Reification, Ideology and PowerExpression and Agency in Honneth’s Theory of Recognition

David OwenPolitics and International Relations & Centre for Citizenship,

Governance and Globalisation, School of Social Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton, U.K.

(Received 26 December 2009; final version received 15 January 2010)

This article addresses Axel Honneth’s recent attempts to incorporate two central phenomena of power – reification and ideology – within the terms

of his recognition theory. Honneth’s arguments in relation to each of these phenomena are importantly distinct. Drawing on Collingwood in

relation to reification and on Foucault with respect to ideology, it is argued that both sets of arguments are problematic but that, despite the differences between them, the problems pervading Honneth’s position on

both topics can be resolved if his recognition theory adopts an expressivist account of agency. The article concludes by noting two more

general implications of this proposed expressivist turn for Honneth’s recognition theoretic research programme.

Email: dowen@soton.ac.uk

Keywords: recognition, reification, ideology, agency, expressivism

Within the radical lexicon of power, the concepts of reification and ideology have privileged positions. Very roughly, ‘reification’ picks out the phenomenon of social relations being experienced as ‘thing-like’, while ‘ideology’ refers to beliefs that serve dominant social interests and which are held in place in virtue of serving dominant social interests. Both reification and ideology are understood as effects of power and as media through which power operates. In

two distinct recent developments in his research programme, Axel Honneth has sought to reconceptualise these classic concepts of Critical Theory’s engagement with power in recognition-theoretic terms and so to provide recognition theory with a more adequate account of power (at least in these forms). In this article, I will focus on his rather different analyses of these concepts in order to argue both that Honneth’s arguments in each case are characterised by significant problems and that, although the problems are somewhat different, they can each be overcome by a turn to an expressivist account of agency within Honneth’s theory of recognition. In developing this argument, I’ll begin with Honneth’s Tanner Lectures on reification, before turning to his essay ‘Recognition as Ideology’. I’ll conclude by sketching two implications of an expressivist turn for Honneth’s theory of recognition.

Reification1

In his Tanner Lectures, Honneth attempts to recuperate the concept of reification for contemporary Critical Theory and at the same time to engage in a significant departure for the theory of recognition. What motivates this development in Honneth’s research programme is the desire to give specificity to social philosophy as a distinctive enterprise which ‘is primarily concerned with determining and discussing processes of social development that can be viewed as misdevelopments (Fehlentwicklungen), disorders or “social pathologies.”’ (2007a: 4). Manifestations of such social pathologies, on Honneth’s account, include phenomena such as stereotyping (sexual, racial, etc.) and, more recently, related practices of profiling such as internet dating that operate on the basis of self-descriptions in terms of externally prescribed categories which he takes to be examples of reification. Trying to get to grip with, and give cogent theoretical expression to, this concept leads Honneth to a radical reworking of his concept of

recognition – a reworking which I’ll argue is unable to perform the role for which Honneth develops it.

The basic sense of reification is, crudely, that a relationship to oneself, others or nature has taken on the character of being thing-like. On this basis one might construe reification either as a moral failure in a way that links reification to the notions of objectification and instrumentalization or as a cognitive failure in a way that links reification to the ideas of illusion and error. What is notable – and appealing to Honneth – about Lukacs’ classic discussion of reification is that offers an account of reification that presents its basic character neither as a species of moral failure nor as a distinctive type of epistemic category mistake but as a form of distorted praxis. Lukacs ‘official’ argument conceptualises reification as the process through which, and the condition in which, ‘a habit of mere contemplation and observation, in which one’s natural surroundings, social environment, and personal characteristics come to be apprehended in a detached and emotionless manner – in short, as things’ becomes ‘second nature’ in virtue of the functional necessities of capitalist society’ (2008: 25). Honneth rejects this argument on the grounds that it depends on idealist assumptions that are no longer viable, however, far from leading to a rejection of Lukacs’ classic discussion of reification, Honneth identifies an ‘unofficial’ line of argument in Lukacs discussion that ‘judges the defect of reifying agency against an ideal of praxis as characterized by empathetic and existential engagement’, and this is taken by Honneth to be a more promising line to pursue (2008: 29)

Honneth attempts to develop this ‘unofficial’ argument by relating this view of reification as distorted praxis to Heidegger on ‘care’:

According to Heidegger, we do not encounter reality in the stance of a cognitive subject, but rather we practically cope

with the world in such a way that it is given to us as a field of practical significance. (2008: 30)

