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2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

27. The Sociological Roots and Deficits of Axel Honneth’s Theory of Recognition

Author : Mariana Teixeira

Published in: The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US

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Abstract

Having written uninterruptedly on several topics concerning political and social philosophy from the late 1970s to the present, Axel Honneth offers his readers a wide range of possibilities to engage with his work. The theoretical path traced in his almost 40 years of intellectual life, however, has not always followed a univocal line, advancing through conceptual shifts of varying scope, always in a committed debate with his peers, commentators and students. This chapter proposes an interpretation that allows understanding the theoretical shifts undertaken along this path, showing that Honneth moves between two critical models: one centered on the social actors’ experience of disrespect and injustice, and another focused on institutions and the functional imperatives of the social order. As a result, the second model runs the risk of falling prey to Honneth’s own objection of critical theory’s sociological deficit. A conceptual tool for avoiding such risk can be found, the author argues, in a dialogically interpreted notion of normative reconstruction, which could restore the latent, dialectical role of negativity, once crucial to Honneth’s theory.

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previous chapter Recognition, Identity and Subjectivity

next chapter Experience and Temporality: Toward a New Paradigm of Critical Theory

It is worth noting that Honneth’s paper was published a year before The Poverty of Theory, the famous book by E. P. Thompson that became a benchmark for the critique of structuralism within Marxism (Thompson 1978).

The argument is similar to the one employed in his interpretation of Michel Foucault’s poststructuralism (Honneth 1989).

Adopting the other’s perspective is an idea borrowed by Honneth and Paris from the tradition of symbolic interactionism since G.H. Mead and his concept of role-taking, according to which assuming the role of the other is a fundamental condition for the possibility of social interaction as such.

A crucial difference between both procedures of theoretical correction lies in the fact that, when it comes to critical theorists in the narrower sense, it is possible to identify fruitful but unexplored insights and pathways, whereas the same does not apply to the analysis of more strictly structuralist theories.

Some of these authors have been at some point associated to the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham (United Kingdom), an institution important for the production and dissemination of the cultural studies which was founded in 1964 by Richard Hoggart. For a presentation of this tradition, cf. Hall (1980).

On the crucial role of sociological and social–historical approaches for Honneth’s critical model, cf. Voirol (2007).

Cf. the idea of “delinguistification” (Entsprachlichung) in Kluge and Negt (1972).

A rather different issue arises if we ask how these negative emotional reactions—such as shame, rage, hurt and contempt—can fill the gap between mere suffering and a cognitive awareness of its sources, and between cognitive awareness and active resistance; it would be necessary to indicate, furthermore, how individual resistance can be collectively articulated and translated into political claims and social movements. On the one hand, norms of recognition “continually demand, from within themselves, the further perfection of our moral action, such that the historical process is characterized by a permanent pressure to learn” (Honneth 2002: 517). On the other, however, feelings of injury or violation only give rise, in fact, to active and collective resistance if the concerned actors can count on a shared framework of interpretation in which those feelings can be articulated as typical of a social group as a whole, thus creating the possibility of social conflicts [Auseinandersetzungen] in a pre-political sense becoming properly political struggles [Kämpfe] (Honneth 2003a: 184).

Honneth himself draws attention to the fact that the negative effects of disrespect are often “described in terms of metaphors that refer to states of deterioration of the human body,” such as “death”, “injury” (Kränkung), and “suffering”. In the case of social misrecognition as well as of physical suffering, it is therefore possible to map a series of symptoms that can help individuals (and critical theorists) identify a pathological state.

These considerations, at first limited to the lower classes of capitalist societies, are gradually generalized to a broader context, so that one can extract from them a “generally widespread pattern of experience” encompassing not only the labor movement, but also, for example, the resistance of colonized groups and the underground history of women’s protests. Had Honneth developed this line of thought—and had he resorted to the wide field of academic literature on forms of anticolonial and feminist resistance—his argument would certainly have been strengthened.

