Recognition as Constitutive Power and the Ontological Status of Recognition

In Chapter One, we have analyzed two “negative” accounts of recognition, Sartre’s and Butler’s.²³⁹ The “negativity” of these accounts of recognition lies, as previously said, in their positing recognition as a fundamental relational category for the development of human subjectivity while conferring it an ambivalent meaning, which structurally downplays the feasibility of recognition to stand for a moral and critical category of the social context. Indeed, the core point of such criticisms is not that recognition can be instrumentally employed for maintaining relationships of social domination of some social group upon others. Rather, they argue that recognition is ontologically co-extensive with power, as distinguished from

239 See the previous section I. 2.2. for a more detailed overview of Sartre’s and Butler’s arguments. Here, we are referring specifically to their reflections respectively contained in Being and Nothingness (Sartre, 2003) and The Psychic Life of Power (Butler, 1997).

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domination.²⁴⁰ Indeed, with “power” is meant the anonymous capacity of the overall social context to substantially constitute human subjectivity without manifest or ideological forms of constriction and oppression, but rather enabling and empowering the social subjects with a limited horizon of emotional, agentive, and conceptual possibilities, to be disclosed in their declinations through the individual performativity of human subjects. Power, therefore, stands for the asymmetrical force of the social world in both determining through its supra-subjectively given or socially redefined personal contents the individual but empowering the latter with certain descriptive and normative qualities, capacities, and statuses. Because of its ambivalent ontological status, in both shaping and freeing the individual subject’s capacity for action, such a form of power of human societies has been described, from Foucault onwards, in terms of

“constitutive power,” to express how it is both a determining and productive force.²⁴¹ It is a determining force because the individual, in order to stand for a human subject on the social and the public level, cannot but internalize the overall symbolic framework of its social context, thereby being integrated and identified as a social subject only by assuming and reproducing its symbolic horizon. On the other side, it is a productive force because it “produces” a new ontological dimension for the individual – the one of subjectivity and social membership – while enabling the subject with a certain power, namely, the agentive capacity to develop through its individual activity the substantial meanings of the emotional, agentive, and conceptual possibilities that the social horizon entails as “feasible,” “imaginable,” “thinkable,”

and “reachable.” From such considerations, it follows that the human subject is a product of social power and that its social being entails the unavoidable ambivalent co-existence of determination and freedom. That is, to be a social subject, the individual cannot but be somehow determined, and to be socially determined cannot but mean a certain degree of freedom in redefining such determinations, even if remaining in the ontological borders of their ontological possibilities.

Even with different conceptual tools and philosophical traditions in the background, Sartre and Butler outline a very different account than Honneth’s of the relation existing between the human being and the social world, which entails both a different qualitative

240 Concerning the ambivalence of recognition and its “co-extensiveness” with power, see also Petherbridge, 2013, Ch. 5.

241 Paradigmatic for such an understanding of constitutive power have been the reflections that Foucault brought about in Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976). “A power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them to submit, or destroying them” (Foucault, 1980, p. 136).

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understanding of social freedom and recognition. Indeed, we have previously seen how Sartre and Butler interpret the social existence of the human being in terms of a limitation, an objectification, and an unavoidable abandonment of the indefiniteness of the subject’s capacity for action. The human being is willing indeed, in order to have a social existence and acquire a new power of agency, to be integrated within the existing structures of its social context, becoming at the same time something described and objectified through social categories (both descriptive and normative), heteronormatively given or supra-subjectively defined. Hence, they conclude, with an extreme and radical perspective though, that becoming a human subject for sure means accomplishing a new status, related to the acquisition through the generalized other (the single individual but also the overall social context) of social existence. But at the same time, it stands for an unavoidable abandonment of the real freedom of self-determination, for the capacity of action of human subjectivity is destined to be the mere reproduction of the supra-subjectively determined symbolic framework that organizes and coordinates the social context, although the reproduction of these contents does not occur merely mechanically but through the individual performativity of their possible declinations.²⁴² Therefore, they both conclude, first, that the condition of absolute freedom is radically precluded to the human being, as being always a human subject in a social context. Second, that the degree of freedom of the human subject, namely, its freedom-in-context, cannot correspond to social existence as such. This means that individual’s freedom, even if it is dependent upon the social, cannot coincide with the subject’s integration and inclusion in the social context as such. Instead, it should be grasped in the attempt of the social subject, never absolutely and fully reachable, to overcome existing social ties and determinations. In a nutshell, human freedom lies in the “sites of resistance or alteration” within existing social determinations, which, however, are destined both to emerge from these social determinations’ horizon of thinkability and ontological potentialities, and to be redefined and lead to a socially new constitutive horizon of sociability and subjectivity.²⁴³ Indeed, Sartre and Butler argue that the freedom of the human subject lies in the ongoing and never reachable attempt to overcome existing social ties, which paradoxically represent the

