Recognizing freedom

Introduction

The project of social criticism should both diagnose the central dangers of the present and help us to navigate a course towards progressive social change. In contemporary debates in the Continental tradition, it is sometimes assumed that Foucault and the Frankfurt School offer incompatible contributions to this project. On the one hand, Foucault diagnoses present dangers with his analytic of power and domination but seems to leave no room for human freedom. On the other hand, contemporary recognition theory offers a guiding concept of social freedom that seems to account insufficiently for the fact that genuine acts of recognition can sometimes themselves be dominating. While Foucault has often been viewed as a source of criticism for recognition theory, much less has been said to indicate that recognition theory has something to offer Foucault. ¹ Rather than starting from the general acceptance of recognition theory and offering Foucauldian correctives, I begin with the Foucauldian diagnosis of modern forms of domination and demonstrate that, with minimal modification, the concept of freedom found in recognition theory is the one Foucauldians ought to endorse. Combining insights from French and German critical theories provides the broader project of critical social theory with a concept of freedom that is sensitive to the subtle and historically situated operation of power.

Understanding the structures of power and domination is the first step towards a concept of freedom that avoids repetition of these structures. Here, I turn to Foucault to identify the general features of domination as well as the particularly modern, Western forms that it takes. On his account, domination occurs when an asymmetrical relationship of power has become fixed or irreversible. I’ve argued elsewhere that power emerges from the concrete interactions of individuals when an action is motivated through reference to a prevailing norm (whether the action conforms to or flouts said norm). As a subset of such power relations, ‘domination’ therefore already refers to a complex social situation in which actions are motivated in a one-sided and rigid pattern. So, an opposing concept of freedom must not confine itself to a capacity of an individual subject, such as freedom of imagination or autonomy. Foucault links freedom with ethics rather than disembodied cognitive capacities, and he is clear that he means ‘ethics’ in the sense of ethos – ‘a mode of being for the subject, along with a certain way of acting, a way visible to others’. ² A Foucauldian concept of freedom must refer to ways of life and the social conditions in which they are to be realized.

Though it may seem obvious that ‘domination’ refers to a state of affairs, a similar opposing concept of freedom has not typically been the focus of, for example, the liberal philosophical tradition. From Locke, Hobbes, Kant and so on, we receive concepts of freedom that focus on subjective capacities while bracketing consideration of the conditions necessary for the exercise of these capacities. ³ Given Foucault’s emphasis on the historically variable constitution of the subject, we must consider that concepts of freedom focused solely on such capacities ignore both the social conditions for realizing freedom in the world and the historically contextual and social formation of these capacities in individual subjects. An appropriate concept of freedom must take into account both of these social dimensions of the realization of freedom.

Our domination

Domination takes different forms in different historical contexts. Combating domination requires identifying its particularly modern forms and the conceptual apparatus that support them. Foucault identifies the dangers of our having adopted an Enlightenment concept of autonomy, which he attributes to Kant. ⁴ Structurally, conceiving of freedom as an exercise of reason ignores the social components of freedom’s formation and realization. We should be suspicious of a concept of reason untouched by its historical situation. But besides being ineffective, the Kantian idea of transcendental reason is, according to Foucault, pernicious. Creating a conceptual distinction between the transcendental and empirical subjects has led to novel forms of domination. This duality of the subject is the conceptual foundation for the human sciences, on which the increasing refinement of disciplinary power relies. ⁵ Disciplinary power is characterized by the gathering of detailed knowledge of individuals and the evaluation of their degree of deviation from what is considered the optimum. With ever-increasing depth and breadth, disciplinary power intervenes in the everyday conduct of individuals and tells them how they ought to be and how they ought to behave. Disciplinary power, therefore, deprives us of the control of our own lives. To be sure, there is self-government in disciplinary societies, but it is perhaps more properly characterized as self-surveillance and recalls the ominous image of the Panopticon. It comes from internalizing the normalizing judgement of an authority figure. And this perpetuation of dominating self-surveillance should be seen not only as a criticism of our institutions but of our very way of conceiving of ourselves as subjects.

Foucault describes disciplinary power in such a way as to rhetorically provoke a sense of dissatisfaction and even disgust at the self-surveillance instilled by our social institutions. He does not, however, attempt to develop a foundational normative theory for his criticism. We are left instead to piece together what sense of freedom is hindered by this self-surveillance. Here, it is useful to turn to Foucault’s discussions of the ancient Greek ethics of the care of the self, which offers a different model of the subject and its freedom. Foucault emphasizes that this ethics was geared towards a concept of freedom as self-mastery or skillful self-management. According to Foucault, ancient Greek ethics did not take the form of a codified, universal set of principles by which everyone was expected to live. Nor did it take the form of a set of prohibitions, but instead, it called for sincere contemplation in the areas of life in which one enjoyed the most liberty. The care of the self focused on regimen and preparedness in reflecting upon one’s goals and the means of achieving them. The most important notion of freedom, then, in an ethics of the care of the self was a kind of savoir faire, the ability to manage oneself skillfully in practical matters and to tailor one’s approach to the varying conditions of need, status, time and any other mélange of circumstances. ⁶

