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 by Brian Milstein
 Submitted originally for the "Field Seminar in Political Theory," Fall 2003, at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, Nancy Fraser, Instructor Cite as: Milstein, Brian. "On Charles Taylor's 'Politics of Recognition.'" Unpublished paper, New School for Social Research, New York (accessed on [DATE] at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/polth-taylor.html). Taylor's argument that Kantian liberalism (sometimes referred to as "liberalism-1") fails to adequately incorporate the politics of recognition is based on his assertion that liberalist philosophy ignores the fundamentally dialogical character of human life (PR 32). Human identity, he argues, achieves fullness only in interaction with the world and with "significant others." This dialogical character, which implies a mutual interdependence, is not antithetical to one's ability to achieve individuality, but is rather a crucial aspect of it. Our awareness of this dialogical character, he argues, is a distinctive feature of the modern age, in which we are free to define ourselves and produce an "authentic" relation with the self, and in which we struggle to have our identities recognized in the context of our larger society. This new conception of freedom over our individuality, he notes, has been at the basis of what he calls the "politics of universalism" in which every individual is entitled to the same rights and opportunities as every other. However, Taylor argues, this politics of universalism is all too often conducted at the exclusion of a "politics of difference." Liberalism's emphasis on the sameness of all citizens, regardless of race, class, gender, etc., often comes into conflict with their need to be recognized in their uniqueness. Equal respect, he argues, is limited in liberal thought to the equal potential inherent in all human beings, but does not necessitate equal recognition of the accomplishments of human beings, as individuals or as groups (PR 41-3). In fact, liberalism's commitment to "difference-blind" politics often surreptitiously "negates identity by forcing people into a homogeneous mold that is untrue to them" (PR 43). Moreover, this mold is often that of a hegemonic culture, whose own values override and alienate the social identities of minority groups. His major example is the case of francophone Quebeckers who form a minority in mostly English-speaking Canada. In Quebec, where French-speakers are the majority, the preservation of French culture is a priority for many local governments and is seen as a collective good: Political society is not neutral between those who value remaining true to the culture of our ancestors and those who might want to cut loose in the name of some individual goal of self-development. It might be argued that one could after all capture a goal like survivance for a proceduralist liberal society. One could consider the French language, for instance, as a collective resource that individuals might want to make use of, and act for its preservation, just as one does for clean air or green spaces. But this can't capture the full thrust of policies designed for cultural survival. It is not just a matter of having the French language for those who might choose it. This might be seen as the goal of some of the measures of federal bilingualism over the last twenty years. But it also involves making sure that there is a community of people here in the future that will want to avail itself of the opportunity to use the French language. Policies aimed at survival actively seek to create members of the community, for instance, in their assuring that future generations continue to identify as French-speakers. There is no way that these policies could be seen as just providing a facility to already existing people. (PR 58-9)Such policies that would in effect force French Quebeckers to speak French is of course incompatible with the ideals of liberalism-1, which would not permit such restrictions on individual choice -- particularly given that several such policies distinguish between francophone and anglophone Canadians. Taylor thus proposes an alternate model of liberalism (what Walzer termed "liberalism-2"), which would include the notion of "group rights" in balance with individual rights and would thereby actively seek to recognize the collective identity-related goals of cultural and social groups. The difficulty with Taylor's proposal is that it is not consistent with his more general framework of identity-formation through intersubjective struggles for recognition. His original critique is of liberalism's tendency to consider people as isolated, atomistic individuals. The addition of "group claims" to individual claims is meant to acknowledge that there exist collective goals that are not reducible to the universal individual. It is the resources of identity-fulfilling interaction that are to be protected. But he offers his solution in such a way that treats cultural or social groups as cleanly separable and relatively isomorphic units -- as monologically constructed units that seem to share many of the properties of individuals as construed by liberalism-1. It would then seem that Taylor has not resolved the problem he finds inherent in Kantian liberalism, but merely displaced it to the group level. One might say that Taylor fails to follow through on the full implications of his Hegelian move. Taylor gives us a political ontology that stresses the interactive component of individual identity-formation: "[I]dentities are formed in open dialogue, unshaped by a predefined social script..." (PR 36). Anything that would interfere with or limit the openness of the dialogical process would be an impediment to authentic identity-formation and so to recognition, and would presumably be bad. To be sure, if identities are formed intersubjectively and -- all things being equal -- without a "predefined social script," it would seem that cultural rules and traditions, insofar as they govern interaction and set terms of self-identification, would impinge upon the ideal of authenticity, that is, unless they can be accounted for within this matrix of a struggle for recognition. In other words, cultural influences imposed on participants from the outside would be a form of misrecognition, and only those cultural identifications produced among the participants themselves as part of an ongoing dialogical process would count as authentic cultural substance. This would seem to be a fair account of the development and maintenance of cultural goods in the context of Taylor's paradigm, but it runs into tension when one must think about the boundaries of cultures. While Taylor admits to the difficulty -- even impossibility -- of specifying criteria with which to categorically distinguish one group identity from another, he proceeds on the assumption that such criteria do exist in principle, at least as a reference point for theory construction. But this cannot be supported from his paradigm of identity-formation grounded in struggles for recognition. Even if we grant the development of ethical substance in dialogical processes of identity-formation, the characterization