In the same measure that the concept of recognition has become the normative core of several different emancipation movements over the last several years, there have also been increasing doubts as to its critical potential. This theoretical scepticism has doubtlessly been fostered by the experience that we live in a culture of affirmation in which publicly displayed recognition often bears the marks of mere rhetoric and has the character of being just a substitute for material remuneration. Praising certain characteristics or abilities seems to have become a political instrument whose unspoken function consists in inserting individuals or social groups into existing structures of domination by encouraging a positive self-image. Far from making a lasting contribution to the autonomy of the members of our society, social recognition appears merely to serve the creation of attitudes that conform to the dominant system. The reservations about this new critical approach thus amount to the thesis that practices of recognition do not empower persons, but subject them to domination. Processes of reciprocal recognition, in short, encourage subjects to adopt a particular self-conception that motivates them to voluntarily take on tasks or duties that serve society.1
These fundamental reservations recall the considerations that moved the Marxist theoretician Louis Althusser over thirty years ago to view the practice of public recognition as the common mechanism of all forms of ideology.2 His roughly outlined arguments, which dealt exclusively with state policies, were later taken up by Judith Butler, who, by drawing on Jacques Lacan's work in psychoanalysis, fashioned these arguments into a tenable concept.3 As is well known, Althusser made use of the double meaning of the French concept of ‘subjectivation’ in order to elucidate what he understood by ideology: individuals become ‘subjects’, i.e. persons who are aware of their responsibilities and rights, only to the extent to which they are subjected to a system of practical rules and role-ascriptions that lends them a social identity. Once we understand the act of subjection according to the model of public affirmation, ‘recognition’ suddenly loses all of its positive connotations and becomes the central mechanism of ideology. On this account, to recognize someone is to encourage them, by means of repeated and ritual invitations and demands (Aufforderungen), to adopt precisely that self-conception that conforms to the established system of behavioural expectations.
However, Althusser himself never employed this concept of ideology in a critical sense, restricting himself instead to a purely descriptive use of it.4 Without making any normative judgements, he described the institutional act of recognition as a mechanism for creating subjects who behave in conformity with a given social system. For a critical theory of society that seeks to locate its normative foundation in the act of reciprocal recognition, however, Althusser's conceptual determinations pose a difficult challenge; a theory of recognition is forced to ask whether social recognition might also occasionally take on the function of securing social domination. In this new context, the concept of ideology loses its merely descriptive significance and becomes a pejorative category, indicating forms of recognition that must be regarded as false or unjustified, because they fail to promote personal autonomy, instead engendering attitudes that conform to practices of domination.5
Of course, it would be wrong to accuse the theory of recognition of having ignored negative phenomena of subjection and domination from the very beginning. After all, this approach owes its entire critical impulse to social phenomena of lacking or insufficient recognition. It seeks to draw attention to practices of humiliation or degradation that deprive subjects of a justified form of social recognition and therefore of a decisive condition for the formation of their autonomy.6 Conversely, this way of formulating the issue makes clear that ‘recognition’ has always been treated as representing the opposite of practices of domination or subjection. Such forms of exercising power were to be regarded as phenomena of withheld recognition, intentional disrespect or humiliation, such that recognition itself could never come under suspicion of functioning as a means of domination. This presumption of innocence, however, is no longer self-evident in view of the considerations to which Althusser's concept of ideology gives rise. The latter draws attention to forms of recognition that, by employing methods of ritual affirmation in order to create a self-image that conforms to social expectations, can be effective as a means of social domination. They thus contribute to the reproduction of the existing relations of domination. We could easily cite past examples that demonstrate just how often public displays of recognition merely serve to create and maintain an individual relation-to-self that is seamlessly integrated into a system based on the prevailing division of labour. For example, the pride that ‘Uncle Tom’ feels as a reaction to the constant praises of his submissive virtues makes him into a compliant servant in a slave-owning society.7 The emotional appeals to the ‘good’ mother and housewife made by churches, parliaments or the mass media over the centuries caused women to remain trapped within a self-image that most effectively accommodated the gender-specific division of labour.8 The public esteem enjoyed by heroic soldiers continuously engendered a sufficiently large class of men who willingly went to war in pursuit of glory and adventure.9 As trivial as these examples may be, they do make strikingly clear that social recognition can always also operate as a conformist ideology, for the continuous repetition of identical forms of recognition can create a feeling of self-worth that provides the motivational resources for forms of voluntary subordination, without employing methods of repression.