Perhaps even worse than this lack of skillful self-management is the homogenizing effect that disciplinary power has on individuals. For the ancient Greeks, there was a purpose to skillful self-management. Linked to an aesthetics of existence, self-management gave a particular style to one’s life. Individuals who are maximally free in this sense will have what Foucault calls a ‘special brilliance’, and this in virtue of the fact that there is a deliberate structure manifest in their actions. ⁷ It is the ‘style’ of life that will allow others to recognize you as the particular individual that you are.

Foucault says nothing by way of argument that we need or even desire this kind of recognition of our particularity. However, when we consider the ways in which we are recognized as individuals in disciplinary power, there does seem to be something importantly missing. Because self-surveillance is encouraged in order to maintain conformity, disciplinary power is depersonalizing. It substitutes individuation for individuality through the compilation of quantitative measurements. Rather than cultivating the particularity of individual styles of living, disciplinary power individuates precisely in order to homogenize. It homogenizes by turning each individual into a ‘case’ that is an object of knowledge and an object of power. ⁸ The individual is both recognized and lost because all of this measuring of aptitudes and capacities is intended to encourage people to reduce the gaps between themselves and the optimum. Individuals are made regular, calculable and ideally, uniform.

In a society in which everyone is encouraged to behave in more or less the same way, individuality actually becomes a bad thing; it means you’re not like everyone else, you’re not normal. What is missing then, is the positive value of one’s particularity. As subjects of the human sciences, individuals are recognized as particulars by a specific set of properties. These properties depend on context, but all share the feature of being some form of measurement of the degree of deviation from a norm. Disciplinary power affords no opportunity for the kind of recognition of idiosyncratic particularity that accompanied the ancient Greek aesthetics of existence. We must return to this aesthetics of existence when considering modifications of the concept of recognition in social freedom, but first it is necessary to establish Foucault’s relationship to the tradition of German critical theory and its various treatments of autonomy.

Given Foucault’s criticisms of Kant and the Enlightenment, it may appear as though Foucault rejects the concept of autonomy outright. However, Foucault’s criticism does not cut across all conceptions of autonomy and relies upon the idea that ‘autonomy is made up of contingent practices with a specific history’. ⁹ Foucault himself claims autonomy as a goal when he sets out to discover, ‘what is not or is no longer indispensible for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects’. ¹⁰ For all his criticism of Kantian autonomy, Foucault still seems to take some concept of autonomy to be the kind of freedom at stake when he uncovers hitherto unnoticed forms of domination. What is needed, therefore, is a reconception of autonomy, one that is not linked to the transcendental standpoint of the subject that fuels our current power/knowledge regime but that could instead be called a ‘socially embedded autonomy’. ¹¹

Hegel’s concept of mutual recognition serves as the basis for one such social concept of freedom. Recognition incorporates into the concept of freedom itself the conditions necessary for its realization. These conditions include other subjects who can promote or thwart the realization of a subject’s will as well as the social institutions that form the background against which subjects are intelligible to each other. Social freedom is a quality that can be predicated of both human subjects and the institutions to which they belong. Freedom can be predicated of social institutions insofar as those institutions serve as the ground in which the process of socialization endows the subject with certain capacities and as the space in which individual freedom is to be realized. ¹²

The concept of recognition, then, incorporates both of the social dimensions of freedom found to be necessary for a Foucauldian concept of freedom, namely in the conditions for both forming an autonomous will and realizing that will in the world. Furthermore, because recognition has both an interpersonal and an institutional component, it is well suited to addressing the forms of domination that arise on both levels. However, much more needs to be said about what recognition is and how it broadens the concept of autonomy into social freedom before we can see that it is a suitable supplement to Foucault’s account of power.

The ontological concept of recognition

It is important to distinguish at the fore two related concepts of recognition. On the one hand, the ontological concept of recognition refers to the descriptive claim that relationships of mutual recognition are constitutive of individual identity. On the other hand, the ethical concept of recognition can play a normative role by taking the subject’s freedom to be dependent on relationships of mutual recognition. It is the latter ethical concept to which we must turn in order to construct an account of freedom that coheres with Foucault’s accounts of power and the subject. However, first exploring the ways in which Foucault, perhaps unwittingly, presupposes ontological recognition will better establish the foundation for incorporating elements of ethical recognition into a Foucauldian concept of freedom.