The implication for the conceptualisation of reification is this:Lukacs must assume that reification doesn’t represent a false form of habitualised praxis, but a false interpretive habit with reference to a “correct” form of praxis that is always given in an at least rudimentary fashion. (2008: 33)

Hence, Honneth argues, reification can now be specified thus:The habit, which has become second nature, of conceiving of one’s relationship to oneself and to one’s surroundings as an activity of neutral cognition of objective circumstances, bestows over time a reified form on human activity, without ever being able to eradicate the original “caring” character of this activity completely. (2008: 33)

In order to account for reification so specified in recognition-theoretic terms, Honneth recasts the concept of recognition such that the fundamental or elementary sense of recognition is at the social-ontological level and not that of a (quasi-) formal notion of ethical life (2008: 36). This reconceptualization of recognition involves two claims. First, recognition is to be seen as a member of the family cluster comprised of Lukacs (unofficial) notion of empathetic and existential engagement, Heidegger’s existentialia (care [Sorge], concern [Besorgen], solicitude [Fürsorgen]), Dewey’s concept of involvement and Cavell’s category of acknowledgment. Second, reification arises from our forgetting (inattentiveness to) the groundedness of cognition in recognition. Honneth is clear about the nature of the thesis being advanced:1AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Maeve Cooke for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper and Mark Haugaard for prompt editorial advice. I owe intellectual debts to Amy Allen, Bert Van den Brink and Peter Niesen for discussion of many elements of the arguments. A draft of section I was presented at the Philosophy and Social Sciences conference in May 2009 and I benefited particularly from comments by Martin Saar and Rainer Forst. I also owe a debt to Axel Honneth whose generous discussion of the arguments concerning reification over a very pleasant lunch gave me the impetus to explore the idea of an expressivist turn in recognition theory further.

Notes ? This section draws on and extends the discussion of Honneth’s view in Owen 2009.

We assert nothing less than that the human relationship to self and the world is in the first instance not only genetically, but also categorically bound up with an affirmative attitude, before more neutralized orientations can subsequently arise. We can connect up with our guiding topic [reification] by pointing out that the abandonment of the originally given affirmative stance must result in a stance in which the elements of our surroundings are experienced as mere objective entities, as objects that are present-at-hand. (2008: 35, my insertion)

There are two arguments offered in support of this thesis concerning reification. The first is a genetic-developmental argument (2008: 41-6) which tries to show through reference to the developmental psychology literature on autism that recognition (in its new sense as pre-cognitive empathetic engagement) is basic to the ability to take up the standpoint of another (presupposed by the notions of ‘communicative’ or ‘intentional’ stances). This empirical argument is intended to help motivate an appreciation of the plausibility of Honneth’s claim by suggesting that, in ontogenesis, recognition must precede cognition. The second, and more immediately relevant for our purposes, is a philosophical argument based on a reading of Stanley Cavell’s classic essay ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’ (1976).

Honneth glosses Cavell’s argument as showing that ‘our cognitive relation to the world is also attached in a conceptual sense to a stance of recognition’ (2008: 47). In this essay, Cavell is concerned to show that the skeptic’s picture with respect to knowledge of other minds cannot be engaged unless one sees that what skeptic tries to picture is ‘the fact that behaviour is expressive of mind’, where Cavell notes that ‘this is not something we know, but a way we treat “behavior.”’ (Cavell, 1976: 262) The skeptic’s stance, if Cavell tracks it rightly, focuses on the right issue but goes astray in

claiming that we have no reason to respond to behaviour in this way, a claim which is indicated by the skeptic’s proceeding to divorce the behaviour from the experience which “causes” it and, thus, to stop treating behaviour as expressive of mind. Cavell’s argument is that if we wish to do justice to the picture of behaviour as expressive of mind, we must rather recognize that, for example, acknowledging your expression of pain is prior to knowing what your being in pain is or means (Cavell, 1976: 263). Honneth comments:

