as the foundational ethical concept, not as merely one good among many,
they nevertheless continue to treat recognition as agood, as something sought
and demanded by individuals and groups, and which they may at various
times lack or possess. And this conception of recognition as a good—perhaps
theoverarching good—Wts well with their implicit answer to the second
orienting question, about the relationship between recognition and justice:
for them, to be recognizedisto be treated justly. This way of using ‘‘recog-
nition’’ inXects Honneth’s and Yar’s accounts of the constitutive connection
between redistribution and recognition: since they see recognition as a
fundamentally normative concept, they locate this constitutive connection
at the level of norms, reading struggles over distribution as claimsforrecog-
nition; and this makes them vulnerable to Fraser’s rejoinders. But how would
the relationship between redistribution and recognition look if we moved
even further toward treating recognition as a general medium of social
interaction rather than a good, and if we attenuated the conceptual connec-
tion between recognition and justice?
The beginning of an answer can be found in Judith Butler’s response to
Fraser, and in particular in a brief observation near the end of her essay about
the place of the distinction between the ‘‘material’’ and the ‘‘cultural’’ in
Marxism. This distinction, Butler argues, is not Marxism’s taken-for-granted
‘‘conceptual foundation.’’ To the contrary, Marx and some of his successors
sought precisely ‘‘to explain how the cultural and economic themselves
became established as separable spheres—indeed, how the institution of the
economic as a separate sphere is the consequence of an operation of abstrac-
tion initiated by capital itself ’’ (Butler 1997 , 274 ). In her reply to Butler, Fraser
identiWes this as a ‘‘deconstructive’’ argument whose point is simply to
dissolve altogether the distinctions between culture and economy, recogni-
tion and redistribution (Fraser 1997 b, 286 ; 2003 b, 60 ). But there is another
way to understand the force of Butler’s claim, and Marx’s. The point of
studying the emergence of the economic as a separate sphere through capit-
alism’s ‘‘operation of abstraction’’ is not to reveal that, after all, there is no
diVerence between culture and economy. Instead, it is to identify a contra-
diction within capitalist social forms: on the one hand, these forms do involve
a separation of the economic from the cultural, and this separation is no
mere illusion; on the other hand, the very means by which this separation
is produced—such as the emergence of a distinctive mode of valuation
that abstracts ‘‘exchange-value’’ from use—also testify to an on-
going continuity of ‘‘economic’’ and ‘‘cultural’’ forms. This is a ‘‘perspectival
recognition and redistribution 461