However, these cases all owe their suggestive power entirely to the certainty afforded by hindsight. The choice of examples itself, indeed the very way they are described, is the result of a moral judgement that can be made only from the perspective of our morally advanced present. Because we live in an epoch that regards itself as being morally superior to past ages, we are certain that the esteem enjoyed by the virtuous slave, the good housewife and the heroic soldier was purely ideological. Yet if we put ourselves in the past, it becomes much more difficult to distinguish between a false, ‘ideological’ form of recognition and one that is correct and morally imperative, because the criteria of which we were so convinced suddenly become uncertain. Why should the slave's experience of being esteemed for his submissiveness by his white masters not allow him to attain a feeling of self-worth that provides him with a certain degree of inner autonomy? And does the public recognition of women as caring mothers not give them a measure of compensation for the disrespect they have endured as a result of their exclusion from roles outside the home? And finally, the set of values characteristic of male heroism may have provided men who suffer from social insignificance, owing to unemployment or lack of qualifications, an opportunity to become part of an independent, male subculture in which they could gain compensatory prestige and reputation. In each case, these possibilities of interpretation reveal that upon closer inspection of the historical circumstances, a particular dispositif of esteem that in retrospect seems to be pure ideology can in fact prove to be a condition for a group-specific attainment of increased self-worth. Once we examine particular forms of recognition in terms of the sociocultural conditions prevailing at the time, determining their ideological contents seems all the more difficult. Only in cases of revolt against dominant practices of recognition do we have any grounds for speaking of mere ideology. In general, however, this difficulty diminishes over time; the greater the historical distance, the more likely we are to possess generally accepted criteria that allow us to distinguish retrospectively between ideological and morally imperative forms of recognition.
With regard to the present, however, this theoretical problem retains its intricacies. As long as we have no empirical evidence that people experience particular practices of recognition as repressive, constricting or fostering stereotypes, it is extremely difficult to distinguish between ideological and justified forms of recognition in any reasonable way. This difficulty is a result of the fact that when we speak of acts of recognition, we always refer to the public display of a value or achievement that is to be attributed to a person or social group. To speak in this connection of an ‘ideology’ is therefore to claim that intrinsically positive and affirmative practices in fact bear the negative features of an act of willing subjection, even though these practices appear prima facie to lack all such discriminatory features. This raises the question of how public displays of social worth, i.e. recognition, can nevertheless bear features of domination. This problem constitutes the topic of this chapter. As an introduction, I summarize what we, after a number of recent attempts to clarify this issue, can understand today by a practice of recognition. Here we will see that the concept of recognition is normative inasmuch as it indicates the rational behaviour with which we can respond to the evaluative qualities (Werteigenschaften) of a person or group (I). These conceptual considerations, however, only appear to offer a solution to the problem of how to distinguish between ideological and morally justified forms of social recognition. We will see that ideologies of recognition are only rarely entirely irrational; rather, they mobilize evaluative reasons contained within our horizon of values (II). A solution to our problem can only be found in the attempt to dissect and spell out the conditions of various forms of recognition, thereby revealing the ‘irrational core’ of all merely ‘ideological’ forms of recognition. I suspect that this irrationality does not lie on the semantic surface of our evaluative vocabulary, but is to be found instead in the discrepancy between evaluative promises and material fulfilment (III).
In a certain sense, the problem I wish to focus on here cannot even exist for Althusser. His concept of recognition is one-dimensional, permitting no distinctions between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘justified’ and ‘ideological’ practices of recognition. Instead, every form of recognition is necessarily ideological; merely by making a demand upon or ‘calling upon’ addressees imposes upon them an imaginary unity that they in no way possess as individuals. By contrast, an attempt to distinguish between ‘ideological’ and appropriate forms of recognition must begin by giving a positive definition of ‘recognition’.10 Although recently there has been strong growth in the research on ‘recognition’, there remains a great deal of dispute over its conceptual core. Indirectly drawing on Hegel, the concept is used generally to depict vague attitudes or practices through which individual subjects or social groups receive affirmation for certain specific qualities. Not only does the relation of recognition to the Kantian concept of ‘respect’ remain unclear, but it has also become more apparent than ever that the concept of recognition encompasses semantic components that differ in English, French and German usage, and that the relation between these various components is not especially transparent. In German, the concept essentially indicates only the normative act of according positive social worth, while the English and French usage also encompasses the epistemic senses of identifying or recalling something. An additional difficulty consists in the fact that in all three languages, the concept can be used to indicate speech acts in which one admits or acknowledges a point, in which case ‘recognition’ has a primarily self-referential sense.11 Finally, a Wittgensteinian interpretation has come to rival the Hegelian usage of the term; ‘recognition’ here functions as a performative response to the actions (Lebensäußerungen) of other people. Owing to the writings of Stanley Cavell in particular, who makes do without any recourse to Hegel, the category of ‘acknowledgement’ has penetrated the inner circle of analytic philosophy.12
