dualism’’ of a diVerent kind, which complements Fraser’s: if her dualism allows
the analyst to examine any social practice now from the standpoint of distri-
bution, now from the standpoint of recognition (Fraser 2003 b, 63 ), this
dualism lets the analyst acknowledge the reality of the social diVerentiations
that underlie the distinction between recognition and redistribution, while
simultaneously understanding those diVerentiations as symptoms of a deep
contradiction within modern social life.
By adopting a diVerent sense of ‘‘recognition,’’ then, we may be able to
discern connections between recognition and redistribution at a diVerent
point than Honneth and Yar suggest: not only in the normative content of
redistributive claims, but also and more fundamentally in the ways of seeing,
regarding, and evaluating people and things—as bearers of quantitative labor-
power, for instance; or as loci of exchange-value—that are constitutive of
economic forms. Yet this, in turn, invites one further conceptual shift. Al-
though the approach I have just sketched diVers from Honneth’s and Yar’s in its
answers to theWrst and second orienting questions about recognition, it still
presumes a fairly conventional answer to the third question, about recogni-
tion’s object: on this view, recognition is still a matter of seeing and treating
someone or something else under some description: as a laborer or commod-
ity, for example. But the alternative sense of ‘‘recognition’’ as a kind of acknow-
ledgment of one’s own condition or circumstances may be apt here too. For
Hegel, it is recognition in this sense that really does critical work: his account of
the struggle for recognition and the master–slave relationship is, in eVect, an
account of a subject’s contradictory eVort to secure certainty of its own
independence through the establishment of a hierarchical social form—an
eVort that ironically testiWes to the subject’s continued dependence on others
while materially insulating him, however imperfectly, from the force of this
contradiction (Markell 2003 , ch. 4 ). If the ‘‘recognitions’’ constitutive of cap-
italism are contradictory in a parallel way, then these recognitions might also be
said to amount to misrecognitions in the sense of failures of acknowledgment;
and at least some of the systematic inequalities and hierarchies characteristic of
contemporary economic life might be understood to be sustained in part by
modern subjects’ existential investments in the capitalist imaginary.
Yet if this way of conceiving of ‘‘recognition’’ opens new avenues for
thinking about its connections to redistribution, it also oVers a new way of
thinking about the diVerence between these terms. As I have mentioned, one
of the most important changes in Fraser’s position has been her increas-
ing concern with a third, ‘‘political’’ dimension of justice. Sometimes, her
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