242 See Butler, 1997, p. 13: “Where conditions of subordination make possible the assumption of power, the power assumed remains tied to those conditions, but in an ambivalent way; in fact, the power assumed may at once retain and resists that subordination. This conclusion is not to be thought of as (a) a resistance that is really a recuperation of power or (b) a recuperation that is really a resistance. It is both at once, and this ambivalence forms the bind of agency. Power acts on the subject: an acting that is an enacting.”

243 See Sartre, 2003, p. 521: “To be free is not to choose the historic world in which one arises – which would have no meaning – but to choose oneself in the world whatever this may be.”

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conditio sine qua non of human subjectivity’s freedom but not its dimension of concretization.

The social world, therefore, fulfils a causal but not performative role for the degree of freedom that the human subject can reach. In fact, the human subject can experience its creative activity only by attempting to partly (never fully) overcome the objectifying and constitutive power of social contexts.

Of course, these “negative” accounts of the social world and the existence of human subjectivity entail a conception of recognition entirely consistent with their theoretical premises. Indeed, recognition is grasped as the primary fundamental device through which the social world, with its social categories, social practices, institutions, and behavioural norms, on the one hand, constitutes the individual as a social subject. Hence, recognition stands for the relational mediation through which the individual acquires, firstly, the status of subject, since, as also the “positive” accounts of recognition state, the status of subjectivity is but mediated by the intersubjective confirmation of other subjects. Secondly, because of the human being’s social organization, recognition represents the social condition through which the individual’s social membership receives a social confirmation, thereby mediating the conferral, since childhood to adulthood, of a set of descriptive and normative juridical and political statuses, or social and cultural categories, which allow the individual to act and move legitimately within a range of feasible emotional, agentive, and conceptual possibilities. So far, it seems that these

“negative” accounts of recognition entirely accept the premises of the “positive” ones. In fact, recognition is grasped in its constitutive role, to be considered in this case in the weak sense of the term, namely, as bringing human individuality in the new ontological dimension of a social existence publicly confirmed and entailing a certain power for action. That is, the power to limit the other subjects’ capacity for action, and to perform a set and order of agency.

Nonetheless, the discriminating point of the negative accounts of recognition is precisely the additional strong meaning they unveil concerning the constitutive role of recognition. Indeed, Sartre, with the idea of “objectified existence,” and Butler, with the category of “subjection,” disclose the existential trap for which, for becoming a subject, the individual is willing to abandon its indeterminacy and potential for creativity in order to be recognized from its social context, thereby internalizing both the heteronormatively given and supra-subjectively determined symbolic framework of the social world. Therefore, through such a perspective, recognition is “constitutive” both as productive of a new dimension for human individuality, namely, its social existence. But, at the same time, it is more strongly

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“constitutive” as internally shaping and determining the human being’s potential creativity through descriptive and normative social categories. These categories are both pre-existing to the human individual, thus heteronormatively interiorized without the deliberative assent of human subjects. Or they are redefined in the course of human intercourses but still on a supra-subjective level, therefore standing in front of the potential creativity and indeterminacy of the human being as “determining,” “identifying,” “objectifying,” “classifying,” “describing,” or

