Culture and Recognition

touchstone of sorts for various strains of modern thought, the German Romantic philosopher G. W. F. Hegel epitomized his wordy meditations on the nature of self-consciousness with a striking figure: the life-and-death struggle for recognition. In Hegel's view, the path toward full awareness and freedom, whether as an individual or as a community, passes through a moment in which we demand that another acknowledge our existence, even if it means that the other must be destroyed or that we might have to sacrifice our own lives in the process. At such a moment, symbolic status becomes far more important than physical survival: death with honor rather than life in disgrace. Of course, since Hegel's entire project aims to reveal the process by which we come to absolute knowledge, dying along the way would present a problem. Indeed, for recognition to occur at all, the trial by death must have an alternate ending. Self and Other thus retreat to positions of Lord and Bondsman, one being recognized, the other giving recognition. The crucial point about this philosophical story is that, for Hegel, time is actually on the side of the Bondsman. The Lord may get his recognition, but it will never be satisfying as long as it comes from a slave, and hence the Lord's path to enlightenment will be stalled. The Bondsman, on the other hand, will be forced by his chains to work for acknowledgment-after all, fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, Hegel jokes-and in that labor lies worldly salvation. The Bondsman's long struggle for recognition is what Hegel calls culture-in his terms, Bildung (which also means formation, education, breeding)-and the force of his account and others like it can be felt throughout modernity, from western Marxism, to existentialism, to a more general understanding (even in America) of culture as an ennobling and redemptive holy grail for all classes and groups. There are many ramifications of this view of culture, but I want to make three quick observations. First, culture and recognition have become wedded to one another in a rather profound way over the last two centuries, that is, roughly since Hegel and since the Romantic proponents of culture (and especially of the fine arts) became terribly ambivalent about their increasing dependence on the marketplace rather than on patronage. The sort of symbolic recognition that no longer seemed to have much relevance in a bourgeois world dominated by material profit-even Hegel later remarked on the feudal echoes of his trial-by-death example-achieved a special meaning in culture. To be sure, great artists and artisans have always been "acknowledged"; but in the wake of Romanticism, culture promised a form of recognition that seemed available nowhere else. Second, almost at the same time, the aesthetic dimension of culture took on a symbolic importance that it could not have had before. After the Romantics, it was clearly not only the particular skill or ingenuity or pleasure-giving talent of the artist that was "recognized." Pleasure itself was more and more subsumed by a heroic life-and-death struggle between the artist and all those forces-meaningless custom, the dull bourgeoisie, an unfeeling universe-that would fetter both beauty and the sublime. As late as abstract expressionism, that heroic dimension has been central to the story of culture; even those, like Georges Bataille, who pointedly rejected Hegel's labor-intensive version of culture, wound up embracing a notion of delirious, aristocratic expenditure that is just as heroic, and far more sovereign. Third, as a consequence of the above, culture gets locked into a curious and paradoxical relationship with the material economy that surrounds it, a situation that could not exist when art was openly designed, even by disgruntled clients, to glorify its patrons. The artist's ability to be recognized as an artist becomes increasingly the function of an intricate dance played with, and against, culture as a marketplace. To be recognized within the marketplace of culture, one must first establish that one's work exists-it must be recognized, that is, as if outside that marketplace. One must reject, and be understood to reject, the marketplace itself as a determiner of value, and one's work must bear signs of one sort or another of that rejection. But no effort of renunciation could ever be recognized as such unless there was also a subsequent recognition by the cultural marketplace. Indeed, the forgotten artist's heroic denunciation of the marketplace is never recognized at all, simply because it is meaningless unless later validated by the relevant cultural institutions, and hence by the marketplace itself. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has perhaps gone farthest among contemporary thinkers to elaborate this dynamic, one in which the educationally inculcated and reinforced separation of cultural or symbolic capital (already implied in Hegel's notion of recognition) from material capital (which we might simply call wealth) ensures that culture will operate as a marker of class distinctionand will do so precisely to the extent that the separation is insisted upon as absolute. For Bourdieu, culture itself depends on the ability to make distinctions. The finer the distinctions one recognizes, the more elaborate the field of classifications one can manipulate, the more recognizable will be one's own distinction--one's good tastein relation to other, less acknowledged cultural preferences. In this view, culture suddenly becomes an elaborate game of recognizing and reproducing distinctions, often in ways so subtle as to escape the notice of all but the most discriminating. In the most egregious cases, there would seem to be nothing but the game,