To recognize a person, in the sense inspired by Hegel, is to assert that the person has a particular quality and to positively evaluate the person for having said quality. On the ontological interpretation of recognition, these acts of recognition are constitutive of our being persons in the first place. There are a few ways we can interpret the idea that recognition is constituting, and they mirror Foucault’s descriptions of power as constituting the subject. In the first place, recognition serves as a criterion for picking out the kind of entity we have in mind when we speak of persons. Heikki Ikäheimo, in his work distinguishing the ontological and ethical concepts of recognition, helpfully clarifies this first sense of ‘constitution’: It is because acts of recognition invoke a set of evaluative criteria that they distinguish persons ‘from other beings that they otherwise resemble in that, unlike those beings, these beings organize, or experience their world as organized, by values and social norms’. ¹³ As is the case when discussing power, we are here interested in human subjects insofar as they are responsive to social norms. One sense in which power constitutes the subject is in the same sense that a pawn is constituted by the game of chess; a pawn is a pawn only within the context of the game, and likewise Foucault defines the subject as human being qua member of society. Since power and recognition are concepts that refer to the social interactions of human subjects, both form the basis of similar conceptual definitions of the subject.

In clarifying the relationship between power and recognition, we should emphasize Foucault’s description of power as an emergent property of interactions – among individuals or between individuals and social institutions – in which actions are motivated by appeal to prevalent norms and values of a particular society. ¹⁴ Acts of recognition, then, are a species of power relation that encourage the expression of certain qualities in individuals. Hegel’s insight that recognition by the Other is a transcendental condition for the possibility of self-consciousness can be rewritten here as the claim that recognition by the other is a condition for the possibility of the relationship of self to self that defines the subject for Foucault. ¹⁵ Insofar as we are able sustain ourselves as subjects at all, we must be engaged in acts of recognition; this fact is sometimes referred to as the ontological need for recognition.

Although for Hegel the concept of recognition plays a fundamental metaphysical role in his philosophy of mind, so too does this concept play a psychological role as recognition provides the social feedback that helps to form our practical identities. The psychological constitution of the subject through acts of recognition is especially pertinent to Foucault’s historicized account of subject formation as the creation of a relationship of self to self. Recognition encourages the adoption of a self-conception by allowing the subject to identify with its own qualities. This recognition can be bestowed upon the subject by other individuals or by institutions (e.g. in the recognition of the legal status of a person with various rights granted on the basis of that institutional status). The crucial idea shared by Foucault and Hegel is that the subject’s practical identity is formed through interactions with other subjects within social institutions.

However, rather than praise these social institutions for creating and sustaining our subjectivity, Foucault provokes us to be mistrustful of the ways in which we are constituted. The source of this mistrust provides a valuable line of criticism for traditional recognition theory while at the same time creating problems for the reconciliation of that theory with Foucault’s more radical statements about detachment from dominating subjection. We must see, first, how recognition theory has associated the formation of our identities within social institutions with varieties of freedom enjoyed by subjects so formed. We will then be in a position to see how Foucault’s accounts of power and subject formation complicate this picture of recognition as a wholly beneficial phenomenon.

The ethics of recognition: Freedom and identity

The concept of ethical life that we call ‘social freedom’ is defined by Hegel as being with oneself in an Other. ¹⁶ Although this formulation of the concept may seem puzzling, it is the key to understanding the relationship between individual identity and the community that enables the concept of social freedom to take its own conditions of possibility into account. Roughly, this idea of being with oneself in an Other amounts to a relationship of identification. In interpersonal relationships, one must be able to identify with other subjects in order to cultivate non-instrumental relationships that render the Other an extension of oneself rather than a threat to one’s own freedom. ¹⁷ Recognition of one’s particular identity in relationships of cooperation and the endorsement of mutual ends are necessary for the realization of the freedom of self-determination. On the level of the broader social order, recognition of one’s universal status as an equal member of the community is necessary for political freedom. One must be able to identify with the social institutions of which one is a member in order to endorse them as the products of one’s own will. In Elements of Philosophy of Right, Hegel details how such identifications take place within institutions of modern Western societies. However, for the purpose of providing a plausible normative supplement to Foucault’s account of power, such details are not necessary or even desirable, as they risk slipping into context-transcendent claims about the structure of recognition and social freedom. ¹⁸ Rather than determining how existing institutions may or may not realize the ideal of social freedom, we should focus instead on clarifying the concept of social freedom itself and the ways in which it complements Foucault’s investigations into the operation of power. Three features of social freedom are especially attractive from a Foucauldian standpoint.