Just as is the case with Heidegger’s concept of care, Cavell’s concept of acknowledgment contains an element of empathetic engagement or sympathy, of an antecedent act of identification, which is ignored by those who claim that understanding other people requires nothing more than an understanding of their reasons for acting.Cavell is not claiming that by taking up such a stance of acknowledgment, we will always demonstrate a sympathetic and affectionate reaction. He also regards mere indifference and negative feelings as possible forms of intersubjective acknowledgment, as long as they solely reflect a non-epistemic affirmation of the other person’s human personality. Thus the adjective ‘positive’ … mustn’t be understood as referring to positive, friendly feelings. This adjective instead signifies the existential fact … that we necessarily affirm the value of another person in the stance of recognition, even if we might curse or hate that person at a given moment. But perhaps we could go a step beyond Cavell and assert that even in cases where we recognize other persons in an emotionally negative way, we still always have a residual intuitive sense of not having done full justice to their personalities.’ (Honneth, 2008: 51)

But it is hard to square this reading of Cavell with the following remarks from Cavell’s essay:

So when I say that ‘We must acknowledge another’s suffering, and we do that by responding to a claim upon our sympathy.’ I do not mean that we always in fact have sympathy, nor that we always ought to have it. The claim of suffering may go unanswered. We may feel lots of things – sympathy, Schadenfreude, nothing. If one says this is a failure to acknowledge another’s suffering, surely this would not mean that we fail in such cases to know he is suffering? It may or may not. The point, however, is that the concept of acknowledgment is evidenced equally by its failure as by its success. It is not a description of a given response but a category in terms of which a given response is evaluated. (It is the sort of concept Heidegger calls an existentiale.)” (1976: 263-4)

Hence, as a conclusion from Cavell, the claim that recognition (as acknowledgment) involves the necessary affirmation of the value of another person is false: we necessarily recognize the ontological personhood of individuals whom we curse and hate, but this does not entail that we affirm their value as persons. Honneth’s thought that ‘even in cases where we recognize other persons in an emotionally negative way, we still always have a residual intuitive sense of not having done full justice to their personalities’ is not ‘a step beyond Cavell’ but a claim in an entirely different territory. Much the same kind of critical point is made by Raymond Geuss in his commentary on Honneth’s lectures on reification in relation to Honneth’s evocation of Heidegger on ‘care’. The objection runs thus:

…I am recognizing you in Honneth’s sense regardless of whether I help you, harm you, or adopt an attitude of indifference to your existence because the recognition in question is prior to adopting any of these specific attitudes. This is a point Heidegger makes repeatedly: from the fact that care for the world is prior to cognition, it does not follow that I must have a basically affectionate, optimistic, or

fostering attitude towards anything in the world in particular. To love, to hate, or to be indifferent, detached, neutral, and so on are all ways of being “care-fully” engaged. …If care (or recognition) is a precondition of everything and anything, including hatred and indifference, it cannot be the basis of an ethics or social criticism. (Geuss, 2008: 126-7?)

Given the cogency of this line of criticism, Honneth needs either to give up his re-conceptualisation of recognition and approach the topic of reification from a different angle or to offer a re-conceptualisation of reification which accommodates the point.

Honneth’s move is to adopt the second option. Thus, in the response to his critics which is the final part of his Tanner Lectures, Honneth now argues:

… reification presupposes that we completely fail to perceive the characteristics that make these persons into instances of the human species in any true sense. To treat somebody as a thing that lacks all human properties and capacities. … Of course, by committing to this literal, ontological meaning of the term, we greatly restrict the scope of what can count as a case of reification in the social world. Genuine cases of reification only exist when something that in itself has no thing-like properties is perceived or treated as a thing. Here we would certainly think of slavery as … it was a system of production in which labourers were treated as mere things. … To reify other people is not merely violate a norm, but to commit a fundamental error, because one thereby violates the elementary conditions that underlie all our talk of morality … [It is] a violation of necessary presuppositions of our social lifeworld.” (2008: 148-9)

This response has the merit of treating reification as closely akin to the phenomenon of autism that Honneth discusses in his genetic-developmental argument for the priority of recognition to cognition, but such coherence comes at the cost of depriving the