“prescriptive” categories.²⁴⁴

Two specific and interrelated theoretical consequences follow from these negative accounts of recognition. In the first instance, as recognition is constitutive, at least, under two meanings, critical theory cannot consider it in terms of an absolute emancipative relationship or category. Although the core point of these arguments is not that recognition can overlap with relations of domination, therefore to oppressive and repressive social relations, the impact of such accounts on the critical potentiality of recognition is misleadingly less impressive. On the contrary, it is more pervasive and structural, for recognition is not just considered in its possible ambiguous outcome, but rather it is enlightened in its intrinsic relational ambivalence, as entailing co-extensively and indissolubly both the freedom and the subjection of the human being within its social context. To the thesis of the ambiguity of recognition, according to which recognition cannot be polarly opposed to domination, the thesis of the “ambivalence of recognition” entails that recognition is intrinsically the harbinger of the asymmetrical constitutive power of social contexts. Thus, recognition intrinsically becomes an ambivalent relational category both from an ontological and theoretical point of view. On the one hand, its potential for subjective freedom is always accompanied by an effective restriction, determination, and subjection of human subjectivity. On the other hand, any critical theory that does not consider such an intrinsic ambiguity of recognition and still grounds its critical project upon its critical capacity is prevented from a real critical approach to social contexts because it cannot stand for an emancipatory theory able to overcome and struggle against the intrinsic attitude of the social subject to subjugate to its recognitive context.²⁴⁵ These accounts, hence,

244 See Sartre, 2003, p. 519: “The Other’s existence brings a factual limit to my freedom. This is because of the fact that by means of upsurge of the Other there appear certain determinations which I am without having chosen them.”

245 See Petherbridge, 2013, Ch. 8 and 9, for her overview of the notion of constitutive power, its ambivalence, and the consequent problem that this entails for a theory of recognition and its conception of the subject’s individualization. Indeed, this latter occurs one way or the other through recognitive relationships characterized by asymmetries of power, and due to such asymmetries, it is better to drop a strong ethical ideal of a full-fledged relationship of recognition.

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suggest that critical social theory should descriptively refer to recognition in order to explain the development of human subjectivity. Nonetheless, from a normative point of view, they deem that it cannot programmatically posit recognition both as the reference point of critique and the ultimate aim of human subjectivity to attain its freedom. On the contrary, the relative degree of freedom attainable for the human being, due to its social existence, lies precisely in the ongoing and never fully realizable attempt to overcome existing recognitive ties and bonds, given social objectifications and identifications, by exploring the most extreme potentialities for change and transformation contained therein.

Therefore, these negative accounts of recognition, despite being descriptively tied to the notion of recognition, manifest in their normative and critical premises as entirely opposed to a positive account of recognition such as Honneth’s. Indeed, we have seen how Honneth, who takes into analysis the issue of power only in the traditional meaning of domination,²⁴⁶ does not consider the social world and social recognition as the social conditions from which the subject’s freedom emerges in terms of a “liberation” from social constraints. Instead, according to Honneth, they stand for the final loci wherein the mere abstract potentialities of human freedom can acquire an effective and objective form.²⁴⁷ Indeed, the social world is the context where the human potential for freedom becomes concrete and real through other subjects, and recognition is precisely the moral and ethical relationship wherein the contents of human subjectivity can find expression exactly through their normative identification by the social context, becoming part of the symbolic and spiritual framework of the social world. From these two accounts, it is feasible to observe how the notion of social freedom can be declined in a twofold manner: human freedom is social because it is factually always “in context”; or because it is effective and concrete thanks to and through the social context and its recognitive structure.

As we pointed out in Chapter One, this kind of opposition among theories of subjectivity and theories of the social world cannot but raise some suspects, due to their respective radicality and unilaterality. Indeed, on the one hand, a positive account of recognition such as Honneth’s, after the considerations drawn above concerning the ideology of recognition, interprets any relation of recognition not implying any imbrication with oppressive and repressive domination

246 See again Petherbridge, 2013, Ch. 3, 8, 9. With an amazing reconstruction of Honneth’s critical theory, Petherbridge underlines how Honneth, in The Critique of Power, proves to be entirely aware of the necessity for critical theory to account also for the Foucauldian notion of “constitutive power,” stressing, nevertheless, how Honneth has subsequently abandoned such a critical point.

