What is the strange difference between an experience tasted for the first time and the same experience recognized as familiar, as having been enjoyed before, though we cannot name it or say where or when?
—William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890)
I am arriving at the airport in South Bend, Indiana. A figure comes striding toward me, his hand extended. Is it Tom? I cannot recognize him at first, as a large straw hat is drawn down over his face. Then, suddenly, the hat is thrown off, and I just as suddenly recognize who it is: Charles! Although I have not seen Charles since last fall (it is now June), he is instantly recognizable—and clearly distinguishable from Tom, who nevertheless resembles Charles in physique and whom I had expected to meet me on this occasion.
It is striking how much of this experience is present-oriented. One present moment—that of the quasi-recognition of Tom—gives way instantaneously to another present moment, that of actually recognizing Charles. Each moment is all-absorbing, and is occupied without remainder by an act of quasi-or real recognition. The act serves to punctuate the present—to give it its special content and its immediate limits. There is a definite fixation on the present, an anchoring of attention there, as well as a felt presentness of the experience itself as it gives itself to me in the moment of recognition.
The presentness is such that the experience here reported lacks an explicit orientation toward past or future. The past in particular is strangely absent from the conscious content of my experience: “strangely” because both Charles and Tom have been integral presences in my past. If they had not been such presences, I could not be said to recognize them at all: past experience of the recognized object is presupposed even if it is not manifest as such in the experience itself. It may be that it is just to the extent that this presupposition is at work in recognition that the past experience itself need not be elicited as anything distinct from the present experience of recognizing: and thus not as something to be recollected as such.
This is not to deny that we do recognize some things precisely as stemming from the past: when I judge that “I recognize him as a ghost of his former self” I do make an explicit reference to the past. But even here no specific recollection (much less a memory image) of this past needs to arise. Rather, the reference to the past is built right into the presentness of the experience—is part of its very content and is not inferred or posited, much less experienced separately. In Heidegger’s terminology, the “as-structure” here is “existential-hermeneutical” and not apophantic in nature; it expresses an inherence of the past in the present rather than the reverse; and it does not effect any division into distinct regions of time. This immanence-in-the-present remains operative even when I recognize something as about to happen. The “about to” is an intrinsic feature of the recognized object itself—much as protentions of the immediate future form the forward fringe of the “living present” in Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness.1
There is still a further level of consideration. Acts of recognition such as occurred in the South Bend airport exhibit presentness not only in the sense of occurring in the present, dominating it, and making it prevail over the past and the future. They also aid in the constitution of the present itself. How is this so? They do so by contributing two basic factors to the present: “availability” and “consolidation.”
Availability
Availability names the way in which recognition serves to render items in our experience readily accessible to us—where “accessible” means not just nonproblematically present but positively identifiable, that is, having a distinct, and normally nameable, identity. A recognized face such as that of Charles affords a privileged access to a body that, before the moment of recognition, was an advancing physique posing a question for perception: “Whose body is this?” A flash of recognition resolved this ambiguous situation by making the identity of the owner of this body available to me—available not just in the present but constitutive of it. In fact, we can trace a movement from “this-body-with-unknown-owner-advancing-toward-me” to “Tom-as-possible-owner-of-this-body-coming-toward-me” to “Charles-as-certain-owner-of-this-body.” This movement of increasing specificity is the work of recognition. At the same time, a distinct sense of “nearing”2 accompanies availability and enhances it. Charles’s face, once revealed and recognized, no longer keeps the distance of something hidden under a straw hat but leaps forward toward me as a distinctly identified entity that constitutes the present as a scene of recognition. Thus, what remained distant in a state of unrecognized ambiguity draws near to my apprehension. It lets me have a still closer look, puts me on the inside of the phenomenon, and gives me the feeling of immediate access to it.
Consolidation
Consolidation is a second, somewhat less obvious, factor. Recognition contributes to the constitution of the present (and thus manifests its own presentness) by allowing the recognized object or event to come forth as itself—to gain its own identity and stability. Hence the unidentified and unstable head-with-straw-hat became the solidified head of Charles. Through recognition, what was evasive and shifting became intact and settled; the question as to the identity of this figure was resolved. The ambiguous head belonged to Charles and Charles alone, and it gained in felt density what it thereby lost in mystery. This density or consolidated character is by no means incompatible with the experience of nearing mentioned just above. The two even work closely together: it is just because Charles drew sufficiently close to me that he gained enough density to be recognized as himself. His nearing and his consolidation as an object of recognition went hand in hand.
We have been discussing what can be designated as the presentness of recognition: its orientation toward the present as well as its actual orientation of it. As a result of presentness, recognition helps to shape the very stretch of time in which it plays out its own drama. Availability and consolidation play a determinative role in this drama, since each contributes in an essential way to presentness. All this occurs in a curiously suspended state of temporal process. The past, though crucially presupposed, and the future, though undeniably portended, are not permitted to intrude themselves into the heart of recognition, composed as it is almost exclusively of present-making activities.