This seems to be precisely the move that led Robin Celikates to criticize and ultimately reject Honneth’s critical model altogether (Celikates 2009: 190–3). Aside from this rather summary dismissal (which, in my view, does not do justice to the complexity and transformations of the theory of recognition), Celikates’ approach to critical reconstruction is very compelling on the whole.

There is not an actual break in Honneth’s work that would categorically separate writings belonging to completely different paradigms, centered respectively on the notions of recognition and freedom. Although “freedom” is granted an increasingly important role in Honneth’s theory from 1999 onwards, he never really renounced the relevance of recognition-theoretical considerations. There are, however, significant changes in the development of Honneth’s critical model that will be dealt with shortly.

This shift is crucial also because it makes it possible to formulate a diagnosis of the present time, something that is relegated to a secondary role in the critical model of the struggle for recognition. It is in this direction that we can understand, moreover, the promising notion of paradoxes that Honneth develops in the same period, but that he abandons shortly afterward. Initially, Honneth proposes that the idea of paradoxes replaces Hegelian-Marxist vocabulary centered on the idea of the work of contradictions. In the sense highlighted here, however, the idea of paradoxes depends on that of contradictions: the paradox is the blocking of the dialectical process set in motion by contradiction. Thus, if the paradox is the very negation of contradiction, it does not make sense without it. Honneth therefore starts to talk of “paradoxical contradictions.” Honneth’s theory, I argue against his own interpretation of his work, has a central and decisive dialectical component, even when it diagnoses the obstruction of the dialectical process in social reality.

This holds especially for personal relationships, but considerations of the sort appear in the other ethical spheres as well, if only to a lesser extent.

Considerations on notions such as suffering and feelings of injustice are not completely absent from Freedom’s Right. When dealing with friendship, for example, Honneth states that the violation of the rules that intuitively underlie relationships among friends is “lived as a crisis” (Honneth 2014b: 135). The same holds for the section on the labor market, where Honneth claims: “We should not be surprised that workers have cooperatively subverted many of these growing burdens through a variety of subtle violations in order to be able to fulfill obligations to family and friends, nor by the fact that the political representation of all these feelings of injustice and all these practices of resistance has been regarded as wholly inadequate” (Honneth 2014b: 246).

On the concepts of mode of presentation [Darstellungsweise] and mode of research [Forschungsweise], see Marx (1968).

For a thorough analysis of Honneth’s use of the terms presentification, actualization, reactualization and reconstruction, see Nobre (2013).

This is further corroborated by the fact that, in an earlier version of this argument, Honneth not only maintains this negative-to-positive order of research in the presentation (forms of recognition are derived from corresponding forms of disrespect), but more importantly he sets himself the task of further developing Ernst Bloch’s “negative approach” based on two central premises: “[F]irst, that the essence of everything which, in moral theory, is known as ‘human dignity’ can only be ascertained indirectly by determining the forms of personal degradation and injury; and second, that it was only such negative experiences of disrespect and insult that turned the normative goal of securing human dignity into a driving force in history” (Honneth 1995e: 248).

This tendency is reinforced in Honneth (2014a), where society is conceived as an organism that is itself affected by pathologies, or rather: diseases.

The purpose here is not, of course, to recommend turning back to Honneth’s earliest writings and abandoning every development from the mid-1980s onwards. My intention is much more modest (and plausible) as it is limited to suggest that some of the impasses in Honneth’s oeuvre can profit from the responses to the conceptual debate between action- and systems theory he himself worked out before his “hermeneutical turn” in The Struggle for Recognition and his “functionalist turn” in Freedom’s Right.

In this sense, reconstructive critique requires a concrete methodological intersubjectivity, in contrast to a “perspective taking” that is performed only fictively. An example thereof would be the Rawlsian notion of reflective equilibrium (Rawls: 1971).

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Title: The Sociological Roots and Deficits of Axel Honneth’s Theory of Recognition
Author: Mariana Teixeira
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Book: The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-55800-8

Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-55801-5

Copyright Year: 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55801-5_27