[request_ebook] Multiculturalism and the politics of recognition

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• Author: charles taylor

The fundamental premise of the identity politics of assimilation is that a group can positively assert its commonality with a dominant group. The politics of assimilation says, "We are smart too; we are beautiful too; we are just like you." These claims rest on a basic kind of individualism that is at the core of modernist thinking. This individualism reflects a belief in the power of individuals to create themselves, to know the truth, to control their social life. It can be seen in all the facets of modernism we discussed in chapter 2. The source of this individualism, again, is expressed by several modernist ideas, especially in the modernist notion of how we know the truth. In modernism the individual is the source of scientific truth. The power of an individual’s senses gives her a true account of the outside world. She has the power to know the truth herself. To be more descriptive, modernism invokes a picture of a lone brilliant scientist, alone unlocking the secrets of the universe. Another example of this individualism is the theory of property ownership developed by John Locke. Locke asserts that the act of mixing labor with some thing is the source of the legitimacy of private property—for instance I can say I own my lunch because I made it this morning. That such individual power is the source of the legitimacy of privilege can also be seen in popular conservative ideology that legitimates inequality. Individuals, the argument goes, each have unique powers that are the source of differences in property. These modernist ideas all culminate in a belief in the self-sufficiency of individuals that the politics of assimilation mirrors. Thus the identity politics of assimilation is not only modernist in its goals but in its very politics. What could be more individualist than to assert, claim, or demonstrate your equality, as if all this were fundamentally a matter of will.

The politics of recognition rests on a different idea. To see this consider that it might not be enough to assert your right to a piece of property. For it to really be yours you need to have other people recognize that it’s yours. Similarly, for your claim for the truth of some observation to be secure requires others to recognize that what you say is the case. From this perspective the individual is much less powerful, indeed, dependent on a community of fellow human beings. The most vivid account of this idea is Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit. In the play, Sartre reveals that it is the human condition to be dependent on the recognition of others, a dependence that is akin to living in hell.

This entails a big problem for identity politics, for it is hard enough to assert your equality with those of a dominant group; it is much harder still to get them to recognize your equality. As such the identity politics of recognition is more difficult for the group involved to wage, its dynamics are more complicated, but it is also (we would ague) more effective. To describe the politics of recognition we turn to discuss three political philosophers: G.W.F. Hegel, Charles Taylor and Frantz Fanon.

Hegel’s Dialectic of Master and Slave

This book tries to understand the politics of identity as being driven by groups’ responses to modernism. On one hand, modernism for such groups is a compelling ideology. It promises freedom and increasing wealth to people in communities that can seem poor and restricting. But at the same time that modernism promises new opportunities for individual advancement the freedom it brings from the constraints of communal ways of life can also introduce a sense of loss, a longing for tradition, the security of long-established folkways, and the romance and mystery of sacred myths and practices. For example, it might seem more contemporary for Catholic priests to lead their flocks in guitar-led choruses in English, but many Catholics nevertheless miss the mass of their youth when a sense of mystery and worship was produced by priests chanting in indecipherable Latin. This sense of loss, indeed a sense of threat, from the changes brought by modernity can be especially acute when modernism seems to be imposed on a community by outsiders, which it commonly has been. Thus there is a tension in the politics of identity between the desirable features of modernity and a kind of romantic longing for an older more authentic way of life which modernism threatens.

Hegel provides especially powerful conceptual tools for understanding the politics of identity because he felt this kind of ambivalence very acutely. Modernism was brought to Germany, Hegel’s home, the same way it was brought elsewhere, by force. We tend to think of Germany today as a prototypical modern nation: the biggest economy in Europe, the producer of such modernist archetypes as the Bundesbank and the Mercedes-Benz sedan. But when Napoleon marched into Jena, where Hegel was teaching in 1806, Germany was "backwards", not even a nation really, but a collection of 234 principalities referred to as the Holy Roman Empire. This was an empire that Mike Myers correctly quipped on Saturday Night Live as being neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. Its government and social structure was largely feudal with a petty and tyrannical aristocracy living off the labors of a largely agricultural and peasant population. At the point of a sword Napoleon united many of these principalities into a semblance of a modern nation state, the "Confederation of the Rhine", and imposed such features of the modern nation state as a rational bureaucracy and equality before the law, the "Napoleonic Code".

Now Hegel and many of his contemporaries were enthusiastic about the changes brought by Napoleon. This is understandable because the modernism that Napoleon brought meant an elevation in status especially for members of the middle or professional classes like Hegel. It also promised less fear of censorship and dependence on sensitive or paranoid aristocrats. But Hegel was also influenced by a movement among his peers that deeply resented the imposition of the foreign ideas of modernism. They called for a new appreciation of the old rather than the new, poetry rather than science, genius over equality, aesthetics over reason, and the blood of the Volk (people) over individualism. We call this anti-modern movement Romanticism. Its essence can be described as a defense of tradition and local community over and against the universality of modernism. Hegel rejected these reactionary elements of Romanticism, but his philosophy nevertheless preserves some crucial romantic insights (especially a preference for unity and community over individualism) in a synthesis with modernism. His entire career amounts to a working out of the character and possibilities of modernity for a society (perhaps a world) for whom modernity is its rightful place but not yet a place to call home. In this effort you might say that Hegel extrapolated out and developed modernist thinking as far as it can go. As such Hegel’s thought became the fullest expression of modernism, and yet, the foundation for a new after-modernist kind of thinking.

Hegel did this by incorporating the romantic critique of modern individualism into his casting of modernity. Romantics thought that modernists like Locke and Kant placed too much emphasis on the power and freedom of individuals. Hegel, instead, argued that people are inextricably tied to their communities. This means more than just that people are social rather than just self-regarding, it questions the degree to which people should be properly understood to be discreet individuals at all. The claim is that reality does not exist individually but only as it is created corporately through culture, language and community. To get a sense of this point consider the degree to which your individuality is really not an expression of just your individual will. Most of the thoughts you have are not really original or unique with you. The language you use and in which you largely experience yourself is not one you made up. We often speak of "common sense" an idea that implies a kind of reason that we have by virtue of collective, reflexive understandings about the nature of the world. And we hate, generally speaking, being isolated from other people for very long.