concept of reification of any significant application - as Honneth partially acknowledges. Notably Honneth’s own example of slavery is unconvincing since there is a distinction between treating individuals instrumentally (e.g., as means of production) and being unable to see them as human agents at all that is salient in this context. Slavery is not an example of reification in the relevant second sense since, as Roman literature attests2, in ancient slave societies, the undoubted centrality of slavery to the system of production did not entail that slaves were not seen as persons ontologically speaking, only that they were not seen as persons in legal and political senses for a very wide range of purposes (they were seen as persons in law for some purposes and under some conditions, e.g., their testimony could be used in law if it was obtained under torture). Admittedly one does find expressions in Aristotle (‘an animate piece of property’) and Varro (a ‘speaking instrument’) that deny slaves possess personhood in an ontological sense but these don’t express the practices of ancient slavery, they are philosophical rationalizations designed to defend it.3 To make the point, we may merely note that the ontological view of recognition and reification that Honneth presents here is wholly incompatible with the existence of the staple figure of the clever slave in the plays of Plautus4 and indeed of Roman practices such as formal manumission in which slaves in being freed immediately became Roman citizens5 in order to see that slavery cannot be construed as a case of reification in Honneth’s sense – and, further, that it is very hard to think of any application for the concept of reification once it is cast in these terms ‘at the zero-point of sociality’ (2008: 157). It is just this non-applicability of the concept which, I surmise, leads Honneth to the somewhat ad hoc introduction of the distinction between (extremely rare) genuine reification and (much more common) fictive reification, where the 2 See on this issue Fitzgerald 2000 for enlightening discussion.3 For a broader philosophical treatment of these arguments, see Garnsey 1996.4 Fitzgerald, 2000: 44-475 Bradley, 1994: 155.

latter notion refers to ‘cases in which other persons are treated as if they were mere things.’ (2008: 157)

Given the problems attending this attempt to hang on to the idea of recognition as an existentiale, it may be more sensible to take the other tact of dropping this notion of recognition and approaching reification from a different direction. Recall that the immediate motivation for Honneth’s theoretical stance is that he wants to avoid reducing reification to either a moral failure or an epistemic category mistake. It is, however, possible to accommodate this motivation without making the ontological turn which Honneth takes up. To introduce this possibility, it is helpful to consider Collingwood’s discussion of ‘the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness’ (1938: 336). As Aaron Ridley puts it:

A ‘false’ or corrupt consciousness ... is one which, because it fails to clarify its own thoughts and feelings, refuses to acknowledge its own experiences as its own: it says about them ‘“That ... is not mine”’, so that the picture it paints for itself ‘of its own experience is not only a selected picture (that is, a true one as far as it goes), it is a bowdlerized picture, or one whose omissions are falsifications’. ... [T]he corruption of consciousness ... is an ethical condition - ethical to the extent that one ought not to be like that (the sense of ‘corruption’ that ties it to ‘vice’ and to ‘lies’), yet a condition to the extent that one’s being like that represents a certain sort of calamity (the sense of ‘corruption’ that ties it to ‘disease’ and to ‘error’). (1998: 7-9)

The corruption of consciousness is linked to both moral failure and epistemic error but it is not reducible to either. On the contrary, it denotes precisely a form of distorted praxis in the sense of a practical attitude towards oneself, others or the world manifest in conduct in which one treats (some aspect of) oneself, others or the world as a type of object rather than as the object it is. This point

emerges clearly when Collingwood argues that art as a form of praxis is the community’s remedy for this condition and the specific sense in which art provides a remedy for this condition in Collingwood’s account is given by his declaration that art is expression (Ridley, 1998: 26). ‘Expression’ here consists ‘not merely in making it clear that one is in a certain sort of state, as the betrayal of emotion does, but in making it clear just what this state is.’:

Expression ... is the activity of getting clear about one’s own experience, an activity that transforms the experience as it clarifies it. One’s experience is thus fully and completely distinctive only once expression is itself complete. (Ridley, 1998: 26).

While what is described can be separated from how it is described, what is expressed is not separable from how it is expressed; expression, unlike description, is necessarily mediated. This distinction between description and expression is directly related to another distinction drawn by Collingwood:

To describe a thing is to call it a thing of such and such a kind: to bring it under a conception, to classify it. Expression, on the contrary, individualizes. … The poet … gets as far away as possible from merely labelling his emotions [or thoughts] as instances of this or that general kind, and takes enormous pains to individualize them by expressing them in terms which reveal their difference from any other emotion [or thought] of the same sort. (1938: 112-3)

Collingwood’s point is that, while description clarifies by generalizing, expression clarifies by individualizing: ‘Description … would yield only “a thing of a certain kind”. Expression yields the thing itself.’ (Ridley, 1998: 29)

