In the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, critical theorists paid renewed attention to what Charles Taylor famously called ‘the politics of recognition’.footnote¹ The demand for recognition, Taylor suggested, was linked to modern notions of identity—a person’s understanding of their fundamental defining characteristics, of who they are. Since our identity is partly shaped by others’ recognition, people can suffer real damage if society mirrors back a demeaning image of themselves. Thus, women in patriarchal societies may be induced to internalize a sexist self-image, to suffer the pain of low self-esteem. White rule has for generations projected a demeaning picture of black, indigenous and colonized peoples, saddling the oppressed with crippling forms of self-depreciation. In this respect, due recognition was a vital human need. Taylor saw the uncertain quest for recognition as linked to the 18th-century emergence of individualized identities, premised on a concept of inner authenticity. Meanwhile Axel Honneth’s Kampf um Anerkennung (1992) outlined a moral theory in which recognition, achieved via political struggle, was constitutive of personhood. Nancy Fraser developed a dualistic rejoinder, later in critical dialogue with Honneth, which balanced recognition with redistribution in the quest for equality.footnote²

The timing of this turn towards recognition was significant. It coincided with the triumph of capitalist globalization, when the conceptual foundations of critical theory and emancipatory politics were deeply contestable and contested. Just as the collapse of state socialism undermined the confidence of Marxist critique, so the aggressive market universalism that followed produced some hesitancy with regard to Kantian critique. For different reasons and in different ways, Taylor, Honneth and Fraser all attended to the critical link between the two traditions: Hegel. Recognition, in its concrete, cultural and historical varieties, was to be a constitutive part of justice. The dialogical dimensions of subjectivity, underplayed or ignored by both Marxism and liberalism, would become integrated within critical theory and radical politics.

A key reason for taking the politics of recognition seriously was that it had its own empirical and historical momentum. The demand for recognition had become integral to what Fraser termed ‘folk paradigms of justice’—the moral vernacular of the social movements that emerged after the 1960s. Multiculturalism was a sociological fact. Despite considerable differences between these theorists, one reason why they deemed recognition philosophically and politically important was that it palpably mattered to political and moral actors themselves. The renewed theorization of recognition was therefore a continuation of what Luc Boltanski had identified as a longstanding problematic: how to register the everyday suffering and demands of ‘lay’ actors with the meta-critique offered by theoretical scholarship.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the protests that followed, the politics of recognition has become a mainstream preoccupation—and a matter of bitter controversy. Both centre-right intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama and neoconservatives such as Douglas Murray claim that the liberal-democratic order is being destabilized by demands for identitarian recognition. Right-wing ‘post-liberals’ and communitarian Catholics attack a left-liberal fixation on recognizing individual injuries and symbolic violence at the expense of traditional moral norms. Populists are also accused by liberals of indulging the politics of identity, racial or otherwise, producing a ‘post-truth’ politics.footnote³ And universities are routinely accused by mainstream media of sustaining a morally relativist ideology in which all claims to recognition are equally legitimate.

Much of the time, however, the new reaction against the politics of recognition is also framed in terms of recognition: ‘identity politics’ is denounced for depriving white men, the working class or the nation-state of the recognition that is rightly theirs. The struggle for recognition has turned into an arms race, in which majority cultural identities deploy the language of minority rights in their defence. In contexts such as Brexit, liberals have also engaged in demands for identity recognition, with street protests, flags and claims of cultural marginalization. Fraser’s warning that, in the absence of any counter-balancing theory of economics, recognition politics could lapse into vulgar culturalism, has been borne out across the ideological spectrum. The politics of recognition has acquired more momentum than anyone could have foreseen in the 1990s. In particular, the digital public sphere is seething with allegations of misrecognition, not all of them made in good faith, and some deliberately used as a tool of confusion.

Two immediate responses present themselves. The first is to remain loyal to subjective experiences of injustice and their modes of articulation, even at the price of escalating the culture war. This retains the advantage of allowing groups to articulate injuries and injustices in their own terms; but that process is now being used by the right as a way of satirizing and sabotaging all discourses of social justice, turning the politics of recognition into a trap for the left. A second response would be to write off the politics of recognition altogether, in favour of a wholly externalist mode of critique that brackets the discourse and demands of injured parties. This provides a welcome exit from cultural politics, but ducks the democratic questions of how to give voice to suffering and agency to the marginalized. Fraser anticipated these difficulties with remarkable acuity, noting that the inflation of recognition as a political category risked the displacement of material injustices, and the reification of simplistic identities, which could become increasingly insular. Her answer proposed a two-dimensional theory of justice, in which equality of political participation is supported by recognition of status and material redistribution, both mutually interdependent. Recognition would not be an end in itself, but a necessary component of positive freedom.footnote⁴

My intention here is to come at the current explosion of recognition demands from a different perspective: to consider how transformations in the public sphere have led to a mutation in how recognition is demanded and supplied. The key condition for this is the digital platform, which has ushered in a new era of public participation in which recognition of status is never adequately achieved by anyone, so injustice feels ubiquitous. In the attention economy of social media, public actors may long for recognition, but have to settle instead for varying quantities of ‘reputation’, or simply the ‘reaction’ of immediate feedback. The task, I suggest, is to retain some loyalty to how everyday critiques and expressions of suffering articulate themselves, but also to arm ourselves with critical resources against the latest tricks pulled by what Jodi Dean terms ‘communicative capitalism’. The rise of platform capitalism has occasioned a new phase which needs to be understood, if critique is not to be ensnared by a platform logic of rating and trolling.