Hegel took this essentially romantic insight and incorporated it into a broad, complex, compelling, and abominably written systematic philosophy of modernity. He outlined how historical progress, science, reason, and politics can proceed on an essentially modernist path but with necessarily romantic rather than modern-individualist assumptions about what it means to be a human being. We began this chapter with the essence of Hegel’s critique. The individual is not self sufficient to claim knowledge or property; the security of science or ownership requires recognition by others within a social/ political community. Hegel’s working out of this idea makes his philosophy especially appropriate for understanding the politics of identity because Hegel bases it on an argument that individual identity itself is the product of dynamics of recognition. At this point we will turn to try to explicate this argument, found in the section entitled "Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage" in The Phenomenology of Spirit.

 

Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or "recognized".

This is how this section of the Phenomenology begins. It is crucial in interpreting this uncharacteristically clear (but nonetheless turgid) bit of prose to appreciate the italicized "is". With those italics Hegel communicates the contradictory nature of human identity or self-consciousness. Our consciousness of our selves, our sense of self that is for ourselves, or (to get further away from Hegel’s terrible way of writing) me-ness is what Hegel means by "self-consciousness that exists in itself". The italicized "is" communicates the paradox that this self-consciousness only exists at all if it has been created through a process of being recognized by another. Self-consciousness, in Hegel’s view, is inextricable from consciousness of others. To see how this could be so Hegel asks us to consider the utter emptiness of consciousness in what we might consider to be its pure state. Think for a moment about your sense of having a self rather than any explicit mental content; think me-ness rather than any attributes or feelings that you could ascribe to yourself. Hegel calls this "self-consciousness [that] is primarily simple existence for self, self-identity by exclusion of every other from itself." At this moment, Hegel grants, the self is "individual", in the sense of being completely independent of others, so much so that the individual self-consciousness regards all others as simply objects. But this self is not individual in the sense we usually give the term, in the sense that an individual is autonomous and free and happy.

Hegel asserts that this moment of pure self-consciousness is not sustainable, for all that one experiences in this state of reflection is pure and simple existence. You sense yourself and nothing else really, except that there is a big world of stuff that is not you. The problem here is that this sense of self, according to Hegel, is not nearly so secure as it would seem. The self becomes insecure, for it thinks it is a self (it experiences me-ness after all), but it asks, "how can I be sure since all I have is just a feeling?" This insecurity comes from a sense of the emptiness of the self, magnified by the fact that our experience of ourselves is unlike other experiences-- we experience the indeterminateness (Hegel uses the abstruse but cosmic word "infinitude") of our consciousness, the sense in which it is not like the rest of the real world (determinate, concrete) and, therefore, not quite real. It has no content, just a sense that it is non-sense, because it has no meaning.

So how does the self acquire meaning and determinateness? Well, the self starts with the basic insight that it is different from all the stuff it sees, smells, feels and tastes. It is a self while they are not. Its identity is thus defined by the distinctions it makes between itself and others. It is defined by what it is not. The identity of particular things that the self senses proceeds the same way. The meaning of those rocks on the ground over there can only come from the sense we have that they are different from other objects around them and different from ourselves. Identity, therefore, for Hegel, requires "negativity" or distinctions between the self and that which isn’t the self that can give the self a sense of determinate content. This is what drives the self to constitute itself through the establishment of relations and representations (concepts, stories) that distinguish itself from others.

This is a critical point. But to really understand it we need to remember that this kind of self-constitution is not the work of an individual self but of human beings in relation to other human beings. Hegel explicates how identity is created through a story about the relations of two self-consciousnesses: the Master and the Slave. This story is kind of like the "state of nature" stories told by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, but rather than justifying the idea that social life is the product of individual actions, Hegel uses the Master/ Slave story to demonstrate how all life is created by social relations of negativity.

Hegel begins the story by pointing out that two individuals in a state of pure self-consciousness are each "indeed certain of its own self, but not of the other, and hence its own certainty of itself is still without truth. For its truth would be merely that its own individual existence for itself would be shown to it to be an independent object…." That is to say that other people bring home to us the insecurity of our own self-ness, for when we look at other people (who are evidently like ourselves) we don’t see their selves but only objects. Don’t we need to know that they have self-consciousness in order to be sure that we, as people like them, have it too? But this creates a difficult paradox. Each pure self-consciousness is, Hegel says, not like the rest of the world. It is infinite rather than concrete, independent rather than being dependent on others. It is free. But it can’t be satisfied with this pure freedom due to its need to be sure of itself and take on meaning by relations with others that Hegel, again, calls negativity. These relations tie the self to things that are concrete, dependent, and not-free. Thus the self is caught in the bind of needing to be both free of the world and tied to it. It needs to take on some kind of determinate content from its relation to others that does not at the same time violate its need to be free and independent of others. The self here is like an insecure wallflower that needs to join the party, but it fears rejection by or absorption in the others that would violate its freedom.

The only solution, according to Hegel, is recognition, a kind of feedback where one gets others to validate your distinctiveness. In doing so others like you demonstrate the efficacy of your consciousness, and in a way, by allowing themselves to be guided by you, they also allow your consciousness to get what it needs from the world while remaining in a sense independent. But recognition is elusive. One self can assuage its insecurity by getting the other self to recognize it as being a self. But the other self wants the same thing, and it can’t get the recognition it needs if it’s recognizing the other person. This should sound familiar to anyone who has come home after a hard day to find your partner sitting on the couch watching TV like you don’t even exist. You want them to recognize you (listen, hold you, draw you a bath), but they had a hard day too, and they may want the same things from you. You both can’t get your needs met at the same time. This leads, all too familiarly, to conflict. Hegel might have had a particularly hard evening with Mrs. Hegel when he wrote, "The relation of both self-consciousnesses is in this way so constituted that they prove themselves and each other through a life-and-death struggle".

