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:
1. Introduction
Honour mattered in pre-modernity. Ideally, honour was the spur to good behaviour and the mark of your true self. Indeed, honour mattered so much in early modernity that it was sometimes presented as the maker of your true self. How you were seen through the eyes of others was widely thought, in various causal and mimetic ways, to be at the crux of who you were. It not only reflected you, but it fashioned you too. While philosophers disagreed in their evaluations of the phenomenon, some believing it a generator of virtue, others decrying it as the ruin of civilization, they were almost unanimous in thinking that the concern for recognition was among the great engines of human action and political organization, that people craved social esteem and were terrified of shame. Philosophers were alive to the porous line between self and other, to the extent to which one’s value and selfhood were constructed through the gaze of the community. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, David Hume, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to cite a few of the big names, all concurred that the eyes of others had huge power over oneself, that an economy of recognition whirred like furious clockwork through society.
When one listens to voices from the margins of power, however, one hears a different story. One hears that the mechanism of recognition is broken. Formerly enslaved black women and men, and white women, albeit from incomparable positions, point to cracks in the machine. This paper tunes into these voices that are usually occluded within the history of philosophy, and more particularly within the historiography on theories of recognition. I explore their analyses of the ethical potency of recognition, and argue that they formulated a critique of its functionality when it comes up against systemic inequality and relations of naturalized supremacy.
They diagnose structural impediments within the putatively free market of recognition, so that appearance is wrenched apart from reality, and however much you try to play by the basic rules of exchange, your moves are illegible and the game impossible to win. The law of reputation is rigged, on this alternative story, trip-wired with double standards, and you are guilty either way, liable to internalize a debased version of yourself. The writers explored in this paper drill into the lenses through which recognition should occur, through which people like them are seen by others and indeed by themselves. They try to fathom the invisibility of qualities – humanity, dignity, reason – that ought to be as clear as a cloudless day, that are demonstrably right in front of one’s eyes. They denaturalize the process of seeing – both pushing against the contemporary empirical excitement about the veracity of sensation and drawing on the sceptical, corpuscularian veil of ideas – and post a theory of the ideological nature of vision, according to which what is seen is simply not what is there. They evoke what it is like to walk in these shadows – in something like the ‘World Shadow’, as W.E.B. Du Bois described the colour line – and how hard it is to make people see.Footnote1 They conceptualize, I argue, a politics of intractable misrecognition in the face of power.
Commentators used to say, variously, that shame culture, and the concern with the opinion of others, waned in modernity, giving way to reflexive guilt and atomized, inward, selfhood. More recently, however, there has been a flourishing of both historical and normative work on the ongoing and growing importance of shame and the recognition of others.Footnote2 This paper aims to contribute to this field by adding marginalized thinkers to the canon of white men whose views are usually sought on the topic, and unpacking precisely the effect of that marginalization on a theory of recognition. It reveals a theory that deconstructs and differentiates the perceptual lenses through which recognition does, or does not, occur in situations of radical domination.
Among modern theorists of recognition, including Seyla Benhabib, Franz Fanon, Nancy Fraser, Yürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Charles Taylor, Honneth is a notable figure for this paper because he takes a historical path that intersects with my own. He traces three distinct, national conceptual histories of recognition, in France, Britain, and Germany, finding in the latter “a social theory with normative content” and recognition as “an occurrence of mutuality between two equal subjects” which culminates in Hegel’s emancipatory struggle for recognition at the onset of modernity, and his insight “that practical identity-formation presupposes intersubjective recognition” (Honneth, Struggle for Recognition, 92).
I am not the first to worry that the beguiling ethics of mutual recognition might be undermined, as Lois McNay puts it, by its “inadequate account of the mediating effects of power” (McNay, Against Recognition, 144).Footnote3 Honneth acknowledges this problem and wonders whether Hegel might provide a way through. Honneth explores Hegel’s own view that a woman, incapable of universal thought, more like a plant than an animal, is fit only for the home and should submit to her husband. Hegel, says Honneth, was expressing the “shared” understanding of his contemporaries, his fellow participants in this collective delusion – a “worldview” that was constructed “behind their backs, so to say” and left no space for “legitimate reasons” to question these “shared norms”. Were “at least some of the participants” to feel and to prove that what was being touted as nature was in fact culture, then the space for questioning would expand, new knowledge become possible, and equality and mutual recognition beckon (Honneth, Recognition, 163, 166–7).
What I show is that many writers, long before Hegel and more recent critics, over centuries and in multiple contexts, were questioning the worldview that they were naturally inferior. Not only was this not a shared view, but they were precisely arguing that domination was a structural block to recognition. Moreover, the futile repetition of the point across time and space reveals the granite strength of practices of othering. It shows that the dialectic does not necessarily tend towards freedom, that proof of equality might not expand the perceptual horizon of those in power, indeed it might harden and narrow it. You can shatter a commonplace with evidence but other minds remain unmoved. The authors in this paper were sensitive to the entanglements of epistemology and politics, trying to dismantle the ways in which regimes of truth – hegemonic ways of seeing – shaped political relations, while being alert to the slippery power of enlightenment, the weird imperviousness of supremacy to demonstration, and the ever-receding blind spots within revelation, whereby for example white women fighting for their own recognition failed to recognize their black sisters. Angela Davis shone a light, for example, on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, co-author of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments of 1848, one of the founding documents of the so-called first wave. Stanton argued in 1865 in racist terms that I will not repeat here that white women should have the vote before black men, and unreflectively compared the condition of disenfranchized women to that of slavery (Davis, Women, Race and Class, 70).
The invisibility and erasure of women, black women especially, is a cornerstone of intersectional feminist critique.Footnote4 Anna Julia Cooper – born into slavery in North Carolina, then educator and philosopher with a PhD from the Sorbonne – had meditated on the peculiar cruelty of not being seen in A Voice from the South (1892). She describes travelling by train in certain states of America and at one station seeing two signs swinging over two “dingy little rooms”, one saying “FOR LADIES”, the other “FOR COLORED PEOPLE”, and “wondering under which head I come” (96). Cooper is not recognized; she cannot find herself represented in the world. Marxist feminists went on to point out the failure to see women and their work. In Wages Against Housework in 1975, Silvia Federici laid bare the exploitative perceptual web that reenvisages unpaid labour as a ‘labour of love’, and a servant as a ‘wife’. By naturalizing care-work as a woman’s biological destiny, her happy ever after, capitalism makes that work “invisible” (Federici, Wages Against Housework, 16–17). Many Marxists themselves, wrote Selma James in 1972, “could not see that women in the home produced” (James, Power of Women, 51).
Invisibility is not always the problem; sometimes hyper-visibility is worse, or simultaneous in the glitches of recognition in relation to race and gender. The two can flicker off and on. While princes amass glory by being looked at, others have their wretchedness compounded. In Ways of Seeing in 1972, John Berger itemized the process of objectification, and self-objectification, of women. “Men look at women”, he wrote. “Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female” (Berger, Ways of Seeing, 47). Laura Mulvey named this ‘the male gaze’ in 1973, whereby all pleasure and action belongs to the men looking, projecting their fantasies onto the female figure, while women, “from pin-ups to strip-tease”, are reduced to passive projections (Mulvey, Visual Pleasure, 19). The ideal self-recognition of the mirror stage/cinema experience is disrupted, and the female ego quashed.