Reinforcing this same emphasis on the present is the fact that recognition often occurs in the immediate context of perception, itself a deeply present-oriented activity. Where else does perception arise except in the present, and what does it offer to us but various contemporary items arranged and arrayed in the same present? In the South Bend airport, recognition occurred in the very midst of perception; it arose from it and was continuous with it; it was in perceiving Charles that I came to recognize him. More generally, to recognize what I see is to see it “as” something. Wittgenstein has deftly analyzed the fact that recognizing something is seeing it as a distinguishable and identifiable thing—as a determinable, and usually an already determined, x.3 This basic act of seeing-as is perceptual in nature, though it is also sometimes interlaced with imaginings.4 Even if it is not true that all recognizing is construable as seeing-as—a theme to which I shall return—that which is so construable presents itself as at once perceptual and present-bound: once I recognize him, I see that advancing figure as Charles now.
Just as to be present-making is not necessarily to be limited to the present, to arise in the midst of perceiving and to occur in the form of seeing-as are not strictly present-confined. Despite the insistent focus on presentness that is so much a part of the experience of recognition, the past must play some role if recognizing is indeed a mode of memory. As Sartre queries:
But if everything is present, how are we to explain . . . the fact that in its intention a consciousness which remembers transcends the present in order to aim at the event back there where it was?5
Even if recognizing does not aim expressly at a past event “back there where it was,” it must involve the past in some capacity if it is to count as remembering. This much we have already acknowledged. But how exactly are past and present related in recognizing? This question becomes acute precisely because presentness is so massively evident as a primary feature of recognition.
It is tempting to explain the role of the past in recognizing by positing a subterranean stratum at work beneath what is manifest in the experience itself. The past is then conceived as a suppressed undercurrent. As reported by William James, Höffding espouses such a view:
His theory of what happens [in cases of instantaneous recognition] is that the object before us, A, comes with a sense of familiarity whenever it awakens a slumbering image, a, of its own past self, whilst without this image it seems unfamiliar.6
But it is superfluous to posit the past in the form of a subliminal image lurking beneath an experience of recognition when this experience not only contains no conscious trace of such an image but does not need it in any adequate accounting. An act of recognizing is self-sufficing, especially in its instantaneous form. That which is recognized, the “recognitum” as we can call it, gives itself to us in transparent plenitude. This is an aspect of its very presentness. Thus it does not need the support, not even the subliminal support, supplied by a memory-image of its earlier occurrence. Even if it were to arise, such an image would be distinctly redundant. As James says in critique of Höffding: “[The experience of recognizing a face] is so intense as to banish from my mind all collateral circumstances, whether of the present or of former experiences.”7 Collateral circumstances are banished—not because they are inappropriate, but because they are useless impedimenta in a situation in which everything essential is already furnished.
But this leaves unresolved how past and present are in fact related in situations of recognizing. Even if the past does not obtrude into the present overtly in these situations and even if it is otiose to invoke it as a covert factor, its presence is hard to deny: as is clear from the simple fact that we cannot recognize something we have not encountered before at some point and in some way. However difficult it may be to detect as such, there is resonance in the present from this encounter in the past. How is such resonance to be conceived?
It will not help to invoke instances of the past/present relationship that were considered in previous chapters. In these instances, past and present remained easily distinguishable terms. In reminiscing, for example, the reminisced-about past is the very topic of the activity of reminiscing itself; it is even thematized as such: “Those were the days. . . .” In the case of reminding, an item apprehended in the present is related to something past (and sometimes to something future) via a distinctive iconic, indicative, or adumbrative relation; at every moment, past and present are discernibly different. The same holds true for ordinary recollection, which is premised on the distinguishability of the scene recollected from the act of recollection. In all of these cases—and in many others as well (e.g., in biographical or historical reconstruction)—past and present are conjoined in such a way that the very difference between the two terms is constitutive of their mode of relation to each other.
In recognition, by contrast, any such intrinsic difference is annulled or held in abeyance: the two temporal phases rejoin each other instead of being kept apart. They rejoin each other so thoroughly that they cannot even be said to adumbrate, much less to indicate or imitate, each other. At the most, we might say that one term expresses the other in the sense of “gives expression to,” “makes manifest,” or “reveals.” Thus the past could be said to be expressed in and by the present of recognition. But the idea of expression has a double disadvantage in the current context. On the one hand, it implies the idea of an unexpressed remainder—whereas what we recognize, being altogether manifest, carries with it no such residue. On the other hand, expression is naturally allied with verbal language—the paradigm of an expressive sign is a word8—while recognizing has no special affinity with linguistic contexts and modes of articulation.
The most adequate model for grasping the relation of past and present in recognition is that of suffusion. By “suffusion” I mean the situation in which what is otherwise distinct, or at least discriminable, combines and mixes to the point of indistinguishability. Such is precisely what happens with past and present in cases of recognizing. In particular, the past of the recognitum fuses with its present apprehension—so completely that we would be hard pressed to differentiate one from the other. Thus, when I recognized my friend Charles, my past relationship to him was condensed or telescoped into the present of my perception of him as “Charles,” as just this person (and not, say, Tom or any number of other people who resemble him). Of course, this relationship itself had been built up from discrete episodes, some of which I could recollect separately, reminisce about, be reminded of, etc. But insofar as I was recognizing Charles, these episodes were not at stake; at most, they were contributing factors to the single Gestalt designatable as ‘Charles-as-recognized’. What was at stake was a circumstance in which the present of apprehending Charles was suffused with the past of my relationship with him.