In this thicket of conceptual confusion and unanswered questions, it is only by giving categorial definitions that do not shy away from simplifying the issue or excluding certain elements that we can gain some clarity. Here we must take account of the fact that recognition represents a moral act anchored in the social world as an everyday occurrence. I assume four premises upon which there seems to me to be sufficient consensus. First, it can be claimed that the original mode of recognition consists in the meaning emphasized in the German usage of the term: the affirmation of positive qualities of human subjects or groups. However, this is not to say that we cannot establish any systematic connections between this and other definitions of the term. Second, there is now general agreement that recognition is an act that cannot consist in mere words or symbolic expressions, because only the corresponding modes of comportment can produce the credibility so normatively significant for the recognized subject. Insofar as we limit ourselves to intersubjective relationships, we should speak of recognition as a ‘stance’ (Haltung), i.e. as an attitude realized in concrete action.13 Third, we can assume that such acts of recognition represent a distinct phenomenon in the social world, which cannot, therefore, be understood as a mere side-effect of a separate action, but must instead be explicitly intended. Whether they be gestures, speech acts or institutional policies, such expressions or measures always represent acts of recognition inasmuch as their primary purpose is to affirm the existence of another person or group. This basic conceptual determination rules out, for example, defining positive attitudes that are inevitably accompanied by other interests in interaction as being a form of recognition. If I have a strong desire to play chess with another person on a regular basis, I may express a certain amount of esteem for the other person's intellectual abilities, but my primary purpose is to play chess together. A fourth, broadly agreed-upon premise can be summarized by the claim that recognition represents a conceptual species comprising a number of various sub-species. ‘Stances’ of love, legal respect and esteem thus accentuate and display various aspects of the basic attitude we understand generically as recognition.
These four premises only summarize what we assume is meant by recognition in a halfway clear use of the term. Recognition should be understood as a genus comprising various forms of practical attitudes whose primary intention consists in a particular act of affirming another person or group. Unlike what Althusser had in mind, such recognitional stances are unambiguously positive, because they permit the addressee to identify with his or her own qualities and thus to achieve a greater degree of autonomy. Far from being a mere ideology, recognition constitutes an intersubjective prerequisite for the ability to fulfil one's life goals autonomously.14 Yet the real challenge in clarifying the use of this concept begins once we turn to the epistemic character of such affirmative behaviour; the decisive question here is whether we should understand recognition as an attributive or receptive act. When it comes to finding an appropriate characterization for a generic case of recognition, we appear to be faced with two alternatives for our cognitive relation to our partners in interaction. We can understand the affirmation contained in such an act either as an ascription of a new, positive quality, or as a perception of qualities that a person already possesses, thus reinforcing or manifesting them secondarily. In the first case, recognition would represent the ascription or addition of a status that the concerned subject could not have previously possessed; in the second case, recognition would be a particular act of perception by which we become aware of an already present status that a subject has independent of our perceiving it. Another way of defining this is by saying that recognition is productive in the first case and merely reproductive in the second; the status or positive qualities possessed by a person or a social group are either produced in the act of recognition or simply reproduced in a particular meaningful way.
It is not easy to choose between these two conceptual models, because each seems to possess certain distinct advantages. I believe that the perception or reception model permits us to account better for our intuition that recognition must be an act motivated by practical reasons: we thereby react in a correct or appropriate way to the reasons contained in the evaluative qualities that human beings possess in different respects.15 By contrast, the attribution model is free of any admixture of this kind of value realism. Here we account for our intuition that recognition is a constitutive act in which we ascribe particular qualities to a person or group. The disadvantage of this latter model represents the advantage of the reception model: if recognition merely attributes determinate qualities to another person, then we possess no internal criteria for judging the correctness or appropriateness of such acts of ascription. There would be no limits to the permutations that recognition could take, because we would have to regard everything as an ability or status just because it has come about by an attributive act. The only way out of this problem consists in claiming that the legitimacy of a given act of recognition is measured according to the normative quality of the way recognition comes about. However, the concept of recognition would then lose all the moral implications that are supposed to distinguish it from a sociological ‘labelling approach’.