This sets the stage of the dialectic of master and slave. A dialectic is an encounter between two opposing ideas (the thesis and antithesis) which produces a synthesis which somehow preserves the truth of the contradictory ideas (Hegel calls this preservation "sublation"). To see how this works consider the contradictory ideas we have already presented: the idea that self-consciousness is for itself (independent) but it can’t be for itself without being dependent on or for another. Hegel suggests that the preliminary synthesis of these ideas is provided by the institution of slavery. By being a master over a slave a self has the satisfaction of receiving absolute recognition from the slave without having to recognize the slave in return. This allows the master to maintain a kind of independence of self-consciousness (being for itself) by being through rather than for another. The slave becomes like an object for the master, but a special kind of object. The slave allows the master to not only belie her dependence on another self-consciousness for her sense of identity but also belie her dependence on the material world as a whole. For the master doesn’t have to work; she only has to enjoy the products of the slave’s labor. As Hegel explains it, the master "who has interposed the bondsman between [the objects he desires to consume] and himself, thereby relates himself merely to the dependence of the thing, and enjoys it without qualification and without reserve. The aspect of its independence he leaves to the bondsman, who labours upon it".

It might be easy at this point to misread Hegel, for it might seem like Hegel is saying slavery or at least conflict to dominate others is a natural expression of a human need for recognition. But this is not the case. This synthesis is not the end of the dialectic but only a new thesis whose contradictions invite further change. In slavery the problem is that recognition needs to be mutual and equal, and it obviously isn’t. The master enjoys his independence and domination of the slave, but somehow that’s just not good enough. As Hegel puts it,

just where the master has effectively achieved lordship, he really finds that something has come about quite different from an independent consciousness. It is not independent, but rather a dependent consciousness that he has achieved. He is thus not assured of self-existence as his truth; he finds that his truth is rather the unessential consciousness, and the fortuitous unessential action of that consciousness.

In other words, the master gets recognition but only from a slave, and rather than being the center of the world he is only inessential. He only consumes after all, and consumption would get done with or without him because time obliterates all. The slave, on the other hand, which appeared to be in the worst position, actually turns out to be better off than the master is. For the slave is, Hegel insists, still a self-consciousness that cannot be completely dominated by the master. In fact in the dominance of the master, in the constant fear of death that constitutes the master’s domination, the slave comes to face death in the same way a soldier gains a kind of humanity by mastering his fear. In this mastery of fear the slave becomes a kind of master. Furthermore, this mastery is not just mental. That would get us back where we started, with the insecurity of a simply mental consciousness that experiences the freedom of being for itself. Instead, through the slave’s labor he is able to achieve a more lasting and satisfying form of recognition than the master is able to get. The master’s recognition is consummated through consumption of the things the slave produces, but this leaves the master only to get hungry again. The satisfaction he derives from consumption, Hegel says, "is itself only a state of evanescence, for it lacks objectivity or subsistence". The slave, on the other hand, satisfies desire in a more lasting way, by transforming the ephemeral desires in his self-consciousness into material objects. For instance, the slave may envision a particularly useful and artistic spoon with which to serve out the master’s porridge, and so she carves it out of wood, making the idea in her self-consciousness real. This gives her a form of recognition, reassurance of the reality of her self. Hegel’s description of this, uncharacteristically clear, again, but still turgid, is worth quoting at length:

Labour, on the other hand, is desire restrained and checked, evanescence delayed and postponed; in other words, labour shapes and fashions the thing. The negative relation to the object passes into the form of the object, into something that is permanent and remains; because it is just for the labourer that the object has independence. This negative mediating agency, this activity giving shape and form, is at the same time the individual existence, the pure self-existence of that consciousness, which now in the work it does is externalized and passes into the condition of permanence. The consciousness that toils and serves accordingly attains by this means the direct apprehension of that independent being as it self.

Instead of having his self-consciousness mediated by a subordinate and his products (like the master), the slave is able to provide the mediation, the recognition, himself through his labor. Labor gives the slave a sense of competence, a self identity based on his ability to successfully work with the material world. So, in the end Hegel’s dialectic has produced an entertaining contradiction: the slave’s position turns out to be superior to the master’s.

The astute reader will, of course, recognize that this is not the end. First, the dialectic never really ends; any synthesis turns out to be just another thesis. But secondly, you should have noticed that the slave’s solution to the problem of identity and consciousness isn’t a satisfactory one either. He’s still a slave after all, and the slave’s greater security in his identity doesn’t compensate much for the fact that he’s still working his butt off with little reward, and he doesn’t have any physical freedom. But, more centrally to Hegel’s argument, the slave hasn’t gotten true recognition yet; that is, recognition from another self-consciousness. That is why the master/ slave dialectic foreshadows the demise of slavery (or feudalism) and its replacement by a new social system (modernism.) in which the slaves do away with mastery and set up relations of equality before the law. Hegel details this change in his Philosophy of Right. The relations between free and equal citizens in a modern state embody a model of mutuality that, for Hegel, entails true recognition.

Recognition and the Politics of Identity

Hegel’s master/ slave narrative provides powerful insights for understanding identity politics. Perhaps the most important insight is the very idea that politics involves issues of identity. In our (modernist) way of understanding the world we tend to see politics as involving conflicts between competing interests or ideologies. The parties in these conflicts, even if they are often groups, are usually understood to be individual actors, pushing their particular individual selfish desires in opposing to other individuals’ selfish desires. These particular interests are understood to be almost like interacting forces in a physics experiment. The relative force behind each of the players determines which interest wins or dominates. Hegel’s master/slave narrative, on the other hand, points out that politics and social relations in general actually shape the identities that people have. Remember that the identities of both the master and the slave were shaped by their feudal relationship. The politics in the relationship wasn’t just happening on the level of each pushing their interest. It happened most crucially on a psychological level. The slave’s identity, his understanding of himself, his aspirations, his feelings, were shaped in profound ways by being subordinate to the master. We can see through Hegel’s narrative that that shaping is dramatically political, and powerfully so.