The line of sight, then, does not have one charge. For some there is power in looking and in being looked at; for others, there is abjection in both. When the light shines on you, it does not necessarily make you stronger. And while some are instructed to keep their eyes down, others can feast their eyes.Footnote5
Those who have been negated in the asymmetrical passages of recognition have fought back, striving to be seen, or to be seen for who they are, to wipe clean the cultural lenses that blot them out, or make monsters of them, to establish new ways of seeing – the female gaze, the black gaze, the black female gaze. As Walter Rodney wrote in 1969, in The Groundings with My Brothers, “it is as though no black man can see another black man except by looking through a white person. It is time we started seeing through our own eyes” (Rodney, Groundings with My Brothers, 31).
The dominant gaze is powerful, reproducing itself in the psyche, custom becoming a second nature, as the early moderns said.Footnote6 Fanon is the great modern theorist of shame and internalization, and explores the “inferiority complex” that has “taken root” “in all colonized people”, the agonies and perversions of (mis)recognition in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). “I want to be recognized not as Black, but as White”, he writes – a desire that finds its ultimate manifestation in being loved by a white woman (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 2, 45).Footnote7
This article tells a prehistory of misrecognition, at a time of eddying political impulses. While the talk was increasingly of freedom, equality, and civility, and the age was revolutionary, early modern society, even in those arrangements that it was proud to admit to itself, was steeply raked and divided, and attempts were made to impress hierarchies into communities through a unilateral flow of recognition by stipulating who was visible and who was not, who shared in dignity, and who was there to watch and magnify. The other was expressly not like oneself. What was orchestrated in perception was not sameness, but difference, in habitual and heavily filtered acts of looking that reinforced the pyramid. The direction of the ritualized gaze had weight, and it did not travel both ways. Some people were lifted by being looked at, and correspondingly, some were brought low by looking, power ebbing away down the path of the eyes. This was most dramatically the case with the spectacle of monarchy – think Louis XIV, the Sun King – where the gaze of the subjects illuminated the monarch while they were, in their watching, eclipsed.Footnote8 Honour makes a person “shine”, says Hobbes in 1651, but who is allowed to shine, and how brightly, is regulated (Hobbes, Leviathan, 128).
The unequal circulation of recognition was permissible, the lopsided stage-management of vision unabashed. The early modern state went so far as to try and stamp it into legislation. Sumptuary laws dictated who was authorized to glitter and rustle, and who, by contrast had to disappear into the background. From Elizabethan England to Tokugawa Japan, only those of high status were permitted to wear silk.Footnote9 Lurking, though, within these endeavours to enforce a trajectory of honour based on class rather than virtue, were anxieties about dissimulation and mutual illegibility, an awareness that appearance might diverge from reality – that the intricately embroidered cloth of honour might come apart at the seams. Burrowed in these endeavours to outlaw mutual recognition was the prospect of resistance.
I examine authors who challenged presumptions of inequality and natural subordination. Alongside well-known figures, I bring in more obscure authors. One anonymous reader described my selection as “a motley bunch”, comprising “some philosophers, some more activists”. But one person’s activist is another’s philosopher, and this paper is precisely about the politicization of vision, about who is recognized and who is not – and about the efforts to try and blur the divide. Moreover, it has been one of the great insights of the contextualization of the history of political thought to see all writing as action, including, for example, by Hobbes and Locke. Some of the sources are fragmentary, anonymous, or mediated, as with Prince’s History of Mary Prince which comes to us via the pens of literate white abolitionists Susannah Strickland and Thomas Pringle – but this is a function, a marker, of the marginalization that is at the heart of the paper, and my desire is to restore a picture of thought from the necessarily patchy source base.Footnote10 I have cast my net intentionally wide in choosing sources, gathering voices from disparate contexts and centuries. In part, this is because I wanted to discuss both race and gender, and the intersections and occlusions between the two, and the sources on abolition and race are often later.Footnote11 In part too, the sweep of texts testifies to the capacious and discursive nature of the critique of laissez-faire recognition; it was not just articulated by isolated authors but expressed across diverse circumstances. Its extension also testifies to the obduracy of its object, to the remarkably tenacious rule of misrecognition, the mysterious difficulty of clearing the air between human beings so that dignity can circulate as it should. And finally, the array of voices speaks to a persistent yearning, to the visceral value of due recognition. In representing a temporally and geographically far-flung theory of misrecognition, the paper simultaneously points to the metaethical significance of recognition.
The paper is divided into seven sections. The first gives an overview of the early modern intellectual context to demonstrate the extraordinary importance accorded to recognition by canonical philosophers, as both a great motivator and source of selfhood. It outlines two opposed evaluations of this phenomenon, one which sees recognition as supporting the practice of virtue and sociability, the other bemoaning its hollow mendacity. Both positions, however, concur about the gravitational pull of recognition on the hearts of men. The rest of the paper then situates non-canonical voices against this backdrop, illuminating the distinctive critique they levelled against the machine of honour. They yearned for its efficacy, and articulated the ways in which this was denied them, the obstacles that led to them not being seen, or seen falsely, even as they fought to dispel the fog. Rousseau and others had fretted about a person’s image not matching their reality, and the obsession with reputation leading them to forget virtue, and indeed this is a worry that early modern feminists will pick up as we will see in Section Three – but what is distinctive about the extra-canonical critique is the idea that marginalized people have no choice but to be misrepresented. They have scant power over their appearance to others. While Rousseau had inveighed against the “insane pride” that led men to manipulate their image and seem better, or more, than they are, augmenting their agency in the public world even as they betrayed their true selves, the writers I examine in this paper explore how people have their image manipulated for them, against their will, and are made to seem worse, or less, than they are (Rousseau, Second Discourses, 170; 105; 197). They struggle to control the construction of their image, which is constructed for them, sapping their agency further. Unlike the vain egos of Rousseau’s disdain, who relish and create the gulf between an inflated reputation and the desultory truth, the subjects of this article long to close the gap between their alleged inferiority and their real capacity, but cannot get any traction on how they are perceived.
Non-canonical authors did not need to read Locke and Rousseau to know that recognition was important – they could feel it in the slighting looks of their august contemporaries – but in addition to throwing into relief their critique of recognition, situating them in the canon is pertinent because it was in this canon that philosophers discussed the very equality and freedom that they denied to the majority of human beings, that in turn prevented their recognition. The project of scientific revolution and enlightenment was precisely about clearing, in Locke’s words, the “Mist before Peoples Eyes”, about cleansing the “Medium through which visible Objects pass” (Locke, Essay, 493, 488). Yet Locke himself could not see the equality of women, naturalizing their inferiority and describing men as “the abler and the stronger” of the two sexes, and subscribing, against his own condemnation of the absolute power of kings, to the constitutional stipulation that “every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves” (Locke, Two Treatises, 321; Constitutions of Carolina, 180). Likewise Rousseau declares that a good education should “open” the “eyes” of the understanding “to reason … free from prejudices”, while avowing that women are made by nature for dependence and obedience – and indeed that learned women, blue stockings, far from enlightening, will lead the mind astray and one must shut one’s ears to them (Rousseau, Emile, 93, 341). The writers I discuss have a lived understanding of the wisps of language and thought that entrench domination and misrecognition. They speak to the intractability of hegemonic ways of seeing.