The first point is practical – that social freedom is attractive not merely from the point of view of Foucault’s analyses of power but from the standpoint of a member of a modern Western society as well. It is important to see that social freedom is a realistic alternative concept within the live options that we might be able to endorse. Foucault is sensitive to the fact that through the process of socialization, we become habituated to the operative concepts of our specific historical context and that our historical a priori sets limits on what is conceivable for us. The very fact that power operates differently in different historical contexts implies that different strategies of resistance will be necessary in these contexts; resistance requires finding a conceptual schema that can appropriately oppose the concepts that serve domination in a particular society. ¹⁹ The concept of social freedom is an appropriate foil for a disciplinary context because it would afford the subject the missing recognition of their particularity. It is within our grasp because it relies on already familiar concepts of freedom. As Foucault notes, ‘it is part of the function of memory and culture to be able to reactualize any objects whatever that have already featured. Repetition is always possible; repetition with application, transformation’. ²⁰

We have seen that Foucault believes we have adopted a concept of autonomy that focuses too much on a single concept of freedom as the freedom of the universal will, and this to the exclusion of concepts of freedom that allow for individual self-expression. What makes Hegel’s concept of social freedom a plausible candidate for our endorsement is that it does not force a substitution of some wholly other form of freedom in the place of this autonomy. Rather, Hegel’s concept contains within itself three distinct notions of freedom so that individuals will still be afforded to some degree the freedom of non-interference, the freedom of self-determination and autonomy and finally, the freedom of identification with an overarching social structure that gives birth to and allows them to express their particular identities. Because Hegel’s concept of social freedom is an expansion of, rather than a replacement for, the Kantian concept of autonomy, it is more likely that we modern Western readers will be able to perform a repetition with transformation of the latter concept in order to take social freedom on board.

The second attractive feature of social freedom is that it can play an explanatory role in Foucault’s own accounts of subject formation. Hegel claims that the attainment of political freedom is dependent upon the freedom and successful identity formation of subjects within other primary institutional structures. Drawing on studies in psychology, Axel Honneth demonstrates that ‘only the feeling of having the particular nature of one’s urges fundamentally recognized and affirmed can allow one to develop the degree of basic self-confidence that renders one capable of participating, with equal rights, in political will-formation’. ²¹ That is to say, on a practical level, the recognition gained in interpersonal relationships is a prerequisite for participation in the political arena; therefore, the whole of the social institutions present in a community must provide opportunities for this recognition and affirmation of particularity. Furthermore, Ikäheimo establishes the interdependence of these forms of recognition and their corresponding modes of freedom on the conceptual level. On his account, in order to be institutionally recognized, one must first be recognized interpersonally because, as he puts it, ‘there is no collective norm administration without the administrators forming a “we” or collective coauthority by taking each other as coauthors and thereby attributing each other this status’. ²² In other words, to be a person in the institutional sense of having rights is dependent on a prior interpersonal recognition of the subject as a legitimate ‘coauthority’ for social and political determination because the recognition of such coauthorities is itself a necessary condition for the very practice of the collective administration of norms. ²³

What is particularly interesting about these observations from Honneth and Ikäheimo is that they find expression in Foucault’s description of his own methodology as he says:

one must analyze institutions from the standpoint of power relations, rather than vice versa, and that the fundamental point of anchorage of the relationships, even if they are embodied and crystallized in an institution, is to be found outside the institution. ²⁴

Finally, and relatedly, the acknowledgment of the interdependence of forms of recognition and forms of freedom helps to ensure that the ideal of freedom considers all facets of social life – even those within which individuals act as particulars. This concept of freedom does not confine itself to the universal freedom of Kantian autonomy, which, at least by Foucault’s lights, gives insufficient expression to the particular (rather than universal) will. It has already been implied that Hegel describes a variety of ways in which an individual can be recognized, each of which produces a different facet of the individual’s identity. Hegel describes the formation of particular practical identities on the one hand, and universal identities – as say, a citizen or a person with equality under the law – on the other. In the formation of identity through recognition, Hegel can provide a more solid theoretical foundation for Foucault’s remark about the varieties of self-relation that constitute one and the same individual as a political subject that is different from the subject who seeks to fulfil its sexual desires. ²⁶ At the same time, Foucault’s descriptions of the classification and individuation of subjects expand Hegel’s own insights beyond the consideration of identity formation in ideal modern institutions. For example, Foucault’s analysis of the ancient Greek care of the self includes not only the idea of creating an identity by which one can be recognized (in the Hegelian sense of ‘affirmed’) but also the idea that the identity so cultivated will tie one to certain obligations within the community. The care of the self requires cultivating an ethos, that is, according to Foucault, ‘also a way of caring for others…Ethos also implies a relationship with others, insofar as the care of the self enables one to occupy his rightful position in the city, the community, or interpersonal relationships’. ²⁷ By observing the different ways in which recognition operates in different historical contexts, Foucault demonstrates the variety of ways in which the particular and universal identities of individuals interact and inform one another.