It is not altogether accidental that the specific recognitum in this exemplary case was a human face. For both James and Hoffding, the face is a paradigm of recognizability. In the face—the naked face as fully recognized9—the suffusion of past and present is at its most complete. Once I recognized Charles’s face, the uncertainty of his identity, an identity at first confused with that of Tom as quasi-recognized, was immediately dispelled, leaving no unrecognized residue. The past pertinent to this experience was made one with the present in which recognition occurred. Indeed, the suffusion was such that not only past and present but the manifested and the manifestation, meaning and vehicle, identity and phenomenon—all merged in the decisive moment of recognition. The two members of each of these pairs of terms interfuse in the terminal point of recognition itself. Much as a finished painting possesses the quality of being finally and fully expressive—and expressive of itself, “auto-iconic”10—so a recognized face has the same intransitive and self-completing character, the sense of having-come-already-into-its own.
The process of suffusion itself is complex and sinuous. I shall single out only two of its features for comment here.
Merging
Merging in its most basic form brings together the perceived with the remembered. A simple example will demonstrate this. When I was working on a summer job many years ago in my hometown, my employer remarked to me one day that he recognized my father in me. When I asked him how this was so, he said that I had “my father’s walk”—his very gait, his style of walking. His perceiving of my walking was imbued with remembering; or rather, his perceiving me the way he did was his remembering—a remembering that did not require a separate recollection of my father’s walking in comparison with my own. The mere perception of my walking supplied both the occasion and the content of his recognitory act.
What is striking about this example, and many others like it in daily life, is the two-way action of the merging. Of such a case, it is equally true to say that the perceived unites with the remembered (my walk with my father’s walk) and the converse (his walk with mine). It is not a matter merely of the remembered becoming immersed in the perceived—even if this remains most salient on many occasions. The perceived also loses itself in the remembered. At the moment of recognition, then, there is a thoroughly reciprocal fusing of the two factors. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, for the past and the present, the manifested and the manifestation, identity and phenomenon, meaning and vehicle.
Of course there are experiences of partial recognition in which the merging of such factors is far from complete: e.g., my quasi-recognizing Tom in place of Charles. The identification was very tentative (“Is it Tom?” I asked myself) because present perception and past experience merged with each other only imperfectly. The perceived figure (still shrouded by the straw hat as it was) did not fully coincide with any particular remembered figure, and the resulting discrepancy between the perceived and the remembered exhibited itself in a distinct hesitation on my part as well as a need to perceive more of the person advancing toward me so that an act of full recognition could occur. In other instances such hesitation can be even more prolonged. But this does not render the moment of merging any less important. Whether it proceeds gradually or suddenly, implicitly or explicitly, all recognition aims at this moment as at a natural culmination. For it is the moment when we can say that recognition has genuinely taken place. Not to experience such a moment is not to recognize fully—even if the moment itself represents the suspension of basic distinctions on which our lives otherwise depend.
Clarification
Clarification names an effect of suffusion rather than part of the process itself; but it is a crucial effect nonetheless. To recognize something is to cast it in a new light—to illuminate it in a way that was lacking when it remained unrecognized in its bare perception. As that which is perceived becomes suffused with the past to produce a recognition in the present, the perception gains a luminosity that clarifies an otherwise ambiguous or attenuated situation: as when the actual recognition of Charles suddenly dissipated the mist of uncertainty that clung to the not-yet-identified person striding toward me in the South Bend airport.
The clarification achieved by recognition need not be so dramatic as this. When I gaze upon the house in which I grew up, I am not looking at an indifferent construction of bricks and boards with an utterly unknown interior. Instead, I am seeing a house known from within and recognized as such. The presently perceived house is clarified by my very recognition of it—quite apart from my having explicit memories of it. Particular memories may also arise, often in the very wake of recognition, but their illumination is of a different sort from that which is effected by recognition proper. In the “click” of recognition, my past experiences with a given perceived object are unleashed en bloc, as an amorphous mass. The illumination cast by connection with this experiential mass is necessarily diffuse; in place of spotlighting (as occurs so frequently in secondary memory, where what we remember enters “the brightly lit circle of perfect presentation”),11 there is a suffusion of light—an indistinct but steady saturation of the object recognized. That this clarification results in something indistinct should not trouble us. Vague phenomena are still authentic objects of phenomenological description. As Husserl admonishes:
We can always bring what is given nearer to us even in the zone of obscure apprehension. What is obscurely presented comes closer to us in its own peculiar way, eventually knocking at the door of intuition, though it need not for that reason pass over the threshold.12
The very light cast by recognition also casts a shadow. This shadow inheres as much in its source (i.e., the amorphous mass of past experiences in which no particular memory or group of memories stands out) as in its present action of illumination, wherein it is difficult to say just how the now-recognized object has been clarified. Description is here drawn into metaphor: “mass,” “mist,” “suffusion” itself. In fact there is no more exact description available to us, since suffusion proceeds as much by obscurity as by clarity, by shadow as by light. Nevertheless, the light that is at work in suffusion is quite adequate for the task of clarifying the recognitum, allowing it to be grasped as something recognized.