I turn to these insights in Section Three, where I examine the gendered nature of the law of (mis)recognition in early modernity, the double standard that is baked into it, and the punitive hypervisibility of women that results. When a woman’s value is reduced to her sexual reputation, all eyes bore into her, and she has no honourable room for manoeuvre. Either she loses her chastity, often through no fault of her own, and certainly not on her own, or she becomes corrupted in an effort to conceal, or to exploit the only power available to her. She is ruined either way, while men walk off unharmed, and the intrusive vision into one objectified part of her, threatens to belittle her other aspects, and to fragment the wholeness of her being. Section Four ventures into the haze of ideology that feminist philosophers argued clouds the perception of men when they look at women, and of women when they look upon themselves, the veils of prejudice, dogma, and authority that the new philosophers of the age were supposedly tearing off, that mean that women cannot be seen as the rational beings that they are, or would be, if they were recognized as such. Women appear trapped in vicious circles of misrepresentation, assimilating deficiencies that are dictated to them, and embodying them in the cramped conditions available. Section Five peers into the blind spot within this blind spot, to the failure of white feminists, as of white theorists more generally, to see enslaved black people as equal, to recognize them as being like themselves, and the diminishment that comes from this erasure. Section Six examines the resistance to the machine of misrecognition; the attempts at both writing oneself into view and at becoming the viewer oneself. The conclusion is balanced between despondency and hope. It gestures at the failure of the dialectic to resolve towards mutuality even in times of revolution, at the intransigence of misrecognition in the face of the undeniable evidence of one’s eyes. But it also points to the generative power of the imagination in reseeing – and remaking – the world.
2. The value of recognition in the early modern context
I turn first to the high currency of honour and – the other side of the coin – shame, in early modernity. Hobbes makes the monetary metaphor explicit. “The Value, or WORTH of a man”, he explains, is “his Price”, and is determined by the estimation of others.Footnote12 It is therefore a relative entity, liable to rise and fall in a way that is reliant on the good faith of society. As Hobbes elaborates, one’s value “is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgement of another”. It is manifest in our reputation. “To Value a man at a high rate”, Hobbes continues, “is to Honour him; at a low rate, is to Dishonour him” (Hobbes, Leviathan, 63). Hobbes unfurls a list of signs of honour that reveal the saturation of this principle in early modern imaginations. To obey someone, for example, to give them gifts, help, flatter, imitate, love, fear, and credit them – all these are signs of honour. To be honoured, says Hobbes, is a sign of power (Hobbes, Leviathan, 64–5). Some people are so exercised by the pursuit of honour, so sensitive to being dishonoured that Hobbes concludes his scientific inquiry into human nature with the inference that men need a Leviathan state because only its unmistakably superior strength can over-awe their incessant pretentions. “Every man”, writes Hobbes, “looketh that his companion should value him”; a hint of dishonour can send him into a rage, which is why the final and clinching cause of war in the condition of nature is the desire men have for “Glory” and “Reputation” (Hobbes, Leviathan, 88). This is the filter through which social relations are drained, and the ultimate rationale for politics.
Locke captures the contemporary power accorded to the eyes of others when he elevated the desire for approval and the abhorrence of censure to the status of a law – the “Law of Opinion or Reputation”, as he called it, evincing the obligatory, ethical, driving force of these passions, and declaring them greater motivators of men than the laws of god and government (Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding, 353). While God’s sanctions of heaven and hell can feel far off, and people have few qualms about breaking the civil law if they reckon they can get away with it, few can stomach the thought of social mortification. There is not “one of ten thousand”, says Locke, “who is stiff and insensible enough, to bear up under the constant dislike and condemnation of his own Club … This is a Burthen too heavy for humane Sufferance” (Locke, Essay, 353, 357).Footnote13 For Locke, this did not seem like a bad way to organize individual and collective life. The rules of conventional virtue and vice were clear; the standard by which one’s reputation rose or fell was transparent. It more or less tracked Christian good and evil, and appearance mostly tracked reality, giving people a fair trial in the supreme court of public opinion, and effectively enforcing natural law.
The preoccupation with admiration and censure echoes into the next century. For Mandeville it is the “bewitching Engine” which makes human beings governable at all. No one, he says in The Fable of the Bees: Or Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1732), is “so savage as not to be charm'd with Praise, or so despicable as patiently to bear Contempt”, and so it is that “the Notions of Honour and Shame” can form the foundation, provide the motive traction, for moral virtue (Mandeville, Fable, 42-3). “Pride”, says Mandeville, is so much a part of Man that it is “inseparable from his very Essence” (Mandeville, Fable, 44).
When Hume comes to “the love of fame” in his taxonomy of the passions in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), he writes that “our reputation, our character, our name are considerations of vast weight and importance”. Indeed, we care little for the objects of pride, such as “virtue, beauty and riches”, unless these are seen through other people’s eyes. The attributes of the self have “little influence”, says Hume, “when not seconded by the opinions and sentiments of others”. This fixation with opinion is explained by the mechanism of sympathy – whereby we feel what others feel – and in the case of opinion, the perceptions of others of ourselves become our own perceptions. So when someone is impressed by us, we see the pleasure on their countenance, and we feel it too. “The pleasure, which we receive from praise, arises from a communication of sentiments” (Hume, Treatise, 316, 324). We swell with pride, and shrivel with shame.
The concept of sympathy reverberates through early modern thinking about recognition and selfhood. “No quality of human nature is more remarkable”, says Hume, “than that propensity we have to sympathize with others”. Hume conjures an image of permeable beings, their feelings and impressions leaking into one another, each taking a “tincture” from the other, the line between self and other blurring, individuals becoming who they are by incorporating how they are perceived (Hume, Treatise, 316–7). Smith builds on this in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), where he explains how men see themselves as others see them, the other becoming an impartial spectator in themselves, animating them through life. It is not success itself that men seek but the appreciation of others. “Humanity does not desire to be great”, Smith affirms, “but to be beloved”, and for the most part, with a few unlucky exceptions, a man’s reputation keeps pace with his true character (Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 22, 166–7).
Some philosophers worry about the sin of pride, the vanity that is the dynamo of civilization. They argue that far from cementing sociability and enforcing ethics, the urge to be esteemed might spoil human association. Rousseau traces the origins of inequality and domination back to “the first movement of pride” (Rousseau, Second Discourse, 162). Rousseau’s great inspiration, Hobbes, thinks, as we have seen, that vainglory is the cause of war, and looks to the dazzling sovereign to overshadow the honour-driven egos of his subjects, so that “they shine no more than the stars in presence of the sun” (Hobbes, Leviathan, 128). In conceptualizing pride as the problem that it is the purpose of politics to solve, Hobbes is echoing Augustine, who saw the Pax Romana as the earthly answer to the libido dominandi that plagued human beings. Just as Leviathan was king of the proud, so Rome was the lid on the boiling pot of passions of fallen men. Such was men’s egoism that, to keep it in check, it needed the might of empire – itself the most extravagant instantiation of the libido it was needed to quell (Augustine, City of God, 866–70). And indeed it is among Jansenists, followers of Augustine, that we find some of the most acute anxiety about the all-consuming “desire to be esteemed by those in whose company one is”, as Blaise Pascal puts it.Footnote14 “We are so vain”, he sighs. “Vanity is so anchored in the human heart”,
that a soldier, a cadet, a cook, a kitchen porter boasts, and wants to have admirers, and even philosophers want them … Pride takes hold of us so naturally in the midst of all our wretchedness, errors etc., that we even lose our lives joyfully, provided people talk about it.