Now, at first sight, matters look no better for the other approach – the reception or response model. In order to be able to claim that an act of recognition constitutes a ‘correct’ response to the evaluative qualities of a person or group of persons, we must presuppose the objective existence of values in a way that is no longer reconcilable with our knowledge of how they are constituted. It may seem right for us to continue to place recognition in the ‘space of reasons’ so that it is not deprived of its character as a moral action. Only if recognition is motivated by reasons we can articulate can it be understood as an intentional act and thus belong in a broad sense to the domain of morality. The proposal that we identify this type of reason as ‘evaluative’ is convincing in that, by recognizing others, we appear to attest to the value of a person or group. The moral constraints we respect in the act of recognition result from the valuable qualities to which our recognitional behaviour gives public expression. The problem starts only when we begin to give a more precise definition of the status of such evaluative reasons. Here it seems that we have no choice but to fall back upon a kind of value realism that is no longer reconcilable with our other basic ontological convictions. However, once we concede the possibility that these kinds of values represent the certainties of our lifeworld, whose character can be subject to historical modifications, the situation changes. The qualities we would have to perceive in persons or groups in order to respond to them ‘correctly’ in our recognitional behaviour would thus be no longer unchangeable and objective, but historically variable. In order to arrive at a halfway plausible theory, however, we would have to add some further elements to the notion of recognition outlined here. We would have to conceive of the lifeworld as a kind of ‘second nature’ into which subjects are socialized by their learning successively to appreciate the valuable qualities of other persons. This learning process would have to be conceived of as a complex one in which we acquire modes of behaviour corresponding to the perception of evaluative qualities, whose particularity would obviously compel us to restrain our natural egocentrism. As a result, we could then understand human recognitional behaviour as a bundle of habits linked to the revisable reasons for the value of other persons in the process of socialization.16
However, this line of argumentation has not yet solved the real difficulty posed by this type of moderate value realism. We have already said that the valuable qualities we can appropriately recognize in other persons can only be real within the experiential horizon of a particular lifeworld. Those who have been socialized successfully into the culture of that lifeworld take these values to be objective givens of their social environment, just as they initially take other cultural particularities for granted. This entails the threat of a kind of relativism that is fundamentally irreconcilable with the normative aims of the concept of recognition, because the values according to which we measure the appropriateness of our recognitional behaviour would only be valid within one single culture. As a consequence, the relativism associated with the response or reception model would no longer differ from that of the attribution model. In both cases the validity of recognitional stances – be they acts of ascription or appropriate responses – would be contingent upon the normative facts of a given form of life. In my opinion, we can only avoid this difficulty by equipping this moderate value realism with a robust concept of progress. This would involve assuming there to be a definite direction to the cultural transformations of valuable human qualities, which would allow us to make justified judgements about the trans-historical validity of a particular culture of recognition.17 Without going into the details of such a concept of progress, which I believe must be defined as a form of reflection on the knowledge that guides us in the lifeworld,18 the main idea behind it is that with the differentiation of the evaluative qualities we observe and notice on the basis of our socialization, the normative level of our relations of recognition rises as well. With every value that we can affirm by an act of recognition, our opportunities for identifying with our abilities and attaining greater autonomy grow. This should suffice to justify the idea that our concept of recognition is anchored in a moderate form of value realism.
But before I return to the question of how we can distinguish between ideological and justified forms of recognition, I still need to deal with at least one other problem; it arises from the fact that we speak of ideologies mostly as transformations of consciousness or evaluative systems of statements whose source lies not in intersubjective behaviour, but in institutionalized rules and arrangements. Like Marx, who held the civil form of the contract to be an institution that produces ideologies,19 we assume that the specific constitution of certain institutions is what originally leads to the emergence of illusory or fictionalizing beliefs. If patterns of recognition are now also thought to be capable of engendering such ideologies, we will have to clarify the fact that not only persons can grant recognition, but social institutions as well. We must therefore shift from the level of intersubjective recognition to the level of institutionally guaranteed recognition.20
We can make this transition by recognizing that institutional rules and practices can contain certain particular conceptions about which human evaluative qualities should receive recognition in which specific way. For instance, the value that a person, as an individual with needs, should be recognized as possessing is expressed in the institution of the modern nuclear family, while the normative fact that members of modern societies are to be respected as free and equal subjects is expressed in the principle of equality, institutionalized in modern legal systems. In both cases, institutions can be understood as embodiments of the specific form of recognition that subjects accord each other on the basis of specific evaluative qualities. However, we have to distinguish between those institutions that ‘express’ patterns of recognition and those institutional rules and practices that articulate particular forms of recognition in a merely indirect way or only as a side-effect. The routines typical of all institutions convey particular conceptions of human subjects; though they do not intentionally accord recognition, they can be understood as crystallizations of patterns of recognition. For example, the rules that regulate the remuneration of labour, safety precautions, health care and vacation time for workers in certain specific industries reflect forms of recognition that result from social struggles, e.g. in the organizational practices and routines concerning the treatment of hospital patients. The schemata of perception and behaviour, which are the prerequisite for the particular treatment of individuals in these organizations as members or clients, can be understood as sediments of practices of recognition in the lifeworld. Of course, the direction of these sediments can be inverted: for instance, if a certain organization takes on a leading role in the creation or discovery of new evaluative qualities. In this case, modified patterns of recognition are established in the rules and practices of an institution before they find expression in the narrative praxis of a given lifeworld. This second case of institutional recognition is surely crucial when it comes to the question of how, and in what sense, certain specific patterns of recognition possess an ideological character, owing to the fact that they encourage subjects to freely subordinate themselves to the prevailing system of rules and expectations.