The salience of this discussion for Honneth’s treatment of reification becomes clear if we recall some examples of the kinds of

thing that Honneth takes to be instances of, or linked to, reification are practices of sexual and racial stereotyping and, more recently, practices such as internet dating on the basis of self-descriptions based on prescribed categories. What links these examples is that they treat human beings as creatures whose nature and value can be specified through systems of classification (these may, of course, be relatively crude or highly elaborate) which locate any given individual as a certain type of individual. In the cases of sexual and racial stereotyping, the relevant classes are typically large but, in principle, as the internet dating example illustrates, this classificatory perspective is compatible with holding the view that each individual is unique, where uniqueness is defined in terms of being the only member of a given class (given ingenuity, one can always refine one’s system of classification to the point that this is the case). What is excluded by this perspective is precisely individuality construed on the expressivist model of human agency articulated by Collingwood’s reflections on art and the corruption of consciousness and which, since Kant’s reflections on the work of art as exemplar, has been so central to post-Kantian thought from the Romantics, Hegel and Nietzsche to Wittgenstein, Arendt and Cavell, not to mention Foucault’s reflections on care of the self to which Honneth’s discussion makes reference. (2008 p.71 & p.92) On this view, reification consists in misconstruing recognition entirely in typological terms and, hence, in denying what is integral to genuine interpersonal recognition, namely, seeking to attend to you qua individuality rather than qua typicality, as an exemplar rather than an example.6 Construed thus, the significance of recognition as expression is that it makes possible relating to certain doings as, for example, my deeds and the failure of recognition manifest in reification consists in attending to oneself or others as merely a type of person, as a vehicle of doings (and hence situated in the realm of causal laws) rather than as a medium of deeds (and hence occupying the realm of freedom).

In sum, then, we can accommodate the motivations driving Honneth’s view of reification without falling subject to the problems that bedevil his own account by modifying the account of recognition not in terms of its level (as Honneth does) but in terms of its character. Introducing an expressivist view of human agency allows us to engage Honneth’s own examples as central cases of reification precisely because they are practices which embody the denial of agency as expression and, hence, represent human agency as a thing-like in the relevant sense. To further develop this argument concerning agency as expression, let us turn to Honneth’s recent discussion of ideological forms of recognition.

IdeologyIn his essay ‘Recognition as Ideology’, Honneth considers the possibility and character of ideological forms of recognition, where recognition in this essay refers not to the ontological notion developed in his reflections on reification but rather to the practical stance or attitude realized in conduct of receptivity and responsiveness to the value of an individual (where such recognition may support the realization of this value). Considered in this light, Honneth argues that the possibility of ideological forms of recognition, that is, forms of recognition that serve the (unjustified) interests of the dominant social order, is dependent on their meeting three desiderata (Honneth, 2007b: 337-9). First, in contrast to, for example, racist or sexist ideologies, they must give positive expression to the value to the subject (or group of subjects). Second, they must be credible to the subject of recognition in virtue of using an evaluative vocabulary which is contemporary with that subject. In other words, they must invoke reasons that have the right kind of shape to get a grip on the subject. Third, they must be contrastive ‘in the sense of giving expression to a particular new value or special achievement.’

(Honneth, 2007b: 339). So Honneth suggests that the mere expansion of an existing form of recognition won’t fulfil this criterion. In sum, an ideological form of recognition ‘must mobilize evaluative reasons possessing sufficient power to convince under given circumstances in order to motivate their addressees rationally to apply these reasons to themselves.’ (Honneth, 2007b: 340).

A candidate example of such an ideological form of recognition is ‘advertisements that set up a schema of recognition in such a way that a specific group of persons see themselves urged to conform their behaviour to a set of given standards.’ (Honneth, 2007b: 342) Honneth is sceptical of the claim that the example of consumer advertising can stand as a fully fledged instance of ideological

6 Sennet 2003 captures this point nicely in relation to respect and it is not surprising that in doing so he is ineluctably drawn to analogies with artistic forms, in this case music and music-making.

Author BioDavid Owen is Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Southampton. He has published nine books, most recently Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (2007), Recognition and Power (co-edited with Bert van den Brink, 2007) and Multiculturalism and Political Theory (co-edited with Anthony Laden, 2007), and many articles/book chapters on many topics in social and political philosophy. He is currently working on a book on migration and political theory.