This brings us to the next big insight that Hegel gives us: identity politics hurts, in ways far more profound than just physical violence. The slave, in Hegel’s philosophy, suffers from having his very being shaped and dominated by the will of the master. We might, in a first attempt to understand this, think of this suffering as an inferiority complex. The slave is insecure about not being as good as the master. But the suffering that Hegel describes is far more profound that this. Recall that Hegel describes the slave as an "unessential consciousness", in other words, as a consciousness which has a hard time experiencing himself as a consciousness at all. Rather, he experiences himself as an object, the same way the master experiences him. He internalizes the master’s point of view such that his own body may feel foreign, ugly, and degraded. This experience of having an identity that is not quite one’s own is amazingly painful. It is hard for us to imagine that slavery means not only loss of physical freedom but also the fundamental freedom of self-consciousness.

But, of course, while Hegel describes this awful subjugation of the slave’s identity, he nevertheless, claims that the slave has in some sense a better identity or self-consciousness than the master. This is another important insight of Hegel’s for understanding the politics of identity. The subjugation of the slaves’ identity is awful, but in Hegel’s narrative, at least the slave has a way out. Hegel claims that the slave’s labor gives him a way to create a more positive identity than the master has. To broaden this point, we can take from Hegel’s philosophy the optimistic thesis that subjugation is never complete. Those with subordinate identities take something from their social position that they can use as a resource for creating some semblance of a positive identity. In Hegel’s philosophy the slave builds a politicized identity from a sense of competence that comes from creative work. Through this work the slave comes to have a deeper understanding of her social situation and the confidence to change it, especially given the master’s complacency and decadence. Hegel’s point here directs us to consider a wide variety of expressions that can serve as resources for subjugated people to wrest control of their identity. Work can serve this role, but so can music, art, religion, or associations. The more general point here, of course, is Hegel’s application of dialectics to history. The subordinate, the lesser, the negative has the role of moving history along. This notion gives an energizing optimism to identity politics, for, in Hegel’s world, the future belongs to the slaves.

This faith in progress that rests in the hands of the slaves, along with Hegel’s idea that social relations shape identity brings us to the next crucial insight from Hegel’s master/ slave narrative. Hegel’s argument that identity is a product of history and social relations challenges modernist notions of identity that stand in the way of identity movements. Modernism has produced two such notions of identity that are oddly contradictory.

One notion that comes from modernism’s commitment to individualism sees identity as something equivalent to individuality. This notion sees identity as the product of an individual’s will, especially the sum of desires that signify who a person chooses to be. This is the view we began the chapter with, the tendency of modernists to see the individual as having the power to assert or create identity without recognizing the important ways in which identities are shaped by culture, economics, politics and history. But this notion of identity is, at the same time, anything but individual. For in the modernist account everyone is basically the same; a rational individual seeking his or her own self interest. Modernism thereby defines identity in a way that deprecates those who feel the need to articulate identities that are defined by solidarity with others rather than individuality, and it also refuses to recognize how difficult the search for identity can be, especially given the obstacles laid down by modernism itself.

The other strand of modernist thinking about identity comes from modernist notions of scientific inquiry that see identities as rather natural entities. Identities here are something like the product of one’s genes that biologically encode one to have membership in a particular group. For instance, under the influence of modernist notions we tend to think that, say, identification as an African American is a product of a set of genes which define being black. If your genetic inheritance can be substantially traced back to Africa, then your identity is, necessarily, black. Similarly, black identity requires that one possess these genetic features. This common view is a holdover from the view of race that dominated most of American history. As Cornell West points out, American’s notions of race and racism have been deeply influenced by the science of race. Racism, West argues, requires the establishment of basic distinctions between populations before people can begin to discriminate. Modernist science, with its procedure of classifying things according to physical features serves the bill nicely, for science provides both a system for discriminating between who is the same or different and a covert justification for these discriminations: they are natural and hence, unchangeable and unchallengeable.

Now, if we put the two strands of modernist thinking on identity together you get a curious result. How can identities be inescapable biological inheritances and at the same time so unimportant to identity that they can be sloughed off by the courageous efforts of the modern individualist? We would argue it’s a contradiction that modernism cannot solve, but both views stand against the view we can draw from Hegel. From Hegel’s master slave narrative we can see that identity is not natural, but rather a product of society and history. But this also means that individuals cannot control their identities, for society and history exert a powerful pull. This leads to a tempered optimism for identity politics. Identities, being social rather than natural can be changed through politics (very broadly construed). For instance, slaves may change their identities by working to overthrow slavery. But, of course, that isn’t at all easy. Not only do social and political relations take time, blood and treasure to change, but they also can never be changed completely. Remember that in Hegel’s dialectic the antithesis or challenge to the dominance of a thesis results in a synthesis which preserves both thesis and antithesis in a new form. Thus, identities change, but we can never escape from our past. New identities preserve something of the old.

This brings us to the final and most central insight into identity from Hegel’s philosophy: the importance of recognition. Recognition is important for the reason outlined in the introduction to this chapter. It is simply not sufficient for people to assert their identity. One’s sense of identity only becomes secure, indeed, real if others recognize that identity. This means, first, that identity politics is not an individual exercise. Identity politics is waged by the members of a group that share a sense of identity. It also means that the fundamental purpose of identity politics is not just to defeat an oppressive group or gain freedom for the subordinate group. The enduring effect of subordination on identity means that simple freedom is inadequate. A satisfactory identity can only be created if the members of a subordinate group can get those who previously dominated them to recognize their new identity.

But what exactly does recognition mean here? Does it mean just assenting to or acquiescing to the new freedom of the former slaves? If we explore the dialectal nature of the master/ slave narrative, it seems this kind of recognition is just the beginning. True recognition requires something like involving the masters in the creation of the new identity for the subordinate group through some kind of dialogue. Recognition, in this sense, is a process internal to the creation of identity, not something that just validates or legitimizes an identity that has been completed. This insight is an extension of Hegel’s idea of the dialectic. As we pointed out above, any new identity developed by a subordinate group still involves their old masters, for they begin the process of creating a new identity with identities deeply imbued with the identity or understandings of the master. These have been internalized and cannot be totally excised from the identity of a group waging identity politics, for in Hegel’s account of the dialectic no new identity or form of consciousness can be created that is not a synthesis of both the oppressed identity of the slave and the oppressive identity of the master.