Presentness (with its two subtraits of availability and consolidation) and suffusion (characterized by merging and clarification) are the primary features of what we recognize. They complement one another in important ways. Presentness points to the insistence of the recognitum, its characteristic manner of insinuating itself into our ongoing experience and of serving as a magnetic pole for our attention. In their presentness, recognized objects become cynosures of our existence, “the stars of our life.”13 In contrast, suffusion singles out another aspect of these same objects, i.e., their manner of combining divergent properties in a seamless whole having its own luminosity. What is accessible and consolidated from the perspective of presentness is by the same token diffuse and vaguely illumined from the standpoint of suffusion. The richness of recognition, the mystery of its working, is reflected in this very complementarity of features whereby what we recognize brings together what we might otherwise consider to be incompatible. No wonder, then, that recognizing so often presents itself as a borderline phenomenon—as located somewhere between memory and perception, past and present, myself and another. It negotiates this borderline state not by vacillating between such pairs of terms but by actively conjoining them in its presentness and suffusion.
We have proceeded thus far as if there were only one fundamental kind of recognizing—instantaneous in its happening and having its paradigm instance in the recognition of a human face. Although facial recognition is certainly an indispensable species of recognizing—its absence, “prosopagnosia,” is debilitating and leads to such anomalies as “the man who mistook his wife for a hat”14—it cannot be regarded as representative of other species. The fact is that recognizing comes in a number of very different shapes and forms, and it takes place in quite diverse settings. Not only can I recognize certain things much more gradually than I usually recognize faces, I can do so when I am in practically any state of mind or body, with corresponding effects on the act of recognition itself. Recognizing occurs in and through emotions as well as by means of perceptions: when I am depressed, recognition even of common objects may differ significantly from recognizing the same objects when I am elated. Just as the circumstances of recognizing vary considerably and may alter the character of the act, so the range of objects I am capable of recognizing is immense: from concrete faces to abstract numbers, from molecular configurations to spiral galaxies, from the style of Monet to that of Mozart. The distinctions between specific recognita are also considerable: a painter will recognize the difference between cadmium red deep and cadmium red medium, while a musician can discern differences between hearing a song in C minor and E flat major (even though the key signature is here the same). Anyone is able to tell the difference between a friendly and a not-so-friendly handshake, between the coolness of irony and the coolness of jest, or between the touch of guitar strings and the touch of the strings on a tennis racket. As our lives are generally surrounded by reminders and reminiscentia of many sorts, they are also immersed in many kinds of recognita. Living successfully—indeed, living at all—depends on our ability to apprehend myriad recognized items and to discriminate among them.
In this section I shall undertake a brief survey of several types of recognizing that deserve recognition in their own right. My intention is not to be exhaustive but merely to suggest the rich array of recognitory possibilities at our disposal.
Dim and Dawning Recognition
Although many cases of recognition (especially facial recognition) are instantaneous in occurrence and perspicuous in content, it would be a mistake to claim that instantaneity and perspicuity are inherent features of all recognizing. Much recognizing occurs slowly and is murky from beginning to end. We can recognize through a glass darkly as well as with full transparency, and it is important to acknowledge this fact. In dim recognition we have to do with those cases in which recognition never reaches a level of complete, or even partial, certainty: we are simply not sure that we have correctly recognized, or even begun to recognize, that which we apprehend. Many of these cases arise in fleeting circumstances, e.g., when we barely catch sight of someone who looks familiar driving past us on a highway. But there are also numerous instances where time is not lacking and yet recognition remains stultified. This happens whenever I encounter someone at a gathering whom I sense I know but whose identity I cannot quite specify: not only can I not recall his or her proper name, but I cannot remember when or where we first met. Even if I linger in the presence of such a person, and even if both of us try to explore the basis of the acquaintance, no further illumination may be forthcoming, leaving me with a recognition that is unremediably vague.
In the case of dawning recognition, an incomplete recognition, rather than remaining in sheer suspension, evolves toward explicit recognition. Let me cite an example from recent experience:
Seating myself in a barroom filled with recent arrivals at a conference, I find myself opposite a figure whom I do not recognize at all at first. Gradually, as the evening wears on, it occurs to me that he may be someone I know—but just how I cannot say. Eventually, I realize that this person is probably the graduate student who once gave me a ride from the Dallas airport to the University of Dallas, where I had attended a meeting the year before. His name, “Randy,” which I had kept vaguely in mind since being introduced to him earlier this evening, suddenly seems just right, and I finally recognize him fully for who he is.
In dawning recognition, then, I only gradually come to complete recognitive awareness—an awareness that may itself culminate in a definitive flash of insight.
What is the critical difference between merely dim and actually dawning recognition? The foregoing examples suggest that it may reside in the factor of context. When I merely pass someone by in a car or when I am caught up in the frustratingly vague recognition of a person I have run into at a casual party, an adequate recognitory context is lacking. If I proceed to seek out such a context, this is because I feel that, if found, it will offer a crucial clue for successful recognition.15 In instances of dawning recognition, by contrast, an identifying context is present from the start. In the case reported just above, it is provided by the conference I was attending—a conference closely related in orientation and theme to the earlier meeting in Dallas for which the as yet unrecognized person in question had served as my escort. The collocation of these historically intertwined factors constituted a valuable recognitory matrix, one which supported my slowly growing recognition. This matrix supplied the context—a context furnishing immediate clues—for my full recognition. It helped to complete a search that began with an initially dim recognition. The “display” of my successfully dawned recognition carried out a task that was implicitly set in dim recognition; the two forms of recognizing coalesced as if they were two phases of one activity.