Many scholars have noted the potential tension between the subject qua particular individual and the subject qua universal moral and legal individual. ²⁸ But this potential tension was not lost on Hegel. On the contrary, the different kinds of identities formed in the different institutions of recognition are the keys to solving the ‘problem of freedom’ that arises from this tension. ²⁹ As addressed by Fred Neuhouser ‘individuals can be brought to will and work freely for the collective good of the social groups to which they belong, insofar as doing so is at the same time a way of giving expression to a particular identity that they take to be central to who they are’. ³⁰ Honneth, too, describes the relationship between particular and universal identities as one in which ‘subjects with equal rights could mutually recognize their individual particularity by contributing, in their own ways, to the reproduction of the community’s identity’. ³¹

But, as was known to Hegel, this characterization of the relationship between the individual and the institutions of the state is one-sided and insufficient to guarantee social freedom. Consider the relationship between the individual and social institutions in disciplinary power. In such a regime, individuals maintain disciplinary social institutions whether they conform to them or deviate from them. Indeed, the insidiousness of disciplinary power is that it thrives on what is phenomenologically experienced as deviance. The rebellious student only serves to reinforce the standards and hierarchies established by disciplinary power insofar as she still finds a place within that hierarchy, rather than undermining the very system of grades, attendance, pedagogical goals and so on. Social freedom, then, cannot be gained solely by the maintenance of social institutions. Rather, the institutions themselves must allow for the recognition of the particularity of their individual members. Hence, the interdependence of forms of recognition and forms of freedom becomes crucial insofar as it places a constraint on the kinds of institutions that will count as free and rational. Disciplinary institutions are criticizable from within a Hegelian framework on the grounds that they provide insufficient means of expression for subjects in their particularity.

Given that recognition theory is able to address at least some of the concerns raised by Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power, it seems that we are left with a rosy picture of recognition in which individuals are assured of their freedom through participation in free, rational institutions. Indeed, Hegel has been criticized for merely attempting to justify the status quo through a demonstration that the institutions of his own society in 19th-century Europe were, in fact, rational. However, by the very attempt to overcome the potential tension between particular and universal identities, Hegel admits the possible failure of social institutions to guarantee the successful recognition that would produce subjects who are fully socially free. Modern scholars therefore take up the normative implications of Hegel’s social theory as a useful toolset for social criticism, for example, in noting that the disastrous emotional consequences of failures of recognition can motivate social movements. ³² Interestingly, Foucault seems to acknowledge the same motivational force of failures of recognition as he notes the:

series of oppositions which have developed over the last few years: opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live. ³³

While Honneth focuses on the ways in which the feeling of failures of recognition can be motivating, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, to the contrary, intended to demonstrate that the subjective sense that one is unfree may in fact be due to a limited understanding of what freedom ought to entail. Fred Neuhouser clearly articulates the distinction between subjective and objective freedom found in Hegel’s work and, like Honneth, believes that a subjective lack of freedom can provide clues about defects in our social institutions. For social freedom to be actualized, it must contain both the objective component: ‘rational laws and institutions must furnish the basic social conditions necessary for realizing the freedom (in a variety of senses) of all individuals’ and the subjective component: ‘it must be possible for all social members to affirm those freedom-realizing laws and institutions as good and thus to regard the principles that govern their social participation as coming from their own wills’. ³⁵

With this distinction in mind, it seems that Foucault’s aim is quite the opposite of Hegel’s. If we characterize Foucault’s project in these Hegelian terms, we can see that rather than hoping to demonstrate the rationality of modern social institutions and thereby reconcile us to them, Foucault seeks to prompt our dissatisfaction with our social institutions in the hope that we will no longer feel ourselves to be free once we fully grasp the meaning of social freedom. Just as Hegel had to redefine freedom in order to attempt the demonstration of our objective freedom, Foucault has to redefine freedom to demonstrate our objective domination. As earlier noted, disciplinary power allows us all the freedom of reflection, deliberation, and self-transformation that a reflexive concept of freedom would prescribe. It is only by redefining freedom as social freedom that we can see that recognition of the particularity of the individual is lacking in disciplinary power/knowledge regimes.

Thus far, we have seen several reasons to think that the concept of social freedom with its emphasis on recognition is preferable to a concept of freedom as Kantian autonomy. The concept of social freedom considers the conditions necessary for its own actualization, and it takes seriously ontological recognition as requisite for being a subject. But there is a further aspect of social freedom that speaks in its favor. Although he is not prescriptive, it is undeniable that Foucault’s descriptions of the operation of disciplinary power are designed to make us feel, at the very least, uncomfortable. With the concept of social freedom, we are able to articulate the source of our discomfort at the thought that we are being made regular, calculable, like among like. That is because social freedom takes seriously another kind of need for recognition beyond the ontological. Neuhouser calls this ‘a spiritual need’ that human individuals have ‘to experience themselves as belonging integrally to a greater social reality, a reality whose significance and being transcend their own particular projects and finite life span’. ³⁶ Although Foucault would be unlikely to endorse the idea that this is a spiritual need (for such a term is too metaphysically loaded), we can easily move away from that descriptor to claim instead that it is a psychological need, perhaps even a need that arose historically but of which we cannot now rid ourselves. ³⁷

The ethics of recognition: Recognition as domination

Though social freedom and the need for recognition can play important explanatory and normative roles as supplements to Foucault’s account of power, it is this spiritual or psychological need for recognition that is at the same time the basis for a line of criticism of recognition theory. Judith Butler poses a deep challenge to the project of integrating recognition theory into a Foucauldian concept of freedom because she argues that this need for recognition is the source of our domination. Butler’s main concern is summarized as follows: ‘where social categories guarantee a recognizable and enduring social existence, the embrace of such categories, even as they work in the service of subjection, is often preferred to no social existence at all’. ³⁸ This observation that we accept and perpetuate subjugating identities because they guarantee our social existence is the basis of two criticisms, one levelled against Foucault and the other against recognition theory. Both criticisms threaten the project of integrating the concept of social freedom into a Foucauldian social theory.