Even, perhaps especially, in those texts that worry about the moral vacuum, the depravity, of the desire to be esteemed, the force of that desire flows over the pages. Even as they worry about the sin of pride, or the manipulation of appearance and betrayal of reality, or the inequalities and conflicts caused by vainglory or amour-propre, they agree about the awesome operation of the desire for recognition. They might not like its psychological fuel, nor the civilization it creates, but they are in no doubt that the mechanism thrums. Man descends into “blindness”, says Rousseau, “in order to feed his insane pride” (Rousseau, Second Discourse, 197). People seek honour with their whole heart. It is the criterion of their worth. It manifests our openness to the perception of others, how we are moulded by them, how dependent we are on other people’s eyes. And it supposes that we are – superficially at least – legible, that whatever performance we put on, it can and will be read accordingly, and that we will rise or fall on its apparent merits.
3. The gendered law of recognition
When we turn to non-canonical authors, however, authors whose epithet immediately signifies their relation to recognition, we find that while they too give voice to the yearning to be seen, they offer an alternative, sceptical account of this undisputedly powerful machine: a theory of irresistible misrecognition.
To begin with women, Emilie Du Châtelet echoes the contemporary ode to recognition, before explaining how women are disqualified from it. To be despised by others is, she says in Discourse of Happiness, written in the 1730s and 40s, “a torture more cruel than all those that the public executioner could inflict”. Everything we do, she continues, is motivated by the consideration of our “future reputation”; “self-esteem is always the more or less hidden driving force of our actions; it is the wind that fills the sails, without which the boat would not move at all”. “Half the world”, however, by which she means her sex, “are excluded, by definition, from every kind of glory”. Barred from politics and war, the only kind of glory to which they would have access as rational beings is the glory of philosophy – but barred too from a proper education, they are forbidden from glory altogether (Du Châtelet, Discourse of Happiness, 353, 358, 357).
The gendered operation of the law of recognition, argue early modern feminist philosophers, disadvantages – and disfigures – women, through an implacable series of double standards and double binds. Society’s eyes exert a scouring kind of pressure on women; they are fixed on them like a hawk’s, looking to pounce, an intimidation that is intensified by the fact that a woman’s ‘reputation’ is often abridged entirely to her sexual conduct and when she falls, she falls irrevocably – whereas men can pursue their honour as an enlarging experience, and sexual misconduct simply slides off them, if it is even perceived as such. The law of reputation for men opens up a life-affirming host of virtues, while the dictates for women are narrow, penal, and corrupting – a snare in which a creature can only flail and fail. We know that the law of reputation has gone awry for women when we meet them not glowing with pride but rather trying, contortedly, to avoid shame. Honour for women contracts to the absence of shame, a negative, the prospect of dishonour hanging like a premonition around even their best endeavours. Women struggle to be seen clearly, or at all, the eyes of society besmirched by prejudice. Buckled, some lose themselves, or become the monsters they are accused of being.
The suffocating pressure on a woman is glimpsed in Robert Clever and John Dod’s hugely popular A Godly Forme of Houshold Government (first published, by Clever alone, in 1598), where they describe the division of responsibility. The husband, they explain, must provide for the household, while the wife must bear its reputation. “The honour of all”, they write, “dependeth onely of the woman: in such sort, that there is no honour within the house, longer than a mans wife is honourable” (Clever and Dod, Godly Forme, sig. L4r). We can feel the weight of this burden, this gravity, in Hermione’s speech when she is on trial for adultery, which she denies, in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Of her life, she says, “I prize it not a straw”; it is “for mine honour” that she is fighting, her honour that she would like to “free” (Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale, 227). A woman can be ruined, as Mary Wollstonecraft says in italics in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) – “broken off from society” on account of one, possibly innocent, error. She is “robbed of her honour” if she is raped (Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 149). To have your social value pared down to one action which anyway requires the voluntary participation of a man, and to have your honour stripped from you even when you did not consent, strikes Wollstonecraft as the maddest justice in law.
The loss of chastity, says Catharine Macaulay in her Letter on “Coquettry” (1790), is the “one fault which a woman of honour may not commit with impunity”. Let her defame and deceive – but on absolutely no account let her be “caught in a love intrigue” (Macaulay, Letters, 210–11). Wollstonecraft picks this up, quoting Macaulay’s “just” observation, and elaborating on the absurdity, and vicious consequences, of the synonymy. “With respect to reputation”, she writes, “the attention is confined to a single virtue – chastity. If the honour of a woman, as it is absurdly called, be safe, she may neglect every social duty; nay, ruin her family by gaming and extravagance; yet still present a shameless front – for truly she is an honourable woman!” (Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 225).
The conflation of honour with chastity focuses women on appearance rather than reality. The necessity of “preserving a good reputation”, argues Wollstonecraft, has poisoned women’s morals, leaving a crust of honour while the substance is eaten away. To “preserve their station in the world”, a woman does not care about “what only heaven sees”. Rather, “it is the eye of man” that she has “been taught to dread”. Her own eye trained accordingly, her moral compass is set only to “preserve appearances”. She chases the only pleasure and power she is allowed – which is sexual – and hones the arts of deception – which should be “contemptible” – to cover up her transgressions. This wrenching of a woman’s attention outwards means that she comes to measure only “shadows” in her calculations about how to behave (Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 219–20).
A woman’s internal reality is eroded, while the opposite is true for men. Men, who are no less interested in their honour, can stoke it by engaging in a cornucopia of genuinely virtuous activities, appearance keeping track with reality such that a man’s moral selfhood is substantiated in the process. For a man, Wollstonecraft explains, “the general outline of his character in the world is just”, and while men jostle for approbation, “the real character will still work its way to light”. For women, on the other hand, “sometimes virtue and its shadow are set at variance”. If “respect for the opinion of the world” is “the principal duty of woman”, then she will manicure that rather than cultivate her mind. Rousseau had been explicit about the gendered divergence in the law of reputation, as Wollstonecraft points out with disdain. She recounts how, in Emile, Rousseau claims that while a man is “secure in his own good conduct, depends only on himself, and may brace the public opinion”, a woman must continually look over her shoulder, because “what is thought of her, is as important to her as what she really is”. A woman’s degradation is therefore socially established, explains Wollstonecraft. When “reputation for chastity” is “the one thing needful to the sex”, this concern swallows “up every other care” (Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 221–4).
The trap of the law of reputation is clamped tighter over women by the men who ruin them in word and deed. As text after text attests, men are relentless in sexual pursuit. Men, that is, are not only complicit in a woman’s loss of honour but drive it with such ferocity that even ‘consent’ is coerced. In 1589 a pamphlet appeared in London called her Protection for Women written by someone who wanted to go by the name of Jane Anger, itself an anonymizing clue to fear and rage. Anger discusses the harassment faced by women. “If we stand fast”, she cries, “they strive; if we totter, though but a little, they will never leave till they have overturned us”. She compares men to “ravenous hawks, who do not only seize upon us but devour us” (Anger, Protection for Women, 33, 35). In pleasing men, in succumbing to their entreaties and their advances, woman wreck themselves. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a seventeenth-century poet from New Spain, articulates the responsibility men bear for a woman’s fall:
Who carries the greater guilt
in a passion gone astray:
the women, beseeched, who falls,
or the man who begged her to yield?