So far my main concern has been to find an appropriate understanding of the concept of recognition. Faced with an alternative between an attribution model and a reception model, I have chosen a moderate value realism. We should understand recognition as a way of rationally responding to evaluative qualities we have learned to perceive in others to the degree that we have been integrated into the second nature of our lifeworld. This suffices to give us a sense of the difference between this conceptual definition and Althusser's suggestion that every form of recognition represents an instance of ideology. He holds that regardless of how subjects are addressed, the mere ascription of social worth represents an ideological practice, because it creates both the illusion of unity and identity as well as the willingness to accept corresponding behavioural expectations. By contrast, the thesis developed in this essay assumes the possibility of an appropriate and rational form of recognition, which would consist in giving performative expression to existing evaluative qualities. However, this does not yet give us a clear enough sense of why this conception of recognition should indicate a moral act at all. Although we are dealing with an act that is mediated by evaluative reasons, this by itself in no way indicates that this act is necessarily moral. Its character as a moral act does not become apparent until we take a closer look at what I have already described as a ‘restriction of egocentrism’. In a certain sense this idea builds on Kant, who, when introducing his concept of respect, wrote that every conception of worth compels us to impose a restriction on our actions which ‘thwarts’ our ‘self-love’.21 We could continue this line of thought by saying that to recognize others is to perceive an evaluative quality in them that motivates us intrinsically to behave no longer egocentrically, but rather in accordance with the intentions, desires and needs of others. This makes clear that recognitional behaviour must represent a moral act, because it lets itself be determined by the value of other persons. When we take up the stance of recognition, what guides our behaviour are not our own intentions, but the evaluative qualities of the other. If that is the case, we must be able to distinguish between as many forms of moral action as there are values worthy of recognition. This is why I have come to the conclusion that we have to distinguish between three sources of morality corresponding to the various forms of recognition in our lifeworld. As I have claimed in agreement with several other authors, the value horizon of modern societies is characterized by the idea that humans, as beings who have needs, who are equally entitled to autonomy and equally capable of achievement, should possess a value to which diverse forms of recognitional behaviour correspond (love, legal respect, social esteem).22
Before I pursue this thought any further, I want to address the question that should in fact stand at the centre of this essay. I had said that we cannot exclude the possibility that forms of social recognition possess a purely ideological function if they encourage an individual relation-to-self that suits the existing dominant order. Instead of truly giving expression to a particular value, such ideological forms of recognition would ensure the motivational willingness to fulfil certain tasks and duties without resistance. At this point it probably makes sense to further narrow the set of public value statements and conceptions of the human subject that could play any role at all in such ideological forms of recognition, for the majority of the evaluative classifications we might currently encounter in our current lifeworld do not even meet the prerequisites for being credible as ideological forms of recognition.
First of all, the systems of belief that might be at issue in the case of such ideologies have to give positive expression to the value of a subject or group of subjects. These ideologies are only capable of fulfilling the function ascribed to them if they give individuals the opportunity to relate to themselves affirmatively, such that they see themselves encouraged to adopt certain specific tasks willingly. Thus we must exclude classifications of an obviously discriminatory character; systems of belief in which specific groups of persons are denied worth – racism, misogyny or xenophobia – cannot represent ideological forms of recognition, because they usually injure the self-image of their addressees. Ideologies that are to be effective in terms of social recognition cannot exclude their addressees, but must instead contribute to their integration.
Second, in order to achieve the desired effect, these systems of beliefs must be ‘credible’ in the eyes of the addressees themselves. If the latter have no good reason to identify with the value statements addressed to them, then these statements will fail to fulfil their performative function. This limiting condition is in no way trivial. It is obvious that if positive value statements are to strengthen the self-image of a person or group of persons, they have to be realistic – that is, they have to apply to abilities or virtues that the addressees really do possess. It makes just as little sense to praise police officers for their mathematical skills as it does to praise outstanding mathematicians for their physical strength, unless both are being honoured for achievements unrelated to their respective careers. But there is a second, more important element to the criterion of ‘credibility’, one that is related to the expansion of the realm of evaluative reasons: people will only accept value statements that go beyond the value they have already achieved in the process of overcoming one-sided or inappropriate interpretations. In other words, ideological forms of recognition can only employ value statements that live up to the evaluative vocabulary of the present. Praise for already discredited evaluative qualities will not be credible in the eyes of the addressees. Therefore, the criterion of credibility also contains a component of rationality with a clear historical or temporal index. Today, a woman who is praised for her virtues as a good housewife will have little reason to identify with this value statement to such a degree that she could regard her own feeling of self-worth as having been thereby reinforced.
