Recognition vs. Direct Action

In my research into Canadian politics, political theory, and the Intellectual Freedom, I’ve been trying to understand how the concept of “recognition” - still a potent theoretical category - came to play such a vital role in Canadian politics.

To my mind, “recognition” flows primarily from human rights discourse, and became the dominant orientation towards cultural policy and Indigenous and Quebecois sovereignty issues in Canada at the end of a broad global movement for civil and human rights in the late 1960s. Following the failed proposal of the 1969 “White Paper” due to Indigenous resistance and organization, which would have finalized Indigenous assimilation in Canada, Trudeau and Chretien decided to change tack, focusing on a “recognition” of Indigenous rights and differences. In Quebec, following the FLQ crisis of October 1970, recognition became the watchword for that set of issues as well.

Juridically, court cases like the Calder decision in 1973 recognized Indigenous land claims in Canada for the first time, while the Quebec referendum of 1980 recognized - if only a symbolic way - Quebec’s right to separate from Canada. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms was an attempt to enshrine recognition (of rights and immunities) in the new Canadian constitution in 1982. The question of how far to recognize Quebec as a distinct society formed the basis of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords, with a retired Trudeau fearing that too much recognition of Quebec’s difference would threaten the liberal universality that was the foundation of his view of Canadian citizenship.

The Meech Lake accords failed, of course, due to a lack of recognition of Indigenous people in the constitutional process, as Elijah Harper voted against the accords in the Manitoba legislature. Recognition and rights are therefore tightly connected. But even framing this as a lack of recognition plays into the dominant political discourse: it would be better to say that what was lacking was not recognition, but real participation of Indigenous peoples in the constitutional process.

As Nancy Fraser has argued with respect to recognition, recognition is nothing without redistribution. And this, I think, is where recognition and human rights discourse really come together. We often hear language about “rights” used to proclaim a desired state of affairs: “we have human rights”, “we have a right to assemble”, “we support a right to free expression”. Sometimes this is couched in terms of moral worth: “we deserve human working conditions”, “we deserve a shorter work week”, etc. We can also see recognition and right in the question of the erasure of labour: crediting work done by others is recognizing their value and contribution, not doing so “erases” their labour (by which is meant erases that recognition). Recognition, then, has come to be woven into the fabric of the way we discuss many political, moral, and cultural issues in the contemporary world.

But this allows recognition to replace redistribution, an idealistic act of recognizing to supplant real transformation of our social, political, cultural, and economic relations. It defuses all criticism, defangs all challenge, deradicalizes every movement for real change. Recognition - like rights discourse itself - is pernicious in that it flattens out and recuperates every threat to capitalism itself. It places every demand for material distribution onto a plane of pure idealism where nothing concrete ever needs to happen.

In a way this is because the (verbal) act of recognition, like the reciprocal (verbal) claiming of a right, is understood as a performative speech-act, something that actually changes a state of affairs. To recognize Indigenous land claims or Quebec’s nature as a “distinct society” or to credit someone else’s work or to publicly claim a right are generally meant to have some effect on the real social and political relations that obtain at a given moment.

But the reason that “recognition” (and rights discourse more broadly) is so acceptable - to the Canadian settler state, to neoliberalism, to capital in general - is because (in classic idealist fashion) it does not actually change the state of affair. This is what Fraser means by recognition meaning nothing without material redistribution. What does it mean to “recognize” Indigenous land claims in the Calder or Delgamuukw cases when the RCMP still physically clears land defenders out of the path of pipeline development? What does it mean to claim a right when those rights continue to be violated with impunity? The Canadian federal government now (after many years of procrastination) “recognizes” the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, writing that the Declaration “shows us that further steps must be taken to respect, recognize and protect the human rights of Indigenous peoples and to address the wrongs of the past”. Recognition is built into the Canadian government’s orientation towards both rights and Indigenous peoples. But recognition means nothing - the 2016 endorsement of UNDRIP did nothing to force the federal government to, say, fulfill its promise (another form of recognition) to implement the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action. The horrific discovery this weekend in Kamloops demonstrates how little recognition really means: TRC Calls to Action 71-76 on “Missing Children and Burial Information” lays out a set of steps to try to deal with the issue of mass burial at residential schools. Despite the small amount of money this would have cost, the federal government continues to prefer recognition to real action.

Recognition - like human rights discourse itself - follows the liberal approach of imagining that setting up a procedure constitutes in and of itself a real transformation of the world. It is a form of nominalism: if you name it, then it exists. If we utter the magic incantation - recognizing a right, for example - than it must suddenly be so in reality. This is the purest idealism.

Librarianship’s commitment to Intellectual Freedom follows this idealist blueprint. A library will recognize a community’s concerns as long as they don’t have to change a policy or make a real material commitment to that community. They will continue to recognize that community’s concerns until the community itself moves from idealism to direct action. When Vancouver Pride banned Vancouver Public Library in 2019, defenders of Intellectual Freedom in libraries were outraged. It was one thing to demand recognition, it was quite another thing to do something. Similarly, in an act I have referred to elsewhere as “recognition theatre” Toronto Public Library recognized trans people and allies at their Board Meeting in October of 2019 - and proceeded to not listen or effect any material change. When people engaged in direct action - the protest at the Palmerston branch - recognition was exhanged for the material force of the state as the police took over management of “arsenal of democracy” and staunch defender of Intellectual Freedom.

A new example of direction action is in the news today: Halifax Pride has gone beyond recognition to protest the inclusion of a transphobic book in the HPL catalogue by cutting all ties with HPL. The library would like to continue to recognize the trans community as well as to uphold its commitment to Intellectual Freedom, but these two aims become completely incompatible once recognition is replaced by real material action on the part of Pride. Such action requires a material response, not just recognition, on the part of the library, and it is this material response - in contravention of the rights-discourse of Intellectual Freedom - that the library (just like the Canadian government) cannot engage in.

The library muddies the water by claiming that to exclude Irreversible Damage from its collection would be censorship, despite the books wide availability worldwide, and the fact that it was named the Economist’s Book of the Year and Times Best Book of 2021. Essentially, what critics of absolutist IF are saying is that this extremely popular and well-known book, which is widely available and trivially easy to access, should not be recognized through its inclusion in a publicly-funded library collection. This is not censorship; this is an ethical commitment. If “library values” do not translate to ethical commitments with real practical effects in the world, what are they for? They become nothing but pure idealist recognition as a substitute for material commitment to social improvement and justice.

Library leaders like to pretend that positions which challenge absolutist IF challenge IF as such. But there are other ways to understand intellectual freedom which do not subscribe to liberal universalist, individualist, and ”neutral” perspectives. Such a view of intellectual freedom would reject individualism in favour of a real understanding of social solidarity; would reject universalism through a real negotiation of difference; and would reject our spurious neutrality in favour of a real understanding of moral commitment. The “neutrality” of librarianship, the library’s hiding behind proceduralism, recognition, and rights discourse merely allows the library to maintain the anti-Indigenous and transphobic status quo that is the Canadian reality. When direct action on the part of community groups - whether that is Millennium4All in Winnipeg, or the various Pride organizations in Vancouver, Toronto, and Halifax - confronts the idealism of recognition, libraries have to choose what side they’re on. No matter which side they choose, there will be consequences, but this is not something to be avoided by withdrawing to the safety of idealism. These consequences are the cost and the benefit of choice itself. If “freedom” means anything at all, it must mean to choose, and to take the consequences.