Or which one merits more blame
although both deserve our censure:
the woman who sins for pay,
or the man who pays to sin?
You think highly of no woman,
no matter how modest: if she
rejects you she is ungrateful,
and if she accepts, unchaste.
The social premium on a woman’s sexuality, the opposing knife edges she must walk between chastity and ruin, and between sex and disfavour, become all the more cutting when one considers the vulnerable legal status of early modern women. Many commentators agreed that, as Moses á Vauts writes in 1650, a husband has a “punitive or corrective Power” over his wife; a good man, that is to say, may by right beat a bad wife (Vauts, Husband’s Authority Unvail’d, 73). Matthew Hale encoded into English common law the principle that a “husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife” (Hale, Historia, 629). According to the system of coverture, a wife’s personhood was subsumed under that of her husband. Her property became his, indeed she became his property, deferring her will and judgement to his. Drawing on the neo-Roman tradition so beloved of Parliamentarians and Whigs, according to which one is a slave if one is dependent on the will of another, early modern feminists said that women were slaves.Footnote15 Not sui juris – the mark of freedom – but rather subject to the jurisdiction of men, women lived at the mercy of their husbands and therefore fitted exactly into the definition of the servus. In this context, not only is the law of reputation not something a woman can simply take or leave, but pleasing men is a matter of survival, as well as the only source of power and pleasure in a situation of subjugation. The placatory imperative turns a woman inside out, becoming a devotee of appearance, of beauty – “woman’s glory!” – as Wollstonecraft calls it. Adorning her person rather than building her character, she abrades her inner self, zeroing in on artifice instead of nature, seeing and adjusting herself through men’s eyes, looking to them to find herself and discovering nothing, or nothing good (Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 113, 227).
The iron law of reputation compels women to maintain at least a façade of chastity, while her dependent situation drives her to puncture it. The reduction of a woman’s honour to her sexual status conspires with a structure of male domination to turn women – in contradictory and therefore contorting ways – into sex objects, debasing the conditions of subjectivity and making recognition barely imaginable.
4. Mists of misrecognition
Early modern feminists give a rich account of the ideologically suffused perceptual lens that surveyed women, that either saw them negatively or did not see them at all, that clouded their own benighted vision as they thought about themselves, and deprived them of the recognition they deserved.Footnote16
At the beginning of the fifteenth century, Christine de Pizan sat in a library in despair at the wall-to-wall coverage of women. “All manner of philosophers, poets and orators too numerous to mention”, she declares, “all seem to speak with one voice and are unanimous in their view that female nature is wholly given up to vice”. She picks up a book by Matheolus, who had written about the evils of the female sex and the monstrosity of women. She feels her mind “flooded with an endless stream of names” as she recalls all the writers who picture woman as a vile thing. As authority after authority surges by she lapses into “disgust and sadness”. “I began”, she says, “to despise myself and the whole of my sex” (Pizan, City of Ladies, 6–7). Pizan sees herself refracted in the eyes of others, and feels that judgement encase her, with no chink of an alternative view. It sinks into her, becoming her judgement and her revulsion too.
Marie le Jars de Gournay, author of l’Égalité des hommes et des femmes (1622), refers to the words men “spew”, “spin”, and “trumpet in the streets” against women (Gournay, Equality, 54). In La Grief des dames (1626), she evinces the sense of infestation, the thick buzzing intrusions of negative thoughts that blot out the capacity to see women clearly. She describes “that swarm of writers or intellectuals, who despise the unfortunate and much criticized female sex”. Their words – repeated through text after text to the point of mindless plagiarism – peel out of the presses. They crow that they “never bother reading anything that is written by a woman”, ensuring that no reasonable objection, nothing new, nothing true, will cut through (Gournay, Ladies’ Complaint, 77).
One of the most sustained analyses of the veil of prejudice that hangs over men’s eyes was composed by François Poulain de la Barre in his Discours physique et moral de l’égalité des deux sexes, où l’o voit l’importance de se défaire des préjugez (1673). Poulain’s purpose is to unpick the great lie that holds everyone in its grip – that women are inferior to men. It is hard to dismantle “an opinion as old as the world, as widespread as the earth, and as universal as the human race”, he writes (Poulain, Discourse, 199). It is hard to honour women, to build them up in estimation, when esteemed authority recurrently knocks them down. A woman’s reputation struggles to take flight when “those who have a reputation for learning” have a monopoly on “truth’ and declare that women are vicious creatures. As Poulain writes, “common eloquence is a verbal optics” that distorts how women are perceived, and turns reality upside down, virtue into vice and vice versa where gender is concerned (Poulain, Discourse, 147–8).Footnote17 Writing at the end of the next century, in her Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798), Mary Hays is still sighing about the “erroneous ideas with regard to women” which take “so deep root among mankind”, the “prejudices” that need exterminating (Hays, Appeal, 109–10).
People look at the arrangement of the public sphere as the arrangement of nature: women cannot participate there, because they must be “less intelligent than men”. Everything that is, is as it ought to be. Poulain describes the way the naturalistic fallacy operates on our mind. “Things have always been the way they are … this is a sign that things should be as they are”. He draws on the sceptical tradition to demonstrate how out of whack with nature the appearances of gender are. It is as though we “have been reared in the middle of the ocean”; from that vantage point it seems that the land is moving, not us. Just so with women; we are so entrenched in spaces where women are subordinate and dependent, that we think they are incapable of reason and virtue. When there are “places where women are treated like slaves”, when their feet are bound in China, when they are rigidly controlled in Turkey and Italy (his examples), when everywhere they are engaged in “menial” and “trivial” concerns, people assume without a second thought that women are in their rightful place and “are incapable of doing anything else”. It takes thought, courage, care, to cut through “superficial appearances” – the prejudices that swathe our minds – that are themselves fastened in the de facto realities of the world (Poulain, Discourse, 120–6).
The veil of false ideas does not hang neutrally. Custom is hegemonically constructed and embedded by power. This is a point made by the anonymous author of Woman Not Inferior to Man (1793), who wanted to go by the title of Sophia, Person of Quality, and whose text draws inspiration from Poulain’s.Footnote18 Sophia probes the sharp edge of the male gaze, its caviling, demeaning effects. “The office of nursing children”, for example, “is held by the Men in a despicable light, as something low and degrading”. If nursing were seen clearly, in its proper light, it should be obvious to any sane person that “there is no employment in a common-wealth which deserves more honour, or greater thanks and rewards” (Sophia, Woman Not Inferior, 12). The perception of honour has become untethered from its proper objects. Hays describes how the very same attribute in a person – the “passion to distinguish themselves”, which insofar as it produces pleasure and utility, ought to be applauded – is applauded in men, but is disparaged in women. Men are seen “in their natural colours”, whereas women are seen through a dirty glass (Hays, Appeal, 77).
Observing “the universal prevalence of prejudice and custom in the minds of the Men”, according to which women are confined to inferiority, Sophia digs out the vested interest, the possessiveness, that shores up this commonplace. Men are “every where jealous of superiority, and watchful to maintain it”. Theirs is a “tyrannical usurpation”, born of brute force and continued in violence, that they have every incentive to maintain (Sophia, Woman Not Inferior, 1–2). They present the status quo as natural, reasonable, claiming that women “are made only for their use … fit only to breed and nurse children … and to obey, serve, and please our masters” (Sophia, Woman Not Inferior, 11).