Correspondingly, ‘normalizing’ patterns of recognition cannot be viewed as ‘ideological’ forms of recognition.23 After all, the term ‘normalization’ in this context means that a person or group has been recognized for having certain qualities or an identity that they view as a restriction on their sphere of autonomy.24 Therefore, a normalizing form of recognition cannot move us to develop an affirmative self-conception that would lead us to willingly accept tasks and sacrifices imposed upon us by others. The matter is a bit more complicated when we only suspect the effect of an act of normalization, without having any empirical evidence that the addressees are displeased with or object to such an act. In these situations, the negative judgement assumes that its addressees would actually reject the qualities ascribed to them if they indeed knew all the details, for they would then have a sense that their autonomy has thereby been restricted. Therefore, this idea essentially amounts to the claim that a pattern of recognition is ‘normalizing’ if it serves to maintain a restrictive, evaluatively anachronistic ascription of identity in an unjustified manner, while ideological forms of recognition can only maintain their repression-free effect with the aid of contemporary, evaluatively rational value statements.
Perhaps we can name a third condition that has to be fulfilled in order for forms of social recognition to take on an ideological function: such value statements have to be not only positive and credible, but also contrastive, in the sense of giving expression to a particular new value or special achievement. This restriction follows from the fact that individuals can identify with the definitions ascribed to them only if they have the sense of being distinguished in a certain way. A value statement, which the addressees have to be able to apply to themselves in comparison with the past or with the surrounding social order, will have to evince a contrast that guarantees that they will feel distinguished in some special way. If an existing form of social recognition is only expanded to include a previously excluded social circle, it will lack this aspect of definitive accentuation eliciting the motivational willingness to subject oneself voluntarily.
With these three restrictions, not all of which are equally important, I have begun to outline only the conditions for partially successful ideological forms of recognition. They can evoke an individual self-conception that motivates a subject to accept tasks and obligations freely and willingly only if the value statements employed are simultaneously positive, credible and contrastive. But taken together, these conditions for success make clear that such ideological forms of recognition cannot simply represent irrational systems of beliefs; rather, they must mobilize evaluative reasons with the power to rationally motivate their addressees to apply these reasons to themselves. In contrast to ideologies that have an exclusionary character and virtually shatter the evaluative perceptual horizon of the present by blinding individuals or groups to the evaluative qualities of others, ideological forms of recognition operate within an historical ‘space of reasons’: they only expand, so to speak, the evaluative qualities we have learned to perceive in other humans by adding a new meaning – one which, when taken up successfully, creates a self-conception that conforms to a person's function in society. As with every new accentuation inherent in social recognition, these kinds of rational ideologies are also located within the horizon of value that encompasses the normative culture of recognition in modern societies. They also cannot avoid making semantic use of the principles of love, legal equality or achievement which shape the given conditions of reciprocal recognition all the way down to our evaluative awareness. The question we must therefore pose is how we can draw a distinction between justified and unjustified forms of social recognition. At what point does a new accentuation become an ideology with the function of merely evoking a relation-to-self that conforms to a given social role?
We do not get a clear sense of the full extent of the difficulties we face here until we recall that the historical development of recognition generally occurs as the disclosure of new points of view within the horizon of general principles. By invoking an overarching principle of recognition, one brings a new, previously neglected value into play whose consideration compels us to broaden our evaluative horizon and thereby intensify or expand recognition. In my view, during the last two centuries, new needs have constantly been asserted by invoking the normative meaning of ‘love’ – the well-being of the child, the wife's need for autonomy, and so on. These needs have gradually led to a deepening of reciprocal care and affection; the same dynamic can be observed in the relations of recognition obtaining in modern law, where legal proceedings pertaining to previously neglected life-situations have brought about an unambiguous increase in legal equality. I would also speak of a dialectic between the general and the particular even with regard to the achievement principle, since here an unbroken symbolic struggle over the meaning of ‘work’ and ‘pay’ has brought us to the threshold of a broader conception of social contributions and achievements. But the more we become aware of the fact that relations of recognition have been transformed, expanded and improved historically by means of new accentuations of general principles, the more difficult it becomes to identify merely ideological forms of recognition. Who can tell us for sure that an apparently functional, ideological evaluation is not just one of those shifts in accentuation by means of which the struggle for recognition unfolds historically? The issue is simple only in cases where the concerned parties actually resist new forms of evaluative distinction. Here we have at least an initial reason to question changed forms of recognition and to suspect that a mere ideology could be at work. But in the absence of such protest, where individuals seem to attain a stronger sense of self-respect through a new form of recognition, we initially lack all criteria for distinguishing between ideological and justified shifts in accentuation. In the final part of this essay, I would like to present a recent example in order to at least sketch the first outlines of an answer to the question.
