In order to develop my account of how recognition operates within new economies of voice, it is useful to first consider the recent work of Judith Butler (2009; Butler and Athanasiou, 2013), in particular her critique of particular “schemes” or “frames” of recognition. This work - written in the context of post-9/11 US politics and what she argues are the violent rhythms of neoliberal expropriation around the globe - helps me think through what it is that conditions the recognisability of others. Misrecognition, distorted recognition and non-recognition are useful as ways to articulate the ways in which voice can be rendered silent, marginal or futile. However, these prefix descriptors do not fully capture the ways that recognition itself is subject to restructuring by particular rationalities and impulses. While Honneth (1995; 2007) is interested in the ways
misrecognition causes injury or moral harm at the level of psychic distress or self-esteem, the value of Butler’s work is that she uncovers how recognition itself can perform a different kind of ethical violence, one that is in many ways more insidious.
In coming to terms with post-9/11 America and the resulting War on Terror, Butler (2009) carefully examines how categories of difference and frames of recognition helped constitute those whose lives were worthy of being regarded as a ‘life’, and those who fell outside the category of human. By formulating recognition through a series of
preconditions, Butler performs a simultaneous excavation and uncovering of the
hierarchies of value that lie behind its production. More pressingly, she reveals what is at
stake in its conferral or withholding. To be apprehended, regarded or accorded recognition
does not assume that recognition is a pre-formed object that can be bestowed upon another; instead, certain categories of recognisability render subjects worthy or unworthy of recognition in the first place, or worth only of a recognition that places them in a vulnerable state. Butler insists that recognition is contingent upon intelligibility: “just as norms of recognisability prepare the way for recognition, so schemas of intelligibility condition and produce norms of recognisability” (7). This ‘ordering’ of recognition into its prerequisites - norms - and subsequent processes of identification - schemas of
intelligibility - draws attention to the terms and frames of recognition that precede its formation. In this work, Butler uses the language of exposure, vulnerability and precarity, invoking a dynamic and affective politics of voice useful to my own analysis. It is a reminder that certain kinds of ethical violence are pressed or imprinted upon subjects; that one can be “subject(ed) to recognition” (Gray, 2013). In other words, some lives - and
certain kinds of subjects - are made precarious through their exposure to certain processes of recognition.
The incorporation of difference and the production of exception are twin
imperatives in this economy of recognition. They condition a variety of effects. Certain liberal discourses of recognition are important in claims to rights, but they can also work to inflict their own kind of ethical violence by assimilating and incorporating difference, transgression and alterity into a single homologous category of tolerance or diversity, as touched on in Chapter Four. But the politics of recognition is not solely based on social claims alone; the desire for recognition arises in political claims for intelligibility by people excluded from the normative frameworks that regulate and accord status within society. Butler’s recent thinking (see Willig, 2012: 140) also uncovers how recognition itself is a “structure of intelligibility” that conditions what is regarded as recognisable. For instance, she argues that for those who have been excluded from the “structures and vocabularies” of representation, recognition becomes a problem. This, she suggests, is particularly acute for “those who can only enter the existing structures of political representation by
assuming a position as a subject that actually effaces their historical and cultural history and agency” (140). Further, Butler, with Athanasiou (2013: 82) argue “schemes of intelligibility and norms of recognition are interlinked in both state-centered and biopolitical forms of power”. This stranding-out of recognition into its constituent frames and resulting norms highlights the different registers in which recognition operates. For instance, the continual performance of productivity through market participation is increasingly demanded by the state, requiring citizen to adopt particular subject formations that align with these frames of recognition. In other words, the cost of recognition might involve a degree of self-
effacement. For instance, Butler and Athanasiou (91) argue that, in some cases,
[…] formal recognition comes with the requirement of the recognized subject’s conformity to certain standardized accounts of victimization and depoliticized modalities of injurability.
This speaks to a larger question of ethics about how, and to what degree, it is possible for the mechanism of recognition to meet the voices of structural and historical injustice, discrimination and inequality without reducing such claims to the individual. As described in relation to therapeutic strategies of listening and the state, accounts of individual trauma or suffering are not a substitute for injuries caused by historical injustice (see Humphrey,
2006). From the vantage point of recognition, we can see how the terms of recognition can be a form of exclusion, as well as inflict further injury on communities impacted by a history of discrimination or displacement. The social divisions of class and culture are intensified and dissolved through what Butler describes as the “differential distribution of recognizability” (Willig, 2012: 140) which, on the one hand, recognises citizen-subjects as autonomous individuals, while on the other, marking out regulatory spaces for those deemed disposable or undesirable, outside the existing regime. In this way, Butler uncovers how recognition becomes implicated in the uneven reproduction of power.