Now, if recognition is what creates this synthesis for Hegel and recognition must be something like involving both the master and slave in the creation of a new identity, then recognition entails a dramatic and deep reconciliation between the two groups. The difficult moment in this reconciliation is that the old oppressors must realize the extent to which their own identity is bound up in and dependent on the oppressed. This makes the masters realize the extent to which their mastery and identity was really illusory all along, and must likewise be changed. It also makes the masters see the value in the identity of the oppressed in such a way that they may participate in the work of building the oppressed group’s new identity by reconstructing their own. When the masters can make this step the slaves can finally deal with the aspects of their identities that will necessarily maintain features inherited from the old order of identity. To put it sentimentally, only forgiveness can establish a new ethic of mutuality that can produce a satisfactory new identity for all concerned. Thus identity is an intersubjective creation of a new community between former masters and slaves.

But masters are never brought to this synthesis easily. As Hegel rightly puts it, the struggle for recognition is a life and death struggle. Certainly the politics of identity have, sadly, followed this dictum. But Hegel was less prescient about the kind and scope of recognition that the history of identity politics has shown is required. Hegel had a unique insight into the dialectical conflict of his own age, the struggle between feudalism and modernism. But he did not appreciate that the conflicts between identities initiated by the advance of modernism could not be easily synthesized by the modern invention that, in Hegel’s view, was to do the job: the modern state. Hegel thought that the state could create an ethical community that could successfully synthesize both the individualism of modernity (as in Kant) and the communitarian spirit that was so central to the thought of the ancients like Aristotle. Hegel might have been successful in this effort, but this tension was does not exhaust the conflicts brought on by modernity. The tension between the ancient community and modern individualism might have been the central conflict within the identities of philosophers like Hegel, but modernism created many more conflicts than this one.

Hegel couldn’t see the broad scope of conflict because he never understood the heterogeneity of people within the modern state. Hegel likes to talk about the unity of citizens and the "life of a people" that communicates a kind of profound ethnocentrism that is very modern. He, therefore, never really takes slavery seriously enough to think deeply about what recognition and mutuality would require to redress the wrongs of oppression. Thus, Hegel’s identity politics is confined to thinking about the reformation of relationships of authority between feudalism and modern liberalism. He never considers the kind of identity politics that would be engendered by struggles against hierarchies of race, sex, sexuality, ethnicity and colonialism.

 

Recognition, Autonomy and Authenticity

Hegel’s philosophy is not a rejection of modernism, but rather an attempt to solve respond to the romantic critique of modernity by taking the individualism out of the modernist project. While this is an important contribution, Hegel’s thought still doesn’t do justice to romantic concerns for the authenticity of culture and tradition in the face of modernism. This is especially the case since, while some features of modernism amount to obstacles to identity politics, other features of modernism actually tend to encourage and reinforce romantic longings that lead to identity politics.

This is the argument of Charles Taylor’s essay "Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition". Taylor begins by pointing out that identity politics is a phenomenon that could only happen after modernism, for identity politics, while involving groups has fundamentally individualist foundations. It involves creating a personal identity through association with some group. This was not possible, Taylor argues, before the advent of modernism. Before the modern world individuals’ identities were defined by their place in established social hierarchies. Since these hierarchies were generally stable, allowing for little social mobility between classes, places, or occupations and supported by effectively repressive institutions like the armies of those at the top of hierarchies, people generally didn’t think to question their identities. But the revolutions of the 18^th and 19^th centuries made social hierarchies much less stable. Political revolutions removed the absolute and arbitrary power of feudal lords, and the industrial revolution and the growing capitalist marketplace made class and geographic mobility much easier. The result was that people no longer inherited an identity from their parents, rather they had to create one of their own.

Furthermore, Taylor points out, the individualism of modernity tends to make the creation of personal identity more essential. For instance, the protestant Christian strand of modernity made people agonize more over their identity because Christianity made being a good person about having an authentic inner experience of God rather than just participating in the traditions and practices of a community. It wasn’t enough after Protestantism to just go to mass and confession to escape the fires of Hell, you had to have an individual subjective experience of God’s presence inside you to be sure of salvation. This created, according to Taylor, a new tendency for individuals to be concerned with their inner feelings. After all, eternal damnation was the price for not having the right inner experience of God and an authentic inner experience would produce inner feelings that would guide a Christian towards goodness rather than sin. From this concern with the moral "voice within", Taylor explains, it is just a short step to the modern concern with the voice within, our sense of individuality that requires that we be true to ourselves.

Taylor argues that the path for this step was laid by modernists like Rousseau and romantics like Herder who developed the ideas of autonomy and authenticity. For Rousseau autonomy, or giving oneself law, becomes the basic expression of one’s individual humanity. Such autonomy is not just individual freedom and self-determination, for Rousseau, but ideally an expression of an individual’s natural uniqueness. Each person has a singular genius or gift that can only be realized by an individual’s diligent cultivation of his or her self. Thus autonomy becomes a central value not just because it expresses respect for individual freedom and equality, but because the general good loses if each individual is not given the freedom to realize their potential.

So far Taylor provides us with an account of why people in modern nations tend to go into identity crises. Freed from hierarchical constraints, individuals agonize over finding their true selves against the forces of social conformity and responsibility to others that distract them from the central quests of their lives. But Taylor goes on to show how authenticity and autonomy also get applied to whole groups of people. Herder, the German romantic that influenced Hegel, applied the notion of authenticity to nations or ethnic groups. A people, Herder argued, should not try to conform to the culture of other nations but should instead cultivate their unique character and bring that to flower. Herder specifically meant that Germans should not try to imitate the French, but should instead be true to an authentic way of being that is uniquely German. To generalize from this point, Herder directs all people to join the cultural project of their ethnic or national group, and in reinforcing the authentic character of those groups, seek their own self-fulfillment.