Ideological forms of recognition have to represent positive classifications whose evaluative contents are sufficiently credible for their addressees to have good reason to accept them. Any new form of distinction must be able to alter their relation-to-self so as to promise a psychic premium of heightened self-respect, provided that they do in fact regard the abilities, needs and virtues associated with this distinction as being their own. Today, the primary examples of such ideologies appear to be advertisements that set up a schema of recognition in which a certain specific group of persons feels the urge to conform to a set of given standards. If the corresponding practice can be carried out with the help of an item advertised in a more or less concealed way, advertising has attained its goal. However, the example of consumer advertising is only partially sufficient to illustrate ideological forms of recognition. In general, the content of these advertisements is received with the mental reservation that the commodity on offer cannot really alter our life practices in any substantial way. But if certain specific advertisements cross this threshold and have an actual effect on our behaviour, then we could say that they wield the same power as ideological forms of recognition: they would then possess the ‘regulative’ ability to engender modes of behaviour by promising the advantage of an increase in self-esteem and public affirmation. Using Foucault's terminology, the power exercised by ideological forms of recognition is productive and not repressive. By promising social recognition for the subjective demonstration of certain abilities, needs or desires, they engender a willingness to adopt practices and modes of comportment that suit the reproduction of social domination.25 But even by having clarified the type of power represented by ideological forms of recognition, we have not yet determined how they could be identified within the unbroken flow of a many-layered struggle for recognition. Although the comparison with modern methods of advertisement gives us a clear sense of the fact that such ideologies must speak to their addressees in a way that reinforces the former's evaluative credibility, justified demands for new accentuations of social recognition can no longer be made without taking on elements of a symbolic political aim that draws public attention to them. Instead of continuing to address this question on a merely conceptual plane, I will now take a look at an empirical example in the hope that it might further clarify matters. From the multiplicity of new patterns of recognition currently found in our society's culture – the increased value accorded to female housework in connection with the achievement principle, an appreciation of belonging to social minorities in connection with legal equality, the idea of giving recognition to ‘public service’ (Bürgerarbeit) – I would like to pick out one instance that shows all signs of being a purely ‘ideological’ form of recognition. This should reveal whether there are any criteria for determining the ideological content of forms of recognition with any real certainty.
Recently, the sphere of work in developed capitalist economies has undergone a far-reaching structural transformation, with the result that employees have come to be addressed in a new way. Current management literature speaks no longer of ‘wage-workers’ or the ‘labour force’, but instead of creative ‘entrepreneurs’ of their own labour, or ‘entreployees’ (Arbeitskraftunternehmer).26 The shift in accentuation accompanying this change in nomenclature takes up the discourse of individual self-fulfilment in order to apply it to the organization of labour in the sphere of production and the provision of services. Growing needs for self-fulfilment in the sphere of labour should be accommodated by levelling hierarchies, raising the autonomy of teamwork and providing a higher degree of self-management, thus increasing the chance of conceiving of one's own activity as an autonomous expression of acquired skills. Furthermore, this new nomenclature seems to be accompanied by a whole new way of conceiving of one's own profession, since subjects should regard their work no longer as the fulfilment of a necessity, but as the realization of a ‘vocation’ or ‘calling’. The idea of labelling labourers as employers of their own labour-power urges us to regard every job change or every new change in working conditions as a result of these subjects' own decisions, made solely in accordance with the intrinsic value of their respective job. Therefore, this modified nomenclature also seems to be accompanied by a new accentuation of the achievement principle, since wage-labourers are required to perform all the autonomous, creative and flexible activities previously reserved for the classical entrepreneur. This new form of recognition asserts that every qualified member of the labour force is capable of planning his or her career path as a risk-filled enterprise, requiring the autonomous application of all of his or her skills and abilities.