247 For a further overview on Honneth’s understanding of social freedom, see Honneth, 2000, 2014.

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as entirely ethical and successful, thereby destined to concur to the flourishing realization of human subjects. Although we have seen the problems deriving both from Honneth’s notion of domination, as polarly opposed to recognition, and from the need for a structural modification of its anthropological framework in order to address the empirical fact of the intermeshing of recognition with domination, Honneth attempts, through his paradigm of recognition, to deal only with the phenomenon of social domination. Namely, the kind of social relation that he identifies as both the fundamental object of criticism for critical theory and the contrasting reality against which an ethical paradigm of recognition, through its ontological conditions, is to be sensitive, is the one of domination. And his subsequent conclusion is that, in the absence of elements of social domination, recognition can stand for the genetic and constitutive condition for the human being’s free realization within the social context.²⁴⁸

On the other hand, these negative accounts of recognition point out a different form of power than of domination, then concluding that any form of recognition is but a mediation and device of constitutive power, i.e., the asymmetrical force that the social context, in its relational structures and through its horizon of thinkability and agency, has in determining and substantially constituting the human subject’s capacity for action. As incisively pointed out by Rahel Jaeggi and Robin Celikates, these negative accounts of recognition unveil a relevant aspect both of the social world, namely, its asymmetricity with respect to the individual, and of recognition, that is its standing for a relationship whose response to the requests of subjectivation and individuation of human individuals unavoidably occurs through the mediation of supra-subjective symbolic and social frameworks, thus partly both enabling and determining the human subject’s potential for creative activity. Nonetheless, the critical and normative risk intrinsic to such accounts lies in their possible “critical inefficacy,” for they end up considering any relationship of recognition as an object of critique and as a relational category that cannot stand effectively as a real tool for liberation and emancipation. In this way, any capacity to distinguish between the inevitable and the problematic degrees of social asymmetry and constitutive recognition gets blurred, and the relational and social development of human subjectivity is uniformly considered problematic.

248 Here, with “constitutive,” we intend the weak meaning of the term pointed to in the previous pages. That is, recognition is weakly constitutive in the sense that it is the affirming confirmation in the absence of which the subject is prevented from a socially and publicly known existence, thereby lacking the possibility to develop a positive relation to itself.

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[This philosophical approach] seems to be locked in a paradoxical and aporetic description of the inevitable social character of our existence. It makes difficult, indeed, to demarcate social relations of reification, alienation and domination from those recognitive relations which, instead, are constitutive of the process of subjectivation […]. The issue regarding how we can become free in front of constrictive norms and their normalizing social pressures, is to be conceived as related to the possibility for subjects to appropriate and transform social determinations, rather than as an alternative among determinacy and indeterminacy.²⁴⁹

What Jaeggi and Celikates are attempting to stress with this argument is that the negative accounts of recognition transform the inevitable situationality or sociability of human subjectivity, namely, its unavoidable birth and development within and through a social world whose existence, reproduction, and coordination cannot but rely upon supra-subjectively regulating contents, into a problem as such. They provide an ontology of the social world and a theory of human freedom wherein the normative dimension overlaps the descriptive one.

Indeed, the social world is now rightly described in that dimension of its material and symbolic reproduction that is:

(i) supra-subjective, i.e., occurring beyond the singular, conscious, intentional, and reflexive activity of the human subject.

(ii) anonymous and trans-relational, as proceeding from the interrelation of the simultaneous and dynamic systems of integrations that coordinate, give unity, direction, meaningfulness and empowerment to the overall set of social relationships.

Correspondingly, the development and formation of human subjectivity is also descriptively unveiled in:

(i) its passive, unintentional, often pre-reflexive dimension, since becoming a human subject entails becoming and developing as a publicly acknowledged social member, being thus integrated and dynamically redefined in its new contents in and through a partly given and supra-subjective social framework, which is performed simultaneously and dynamically by the overall contexts of social relation.

(ii) its partial heteronormative constitution, which, despite the empowering and individualizing capacities that the subject acquires through the mediation and integration of its contents in the overall symbolic framework, is due to the unavoidable determination and restriction of its potential for undetermined activity.²⁵⁰

249 Jaeggi & Celikates, 2017, p. 74. (Translation mine).

250 The “negative” accounts of recognition, hence, cast doubt on an action-theoretic account of the social world and the human being, by highlighting the anonymous and supra-subjective existence and reproduction of the social world with respect to the individual being. For the consideration of the anonymity and trans-relationality of social