 |
|
|||
|
|
|||
16 politics of recognition
The politics of recognition goes beyond any “identity politics” based on a simple identification with a gender, ethnic group, class, or age cohort. It presumes multiple planes of cultural domination and multiple counter-tactics aimed at both re-marking and re-moving privileged access to the public sphere, and re-inserting marginalized individuals (as strangers) into the space of the public sphere that was formerly held by privileged individuals. It seeks to change the cultural/symbolic coding of the public sphere to allow for diverse diversities—for singularities and heterogeneities.
This politics goes hand-in-hand with the “politics of redistribution” that seeks to remedy political/economic inequalities and injustice. Symbolic change is too often offered by those who would “permit1” this as an alibi to retain political/economic privilege. And so symbolic change first is not requested, but demonstrated, and second, is not allowed to replace or diffuse demands for economic justice.
1“Allowing” multiculturalism while promoting this as a mere “play” of difference—for example, by forcing difference into a normative framework, where each group fills a pre-figured slot in a matrix of cultural practices—recreates difference as a variation on a single theme. Culture “X” is allowed this and that distinct cultural properties, and culture “Y” has corresponding properties of its own “unique” variety. Authentic, incommensurable difference is not allowed, and individual variations are not important. Difference is domesticated by being subsumed under a framework of expectable variation.