Taylor’s explication of the politics of recognition is very individualist at this point. He describes why individual identity seems in such a crisis in our modern world: it is confronted with the awful responsibility that comes from the call to autonomy and authenticity. But from here, Taylor’s argument becomes much less modern and more Hegelian, for he argues that individuals acting alone cannot secure identity. Human life, he points out, is fundamentally dialogical, that is formed through a conversation with fellow human beings. This brings up a big problem, for if identity requires a conversation with others we are dependent on others and their willingness to engage in dialogue with us.

This might not appear at first to be so difficult, for this dialogical creation of identity happens with people who are close to us and are (usually) ready conversation partners: parents, friends, lovers and spouses. Dialogue with these "significant others" are perhaps best able to help us discover and clarify aspects of our identities. But following the notion of authenticity that comes from Rousseau this means that others are significant to our sense of self, but they should not be so central that our sense of identity is dependent on them. Thus one source of identity conflict happens as people endeavor to establish identities in which significant others support our efforts at identity formation without forcing a particular identity on us which we may not feel is authentic to us (hence the inherent conflict between parents and children). Nevertheless these significant others often become so central to ourselves that they become part of our identity.

Of course, Taylor continues, this dialogue is carried on with others with whom we are not so intimate. Interactions with teachers, acquaintances, colleagues and even strangers can influence our sense of self, encouraging the inner genius of our identity (or not) and connecting us (or not) with deeper aspects of our cultural traditions that allow us to develop more authentic identities. But dialogue, like language, is an aspect of humanity in which (as Hegel demonstrates) we are sadly dependent on others. In order to have conversations that build positive identities we need others to recognize us as both equal and free interlocutors (our universal humanity) and to recognize our autonomy (our particular authentic identity). Both kinds of recognition, Taylor acknowledges, are often difficult to come by. But the second is more difficult.

This hasn’t always been the case, however. Up until the last 50 years women and people of color were often denied the recognition of their universal humanity through explicit legal codes and cultural practices, like segregation and compulsory housewifery. But increasingly, the first kind of recognition has been supported by institutions and laws of the dominant American strand of legal modernism, liberalism, which uphold the individual civil rights and liberties of citizenship. For instance, since the Civil Rights Act of 1968 it is illegal to deny someone housing because you don’t like their race. Thus recognition of our universal humanity is not guaranteed but at least supported by all the power of the modern state.

But the second kind of recognition, recognition of our particular authentic identities, is more difficult, as Taylor points out, especially since the kind of recognition required is often at cross-purposes with the first. The universal recognition of liberalism demands that we treat everyone the same, as equal bearers of rights with no preferences or discriminations extended for peoples’ distinctiveness. The law, especially, should treat everyone the same. But extending recognition of peoples’ particular identities can often violate this maxim, as in Taylor’s example of the insistence of Quebecois that their particular cultural identity be given constitutional protection in Canada. For instance, Quebec has passed laws limiting the public use of English. Only French, for instance, can be used on public signs. Such laws protect the French culture of Quebec at the expense of making English speaking citizens, in a way, second class citizens in their own country. This seems to violate the principle of equal rights before the law. On the other hand universal recognition of humanity can undermine a people’s ability to maintain recognition of a particular identity. For instance, if the laws of Quebec did not promote use of the French language then it is very likely that Quebec would slowly begin to lose its cultural distinctiveness under the pressure of the more dominant English-language culture of the rest of Canada and the United States. Equality before the law would end up denying French Canadians the kind of political recognition necessary to maintain their particular identity.

 

Taylor’s analysis of these issues allows us to see the influence of modernism on identity politics even better. While Hegel’s argument is that identity formation is a problematic endemic to humanity in every moment, Taylor points out that identity is especially a problem in our modern world. Modernity makes identity more important than ever and easier to master, as people’s identities are not inherited because of culture of social position. Furthermore, the modern state uses its power to give everyone a basic recognition of his or her equal humanity. But paradoxically, our modern world makes identity formation, in a way, more difficult than ever before, for the modern world’s commitment to universal and equal humanity denies us the resources, connections, and political institutions that are necessary for the recognition of our particular authentic identities. Furthermore, many find that this authenticity can only be found through a dialogue with cultures and traditions that are threatened by the modern world.

Taylor argues that these obstacles can often lead to a lack of recognition or even misrecognition, and the result of this failure to be adequately recognized is pain. As he puts it, "misrecognition shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred. Due recogntion is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need". This is an especially important issue to the politics of recognition, but Taylor (as someone who probably does not suffer disproportionately from misrecognition) is unqualified to explore this issue with the necessary insight. To explore the issue of misrecognition in more depth we turn next to discuss the work of Frantz Fanon.

 

Frantz Fanon: Recognition and Misrecogntion

 

In his first important work, Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon tried to explore and understand what he saw as a pervasive inferiority complex among blacks in his home of Martinique and throughout the world. Fanon, trained in psychology and psychoanalysis, wanted to explain this evident inferiority complex without reference to contemporary psychological theories that tended to understand such neuroses as a product of immature intellectual or psycho-sexual development. Such an understanding, Fanon realized, would tend to blame blacks for their situation and, furthermore, legitimize racist understandings of black inferiority as having a biological basis. Instead, Fanon developed an eclectic theory that emphasized the roles of language, culture, and economic exploitation in producing both black inferiority and white superiority. Through this analysis Fanon provided a powerful critique of European systems of understanding identity in terms of simple psychological (Freud) or class dynamics (Marx), emphasizing instead the influence of a broad social web of institutions and meanings that is very sympathetic to the philosophy of Hegel.