Recognizing-in
This is a neglected but nevertheless important form of recognizing. It occurs whenever we recognize one thing in another: in its form or on its terms. Let me cite another example from my own experience:
Every time I see a photograph of my great uncle Emmett, I see my mother’s face in his—in particular, in his dark eyes, expressive eyebrows, and high cheek bones. Others in my family claim that they see me in his face—as well as in his intellectual interests and activities.
It is not entirely accidental that this example involves a family resemblance. In the context of a family, recognizing one person in the aptitudes, features, moods, even the whole life, of another is an ordinary occurrence—indeed, for some families an absorbing pastime. Just as Galton’s celebrated composite family photographs bring out strikingly the facial traits shared in common by diverse family members, so cases of recognizing one relative in the habits or traits of another serve to pick out a commonality often unsuspected by the persons who are being juxtaposed.
But recognizing-in is by no means restricted to such family situations. It arises wherever a significant overlap between any two or more people, places, or things becomes evident to the recognizer. To name just a few such non-familial instances: teachers in pupils; analysts in analysands; owners in their pets; the sense of a certain kind of British countryside in regions of Connecticut; the style of one musician or painter in another musician or painter. Included here is the “influence” of one person on another: witness only certain of Wittgenstein’s immediate disciples, who were said to mimic him (often unconsciously) in clothing, gesture, wording, and even smoking habits! In a more mundane context, the two members of a married couple are frequently said to resemble each other increasingly as the years go by. Just as we recognize Wittgenstein in his disciples, so we recognize one marital partner in another.
Is resemblance a requirement for recognizing-in? Doubtless it facilitates it—as is evident precisely in cases of family resemblance. But there are instances of recognizing-in in which no notable or even perceptible isomorphism is at play. For example, Picasso owned several early paintings by Matisse that were painted at the beginning of the century, before the emergence of a style that art critics and connoisseurs would come to label as recognizably “Matisse” in character. Yet Picasso insisted that he could readily recognize the mature Matisse—even the Matisse of 20 years later—in these juvenilia. Here is a judgment of recognizing-in that is not based on any overt resemblance—indeed, on its very absence, given the considerable evolution in Matisse’s style after these early works. Nor is the example as isolated as it may appear. Art historians often urge us to recognize the imprint of one artist or school of art in another—where before we had perceived only discontinuity and difference.
Such recognizing-in has a distinctly different basis from resemblance proper, and may be described approximately as follows. In what we now apprehend, x, we can recognize the presence of at least some of the significant features of y—not because these latter literally resemble any of the features of x but because they inhabit the apprehended structure of x. They do so by a process of subtle ingression whereby they, or their representatives, have come to take up residence in x. Once they find a place there, they are not so much presented as “appresented” (in Husserl’s useful term).16 To be appresented is not to be presented as such, in distinct self-identity (hence as enabling a judgment of resemblance, which exists between two separately identifiable terms), but to be indirectly presented. The indirection may assume various forms, including suggestion, allusion, expressiveness, and implicit references of many kinds. In the case of a pictorial-visual object, it often arises in a format in which y, the appresented object (e.g., Matisse’s later work), is indirectly presented by the complex conglomerate structure of x (Matisse’s early work). Rather than the discrete features of x, it is the global structure of x, its overall configuration, which allows one to recognize y in it. Thus, it may not have been any particular features of Matisse’s early paintings—their colors, their brushstrokes, their subject-matter—that led Picasso to recognize the later work in them but instead a diffuse tendency which could not be readily analyzed into discrete elements. In Picasso’s perception, the later work resides in the early work—haunts it in advance, as it were—by inhabiting it in this indirect but nonetheless highly effective fashion. We might say that it is present there “by proxy”—the proxy provided precisely by the appresentational structure of the early paintings. This structure, far from being based on actual resemblance, may even be hindered by such resemblance inasmuch as it may induce the viewer to undertake a point-for-point comparison between the resembling terms. Not to be led to do so is to find oneself freer to engage in the more nuanced, more discerning recognizing-in to which Picasso testifies. Such recognizing-in is worth cultivating—not only in the realm of art but in other domains of human experience as well.
Recognizing-as
Earlier I noted an affinity between much ordinary recognizing and seeing-as. But I also warned that not all recognizing can be assimilated to such a strictly perceptual act as seeing-as. This even includes the phenomenon of recognizing-as. In seeing-as, I pick out certain features in a perceived object: I see this object as green and bulbous and heavy. These features are simultaneously present to me, and the perceptual task is typically to perceive as many as possible at a given moment. In recognizing-as, not only is there no restriction to perceived objects, but the features I recognize need not be simultaneously present. The shadow of the past makes itself felt in the form of a discrepancy between present and non-present constituents: a discrepancy notably absent in the situation of seeing-as. How this is so will become manifest as we consider the three main subtypes of recognizing-as.