In the first place, Butler uses recognition theory to criticize Foucault for taking insufficient account of the need for a socially recognized identity. She rightly identifies a number of statements in which Foucault seems to be calling for a radical casting off of our identities. If Neuhouser and Butler are correct that there is a need – spiritual or psychological – to have our identities socially recognized, then refusing such identities is psychologically damaging. If Hegel and Honneth are correct that recognition is necessary for being a subject at all, then refusing the identities by which we’re recognized is psychological suicide. On Butler’s interpretation of Foucault, he is careless in failing to realize the impossibility of refusing our identities. But if I am also correct that Foucault’s account of subject formation presupposes a kind of recognition theory, then Butler’s criticism would render his thought not merely careless but internally inconsistent. Though Foucault is usually more careful to say that we must reject ‘this or that’ specific identity, there are moments when he does seem to call for just the kind of radical refusal of identity that we, with Butler, should oppose on conceptual and psychological grounds. ³⁹ By using a psychoanalytic version of some of recognition theory’s fundamental assumptions, Butler establishes a genuine constraint that prevents us from following Foucault in his most radical visions of what resistance might entail. We must realize that there are limitations to the kinds of self-transformation that are possible within a Foucauldian social theory, namely, that we cannot dispense with our social identities altogether and must, instead, search for modes of subjectivation that are less dominating.

However, Butler’s second criticism, of recognition theory itself, would cast grave doubt on the possibility of establishing such non-dominating forms of subject formation. Butler doesn’t just claim that we must prefer subjugating forms of identification to the absence of all such identification; she further implies that any constitution of the subject through recognition must be dominating because recognition invokes pre-established norms and values beyond the subject’s control. As Butler puts it:

bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent. Social categories signify subordination and existence at once. In other words, within subjection, the price of existence is subordination. ⁴⁰

It is not the case that any and all systems of constraints outside of the subject’s control will be in service of dominating systems of power or that acts of recognition must be subordinating. But if we modify Butler’s concern about the subordinating effect of recognition, it may cut deeper than she herself even realizes. What I take to be the greatest problem yet to be sufficiently addressed by recognition theory is the fact that genuine acts of recognition can perpetuate dominating power structures. Axel Honneth stands out among contemporary recognition theorists in his attempts to disambiguate ideological patterns of recognition from what he calls ‘genuine’ acts of recognition. He establishes criteria by which to claim that subordinating acts of recognition are not really acts of recognition at all. ⁴² But these criteria appear insufficient to claim that ideological patterns of recognition cannot in principle be genuine. Amy Allen raises this problem explicitly as she asks, ‘does Honneth’s account of power in terms of morally motivated struggles for recognition in the lifeworld actually do justice, as Honneth aims to do, to the insights of Foucault’s analysis?’ ⁴³ Allen provides an example of the troubling role recognition can play in perpetuating gender stereotypes. We are to imagine Elizabeth, a five-year-old girl, who finds her parents’ love expressed in statements that reinforce the values of beauty, obedience, and personal relationships rather than achievements. ⁴⁴ Allen describes the effects of such acts of recognition in terms that resonate with and helpfully refine Butler’s criticism:

[Elizabeth] is receiving recognition (through the vehicle of parental love) and subordinating gender ideology in a single stroke. And because Elizabeth has been receiving love and gender subordination in a single stroke for as long as she has been alive, and for all that time has been unable to assess that gender ideology critically because she hasn’t yet fully developed the requisite capacity for autonomy, she is likely to form a psychic attachment to those subordinating modes of femininity that may prove, in adulthood, quite difficult to shake. ⁴⁵

Nevertheless, the perpetuation of gender stereotypes is a form of domination as it teaches children that what makes them valuable is their confinement to specific roles and a lack of ambition to be recognized for qualities that are available candidates for recognition in other members of the community. Here, Foucault can inform and modify recognition theory by acknowledging the dominating effects of such acts of recognition. Understanding acts of recognition as a subset of Foucauldian power relations more generally enables us to consider factors beyond the access to material benefit that serves as the basis of Honneth’s test of genuine recognition. We must expand this test to include the forms of self-conception that arise from acts of recognition as well as the discursive and non-discursive practices through which we relate to others. It is difficult if not impossible to see the dominating effects of acts of recognition if we consider each act in isolation. Rather, we must examine the systematic effects of repeated acts of recognition to see that they can form rigid and subordinating self-conceptions while at the same time giving rise to a perpetual asymmetry in our interactions with others. Foucault, then, gives us new grounds to label an act of recognition a failure or an instance of domination. Both Elizabeth’s self-conception and the way she is treated by others within her social sphere are formed with the rigid asymmetry that Foucault finds to be the hallmark of domination.

