Bound by Recognition

Introduction
THE PROBLEM OF RECOGNITION
WALKING ALONG A CROWDED AVENUE, you see a friend and call out her name: suddenly, a pocket of intimacy forms in an otherwise anonymous public space. Standing in a long line at the immigration office, you find yourself grateful for your Canadian passport, which you know will make it easier for you to extend your employment in the United States. You roll back the metal gates in front of your shop window, which now displays (next to the list of South Asian languages spoken inside) a new assortment of items prominently bearing the American flag. Sitting down with a calculator, you and your partner wonder whether it will be possible to get a home loan together at a decent rate without being married. A young man watches as you slowly board the bus, and then offers you his seat. Driving down a street in a predominantly white neighborhood, you are pulled over again by the police, suspended in mistrust while the officer runs your identification and plates. You recall how several of your male co-workers unexpectedly declared that they think you'll be the next woman in the office to have a baby. You wait for the volunteer to find your name on the voting rolls. You add a new accomplishment to your curriculum vitae. You hold a stranger's gaze for a second too long, checking for and inviting desire.
Life is given texture by countless acts of recognition. From everyday interactions to the far-reaching deliberations of legislatures and courts, people are constantly asking the interconnected questions: Who are you? Who am I? Who are we? In answering these questions, we locate ourselves and others in social space, simultaneously taking notice of and reproducing relations of identity and difference. And in this way, we orient ourselves practically: we regularly decide what to do, and how to treat others, at least partly on the basis of who we take ourselves, and them, to be. For better or for worse, the distribution of affection, loyalty, esteem, consideration, rights and obligations, and many other social goods is closely tied to our assessments of identity, both personal and collective. At one level, there is no reason to regret this fact, and in any case probably no way to escape it, for recognition helps give our lives depth and continuity, and a world completely lacking the signposts of identity would be unnavigable. At the same time, many of the relationships established and maintained through recognition are unjust, often severely so. If recognition makes the social world intelligible, it often does so by stratifying it, subordinating some people and elevating others to positions of privilege or dominance. This book is about the social and political dynamics of recognition, about how recognition becomes a medium of injustice, and about what it would mean for relations of identity and difference to be structured more justly.

Although these are perennial issues, the theme of recognition has become particularly prominent in social and political theory over the last decade and a half, due largely to three intersecting developments. First, during this period, mainstream political theory began to take notice of the distinctive demands for justice raised by political movements organized around ethnicity, race, language, culture, gender, and sexuality. Second, the events of 1989 seemed to place problems of identity and difference--ethnic conflict, religious fundamentalism, regional secession movements, immigration and citizenship, and nationalism--at the center of global politics. And, third, many theorists began to approach these issues through the concept of recognition, drawing more or less directly on the philosophy of Hegel, who coined the phrase "the struggle for recognition" (Kampf um Anerkennung) and gave the concept its most influential philosophical treatment. By the end of the last decade, scholars had even begun to talk of a general shift away from a "politics of redistribution," focused on the satisfaction of interests and the distribution of material goods, and toward a "politics of recognition," focused on securing equal respect and esteem for the diverse identities borne by members of pluralistic societies.1
Out of this intersection of contemporary politics with Hegelian philosophy came a distinctive theoretical approach to problems of injustice on the terrain of identity and difference, which received one of its most famous statements in Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's catalytic essay "The Politics of Recognition," which was first published in 1992. There, Taylor drew on Hegel, among many others, to work out an account of the larger meaning and conceptual underpinnings of the demands for recognition made by members of oppressed and marginalized social groups.