These ideas, and the realities they substantiate, seep into women too. Wollstonecraft explains how “prejudice” can “brutalise” a person (Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 235). Deprived of education, women’s minds are often inferior in practice. Barred from the garden of learning, they cannot taste its fruits. “We can only reason from what we know”, explains Judith Sargent Murray in “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790), “and if an opportunity of acquiring knowledge hath been denied us, the inferiority of our sex cannot fairly be deduced from thence”. A woman’s brain is “fertile”, but it can only grow what is planted there. While her mind is “by nature equal” to a man’s, it cannot develop in the same way; his flourishes in aspiration, encouragement, and “all the flowery paths of science”, while hers hits a dead end of depression and domestication. It should come as no surprise, laments Murray, that men possess “apparent superiority, if indeed custom becomes second nature” (Murray, Equality, 5–6). By closing the gates of education to women, says Hays, men “throw a veil over our eyes” (Hays, Letters, 26).
Women internalize the presumption of inferiority. They experience it as their reality, in the closed doors, low expectations and derisory looks. Wollstonecraft describes the “false shame” that creeps into the innocence of girlhood, the sense that something is wrong inside (Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 115). Murray details the “mortifying consciousness of inferiority, which embitters every enjoyment” (Murray, Equality, 6).
Sometimes, women are not seen at all. This seemed to Emmeline Pankhurst to be the crux of men’s refusal to give women the vote; if men could only “realize” “the fact – a very simple fact – that women are human beings”, the opposition to suffrage would surely disappear (Pankhurst, Freedom or death, 144). It was this mystification that lay behind Mary Astell’s question in her 1706 Preface to Some Reflections upon Marriage to Locke and friends, who were making such a noise about the natural freedom and equality of mankind. If that were so, then how was it that wives were subject to their husbands? “If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves?” – as they must be, Astell elucidates, hoisting Locke by his own neo-Roman petard with a direct quotation from the Second Treatise,
if the being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men, be the perfect Condition of Slavery? And if the Essence of Freedom consists, as our Masters say it does, in having a standing Rule to live by?
Gournay describes how men “erase women by their scorn” (Gournay, Ladies' Complaint, 78). “How unjust”, she rails, “is the way in which women are usually treated in conversations, if they are included in them at all”(Gournay, Ladies' Complaint, 74). Even when women are able to raise their voices in a public forum, there is, says Gournay,
no man, no matter how puny he may be, who would not put them in their place with the approval of most of their company when with merely a smile or a slight nod of the head, his silent eloquence would communicate: ‘It’s only a woman speaking’.
This dynamic of men overshadowing women, this erasure and deformation of a woman’s reality saps her strength, her self, in direct and inverse proportion to the nurturing of a man. It was explicitly decreed by Rousseau, who had explained in Emile that “woman is made to please and to be subjugated, she ought to make herself agreeable to man” (Rousseau, Emile, 358). Jane Anger puts the master-slave dialectic between women and men thus: “our good towards them is the destruction of ourselves” (Anger, her Protection, 35). Far from reciprocal recognition, then, men appear as parasites on the honour-giving eyes of women. Men's honouring eyes are reserved for themselves, as Astell lays out. “Their Eyes are too much fixt on their own Excellencies, to view another”s good Qualities through a magnifying Glass’. A husband is “full of himself”, while his wife follows “all his Paces”, and must “tread in all his unreasonable steps” if she wants any peace in the home. Men “are their own Centres”, while women lose theirs (Astell, Reflections, 47, 45).
5. Blind spots within blind spots
I now turn from gender to race, to the intersection between race and gender, and to the systematic failures of recognition in relation to enslaved black women and men. When Astell and other early modern feminists invoke the language of slavery to complain about a blind spot within the enlightenment in relation to women, they are exposing their own myopia towards the institution of chattel slavery, and especially to enslaved African women. Chapone goes so far as to declare that English wives are in a “worse Condition than Slavery itself” (Chapone, Hardships, 28). Even abolitionists like Wollstonecraft, who condemn “the abominable traffick”, not only compare “one half of the human species” to “the poor African slaves”, but declare that (white) women’s slavery “chains the very soul of woman”, hinting that chattel slavery affects only bodies (Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 234–5). This blindness was shared by white male enlightenment thinkers – although the metaphor of blindness is not quite right, itself a kind of wilful blindness, a putting on of blinkers.Footnote20 What is unconscious bias? Invisibility – erasure – is itself a strategy of power and degradation, and – as we have seen with the oxymoron, the impossibility in law and logic, of marital rape – it can go hand in hand with clear-eyed violence.
The question ‘ain’t I a woman?’, which was attributed to Sojourner Truth, a formerly enslaved black woman, when she addressed a women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851, and which has become a rallying rhetorical question for women of colour ever since, shines a light on the failure of recognition on the part of white feminists (Truth, Ain’t I A Woman? 42).Footnote21 Anna Julia Cooper picked this up in her own critique of the so-called women’s movement. She argued for an intersubjective flow of recognition, one that understood the struggles of others as one’s own, and saw that one’s own struggle had to include all who were subject to debasing domination, that all struggles intersect. Women, she explains, should not turn their backs on any injustice. She elaborates:
For woman’s cause is the cause of the weak; and when all the weak shall have received their due consideration, then woman will have her “rights”, and the Indian will have his rights, and all the strong will have learned at last to deal justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly … It cannot seem less than a blunder, whenever the exponents of a great reform or the harbingers of a noble advance in thought and effort allow themselves to seem distorted by a narrow view of their own aims and principles. All prejudices, whether of race, sect or sex, class pride and caste distinctions are the belittling inheritance and badge of snobs and prigs. The philosophic mind sees that its own “rights” are the rights of humanity.
The cracked lens of racism makes recognition impossible. Benjamin Banneker, African American mathematician and astronomer wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1791 about the “almost general prejudice … against those of my complexion”. “We are a race of beings”, he declared, “who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the world”. Evoking the tight entanglements between time, esteem, and structures of belief, Banneker writes that viewed “rather as brutish than human”, “we have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt” (Banneker, Letter, 3–4). White Quaker abolitionist, John Woolman, explored what he called the “darkness in the understanding” which leads white people, Christians, to view enslaved people “otherwise than brethren”, the way in which “customs” can “become like the natural produce of a soil” and root deep in people’s misinterpretation of the world. Probing the poverty of white vision, he explains how imposing “the ignominious title SLAVE” on people, and “dressing them in uncomely garments, keeping them to servile labour, in which they are often dirty, tends gradually to fix a notion in the mind” that they are “below us in nature”. In a mad inversion, people whose minds have been vitiated by the possession of “absolute command” regard enslaved people with a “mean” “esteem” (Woolman, Considerations, 260, 253, 297). In his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787), Quobna Ottobah Cugoano lays out the cross-hatching of racist ideology, “the evil aspersions of some men”, for example, “who say, ‘That an African is not entitled to any competent degree of knowledge, or capable of imbibing any sentiments of probity; and that nature designed him for some inferior link in the chain … ’ “(Cugoano, Thoughts, 11–12). Olaudah Equiano inveighs against the regimes of truth that surround enslaved people in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Written by Himself (1789). He puts a microscope over the racist optic – over the view, for example, that “slaves … are incapable of learning; that their minds are such a barren soil or moor, that culture would be lost on them”. These assertions ought to bring “shame and mortification” to their speakers but – in a gaping breach in the law of reputation – the dishonour that is due just slinks away (Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 112).