of cultures or social groups as separate and self-contained units does not follow from it. On the contrary, it seems more reasonable to conclude that nominally different social groups, once placed together in a context in which they would be able to interact, would continue to develop their identities together and in relation to each other via the same dialogical processes that are, for Taylor, at the very root of ethical substance and indispensable for recognition. The very notion of having a distinct cultural identity in need of recognition requires a cultural other (for a group that has lived in perfect isolation for the entire span of history, the very notion of "cultural recognition" would be useless and meaningless). Cultural and social identities would seem to be -- at the analytic level -- as fundamentally intercultural as subjective identities are intersubjective. Furthermore, such interaction, so long as it remains authentic and untainted by relations of force or hegemony, would be an unqualified good, even if the process resulted in the occasional abandonment, assimilation, or change of a cultural rule or practice. The concept of recognition, from this perspective, has within it a procedural norm of open and equal dialogue, and it is when this openness and equality are impinged upon that we can say misrecognition has taken place, and call for redress. This is not the way Taylor arrives at his conclusion. Instead of entertaining a concept of culture that circulates and revitalizes itself among cooperating individuals in ongoing dialogue, Taylor does not address the relationship between the development of individual identity to an ongoing development of collective identity, but simply posits cultural substance as a given that can be identified independently of its participants. This leads to a rather absolutist and inaccessible concept of culture, one to which we can ascribe attributes as a singular and homogeneous unity with determinate boundaries. "Cultural claims" are left in want of an internal link to the claims of its members, and it is through this detachment that cultural substance comes to be an end in itself. Cultures thus take on the characteristics of atomic individuals, a move Seyla Benhabib describes as "both theoretically wrong and politically dangerous" (Benhabib 53). The criticisms are familiar: First, it can justify the subordination of individual rights to a notion of a "collective good." Second, it assumes a homogeneity within the group that may not apply, that is, the group may contain its own minorities or suppressed groups that are not themselves recognized by the "collective good." Third, it begs the question of what authority decides who belongs to what group. Taylor must then return to the level of individual rights, which must now be reapplied in some delicate balance with group rights, but having construed cultural identity in such a way as to analytically detach it from individual identity, he is left without any immanent criteria with which to navigate between the two. The reaffirmation of basic liberal rights, such as the right to life or habeas corpus, appear in almost an ad hoc fashion or as an afterthought. In his Quebec example, Taylor makes no assertion that French-Canadian culture develops and obtains its identity in dialogue with Anglo-Canadian culture, and visa versa. If anything, he seems to imply that any indentity-influencing interaction would be an intrusion upon French-Canadian cultural identity; Anglo-Canadian culture is only treated as being abrasive to French-Canadian self-determination. Taylor thus comes to a solution that equates recognition with separation as opposed to a more progressively moderated interaction. If the move were a response to past injustice or claims of inequality, such claims might more easily lend themselves to a mediated solution. The same can be said if the claim were that Canadian dialogues between anglophones and francophones were systemically biased -- which seems to be most in accordance with Taylor's idea of "misrecognition" (cf. PR 64). But Taylor is ambiguous on precisely this point when he attempts to justify Quebec's policy aims. On one hand, the desire to preserve French culture in Quebec is in fact an attempt to counter forms of misrecognition that are perceived to be systemic in the Canadian brand of liberalism. At the same time, it seems that the goal to proactively "create members of the community," as Taylor describes it, stems from a good-in-itself that need not be tied to the redress of any actual instance of misrecognition. "Creating" individual identities is a different matter from preserving, protecting, or recognizing already-existing individual identities of which a common cultural identification is the relevant part. The justification of such a goal as creating a community can only come from an ideological view of culture completely detached from the needs of its members, and this, I believe, is mistaken. Multicultural as the globe may be, the fact that it is in the last instance one globe that all cultures must share suggests a common telos that must be dealt with. One of the problems is that modern political and social theory still tends to slip into the fallacious model of an enclosed, singular, isomorphic society. Thus Taylor seeks a viable option in carving up multicultural societies further into self-contained units -- analytically and, if possible, territorially. Yet the very institution of sovereignty is geared to forms of misrecognition inherent in the establishment of borders, walls, and criteria of exclusion (cf. Habermas 127 and Benhabib 80). We have only displaced the problem, and in doing so delayed it; we have not resolved it. In the global era, it is becoming more and more difficult to deny the fact that we share a planet with limited space and limited resources, and we must learn to interact cooperatively -- hence a continuing relevance for cosmopolitanism. The problem we face in a multicultural world is not that there is a multiplicity of worldviews, perspectives, and moral standpoints, but that all these continue to exist separately and in a state of tension. Taylor is thus partially right when, drawing on Gadamer, he calls for a "fusion of horizons." But we must recognize that our own cultures and viewpoints were never entirely separate to begin with, that our own identities have all along been formed and continue to form in relation to others. The question is not whether cultures can be permitted to influence or change each other, but rather on what terms. The impediments, I would argue, lie in relations of power, inequality, and disparity that are often systemic, institutional, and not easy to disentangle -- hence a continuing relevance for critical theory. Benhabib, Seyla (2002) The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton University Press. Habermas, Jurgen (1994) "Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State" in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton University Press. Taylor, Charles (1994) "The Politics of Recognition" in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton University Press. (abbreviated as PR)
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