In this case it certainly seems reasonable for us to discern the outlines of ‘ideological’ recognition with regulative power. The suspicion is that the shift in accentuation of recognition primarily has the function of evoking a new relation-to-self, which encourages willing acceptance of a considerably modified workload. The increased demands for flexibility and the deregulation of labour that have accompanied capitalism's neoliberal structural transformation require the ability to productively market oneself, an ability engendered by referring to workers as ‘entreployees’.27 Yet, there is a gap between this initial suspicion and a justified claim; overcoming this gap requires a set of criteria that can be developed only with difficulty. If this new way of addressing employees really is to be considered a case of recognition, we can say that it fulfils the conditions of an ideological form of recognition: subjects have good evaluative reasons to apply the altered distinction to themselves and thereby attain a higher degree of self-esteem or self-respect. Therefore, we cannot follow the standard path taken by every critique of ideology, which consists in demonstrating the irrationality of a system of beliefs that is viewed as ideological, for in an evaluative sense at least, the new form of recognition must be sufficiently rational to be ‘credible’ in the eyes of employees, enabling the latter to apply it to themselves. Therefore, I believe we must spell out in even greater detail the conditions for conferring social recognition, so that we might be able to reveal the characteristic deficiencies of ideological forms of recognition. To do so, I pick up my argumentation where I last left off: the discussion of recognition as a suitably rational, moral response to the evaluative qualities of human beings.
At the very beginning of this essay, I pointed out that recognition may not consist in mere words or symbolic expressions, but must be accompanied by actions that confirm these promises. An act of recognition is incomplete, so to speak, as long as it does not lead to modes of behaviour that give real expression to the actual value articulated in the original act. However, recognition can reasonably be said to be ‘fulfilled’ only in cases of simple interaction between two people. As soon as we turn to instances of generalized recognition provided by social institutions, we can no longer suppose recognition to be consummated in the corresponding modes of conduct or forms of institutional activity. Although institutionally generalized forms of recognition also ultimately find expression in transformed habits, they are primarily fulfilled in the realm of institutional policies and practices. In order to establish new modes of generalized forms of recognition, legal definitions would have to be changed and material redistribution would have to take place.
Hence, alongside the evaluative dimension of the credibility of social recognition, we must also consider the material element, which, according to the degree of complexity of a given social interaction, consists in either appropriate individual conduct or suitable institutional procedures. An altered form of social recognition will only be ‘credible’ if, in addition to being rational from an evaluative point of view, it does justice to a new value quality in material terms. Something in the physical world – be it modes of conduct or institutional circumstances – must change if the addressees are to be convinced that they have been recognized in a new manner.28
It is this second, material dimension that provides a key to the difficult task of distinguishing between justified and ideological forms of recognition. As we have seen, the latter are able to develop their regulative power only if their evaluative vocabulary is sufficiently rational to reveal credible modes of fashioning a new and affirmative self-conception. Generally speaking, such ideological forms will be more successful, the more fully they account for the evaluative expectations that point the way towards progress in the culture of reciprocal recognition. But the deficiency by which we might recognize such ideologies could consist in their structural inability to ensure the material prerequisites for realizing new evaluative qualities. Between the evaluative promise and its material fulfilment, there would be a chasm; the provision of the institutional prerequisites would no longer be reconcilable with the dominant social order. If we apply this criterion to the example I have illustrated above, then my belief will prove to be true. The new manner of addressing employees and qualified workers as entrepreneurs of their own labour-power might contain an evaluative promise of recognizing a higher degree of individuality and initiative, but it in no way ensures the institutional measures that would allow a consistent realization of these new values. Instead, employees are compelled to feign initiative, flexibility and talents where there is no material basis for doing so. This new form of recognition is not deficient or irrational in an evaluative sense, but it does not meet the material demands of credible, justified recognition, for the institutional practices required for truly realizing the newly accentuated value are not delivered in the act of recognition. But if we add the components of material fulfilment that together constitute the rationality of recognition, then we can claim that ideological forms of recognition suffer a second-level rationality deficit. Even if they are rational in the sense that they derive from the historically changing realm of evaluative reasons, they remain irrational in the sense that they do not go beyond the merely symbolic plane to the level of material fulfilment. A second instance of a novel form of recognition that could prove ideological from this point of view is the now fashionable notion of ‘public service’, whereby a social group is granted a symbolic distinction that could encourage willing subjection, without introducing corresponding measures at the institutional level.
Of course, even the criterion formulated here ought not to lead us astray into an overly self-confident hermeneutics of suspicion. We can never exclude the possibility that the gap between an evaluative promise and its material fulfilment is merely a temporal one, a mere a delay in the realisation of the institutional prerequisites. On the level of institutional recognition, just as is the case in simple interaction, we should expect lengthy learning processes before the evaluative substance of a new form of recognition can find expression in changed modes of conduct or institutional arrangements. But all in all, the criterion of material fulfilment does provide us with a useful means of testing in advance whether an alteration in a given form of recognition might in fact bring about an increase in regulative power. Institutional patterns of evaluative distinction that lack any prospect of yielding material change can then in good conscience be labelled ideological forms of recognition.