ReferencesBradley, K., 1994. Slavery and Society at Rome. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.Cavell, S. 1976 ‘Knowing and Acknowledging’. In S. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 238-66Collingwood, R.G., 1938. The Principles of Art. Oxford, Oxford University Press.Fitzgerald, W., 2000. Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.Foucault. M., 1994. What is enlightenment? In Michel Foucault Ethics. London, Penguin, 303-320.Garnsey, P., 1996. Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Geuss, R., 2008. Philosophical anthropology and social criticism. In Axel Honneth Reification. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 120-30. Honneth, A. 2007a. Pathologies of the social. In Axel Honneth Disrespect. Cambridge, Polity, 3-48. Honneth, A. 2007b. ‘Recognition as ideology’. In B. van den Brink & D. Owen (eds.) Recognition and Power. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 323-47.Honneth, A. 2008. Reification. Oxford, Oxford University Press. Menke, C., 2003. Two kinds of practice: on the relation between social discipline and the aesthetics of existence. Constellations 10 (2), 199-210. Owen, D., 2008. Recognition, reification and value. Constellations 15 (4), 576-86.Ridley, A., 1998. R.G. Collingwood: A Philosophy of Art. London, Phoenix.Ridley, A., 2009. Nietzsche’s intentions: What the sovereign individual promises. In. K. Gemes and S. May (eds.) Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 181-196. Sennet, R., 2003. Respect. London. Penguin.

recognition on the grounds that ‘the content of these advertisements is received with the mental reservation that it only offers mere fictions that cannot really alter our life practices in any substantial way’, although he admits that if it turns out that (some) advertising can overcome this limitation, then it would be an example of ideological recognition (Honneth, 2007b: 342). This illustrates the point, for Honneth, that ideological forms of recognition are forms of productive, rather than repressive, power (in Foucault’s sense):

By promising social recognition for the subjective demonstration of certain abilities, needs, or desires, they engender a willingness to adopt a web of practices and modes of behaviour that suit the reproduction of social domination. (Honneth, 2007b: 342)

Honneth’s own favoured example, and the one that leads him to suggest a specific practical criterion for distinguishing ideological and non-ideological forms of recognition is the development of the evaluative vocabulary of flexible work that has developed in the context of postfordist forms of production and organisation of labour. Thus, Honneth cites the reconceptualises of wage-labourers as ‘creative entrepeneurs’ who are to regard their work as a vocation or calling and value their own flexibility in moving across different careers and forms of labour:

This new form of recognition asserts that every qualified member of the labor force is capable of planning his or her career path as a risk-filled enterprise requiring the autonomous application of all of his or her skills and abilities. (Honneth, 2007b: 344)

What makes this new form of recognition ideological on Honneth’s account is that the prevalence of this form of recognition does not align in any way with the attempt to provide the material pre-requisites for the realization of the new evaluative qualities picked out by this form of recognition:

The new manner of addressing employees and qualified workers as entrepeneurs of their own labor-power might contain an evaluative promise of recognizing a higher degree of individuality and initiative, but it in no consistent way ensures the institutional measures that would allow a consistent realization of these new values. Instead, employees are compelled to feign initiative, flexibility, and talents in places where there are no roots for these values. This new form of recognition is not deficient or irrational in an evaluative sense, but it does not meet the material demands of credible, justified recognition, because the institutional practices required for truly realizing the newly accentuated value are not delivered in the act of recognition. (Honneth, 2007b: 346)

Given this way of marking the distinction between ideological and non-ideological forms of recognition, Honneth acknowledges that ‘we can never exclude the possibility that the gap between an evaluative promise and its material fulfilment is merely a temporal one causing a delay in the realization of the institutional prerequisites’, consequently, he concludes, those ‘institutional patterns of evaluative distinction lacking any prospect of yielding material change can then in good conscience be called ideological forms of recognition.’ (Honneth, 2007b: 346-7)

This account does not appear to me to be very satisfactory for a number of reasons. On the one hand, it seems to point to hypocritical recognition rather than ideological recognition in cases where there is no intention that the use of the form of recognition should ever be matched by the emergence of its institutional pre-requisites. On the other hand, in non-hypocritical cases, it would seem to encompass the early stages of most struggles for recognition. Thus, for example, it is pretty clear that early stages of struggles for recognition by slaves, women and the working class

