Between Recognition and Reification: On Republican Citizenship in a

Cosmopolitan World

S. Romi MukherjeeSciences Po-Paris

Searching for Res PublicaThe Republic is not an association of strangers, but a political

community

Republicanism recognizes that recognition can turn into reification – that to recognize an identity may lead to turning that identity into a thing,

misrecognizing it, and dominating it

Republican citizenship as the key means of surpassing ethnic fragmentation

The republican question is: to what degree do liberal calls for pluralism and recognition clash with the very possibility of social democracy and republican liberty as non-domination

Republicanism is not inherently anti-cosmopolitan; rather, it recognizes how identification with a given community need not be exclusive, since there may be other way in which common sentiment, common identification, and reciprocal freedom is shared with others

Outline1) Overview of dominant liberal

and communitarian paradigms of pluralism with a focus on problematizing the “politics of recognition”

2) A critique of the ideology of recognition and its related discourses (multiculturalism, diversity, cultural rights etc.)

3) “After Recognition:” Republican freedom as non-domination and post-identitarian citizenship – How and Why?

4) Strategies of non-Reification: Material conditions, Urbanism, Political and Inter-Subjective Reformulations, Constructing the People

Liberal Freedom as Non-Interference

1) Hobbes - “a free man is he that in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do is not hindered to do what he hath the will to do. ”

2) Liberalism makes no claims on what subjectivity, identity, interiority, or one’s internal commitments should be.

3) Interference can never be symbolic, systemic, or predicated on general conditions

4) The threshold of liberty is the exercise of individual will and its capacity to be unfettered and not subjected to the will of authors.

5) Liberty as non-interference, again is a non-moralized category, that melds seamlessly with free-market logics and the fiercest of social and economic competition. In essence, it acknowledges that while we may all be born equal and thus granted certain inalienable rights, we do not necessarily finish that way and nor is this a problem.

From Non-Interference to Recognition • Multiculturalism and diversity policy were

correct in identifying how social inequity can be culturally coded. However, in abandoning the crusade of anti-racism, they offered up their ideological frames as palliative gestures whose ultimate task was not to necessarily elicit greater inclusion, but rather to accommodate ethnic difference so as to uphold the liberal sphere as one of peaceful coexistence guided by negative freedom.

• The culturalization of politics or the politicization of the cultural

• Liberal neutrality maintains that the state should remain silent in the face of cultural and ethnic division so as precisely to not interfere. Hence, minorities must be respected and tolerated enough that they are allowed to live as they see fit just as long as they too do not interfere or harm others

• The question here is whether liberal pluralism, Rawlsian or not, requires that multiculturalism transforms itself into a pluralism of political principles themselves. Does non-interference require the rolling back of the neutrality of liberal democracy in the name of accommodation?

After Society?...CommunitarianismThere can be no abstract citizen or transcendence from the particular as we are always already encumbered.

The communitarian translates non-interference into the literal enclosure and walling off of certain ethnic groups. Hence, while communitarianism was presented as a voluntaristic alternative approach to liberalism, it simply functions as an alternative or radical liberalism;

Non-interference thus, paradoxically allows for communitarianism and the communitarian conceptions of law and social life that oppose the liberal state itself.

After Recognition?

• Multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance…

• The respect for differences applies only to those differences that are reasonable consistent with this identity…

• The peaceful coexistence of strangers or shared fate in a political community…

• Boutique multiculturalism – superficial radical cultural chic

• The politics of recognition juridically manages ethnic groups and hierarchizes them

• The dialectical relationship between identity/subject and citizenship is elided

• Reification – Oppressive Recognition – the Breakdown in Republican Civic Life.

Republican Freedom as Non-Domination Republican freedom in its classical Roman incarnations was primarily

conceived of as freedom from dependence -- freedom from domination from arbitrary power.

“Freedom as non-domination” surpasses “freedom as non-interference” in rejecting all forms of arbitrary interference by power and subjugation.

The robustness of freedom as non-domination is found precisely in its shift away from individual actors and self-interest to the normative construction of resilient and secure societies.

Liberalism protects individuals from interference. Republicanism emancipates individuals from dependence .

Freedom from non-domination can also be articulated as a transcendent social principle which through its exercise and enjoyment comes to be ontologically identified with the moral fabric of the polity.

Citizenship should offer a post-identitarian discourse where selves evade reification in the name of their shared love of liberty and justice – one’s primary self should be defined in terms of the shared political community

The state can intervene in the cultural sphere in a meaningful manner, only if it is guided by a firm commitment to the elimination of arbitrary domination – it cannot be neutral here.

Republican Citizenship as Laboratory

• Citizenship is a laboratory and a space of negotiation, but it can only negotiate cultural pluralism if it remains devoted to the larger transcendent cause of civic virtue as non-domination.