A modified recognition theory

With this Foucauldian insight woven into recognition theory, we are in a better position to inquire into the conditions that make struggle possible even in such cases where a ‘psychic attachment’ is formed to one’s subordinating identity. There is an interesting point of intersection among Foucault, Honneth, and Butler in the idea that acts of recognition in the service of the prevailing power structure cannot completely account for what the subject is to become. As Foucault describes it, ‘the relationship between power and freedom’s refusal to submit cannot therefore be separated…At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom’. ⁴⁸ As a result of this recalcitrance on the part of the individual, the extension of power into ever more realms of life only serves to better define its limitations. ⁴⁹ Honneth and Butler both seem to endorse the same kind of idea, as Butler describes the ‘inassimilable remainder’ of the subject that ‘marks the limits of subjectivation’, ⁵⁰ and Honneth claims that subjects may sense ‘inner impulses to act in a way that is hampered by the rigid norms of society’. ⁵¹

The feeling that something crucial is unaccounted for or left unrecognized can provide an impetus to criticize existing social categories, to expand them and to allow for new opportunities for recognition. Foucault himself seems to call for an expansion of recognition when he says that we must refuse the identities formed within disciplinary power/knowledge regimes, especially if we recall that a chief feature of those identities is the denial of recognition of our idiosyncratic particularity. He similarly appeals to us to shake off ready-made formulas of interpersonal relationships of love ⁵² and says that we ‘should relate the kind of relation one has to oneself to a creative activity’, which, as I understand it, would call for imagining more and different opportunities for recognition. ⁵³

To be clear, what disciplinary power lacks is a sphere in which idiosyncratic particularity is affirmed, apart from any further considerations of measurable aptitudes, capacities, utilities and so on. I take it that this type of recognition is what Hegel had in mind when discussing the institution of the family and relationships of love. It is no surprise, then, that Foucault too sees interpersonal love relationships as a place to begin the work of revising what seems to have gone wrong in what we recognize. Recognition of the idiosyncratic particular has come under threat as even the family has been co-opted in the service of surveillance and behaviour correction ⁵⁴ and as our relationships of love increasingly revert to instrumental attachments. ⁵⁵ Nevertheless, it is within the family and through examples of love of the idiosyncratic Other that we can lend more concrete content to this form of recognition.

Just what is meant by ‘particularity’ in the context of recognition theory is not clear, in part because this concept is often left insufficiently elaborated or defined in contrast to a more robust concept of universality. I have been speaking of ‘idiosyncratic particularity’ in order to suggest that the term ‘particularity’ itself may carry different senses that require disambiguation. ⁵⁶ When I speak of affirmation of one’s idiosyncratic particularity, I mean to get at just that ‘inassimilable remainder’ that defies categorization or objective measurable features. Where the recognition of particularity that takes place within disciplinary contexts seems always to carry the threat of domination, idiosyncratic particularity appears to avoid this problem precisely because it avoids an attempt to define the Other with reference to categories of being or norms of behaviour. This is the kind of particularity at stake when the question of why we love our partner or child or siblings strikes us as uncomfortable or ill-conceived, or perhaps just difficult to answer. To say that we love these people for who they are is to say that we love them apart from any measurable quality or instrumental value. Now, we may be tempted to say that loving someone ‘because she’s my sister’ still invokes a social role with all of the norms and potential forms of domination that come with it. However, this is compatible with the idea that the type of recognition we confer upon them does not depend upon reference to this social role. The role a person occupies may be a reason for our loving them, but whatever the reasons for loving may be, that love itself becomes a reason for affirming the idiosyncratic particularity of the beloved.

This brief sketch begins the work of articulating a mode of recognition that does not rely upon the potentially problematic features of the disciplinary subject. Recall that Foucault’s description of the Enlightenment concept of the subject had it that we are, on the one hand, transcendental in our universal use of reason, and on the other hand, particular in our empirical being as an object of the human sciences. Recognition of idiosyncratic particularity helps us to break away from this picture insofar as this particularity is neither universal nor a measurable set of empirical features that could be, even in principle, objects of scientific study. If it is this scientific framework that leads to new opportunities for recognition as domination, then creating opportunities for recognition outside of this framework can serve as a foil to the dominating tendencies of disciplinary power.