were marked precisely by the fact that ‘the institutional practices required for truly realizing the newly accentuated value are not delivered in the act of recognition’ (if ‘act’ is here construed in non-expressivist terms) and are likely, to a well-informed and realistic contemporary observer, reasonably have appeared to lack ‘any prospect of yielding material change’. Indeed, one of the reasons that we so honour those who initially took up these struggles is precisely because they had no obvious prospect of success, yet exhibited a sheer bloody-minded commitment to keep going anyway despite the costs that doing so imposed on them. However, the central issue that I want to focus on concerns Honneth’s decision to make his account hang on whether or not the institutional pre-requisites that enable agents to act in ways that realise the values picked out by a form of recognition are present or at least in the process of being realized. What is notable about this theoretical choice is what it reveals about the relationship between autonomy, recognition and capacities in Honneth’s theory. Essentially, Honneth’s criterion states that recognition is genuine rather than ideological insofar as it increases the capacities of the agent with respect to the realization of the value(s) to which the form of recognition is responsive. Given that Honneth takes recognition to be constitutive of autonomy, the implication is that an increase in one’s capacities is an increase in one’s autonomy (i.e., capacities for self-realization). In terms of Honneth’s own example, this is shown by the fact that if it turns out to be the case that the new form of recognition described by neo-liberal labour practices does, perhaps with a temporal lag, bring into being the institutional pre-requisites that develop workers’ capacities for realizing the values of initiative, flexibility and entrepreneurialism, then on Honneth’s account we cannot accurately describe this form of recognition as ideological, as serving social domination. This seems to me to be mistaken but understanding why this is the case requires consideration of what Michel Foucault refers to as the

paradox of the relations of capacity and power, namely, the claim that the growth of capacities does not stand in a simple relationship, of the kind Honneth presupposes, with either the growth of autonomy or with the intensification of power relations. (1994: 317).

Foucault’s point is twofold. First, that an increase in capacities denotes an increase in freedom (i.e., one’s power to do, be or become X) but not necessarily an increase in autonomy. Thus, for example, disciplinary power increases one’s capacities to δ and to bring one’s conduct in conformity with social norms concerning δ-ing, but hardly increases one’s autonomy. Second, insofar as we conceive autonomy within the terms of the model of agency characteristic of disciplinary power in which agency is conceptualised in terms of a teleological process of seeking to realise some pre-determined end by bring one’s conduct into conformity with a rule which can be stated independently and in advance of the activity itself, it follows that the growth of capacities remains bound up with the intensification of power relations. This point has been nicely elucidated by Menke:

In disciplinary practices we gain the capacity to direct ourselves, i.e., to direct our own movement and reactions towards a given aim. This is precisely how the concept of a life-plan understands the praxis of leading a life – only here the aim is not given in advance by social norms, but rather given to oneself. Leading a self-determined life, then, means orienting one’s life like an activity leading to a goal. According to this idea, the difference between personally leading a life and disciplinary self-direction simply concerns the realized normative idea – its origin (it is determined by myself), its content (it concerns my good), and its scope (it refers to the whole of my life). But it does not concern the relation between norm and activity: according to the life of a

life-plan, the normative orientation to one’s own good must lead to an ordering of goal or aims, so that leading one’s own life can be understood as an activity of realizing such goals or aims. Precisely this renders the idea of self-determination oriented by the concept of a life-plan into a mechanism or effect of normalization. (Menke, 2003: 207-8)

Foucault’s response to this problem was to offer a re-conceptualisation of autonomy in terms of an expressivist model of agency which he characterises as ‘the aesthetics of existence’. What is crucially different about this model of autonomy is that, in contrast to the rule/application model of the relationship of norm and activity, it involves a relationship to one’s activity in which the rule cannot be stated independently and in advance of the activity but, rather, is given in and through the performance; it offers an aesthetic exemplification of a way of living – not for imitation but for following (as Kant rightly has it).

With these points in mind, we can return to Honneth’s reflections on a new form of recognition characteristic of neoliberal labour regimes to note that this new form of recognition is precisely organised around the idea of rational life plan. Foucault’s point that this mode of self-relation supports the intensification of power relations is nicely illustrated by the practices that are bound up with the worker as ‘creative entrepeneur’, namely, personal development plans, performance indicators and bonuses, the generalization of ‘audit’ mechanisms, where what is characteristic of these activities is the setting, measuring and evaluation of targets to which the worker is presumed to have, and may indeed have, rationally endorsed. What Foucault’s insight suggests with respect to Honneth’s specific example is this new form of recognition can serve the dominant social interests even if it meets Honneth’s criterion for genuine recognition. The more general point for Honneth’s argument is thus that ideological forms of

recognition are not fundamentally distinguished by the presence or absence of institutional pre-requisites but rather by the form of the relation of recognition itself and, hence, of the form of the practical relation to self constituted by being recognized in this way. Here precisely power works through acts of recognition.

