rorty's implied proposition that if society is rich enough to support the proliferation of boutiques or specialized communities, is it acceptable for the public sphere to shrink? Haven't there been seasons of greater & lesser involvement in the public sphere? Periods of war & crisis foster a greater involvement; periods of prosperity seem to support Rorty's vision of numerous communities of self-interest.

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08.20.02