![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
It used to be said that shame culture waned in early modernity, but there is a growing body of historiography on the vital role that recognition and the opinion of others continued to play. Honour mattered; for some it was the mark and the maker of your true self. While philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, Hume, Smith, and Rousseau disagreed in their evaluations of the phenomenon, they were united in thinking that the great engine of recognition whirred like furious clockwork through human society. When one listens to voices from the margins of power, however, to formerly enslaved black women and men, and white women, one hears a different story – that the machine is broken. I argue that, albeit from incomparable positions, they articulate a theory of misrecognition in the face of systematic power. Sensitive to the entanglements of epistemology and naturalised inequality, they offer a politics of vision that deconstructs the punitive lenses of gender and race which render people invisible and misunderstood, and in so doing they try to write themselves into view. They offer an account of the mysterious intractability of hegemonic ways of seeing that poses a challenge to both the putatively laissez-faire economy of recognition of their enlightened contemporaries, and to the emancipatory teleology of modern recognition theorists.
KEYWORDS:
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to the editors of this journal, Alix Cohen and Sacha Golob, for their careful, patient, and judicious work in seeing this article through to publication, and to the three anonymous reviewers whose incisive reports have made it so much stronger. I thank Tim Stuart-Buttle and Heikki Haara for inviting me to their conference on recognition in York in 2019. Over two dreamy summer days we talked, in such good company, and the idea for this article was born. Since then, roving conversations with Tim have much enriched it and I am in his debt.
Notes
1 Du Bois, Worlds of Color, 67.
2 For some classic, albeit divergent, accounts of the decline of shame culture, see Dodds, The Greeks; Williams, Shame and Necessity; Muchembled, History of Violence. Elias, Civilizing Process wrote in the other direction, and more recently: Dawson, “Shame in Early Modern Thought”; Stuart-Buttle, From Moral Theology to Moral Philosophy; Haara and Stuart-Buttle, “Beyond Justice”; Haara and Stuart-Buttle, “Problem of Sociability”; Douglass, Mandeville’s Fable. For a rethinking of atomised selfhood, see Lenz, Socializing Minds.
3 See also Thompson, “Axel Honneth and the Neo-Idealist Turn in Critical Theory”; Stojkovski, “Recognition and Power”; Markell, Bound by Recognition. For defences of recognition theory in relation to power see Stojkovski, “Recognition and Power”; Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. For Fraser and Honneth’s own debate about how far the concept of recognition can grapple with social inequality, see their Redistribution or Recognition.
4 See, for example, Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith, All the Women Are White; hooks, Feminist Theory, especially 1–5; Threadcraft, “North American Necropolitics” on black women and the spectacular death deficit.
5 See Gowing, “The Manner of Submission”; Simons, “Women in Frames”; Korhonen, “To See and to be Seen”.
6 For example, Pascal, Pensées, 39: “Custom is a second nature which destroys the first”.
7 See hooks, Feminist Theory, 41 on Fanon’s “blind spot” in relation to “sexist oppression”.
8 See Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, and, to complicate the narrative: Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure; Liang and Rodriguez, Authority and Spectacle; Valerio, Sovereign Joy.
9 See Riello and Rublack, The Right to Dress; Vaporis, Voices of Early Modern Japan, 27. See also Burghartz, “Covered Women?”.
10 On the politics of the archive, and for histories that reach tenderly past that archive, see Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives; Hartman, Wayward Lives. For a reading of images that itself feels like an art historical exercise in recognition, see Fromont, Images on a Mission.
11 This is not to suggest that there was no race before enslavement. As Pre-Modern Critical Race Studies has taught, there absolutely was; for a stunning recent exploration of which, and one that speaks especially to the visual theme of this article, see Ndiaye and Markey, Seeing Race Before Race. For foundational contributions which focus particularly on the intersection of race and gender, see Hall, Things of Darkness; Hendricks and Parker, Women, “Race,” and Writing. See also Loomba and Sanchez, Rethinking Feminism, and Pateman and Mills, Contract & Domination, who think through the racial and sexual contracts side by side, examining where they cross and diverge.
The literature on early modern women’s philosophy is vast. For a recent monumental contribution which contains crucial references as well as brilliant pieces, see Detlefsen and Shapiro, Routledge Handbook of Women, and for pieces that speak especially to the themes and figures of this article see those by Jacqueline Broad, Alan M.S.J. Coffee, Adriana Clavel-Vázquez and Sergio Armando Gallegos-Ordorica, Aaron Garrett, Lena Halldenius, Julie Walsh, Hasana Sharp and Margaret Watkins. See also Broad and Detlefsen, Woman and Liberty.
12 See Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery, on the relations between gender, capitalism, and slavery. I see a close relation between the terms ‘recognition’ and ‘honour’ in the primary sources, but for a pulling apart of the difference, see Clifton Mark, “Recognition and Honor”.
13 See Stuart-Buttle, “A Burthen Too Heavy”.
14 See also Nicole’s, Essais de morale which, significantly, Locke chose to translate. For wonderful commentary, see Brooke, Philosophic Pride.
15 See Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism on the neo-Roman tradition, and Dawson and de Dijn, Rethinking Liberty before Liberalism on the enduring power of this tradition as a hermeneutic tool. On early modern feminism’s deep engagement with this tradition, see Halldenius, Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism; Coffee, “Freedom as Independence”; Dawson, “When Reason Does Not See You”.
16 See Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, on testimonial and hermeneutic injustice.
17 On the anxieties about paradiastole, semantic instability, and moral (mis)understanding, see Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric; Dawson, Locke, Language and Early-Modern Philosophy, 219–38.
18 See Broad, “From Nobility”, on Sophia’s originality.
19 Compare Locke, Two Treatises, 284.
20 On ‘Black femme freedom’ (10), see Johnson, Wicked Flesh.
21 See also Maracle, The Women’s Movement.
22 See Bejan, “Since all the World is Mad”, on Astell’s ‘psychology of superiority’.