RECOGNIZING X AS Y
This occurs whenever something of indistinct, or even mistaken, identity comes to be recognized as other than it first presented itself as being; not just as having other features but as being another person or object altogether. This was what happened to me in the South Bend airport: there was a movement from the perception of an ambiguous x (i.e., an as-not-yet identified person) through a transitional phase of quasi-recognition (i.e., of x as possibly Tom) to the decisive insight that this x was actually y (i.e., Charles). A discrepancy between present and nonpresent arose in the very gradualness with which my process of recognition unfolded. Even though this process culminated rapidly with the certain identification of the figure as Charles, the moment of authentic recognition of x as y was preceded by a stage of coming to recognize that x was indeed y. This stage of coming-to-recognize was nonpresent, already elapsed, in relation to the actual moment of recognizing-as.
RECOGNIZING X AS HAVING HAPPENED BEFORE
The nonpresent may figure into recognizing-as in a quite different manner: as its very content. For one way of recognizing something is to recognize, not its identity or special characteristics, but the sheer fact that it has arisen before in one’s experience. This “before” can be quite indeterminate; no exact dating or even recalling of the specific occasion of occurrence needs to be effected, tempted as we may be to do such things. All that is required is the conviction that the object or event presently encountered has entered one’s experience at some prior point, whatever its precise determination may be.17
Another example will help to bring this out. Upon entering a certain Midwestern bus station after an absence of many years, I have the immediate sense that all this has happened before: that I entered the same station in just the same way (i.e., by debarking from an incoming bus) and looked about in much the same manner, half-expectant that I would see someone familiar (my father); and that I found the same rather desolate arrangement of chairs, lockers, and a ticket counter. More than mere familiarity is involved in such an experience, since I can sometimes find a scene familiar even when nothing is being re-enacted in it. Beyond just being back in a familiar bus station, a place which I can grasp as such in an act of simple recognition, I now recognize it as the scene of former action on my part, of an earlier enactment18 which I take to be re-enacted as I re-enter the same setting. What I recognize is thus my current action of entering the bus station as having happened before.
RECOGNIZING X AS A FACT
Here we move from acts of sheer acknowledgement to acts in which we claim truth. To recognize something as a fact is not merely to have the conviction that one is acquainted with its identity or earlier history but to claim to know that the item in question has the identity one takes it to have, or did indeed occur as one suspects it did. The usual idiomatic expression of this truth-claim is the simple assertion “I recognize the fact that . . .” (When one says “I recognize that times have changed,” one is acknowledging change only because one has observed that change has in fact taken place: the acknowledgment proceeds from the more fundamental act of recognizing-x-as-a-fact.)
One of the most striking characteristics of recognizing-x-as-a-fact lies in its considerable range of application. It extends from cases of quite general recognition—“I recognize [the fact] that he is getting older now,” where x equals “getting older” and remains largely unspecified as to just how or at what rate he is getting older—to very concrete instances: “I recognize [the fact] that she is 38 years old now,” where x equals “being 38 years old” and is precisely specified, at least in terms of chronology. What is common to all such cases and holds them together as a class is the act of recognizing that a certain state of affairs truly obtains. This act itself need not involve any dramatic sense of confirmation or discovery. Indeed, it can happen in a quite resigned state of mind, as if to say: “I cannot help but aver that x is a fact” since I know that x is a fact. Such resignation is not surprising in matters of truth, of which we need only be the witness in any given situation.
We are witnesses of recognized facts as settled states of affairs, that is, as already being the case. Once more the discrepancy between the present and the nonpresent asserts itself. Not only is a fact already a fact when we recognize it, but this very attestation depends on the fact’s precedence of our present judgment. Thanks to its precedence, it can present itself as a fact to be recognized as such—as something there to be witnessed. As in other sorts of recognizing-as, such links to the past, however tacit they may be on a particular occasion, bestow on recognizing-as a peculiar temporal depth that contrasts both with the shallowness of presentness and the indistinctness of suffusion.
Recognizing the General
A common experience is that of seeing familiar figures or shapes in the world about us: the “man in the moon,” a camel or other animal in a cloud, a figure in a crack in a wall, a leering face in the very midst of an abstract expressionist painting. These are cases of genuinely recognizing the objects or shapes in question and not of simply perceiving them; or more exactly, we are recognizing them as having these shapes or as appearing in the form of such objects. The “as” in these verbal formulations is neither the “as” of seeing-as—we are not seeing the cloud as a (real) camel or the moon as an (actual) man—nor the “as” of as-if, i.e., of an act of mere make-believe in which we would be merely pretending to recognize the object or shape.19 Nor is it even the “as” of recognizing-as, since it is not a question of recognizing any object, event, or fact that has temporal depth as an intrinsic dimension. Instead, we have to do with an autonomous activity which is that of recognizing something general in its very generality. Rather than recognizing what is strictly singular—e.g., a given person or place in its very noncomparability with other persons and places—we recognize a general shape or form of objecthood such as ‘camel’, ‘man’, ‘leering face’ that can be exhibited elsewhere in a quite comparable form. By “general,” I mean such as to be shareable or transportable between experiences: as happens each time we see “the man in the moon” anew. It would be absurd to claim that we are recognizing the same man, much less a given particular man; but it is not at all absurd to say that on each such occasion we are recognizing the same, or a similar, shape and that this shape evokes the designation “the man in the moon.”