In sum, then, the argument of this section is if Honneth is to account for ideological relation of recognition in terms that acknowledge the paradox to which Foucault draws attention, he needs to be able to distinguish between aesthetic-existential and disciplinary practical relations to self and the forms of recognition that are constitutive of these different relations to self. If my argument is cogent, the worry for Honneth’s theory of recognition as currently formulated is that it can render invisible, and hence serve as a conduit for, ideology.

ConclusionThe arguments of the preceding sections converge in the claim that Honneth can adequately reconceptualise the classic notions of reification and ideology with recognition-theoretic terms if and only if he adopts an expressivist account of agency. But what implications does such a turn have for Honneth’s general theory of recognition? If we consider the three modes or axes of recognition that Honneth proposes – love, respect and esteem – the central point that emerges is that it is a mistake to imagine the forms of recognition that support the relevant practical relations to self can be specified in terms of rules specifiable independently and in advance of the activity itself such that recognition consists merely in the context-sensitive application of a rule. To put it another way, the conditions for the successful accomplishment of (non-trivial) acts of recognition involve criteria that are internal to that accomplishment and which are worked out in the course of

successful (or unsuccessful) performance of the act. As Ridley comments, using the example of marriage as a mode of mutual recognition:

It is true that there are some independently specifiable success-conditions here (although they are defeasible). Respect is presumably necessary, for example, as are caring for the other person’s interest and not betraying them, say. But what exactly might count as betrayal, or what caring for the other person’s interests might look like in this case – or even whether these things are what is at issue – cannot be specified independently of the particular marriage that it is, of the circumstances, history and personalities peculiar to it, and of how those things unfold or develop over time. It is, in other words, perfectly possible that everything I do is, as it were, strictly speaking respectful, considerate and loyal, and yet that I fail to be any good as a husband – I am true to the letter but miss the spirit, as we might say. (Ridley, 2009:186)

What being true to the spirit requires is not fulfilment of the obligations of marriage but an exhibiting of the virtues internal to this structure of mutual recognition.

A deeper issue arising from the expressivist turn concern Honneth’s understanding of the relationship of theoretical reflection of the kind manifest in a theory of recognition and historical developments. Essentially, as I understand it, Honneth’s view is that we can reconstruct the normative grammar of struggles for recognition as examples of universal rules whose emergence is immanent to the historical process. The theorist’s role is thus to attend to the plurality of such struggles over time in order to abstract the normative kernel in the form of universal rules. However, as Honneth acknowledges, the plausibility of this stance requires that he endorse a strong account of progress (2007b: 334). By contrast, on an expressivist view of struggles for

recognition as exemplars, the appropriate model is provided by the common law judge who addresses the normative grammar of a particular case by situating it in a network of similarities and differences with other cases and engaging in a process of rational reconstruction which Brandom has glossed in relation to concepts thus:

The model I find most helpful in understanding the sort of rationality that consists in retrospectively picking out an expressively progressive trajectory through past applications of a concept. so as to determine the norm one can understand as governing the whole process and so project into the future, is that of judges in the common law tradition. Common law differs from statutory law in that all there is to settle the boundaries of applicability of the concepts it employs is the record of actually decided cases that can serve as precedents. ... So whatever content those concepts have, they get from the history of their actual applications. A judge justifies her decision in a particular case by rationalizing it in the light of a reading of that tradition, by so selecting and emphasizing particular prior decisions as precedential that a norm emerges as an implicit lesson. And it is that norm that is then appealed to in deciding the present case, and is implicitly taken to be binding in future ones. In order to find such a norm, the judge must make the tradition cohere, must exhibit the decisions that have actually been made as rational and correct, given the norm that she finds is what has implicitly governed the process all along. Thus each of the prior decisions selected as precedential emerges as making explicit some aspect of that implicit norm, as revealing a bit of the boundary of the concept. ... Telling a story of this sort - finding a norm by making a tradition, giving it a genealogy - is a form of rationality as systematic history. (2002: 14)

This is an intrinsically defeasible and pluralist approach which need not invoke any strong view of progress and in this respect is considerably easier to defend in our post-metaphysical age than Honneth’s current position.

These brief sketches of two of the primary implications of an expressivist turn for Honneth’s theory of recognition do not of course exhaust what would be involved in working out the full character of such a turn but, in conjunction with the specific argument offered concerning reification and ideology, they do suggest that such a turn offer considerable benefits to Honneth’s position at relatively low cost, not the least of such benefits being a more adequate appreciation of the forms and subtleties of power.