In the next century, Frederick Douglass gave voice to not being seen. He attacked those who are “stupidly blind”, and the hypocrisy at the core of “republican politics” (Douglass, What to the Slave, 212, 216). In his 1852 speech to the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Rochester, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, Douglass lambasts the extraordinary feints whereby white Americans deny the freedom to enslaved people which by their own logic they should grant.
You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation, as embodied in the two great political parties, is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen.
Prince gestures at a neighbouring space in the shadowlands of recognition; next to not being seen, or not being able to see oneself, in not being able to encompass in words the reality of one’s life – when linguistic structures, themselves instantiations of the codes and concepts of a culture, will not admit you. Equiano faces the abyss between speech and enslaved experience when he tells of arriving at the coast and seeing a slave-ship, and being carried on board, and the “terror” that he still cannot name. What he felt, “I am yet at a loss to describe” (Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 55).
6. Writing oneself into view, and into the viewer
In these hellish systems of misrecognition, people fought back: to be seen, to cleanse the eyes of those who looked and judged. Pizan built a whole new civilization on the filthy ground of ideas about women – or to see it another way, she cleared a city from the mists that was already there. Her Cité des dames, with its sturdy ramparts and sky-high turrets, made visible, brick by paragraph brick, the virtuous women in history that male authority had not acknowledged. It also made women’s honour visible to themselves. “You can see”, she says, directly addressing her “beloved” women readers, “you can see that it is made of virtuous material which shines so brightly that you can gaze at your reflections in it” (Pizan, City of Ladies, 237–8). Unlike in the sordid books of men where women found themselves vicious, on Pizan’s pages they can gaze into a clean mirror – and, correcting the corruption of honour in the city of men, this self-recognition does not puff women up with sinful vanity but rather deepens their modest good nature.
Sophia paints women flamboyantly onto the canvas of glory. Discarding humility, she walks us through the entire public sphere that women could and should inhabit – she imagines them in government, in military office, and in the academy. Unfurling her own eloquent sentences, she colours women in, portraying them as just as capable of oratory as men. “When a Woman speaks”, she explains, “her air is generally noble … her gesture free, and full of dignity”. She can “soar” to the highest intellectual level (Sophia, Woman Not Inferior, 40). Sophia exhorts women to “shew our selves” – to show men what women already are, without the education that men enjoy, and to gesture at all that they could become with the same advantages as men – and that way to “force a blush” from men as it dawns on them how unjustly they esteem women (Sophia, Woman Not Inferior, 61–2). Here Sophia, like Pizan, is not only parting the clouds, but inverting the social mechanism of credit and shame. It is men who should feel embarrassed, men whose blushes should rise uncomfortably.
Formerly enslaved authors wrote themselves into public view. Stepping out of the name – John Stewart – imposed on him by his master, Cugoano presents himself to the “The Inhabitants of Great-Britain” as “Ottabah Cugoano, a Native of Africa”. Inscribing his own identity and heritage, and his original freedom and honour, he states: “I have only put my African name to the title of the book” – the name he had when he was separated from his “father and relations” who were “chief men in the kingdom of Agimaque and Assinee” (Cugoano, Thoughts, 7). Writers of the African diaspora told the stories of their lives in narratives, inventing and reinventing the genre of autobiography to bring hidden realities and fertile interiorities to light, and to reorient the public circulation of sentiments so that honour might shimmer around them and their homeland, and so that those that pass as honourable would have their masks stripped away.
Mary Prince introduces herself thus: “I was born at Brackish-Pond, in Bermuda, on a farm belonging to Mr Charles Myers. My mother was a household slave; and my father, whose name was Prince, was a sawyer belonging to Mr Trimmingham, a ship-builder at Crow-Lane”. At the end of her epic history, through which she makes evident her dignity, her humanity, the symphonies of her human sentiments, and the cruelty and labour she and her fellows endured, she brings to life the ongoing atrocity of enslavement in a way that ought to marshal the sympathy and outrage of all honourable readers. She describes how English people “go to the West Indies” and there
forget God and all feeling of shame … They tie up slaves like hogs – moor them up like cattle, and they lick them, so as hogs, or cattle, or horses never were flogged … they will have work – work – work, night and day, sick or well, till we are quite done up; and we must not speak up nor look amiss, however much we be abused. And then when we are quite done up, who cares for us, more than for a lame horse? This is slavery. I tell it, to let English people know the truth.
Bringing oneself in from the margins of vision and, associatedly, honour, involved washing away the film of prejudice that dirtied the eyes of society. It is no good putting oneself in the line of sight if one cannot be seen properly, if those looking cannot see clearly. In part, this is about looking not superficially, but deeper. As Pascal says of true geniuses: “they are recognized not with the eyes but with the mind” (Pascal, Pensées, 86). This injunction to sweep aside erroneous appearance and land on reality is filtered through ancient scepticism and its various readers, such as Descartes’. Poulain, for example, explains how particular “perspectives” on women mean that one “lose[s] sight of” them, that rather than “embrace blindly everything that agrees with their prejudices and their self-interest”, people should adopt the “essential criterion of truth”: “clarity and evidence”. Equipped with the eye of reason, people will see past the divergent bodies of men and women, and realize that “the mind has no sex” (Poulain, Discourse, 121, 157). Murray rubs out the hard binary line that supposedly carves nature at the joints by pointing out that “occular demonstration evinceth, that there are many robust masculine ladies, and effeminate gentlemen” (Murray, Equality, 8). Wollstonecraft goes straight for Smith when she says that we must precisely not “view ourselves as we suppose that we are viewed by others, though this has been ingeniously argued, as the foundation of our moral sentiments”. That way, the prejudices of one’s age and country will only be recycled. We should instead see ourselves through the eyes of God, and try “to find favour in His sight” (Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 224). Hays looks forward to a time when men do not see women as beneath them, “when the mysterious veil formed by law, by prejudice, and by precedent, shall be rent asunder” (Hays, Appeal, 100).
We have already encountered the veil that white feminists draw over their own eyes. Cooper wants it gone. “All mists must be cleared from the eyes of woman”, she insists, picking up the familiar metaphor. “Hers is every interest that has lacked an interpreter and a defender. Her cause is linked with that of every agony that has been dumb – every wrong that needs a voice”. “The Reform of our day, known as the Woman’s Movement” must crack open the category of “woman” to include all women, and indeed universalize its scope to everyone who is oppressed, “the black, the brown, and the red”. It is time, says Cooper, to complete “the circle of the world”s vision’ (Cooper, Voice from the South, 121–2).
Cugoano scours the cultural lens. He disinfects it, correcting its perception of colour. Considering those who treat human beings like beasts, he says that their ideas are “of a blacker kind than only skin deep”, that their complexion has in fact “an infernal hue”, and that devils can be white. Moreover, in the beginning, human beings sprang from one family and were “all of one complexion” (Cugoano, Thoughts, 12, 29). Equiano likewise dismantles race when he describes being “handled, and tossed up” by the crew on the slave-ship and concludes that he must have “gotten into a world of bad spirits” – these creatures with complexions “differing so much from ours”, these “white men with horrible looks, and red faces” who acted “in so savage a manner”. Turning the conventional wheel of esteem in the other direction, Equiano asks white people if they are “not struck with shame and mortification” (Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 55–6, 112)?