It might be objected that an insistence on recognition of idiosyncratic particularity is misguided. I don’t mean to suggest that there is no value in other forms of recognition, especially in recognition of universal features such as personhood and citizenship that give rise to rights and duties. But perhaps even the social institutions that are primarily concerned with our status as universals can at least make room for the thought that Foucault expresses when he says that one and the same individual is not the same subject when they cast a vote as when they engage in a sexual relationship. Perhaps our institutions can make room for a playful or creative element in how we construct our identities even within existing categories.

It is this idea of relating to oneself as a creative activity that recalls the aesthetics of existence as an avenue of resistance to the rigid categories of disciplinary societies. As briefly mentioned above, Foucault uses the phrase ‘aesthetics of existence’ to describe these ‘intentional and voluntary actions by which men…make life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria’. ⁵⁷ In a well-known interview with Dreyfus and Rabinow, Foucault asks rather cryptically, ‘But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?’ ⁵⁸ These puzzling statements have led to the wealth of speculation and criticism that surround Foucault’s interest in an aesthetics of existence. Foucault does not specify what these ‘important stylistic criteria’ are, and one may get the sense that an aesthetics of existence is a narcissistic enterprise or a superficial self-styling. However, the practice of occupying different social categories, even seemingly incompatible social categories, from one context to the next is a creative enterprise that places power on the side of the individual insofar as it undermines the rigidity of these categories as well as any faith we may have that they are natural or necessary. In fact, much as the artist can be creatively inspired by constraint, so too can we creatively take up available categories to demand new opportunities for recognition. One way to implement an aesthetics of existence, then, is to imbue our identities with the patchwork quality of collage and the flexibility of improvisation. Such self-transformation calls for social recognition of what we might call ‘dynamic particularity’. ⁵⁹

The value of an aesthetics of existence is that conceiving of our lives in artistic terms provides another possible alternative to the perspective of the human sciences. ⁶⁰ As Foucault tells us in his own words:

My idea is that it’s not at all necessary to relate ethical problems to scientific knowledge. Among the cultural inventions of mankind there is a treasury of devices, techniques, ideas, procedures, and so on, that cannot exactly be reactivated but at least constitute, or help to constitute, a certain point of view which can be useful as a tool for analyzing what is going on now – and to change it. ⁶¹

Concluding remarks

Foucault’s reference to ‘recent liberation movements’ is an important reminder of the scope of his discussions of power and domination. The link between ethics and scientism is a modern, Western problem, as are the specific forms that domination takes within a disciplinary power/knowledge regime. It is therefore important to specify the scope of the claims made about freedom in this article. I have argued two key points: that Foucault ought to take on board a version of the social freedom that we find in Frankfurt-style recognition theory and that this theory should take on board Foucauldian criticisms to expand the concept of recognition to explicitly acknowledge the importance of idiosyncratic and dynamic particularity. The scopes of these claims are importantly different.

To the extent that Foucault speaks generally about power and the process of subject formation, it is clear that social norms and our institutions play a major role in the constitution of the subject. Therefore, a general concept of social freedom that takes into account both the conditions in which the subject is formed and in which the subject expresses itself in interaction strikes me as the most plausible supplement we can offer Foucault. This general concept of social freedom then provides a framework with which to diagnose the norms and institutions operating within specific historical contexts. For example, Foucault’s concerns about the dominating tendencies of disciplinary power make sense when we consider that our constituting norms and institutions provide insufficient opportunities for the formation and expression of individual practical identities. It is for this reason that I offer the concepts of idiosyncratic and dynamic particularity as potential foils for the disciplinary conception of the subject as a stable set of measurable qualities. That is to say, such forms of recognition are of especially pressing concern within a disciplinary context, but may not have the same weight or critical function within other contexts.

And what’s more, the analysis given in this article of the process of subjectivation through recognition radically underdetermines both the features of the subject that should or will be recognized and what the specific demands for recognition in acts of experimental resistance will entail. Though recognition may be an anthropological necessity for our constitution as subjects, the forms of this constitution will be historically context-dependent. For Foucault, neither such ethical nor even ontological matters can be settled a priori, or in abstraction from historical context. Foucault neither prescribes the specific qualities that ought to be recognized nor specifies the criteria for excluding certain opportunities for recognition.

Because the normative principles of recognition must be worked out from within a given historical context, a Foucauldian concept of social freedom must further imply a meta-ethical principle of openness committing us to acts of resistance that would attempt to push the boundaries of recognition so that we may affirm previously unimagined ways of life. ⁶³ Realizing the extent to which forms of recognition are subject to historical change should enable us to be more flexible about adhering to specific categories within our own context. A principle of openness with respect to recognized ways of life forces us to challenge our own normative limits with the ‘constant checking’ ⁶⁴ that Foucault would have us perform on our own normative contexts. ⁶⁵ Such a challenge can encourage experimentation with unconventional modes of identification. Furthermore, even those disinclined to such experimentation in their own lives will be better equipped to imagine a possible space of existence for those who appear to defy conceivable labels.