Recognition need not therefore be of particulars in their uniqueness (even though just this uniqueness is critical in the recognition of persons) but can be of generals as well, whether these generals occur as perceived shapes, states of affairs, patterns of thought, artistic styles, or in still other forms. Because it can grasp generals in this way, recognizing ranges over the gamut of human experience. Nothing belonging to that experience is foreign to it, since everything in this experience is subject to some degree of generalization.
Self-Recognition
Despite the widespread generality of recognita, many present themselves as stubbornly particular. This is above all true of myself as recognized by myself. Such self-recognition is perhaps the most spontaneous, the least rehearsed, form of recognition. We enact it so frequently and so unthinkingly that it hardly seems a form of recognition at all. The fact that we do not notice ourselves recognizing ourselves is linked to the absence of anything comparable to a flash of recognition: “Aha! that’s me!” is a very rare utterance. Nor is there normally anything like a dim or dawning recognition for which the flash would represent a resolution. For we do not misrecognize ourselves except in unusual circumstances—e.g., when one notices an apparent stranger at a distance in a mirror and then realizes with a start that the figure is in fact oneself.
Recognizing oneself in a mirror is no merely contingent example. It is integral to the very process of self-recognition. Jacques Lacan even argues that the formation of one’s first sense of self-identity depends upon seeing oneself in a mirror early in life. According to this “mirror stage” theory, the child of eighteen to twenty-four months sees itself in a mirror and suddenly has the insight, thanks to the coordination of actual bodily movements and mirrored movements, that the onlooker and the looked-at are one and the same entity. Self-recognition is born at this moment—albeit in an idealized form.20 By the time adulthood is reached, the self-as-mirrored has been so thoroughly interwoven into self-recognition that it has become a deeply immanent ingredient of one’s ongoing sense of self. At this later age, self-recognition is at once highly diversified (since we recognize ourselves in innumerable ways, in habits and forms of thinking, in feelings and tendencies, and not only in visual images of our body) and radically internalized: it is no longer dependent on externally perceived cues but has become intrinsic to our entire personal being.
In short, self-recognition proves to be crucial to self-identity. Were I not able to recognize myself in such diverse and internalized ways, I would lack an essential dimension of my very sense of self. Having a personal identity requires the ability to recognize myself as continually selfsame in whatever I do. We might even say that, paradoxically, self-recognizing by and large vanishes from the scene of manifest recognition so as to assume a suppressed position in the subterranean scene of self-identity. By no longer (or only rarely) being an issue in the daytime world of ordinary, overt recognizings, it has become free for covert operations of enormous scope—a scope which is co-extensive with that of the very self it helps to constitute.21
Four final observations are here in order.
(1) The description of types of recognizing could continue almost indefinitely. In the end it is difficult to tell what is not recognitory in human experience. Since recognizing of some sort can take place in virtually every context and with regard to any kind of object (including oneself), its typological variety is considerable. Indeed, the variety is such as to induce an almost literal con-fusion of recognition with other human experiences. For recognizing readily conjoins with practically any other activity, e.g., imagining and perceiving, thinking and feeling. In this respect, it is Hermetic in character, a creature of the borderlines.22 The fate of recognizing is often to find itself precisely at the borderline: to be between other, more easily discernible phenomena.
The borderline standing of recognizing brings with it both an advantage and a risk. The advantage is that of enabling disparate experiences to become more continuous with each other. Recognizability bestows on these experiences the cement of the familiar. Even if recognizing cannot be reduced to merely cognizing what is familiar,23 the general effect of recognition is to enhance the familiarization of the circumambient world: to make us feel more completely at home in it. The corresponding risk is that in its very domesticating-cum-mediating role recognizing may lose any distinct status of its own. This risk has been apparent throughout the present chapter. Even in my initial example of recognizing Charles, I was discussing a situation in which recognizing is difficult to distinguish from ordinary perception. Would we not say that I came to perceive Charles, having at first misperceived him as Tom? Indeed. And yet we would also rightly say that I came to recognize Charles, having first quasi-recognized him as Tom. The situation was at once perceptual and recognitory: both, though neither in isolation from the other. The same ambivalent logic—of being somehow both A and B and yet neither simply A nor simply B—can be detected when we think of recognizing in relation to imagining, thinking, feeling, and still other basic human activities.
So polymorphic is recognizing that it even attaches itself to other, nonrecognitory forms of remembering itself. On the one hand, I can recognize myself recollecting or reminiscing, remembering-how, or remembering-on-the-occasion-of. In such cases I recognize myself in the act of remembering. On the other hand, I can also recognize what I recollect (i.e., its specific content) as well as what I reminisce about, remember how to do, or recall on a certain occasion. I recognize in and by remembering—just as I remember in and by recognizing itself.