The task is not simply to scrub away prejudice from the eyes of one’s oppressors, but also to look inwards, to purge the structures there – to trust the evidence of oneself. We first met Pizan shrouded in authority – the dominant internalized voices telling her that she is a despicable creature. She comes to doubt the “evidence from my own experience”. In a feminist dramatization of the internal spectator, Lady Reason appears to Pizan and corrects the image of women as offensive nags. “Believe me”, Lady Reason thunders, “despite what you've read in books, you’ve never actually seen such a thing because it’s all a pack of outrageous lies”. “Return to your senses”, she instructs. Trust the evidence “of your own body” (Pizan, City of Ladies, 6, 9, 21). Imagining another virtuous circle of self-centring and self-trusting, Poulain argues that women are capable of metaphysics and that in studying their own minds, they would show the world their capacity, and see it inside themselves in a transformative praxis of self-reflection (Poulain, Discourse, 159). Astell entitles her book Reflections upon Marriage and frames herself as the ‘Reflector’, trying with sound philosophical method to discern the truth. Confronted by the commonplace of “the Natural Inferiority of our Sex, which our Masters lay down as a Self-Evident and Fundamental Truth”, she will not, she says, “shut her Eyes against the Light of Truth”. She will not simply assert, but rather prove, “so that every one may see with their own Eyes”. She asks leave for “as many Glasses as you please to help our Sight” – so that she might sift through “the Custom of the World” to get at the reality of womankind. Pride is a “false and magnifying Medium”, but humility ought not to “put out our Eyes”, and stop women enjoying the inward confirmation of their own high-ranking souls (Astell, Reflections, 9–10).Footnote22
There is power not only in being seen, but also in seeing, in becoming the eyes of a culture. Filling the void, or the blind spot, Prince relates “what my eyes have seen … for few people in England know what slavery is. I have been a slave – I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what a slave knows” (Prince, History, 21). In claiming the territory of the first person, and of empirical experience, Prince transforms herself from an object into a subject, into the knowing ego, the I – and the eye – that has epistemic mastery and control of the narrative. Equiano instantiated black power by telling his own story and bearing witness to what his eyes have seen. “I have often seen slaves, particularly those who were meagre, in different islands, put into scales and weighed, and then sold from three-pence to six-pence, or nine-pence a pound”. He has seen “wives taken from their husbands, and children from their parents”, and he has seen those left behind at the shore keep “their eyes fixed on the vessel till it went out of sight” (Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 110). Explicating the world through this chain of eyes, Equiano is threading the black gaze into his readers: he, a slave, looking at other slaves looking at other beloved slaves – a concatenation, a community, brought back, or remembered, from the sea.
7. Conclusion: intransigence and imagination
Early modern marginalized people tried to balance the scales of mutual recognition, but ultimately many sensed that becoming visible, and constituting themselves as subjects, would not be enough, indeed it might bring down fresh hell. Being seen, it turned out, does not guarantee that your masters will care, and it might make them rage. Cugoano quotes John Dryden about the motive effect of seeing iniquity: “Vice, to be hated, needs but to be seen”. But Cugoano has a sinking (in)comprehension that this simply is not so. The more that is known about the “enormous evil” of slavery, the more it is clear that the vested interest in the trade of human beings will dig in its heels and draw the shackles closer (Cugoano, Thoughts, 21). Douglass wonders about the fight to be recognized as human beings – the fight which was stamped into the slave medal. Am I not a man and a brother, it asked, and, am I not a woman and a sister? The question on the medal is weirdly rhetorical, suggests Douglass. “Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man?” he asks. “That point is conceded already”, he says in 1852; “nobody doubts it”, certainly not the slave-holders (Douglass, What to the Slave, 205). There is no argument left to win. The issue needs to be forced. As he declares in The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies in 1857, “Power concedes nothing without a demand” (Douglass, Significance of Emancipation, 288).
The writers explored in this article articulate a pre-modern theory of misrecognition. They argue that there is no unmediated way of seeing, no vision outside of culture, that the eyes make meaning in their objects regardless of the intrinsic properties of those objects, and in particular that the hierarchical constructions of race and gender cast a fog in our understandings that cannot be easily dispelled. They gesture at the fact that even when the fog clears, and the reality, the humanity, of the other is revealed, when, in Hegel’s words, “each is for the other what the other is for it”, this revelation might not have the normative import dreamed of by recognition theorists (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 113). Glimmering behind some modern theories of recognition is a version of the old Socratic intellectualist hope that seeing the good will itself constitutes the trigger for doing good – that seeing the other as akin to oneself will lead one to treat them as an agent in their own right, that certain obligations will follow from a recognition of their equality. This article therefore contributes, historically, both an affirmation of and a challenge to recognition theory. It affirms, as Fanon says, that a man's “human worth and reality depend on this other and on his recognition by the other” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 191), that “nonrecognition” as Charles Taylor says, “can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being” (Taylor, Politics of Recognition, 25). But (with Fanon and Taylor) the premodern writers explored here also attest to the limits of discursive ethics, to the strange obstinacy of false perceptions and internalized ideology in the face of palpable demonstration, to the ways in which sustained and widespread deconstruction of arbitrary worldviews, the careful reversal of apparently “irreversibly hard fact[s]”, do not change minds (Honneth, Recognition, 165). Contestation, conflict, even violence do not necessarily drive, in Honneth’s words, the “moral development of our relations of recognition over the course of human history” (Honneth, Recognition, 174). The writers in the article offer a rebuttal of the emancipatory teleology of recognition through their political analyses of vision, of its filters and its barbs. You cannot always prove, or fight, your way to being seen.
Early modern philosophers loved to say that they were clearing the mists before their readers’ eyes, enabling them to see the truth of things. In addition to unsettling the feasibility of this blithe mission, the authors in this article complicate the metaphoricality of this trope. They wrote out of and around the post-sceptical empirical interest in both the equivalence between seeing and understanding, and also in the sophisms of sensory perception. They problematized vision anew and in so doing transformed the framework for thinking about the practice of recognition. For them, being seen is not just a metaphor, it is literal – and more than that, their deconstructive theory closes the gap between seeing and understanding, and probes the intense hermeneutic work done in seeing. Being recognized is about changing what the eyes see, the meaning that is made on bodies. Far from penetrating the surface of things to get to the knowledge beyond, as Locke for example had envisaged doing with the plumbline of his logical inquiry, these authors were precisely interested in staying skin-deep. They identified the interpretative errors that gathered there, the nexuses of race and gender that proved so hard to shake off. They tried to dismantle and transfigure what was seen – to remake blackness, darkness, woman.
There is a doubleness to their articulation of a theory of misrecognition, an assertion of agency in the theorization of powerlessness. These texts themselves imagine new worlds. They materialize new realities of mutual clarity, and of freedom within the gaze of others. When Cooper articulates her hope for interracial recognition, she knows it is (only) a hope, but it has meaning on the page. “What I hope to see before I die”, she writes, “is a black man honestly and appreciatively portraying both the Negro as he is, and the white man, occasionally, as seen from the Negro’s standpoint”. Cooper gestures at the ever-open future possibility of reciprocal self-construction. “When we have been sized up and written down by others”, she consoles, “we need not feel that the last word is said and the oracles sealed” (Cooper, Voice from the South, 225).
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’.
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