As a black man educated in the western tradition Fanon had an explicitly ambivalent relationship to modernism. On the one hand Fanon saw the forces of modernism as equivalent to western colonialism. These forces had caused the "death and burial of [blacks’] local cultural originality", the deprecation or erasing of African cultural accomplishments, the terrible debasement of black identity, and their replacement by a cold "rationalism" that would not recognize the emotional claims of blacks’ lived experience of suffering. But on the other hand Fanon embraces some of the most central tenets of modernism. For instance, Fanon again and again argues for the brotherhood and equality of all humanity, prophesying an ultimate reconciliation between the races. He is also unwilling to abandon modern notions of reason and science and embrace completely a romantic notion of Africanness that would leave the descendants of the African Diaspora poor and subordinate. As a result, Fanon is compelled to say at the beginning of his book, "However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white."

But this conclusion does not mean that Fanon embraced an identity politics of assimilation. This would mean that Fanon argued that blacks should and could adopt the culture and ideals of modernism. For instance, if racism sets up the dichotomy,

White Black

(rational, cultured, moral, good) (irrational, primitive, sexual, bad)

the politics of assimilation entails the subordinate group just assimilating the valued characteristics of the dominant group and rejecting the characteristics imputed to them by racism. So the politics of assimilation looks like:

White Black

(rational, cultured, good) (rational, cultured, good)

But Fanon concluded that this was impossible for just the reasons outlined by Hegel. The dominant group would not allow it, for if an assimilated identity is to be secure the dominant group must recognize it.

Fanon argued that whites would not voluntarily give blacks this recognition. In a very personal account he explains how he had tried to merit recognition by assuming the characteristics, values, and accomplishments of western culture, but he was never accepted because of his color. Fanon describes this rejection in a famous poetic passage where he describes an encounter on the street with a little white child. The child exclaims, "Look, a Negro! … Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!" Fanon responds at first by being amused, the child’s racism, he says to himself, is just an expression of the child’s youth and ignorance. But then he finds that he cannot laugh, for he realizes this is not just a display of naiveté. This is who he is in the white world. "Look, a Negro!" is a leitmotif signifying white society’s utter unwillingness to live up to its ideals of universal humanism. No matter what, whites always would always see him as just a nigger. But this is more than just discrimination. Fanon explains that "Look, a Negro!" stands for the complex of social myths, practices, and institutions that create what Fanon calls "blackness" and "whiteness". These social webs of racism cannot be easily broken, for they are intricately woven within all of modern social life.

Fanon’s explanation of the social webs of racism is an eloquent application of Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave. Following Hegel’s argument that identity is built up from the human need for recognition of the truth of self-consciousness, Fanon argues that black identity has been shaped by the lack of recognition or misrecognition that whites extend to blacks. For Fanon, the truth of black self-consciousness or a black sense of reality was secure when blacks had their own autonomous communities or cultures, for then black identity was granted ready recognition. But these cultures have been "wiped out because they were in conflict with a civilization that [blacks] did not know and that imposed itself upon [them]." Lacking a community that could provide recognition of the truth or validity of black identity, Fanon explains, his identity ceased to exist, for "the real world [the white world] challenged [his]- claims" to know reality or even himself. Since the possibility of black identity had been destroyed, the only identity blacks could possess was one of "blackness" or the racist stereotypes imposed by whites. Since blackness is imposed from outside, Fanon describes feeling alienated from his own body instead of being directed by his own self-consciousness. He experiences a "third-person consciousness". This consciousness is full of all the "legends, stories, history, and above all historicity" of racism. In the absence of recognition of his true self, Fanon is left with an identity imposed upon him by white society. As he describes it, "I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin’."

What this means for Fanon, following Hegel, is that black identity is the identity of slaves and white identity is the identity of the master. Within this slave identity blacks have no identity of their own. They exist only in comparison to whites. Fanon might say that the politics of assimilation could only provide identities that are approximations to whiteness rather than truly black identities. So following the diagrams above, the identity politics of assimilation produce the following unsatisfactory result:

White Black

(rational, cultured, good) (rational as whites, cultured as whites, good as whites)

 

An identity that exists only in comparison with the white Other (I’m as rational as whites) can never be secure. For whiteness is an unreachable ideal for a black person; he or she will always be like whites, even just like whites, but never white. This idea results in an important innovation of Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave. Fanon’s account of the dialectic happens between 3 rather than 2 parties. For, since the white ideal is unreachable, black identity exists not just as a comparison to the white ideal but in comparison to other blacks. As Fanon puts it, "[A black man] does not compare himself with the white man qua father, leader, God; he compares himself with his fellow against the pattern of the white man."

Fanon argued that this propensity of blacks to compare themselves with other blacks against the standard of whiteness created powerful social webs of racism within black communities. Being more or less white than other blacks became a central norm among black communities, a means by which status and privilege was distributed and maintained. In Fanon’s home of Martinique, for instance, having spent time in France was flaunted as a badge of honor. Fanon describes their return to Martinique: "[they] convey the impression that they have completed a cycle, that they have added to themselves something that was lacking. They return literally full of themselves." He also describes the prejudices that racism sets up between non-white ethnic groups that reinforce whiteness and blackness. Martinicans, Fanon explains, may realize and resent their subordinate status to whites, but this is made up for to some extent by their ability to feel superior to other blacks, especially Senegalese. Because the social norms of racism distribute at least some superiority to Martinicans they are willing to buy into and even reinforce these norms.

As important as these dynamics are, Fanon presents the extremely important argument that language is the most powerful way in which the social webs of racism are formed and maintained. On one level, language is just another means of comparison between blacks. Fanon describes being able to speak Parisian French as opposed to black Creole as the most important way Martinicans differentiated between those who were civilized like whites and those who were not. As Fanon explains, "The Negro of the Antilles will be proportionately whiter—that is, he will come closer to being a real human being—in direct ration to his mastery of the French language."

