I call misrecognition the fact of recognizing a violence which is wielded precisely inasmuch as one does not perceive it as such. / What I put under the term of ‘recognition’, then, is the set of fundamental, prereflexive assumptions that social agents engage by the mere fact of taking the world for granted, of accepting the world as it is, and of finding it natural because their mind is constructed according to cognitive structures that are issued out of the very structures of the world. What I understand by misrecognition certainly does not fall under the category of influence; I never talk of influence. It is not a logic of ‘communicative interaction’ where some make propaganda aimed at others that is operative here. It is much more powerful and insidious than that: being born in a social world, we accept a whole range of postulates, axioms, which go without saying and require no inculcating. This is why the analysis of the doxic [doxa: common belief] acceptance of the world, due to the immediate agreement of objective structures and cognitive structures, is the true foundation of a realistic theory of domination and politics. Of all forms of ‘hidden persuasion’, the most implacable is the one exerted, quite simply, by the order of things…
Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, Symbolic Violence
Just a series of tentative, if not naive questions here:
What do we do with ‘misrecognition’ vis a vis personal behavior? To know there is plenty of misrecognition and to act accordingly? To believe we can interrupt or intervene it by individual behavior is to invite waves of anxiety, isolation, depression— and then the building of subcultures around these behaviors, anxiety, isolation, depression— is this a cost ‘we’ ask one another to pay? This, in a heroic-- but always limited-- attempt to spare one another the costs of daily life? Is that what 'politics' is? A kind of intervention that rests on a 'consciousness' or language? I will have to borrow from some one that kind of youth; I could only hope they would never foreclose.
There is much that is constantly assumed in our interactions. The surprise, perhaps, at being listened to intently; the fascination that our beliefs may be shared, even encouraged by others; the belief that language is the main barrier to understanding. There are many more assumptions, but it reveals a lot about our comprehension and our ability to change these structures that we enhance, through repeated consideration, our weaknesses in abstract interactions. Politics enhances mis-recognition, facilitating the substratum of this "hidden persuasion" and our own fear of the "other".
ReplyDeleteIt takes a lot of courage to recognize this. It takes even more to see this as a common weakness and attempt to replace it with an empowered individuality, full of purpose and creative expression, ready to take on the challenges of existing in an abstract, postulating political world, bent on subsuming the individual for fascist and anti-liberal aims.