• A discourse wherein interests can be voiced in a manner that does not dominate others or ourselves (this would be akin to mastering not only the nature of the common good, but cultivating what Orwell called “common decency”).

• The mutual reciprocity of “freedom as non-domination” emerges also as a means for the subaltern (here understood as those alienated by the state or without a state within the state) for inscribing themselves into national and international political narratives.

Bound to the Common

• How does one instantiate collective will and beyond the institutional constructs of liberty, and equality, meet the demands of that opaque third term – fraternity.

• Non-domination forms the psychic and subjective bedrock of the very tissue of society where there is no distinction between the political and the non-political (and there is no pre-political).

• Spitz: Non-domination in social and political relationships, which is produced and warranted by the state and cannot be obtained but by public means; freedom is defined as a kind of subjection to egalitarian and democratically enforced laws.

• The law is thus the condition of liberty. No one is above the law and obedience need not be confounded with domination or submission

The Republic and the Sacred: A Durkheimian Interlude

• Reframing Civil Religion: belief and rite could exist far outside of a strictly religious frame rendering them applicable to juridical, legal, social, and scientific modes practice.

• The Social as Transcendent Sacred

• Social Energies are Real – the Substrate of the Republic. Realized in the alteration between the profane and the sacred in moments of “collective effervescence.”

• Effervescence as a moral “toning up” where atomized individuals come to consciousness of the transcendent social – where they are no longer fragmented identities, but citizens.

• Society, the sacred, protects and consoles.

From Recognition to Republican Non-Domination

• Pluralism, multiculturalism, and the politics of recognition function as modes of arbitrary domination that foreclose the possibility of citizenship and the construction of the common.

• The task of republican citizenship is to emancipate from the particular and engender a critical perspective on primordial identity.

• C. Laborde: “Immigrants and their children are not so much the bearers of discrete, authentic, and self-contained culture as they are the targets of identity assignation from the outside, finding themselves stigmatized (often vis a vis recognition) as foreigners, Arabs, Blacks, Pakistanis, Muslims etc…. The critical literature on ethnicity has shown that contemporary cultural claims are shot through with relations of power and domination and shaped by the asymmetrically distributed power of recognition.”

• …Immigrants are better served by having access to public sphere as citizens bound under the logic of non-domination than being treated as ethnic enclaves or isolated communities. The larger point is that the republican principle of universal status recognition or citizenship can only emerge through the reduction of unequal merit recognition in any given society.

Strategies of “Non-Reification”

“De-ethnicisation” republics must distance themselves from their own origins (although never entirely) and rewrite their narratives and collective memories from the perspective of the immigrant and minority. In other words, symbolic life must also be recalibrated and the immigrant must be inscribed into the story of the republic’s history.

“Transposition” -- the citizen experiences liberty as not the articulation of identity, but the liberty from the burden of identity. Yet, this freedom does not erase the primary identification, but revoices it in a second dimension in relationship to the concrete universal. The terms are of course irreducible but their negotiation depends on the articulation of the primary identity in the second – now such a transposition can only occur if the symbolic life of the republic, its myth of citizenship, is sufficiently potent.

Desegregation of the City and its Imaginary

Space as ethnicised – space requiring equal forms of de-ethnicisation insofar as space contains ideology, representational practices, and the movements of everyday life, which reflect relations which are hierarchically and materially grounded and historically produced.

Cosmopolitanism from Below

The real cosmopolitans are the losers of society, those transnationals who have been shut out of “high cosmopolitanism”, victims of modernity, who have been stripped of their interiorities = refugees, migrants, exiles, diasporas, strangers.

Conviviality

Paul Gilroy:“Processes of cohabitation and interaction that have made multiculturalism an ordinary feature of social life” and “the point where multiculturalism broke down,” introducing “a measure of distance from the pivotal term ‘identity” and engendering a “radical openness that…makes a nonsense of closed, fixed, reified identity and turns attention towards the always unpredictable mechanisms of identification.”

Ordinary Virtues

Cosmopolitan attachment finds civic and ethical value in the process of exposure to otherness” and glories in the ordinary virtues and ironies – listening, discretion, friendship – that can be cultivated when mundane encounters with difference can be rewarding.

Smelling the Smells and The People

…the “people” would emerge from in between: they would burgeon from that inter-zone where the middle class neither coddled, nor tolerated, nor disavowed the existence of the low and deliberately made the effort to smell the smells, in good faith and with a dose of realism. As for the proles or the minorities, they would have to simultaneously humanize themselves and also refuse a reverse snobbism that rejected and also envied the world of those who never worked with their hands

Thank You!