But at a more profound level, Fanon argues that language in general is the most important means by which whites have been able to colonize blacks’ identities. Since language is the means by which people understand the world and themselves, to take on the language of a colonizer really results in having one’s consciousness colonized. Fanon explains it this way: "To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all else to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization." This is not as innocuous as it may sound at first. The European notion of civilization is defined to a significant degree in opposition to what is not European, especially the mythological notion of African as the paradigm of barbarism. Therefore, to speak French, Fanon realizes, is to align oneself with a deeply racist culture. Fanon’s clearest articulation of this idea is in the quote we gave above: "I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all else, above all: ‘Sho’ good eatin’." Here Fanon is arguing that the language of European French communicates racist stereotypes of Africa, but also "and above all else, above all" that it enforces the attitude that the languages or dialects (especially Creole) of diaspora Africans are debased in a way that serves as a "retaining wall" that preserves racial hierarchy. Language can be just as powerful a marker of race as skin color, especially because it allows the racism of whiteness to be hidden in the guise of culture and education. For instance, Fanon, realizes that his education and proficiency with French allows whites to reinforce the boundaries of race, for he is only the exception that proves the rule. When a colleague compliments him by saying, "At bottom you are a white man" he is implying that Fanon’s intelligence is evidence of an inner whiteness; such intelligence could not possibly adhere to blackness.

Given the intractability of white racism, supported by the strength of the social webs of racism as well as the economic, political, and material forces of colonial exploitation, Fanon is left with a difficult choice of what to do. Given his failure to achieve recognition and build an identity through a strategy of assimilation, what can be done? Fanon’s answer was to take the norms and values of blackness and whiteness and turn them upside down. Instead of taking the characteristics of whiteness as the ideal standard and deprecating the characteristics of blackness, Fanon began to see features of whiteness in a negative light and celebrate the features of blackness. We might diagram this move this way:

Instead of

White Black

(rational, cultured, moral, good) (irrational, primitive, sexual, bad)

Fanon tried to reverse the valuations to

White Black

(rational, cultured,moral, BAD) (irrational, primitive, sexual, GOOD)

Fanon describes this strategy as an attempt to embrace his African heritage. As he put it, "From the opposite end of the white world a magical Negro culture was hailing me". Fanon describes this summons as an impulse to valorize and revel in all the myths of a lost African exotic past. "Black magic, primitivism, and animal eroticism" become a way to recoup a lost patrimony, the true and authentic way to be black, rather than practices to be shunned as inferior. Blackness, at this point for Fanon, becomes something to be embraced. Blackness’ lack of western culture becomes a virtue, for white culture lacks the "subtle riches and sensitivity" of blacks’ innate emotional knowledge that comes from blacks’ natural connection to the realms of body and spirit. Rather than envying the technology and material accomplishments of white culture, Fanon associates white reason with a rapacious "acquisitive relation" to the earth, an immoral desire to enslave the world. Thus Fanon comes to see white culture was "corrupted", "mechanized", and inhuman. Blacks, on the other hand, rather than being subhuman, are actually the people who are most authentically human. Rejoicing at this newfound authentically black identity Fanon exclaims,

So here we have the Negro rehabilitated, "standing before the bar," ruling the world with his intuition, the Negro recognized, set on his feet again, sought after, taken up, and he is a Negro—no, he is not a Negro but the Negro, exciting and fecund antennae of the world, raining his poetic power on the world, "open all the breaths of the world." I embrace the world! I am the world!

But recognition of this new identity by whites is not easy to attain. First, Fanon argues that recognition cannot be given freely by whites. Following Hegel, Fanon insists that recognition must be the product of a struggle. The masters must be made to recognize the slaves. For Fanon, that blacks have not fought to be recognized is the core of their problems. That political freedom was given to blacks means that whites may ignore blacks’ particular claims to identity and instead enjoy the self-satisfaction of "giving" the features of white identity to their former slaves. Thus Fanon calls on blacks to fight, even if that means violence, to achieve recognition of an authentic black identity.

The Strategy of Essentialism

Later in Black Skin, White masks Fanon abandons the strategy of building identity through some kind of return to a truly African identity, but Fanon’s discussion of this romantic turn to a supposedly authentic past is paradigmatic of the politics of recognition. His strategy of reversing the valuations of the social myths and practices that enforce subordination has been used over and over again not only by blacks but by women, homosexuals, Native Americans, nationalists and almost any group that has struggled to build and achieve recognition. We call this strategy essentialism, for it reflects an attempt to ground and build identity on the essence of a group. This essence is the core truths that define what a particular group is and means for its members. The strategy of essentialism usually entails trying to find these core truths by tracing them back to some immutable characteristics either in the biology of the group or the particular history and practices of the group. The modern world, the argument goes, has taken away the group’s access to these sources of identity, destroying the natural access the group would have had to the rich sources of identity that existed in some lost idyllic past. The strategy of essentialism holds that true identity can be regained by reviving some of these values and practices, a reawakening that will allow the group’s memebrs to be healed from the wounds caused by their previous subordination.

Where this is not possible, say, because ancient practices are forgotten, impracticable, or counter to contemporary values the group may resort to another strategy that is less romantic but still essentialist. This is the idea that members of the group somehow have a special power or insight either because of a natural endowment or the group’s particular history that serve as resources for creating a new identity. The group must cultivate their particular identity, so that its unique truths may be manifest and develop to nurture the group. This strategy of essentialism is explicitly contrary to the modernist narrative with its notion that everyone is (and perhaps should be) basically the same. The strategy of essentialism asserts that members of the group have a particular culture or way of being that is generally not open to outsiders.

The struggle for recognition within a strategy of essentialism means wresting enough freedom from forces oppressing the group so that the group members may either recoup or reform their true identity. But it also means achieving some recognition from the old oppressors or the dominant group in society of the validity and worth of the group’s identity. This does not mean that others must give the group’s identity respect equal to other groups or to their own. It means, however, that they must win tolerance and some level of respect.

Whether the identity politics of recognition is practical, appropriate or desirable will be a topic of subsequent chapters. The purpose of the following application chapter is to illustrate how the politics of assimilation has generally failed and how the identity politics of recognition has been an outgrowth of that failure. The examples of black, feminist, and national identity show that the politics of recognition has much more heterogeneous manifestations that the politics of assimilation. We shall see, especially, quite different examples of the strategy of essentialism. These examples, we will argue, illustrate that the politics of recognition, rightly understood, is an inescapable feature of identity politics, but the strategy of essentialism is a problematic and not necessarily inescapable feature of the politics of recognition.

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