(2) It is a fact worth pondering that the only comparably polymorphic memorial activity is that of recollecting. Recollecting, too, has numerous types and subtypes, and their description led me to adverbial and prepositional designations as convoluted as those I have devised to fit recognizing. In their shared polyvalence of realization and expression, recognizing and recollecting are brothers under the flesh. Perhaps this helps to explain why these two forms of memory have been subjected to such intensive comparative scrutiny in experimental psychology: as if detecting their “objective” differences might stave off any threat of confusion with one another. In addition to these efforts—whose results are far from unified24—Piaget has attempted to argue that recognition and “evocative memory” (i.e., ordinary recollection) represent respectively the first and the last stages in the development of human memory.25
Piaget also offers a working definition of the difference between recognition and recollection: “by ‘memory in the strict sense’, we shall refer to reactions associated with recognition (in the presence of the object) and recall (in the absence of the object).”26 However pithy and practicable Piaget’s formulation may be, it overlooks critical cases in which the “presence of the object” is not explicitly or fully operative and yet full recognition nevertheless occurs. This happens precisely in certain combinations of recognition and recollection:
(a) Recognizing in recollecting. We would not consider ourselves to be genuinely recollecting at all unless we were able to recognize, to some significant degree, that which we are in the process of recollecting. Such recognizing not only bears on the act and content of recollecting, but may include a distinct sense that we have undertaken a comparable action of recollecting before. Moreover, we can recognize that we have recognized such an action. The interaction between recognizing and recollecting is such as to allow for continual reiteration.
(b) Recognizing by recollecting. A quite different avatar is that in which recognizing takes place by recollecting—by its aid or means. Rather than appearing in the very midst of recollection, recognizing here calls on the latter for the special help it can offer. This arises, for example, in situations of dim or dawning recognition when the presently proffered material (even if it is given in perception) is either highly ambiguous or simply insufficient. Recourse to the “absences” of recollection is then a way of elucidating or expanding such “present” material. I ask myself, “Where have I seen this object before?” “What part of the past does it stem from?” To recapture in recollection the same object in an earlier appearance helps to establish this object as genuinely recognized in the present.
Given such possibilities of interchange, it is not altogether surprising to realize that recollecting and recognizing have in effect framed this book’s analysis thus far. What was inaugurated in Part One with recollection has now culminated in Part Two with recognition. Moreover, each form of remembering represents a borderline: in the former case, a borderline for conventionally conceived “remembering in the old manner,”27 i.e., as a mentalistic activity; in the latter case, a borderline for less frequently acknowledged or researched mnemonic modes. As recollecting takes us decisively into the mental domain—being the very paradigm of “reproduction in the psychical field”28—so recognizing places us no less decisively on the margins of the same domain, a borderline that is contiguous with reminding and reminiscing, both of which exceed recapture in recollective terms alone.
(3) It is becoming evident that recognition enjoys in many respects a distinctly intermediary position in matters of memory. As we have just seen, not only does it stand between various basic human experiences; it also insinuates itself between particular recollections. At the same time, it mediates between reminding and reminiscing, each of which regularly relies on recognizing for its own accomplishment. Both the reminder and the remindand must be recognized by us as aspects of an already constituted situation of reminding; and in reminiscing I count on myself and my co-reminiscers or listeners to be able to recognize what I am reminiscing about: to identify its subject matter as shared among us.
Still more importantly, recognizing is actively inter-mediating by virtue of thrusting us into the presence of a nexus of recognita. This nexus is even vaster than the domains of reminders and of reminiscentia to which I have pointed in the previous two chapters. For it includes all manner of objects, not excluding reminders and reminiscentia themselves. Indeed, it even includes the world of Platonic Forms, which we must recognize if we are truly to know them. If Plato does not speak expressly of “recognizing,” this is only because recognition is so deeply presupposed in his thinking. What else does the dialectician do but recognize Forms in particulars? Plato’s general preoccupation with the realm of metaxu (“intermediaries”) and with the issue of methexis (“participation”) finds in recognition an invaluable if not explicitly acknowledged ally.
(4) Recognizing is intermediary in still another way as well: a way that helps to account for its literally intermediate location in this book. In recognizing, I find myself midway between my mind and my world. As a recognizer, I am rarely confined to mind alone: even in intra-psychic recognizing I discover pathways into the surrounding world by way of the content recognized or through the historicity of previous enactments. But, by the same token, I am not trapped within the circumambient world when I recognize; I retain access at all times to what Whitehead would call the “mental pole,”29 thanks to the freedom with which I can shift attention and refocus in the process of recognizing.
As a result, recognizing engages us in a basic two-fold action. On the one hand, it plunges us willy-nilly into the unyielding perceived world regarded as a source of what Piaget calls “perceptual indices.”30 What could be more obdurate, more determinately given than such indices taken as recognitory cues? On the other hand, recognizing draws us back into the interiority of our minds, where its complicated liaisons with recollecting reveal it to be capable of subtle psychical involutions. Its undeniably public face—its manifest and above-board character when it is allied with perception—is counterposed with its equally incontestable (albeit less manifest) private side when it is tied to recollection. The tension between these two directions or dimensions of recognizing is at once more dramatic and more consequential than the corresponding tension between external and psychical reminders, or that between co-reminiscing and auto-reminiscing. All three kinds of remembering exhibit both poles, mental as well as physical—indeed, just this homology helps to constitute them as a coherent group of “mnemonic modes”—but in recognizing the disparity between the two poles is most fully highlighted.