The liberal values of inclusion, and the neoliberal discourses of market participation and responsibility, are increasingly accommodated through frames of recognition that work to manage and regulate difference. As Butler and Athanasiou (2013: 65) suggest, the liberal form of recognition “endlessly works to encompass, adjudicate and commodify ‘difference’ and thus depoliticize and legitimate the differential configuration of subjects, lives and the world”. Thus, the terms, norms and frames of recognition can operate as both a
productive and limiting force. This does not mean recognition is not a useful or necessary as an important connecting term. Rather, it requires a concession that recognition is not always “unambiguously good” (82). For instance, as I discuss further on in relation to self-quantification technologies, neoliberal frames of recognition - along with new
categories of data-driven speech - work to prescribe acceptable and aspirational modes of participation through the values of enterprise, optimisation, responsibilisation and
productivity. Access to neoliberal recognition in some cases involves careful and continuous work on the self, so that self-craft becomes a pursuit in the name of
recognition within the dominant frame of the market. We can see how neoliberal norms of recognition restructure relationships in terms of the market and circulate in a moral
economy distinct from one based on a Hegelian intersubjectivity alone, even if these shifts can’t be described as clearly good or bad. Democratic participation is recast as market participation, where particular modes of recognition are shaped around the values of individual optimisation and enterprise. This shift in value and emphasis can be seen in the nesting of identity politics within a broader politics of self-craft. Certainly, the mechanisms of neoliberal biopolitical power operate precisely to dismantle and distribute cohesive social structures and reconstitute them as markets. This means that there are always potential markets that can accommodate any claims to voice based on a need for recognition, transforming the meaning and value of recognition in the process.
Access to recognition may be continent upon using the vocabularies of the dominant organising structures of society, but it is also conditioned by the extent to which it is
possible to be understood in terms other than those made available through existing frames of recognition. For instance, when frames of recognition favour the enterprising individual - where a politics of identity has been replaced by a politics of individual productivity - access to recognition is contingent upon narratives of participation that incorporate the self-regulatory and surveillance tendencies on the market. In this context, Spivak’s (1988) critical question can the subaltern speak? takes on a new resonance - a culture of productivity and enterprise can prevent access to recognition (or makes access contingent upon) narratives that fall outside these dominant frames. The paradox of Spivak’s question, of course, is embedded within its own framing: to give account of the subaltern, one must take up the terms by which the subaltern is rendered an intelligible subject, even if these terms are used to critique the very structures of their formation. But Spivak’s question highlights a further point: that is, the co-constitutive relationship between categories of speech and the terms of recognition in registering voice. Pushing beyond Couldry’s (2010: 98) claim that neoliberal culture allows the world to become “unnarratable from certain points of view”, I suggest that neoliberal terms and frames of recognition regulate and govern the boundaries of those very points of view. It is not just a case of being unable to speak (or be rendered intelligible) from a certain subject position, but struggling to render those positions visible by forging new spaces of recognition within the existing structures of society.
Certainly, there are problems when recognition is confined to either a restricted band of what is of what is recognisable or limited terms in which one can be made intelligible – both of which could be said to have a ‘narrowing’ effect on voice, as cultural critiques of neoliberalism often claim. But further than this, and of relevance to my argument, it is not simply a shift in the terms or frames of recognition alone that condition the possibilities for voice, but the resultant transformation of the category of recognition itself by values and attachments operate according to a non-relational set of logics. Like certain modes of listening, as described in Chapter Four, recognition can also operate as a regulatory force that designates the terms by which subjects can make claims to voice.
If being apprehended is contingent upon certain kinds of neoliberal identifications and identities, then the available modes of speech are adjusted accordingly. Even while objects of market value that have become attached to recognition have altered the modes of address and kinds of narratives produced, Appadurai’s (2004) insistence that control over the “terms of recognition” is what strengthens the capacity for voice still holds strong. This is not to say such modes cannot be redeployed to critique the structures and norms of recognition (as Spivak and subaltern and postcolonial studies in general aim to do), but it is to suggest that sites and practices of voice are always nested within existing architectures with multiple registers, held in dynamic tension. The terms of recognition within any struggle for voice must be taken into account and understood in these changing terms.