SubStance

Do oppressed peoples deserve recognition by dominant groups? Is recognition at the heart of political struggle? Judging from mainstream discourses of oppression, strategies of emancipation, and the assumptions undergirding calls to integrate multicultural perspectives in critiques of contemporary life, this seems to be the case. But as Kelly Oliver argues in Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, the notion that recognition grants fundamental human dignity and agency is flawed. In her view, conceiving human relations in terms of self and other, and understanding recognition as something the oppressed deserve are themselves stances that derive from the pathology and psychic damage oppression engenders.

Oliver rejects the common Hegelian notions that place recognition at the center of subjectivity, positing a more radical understanding of what human subjectivity and dignity require: a practice she calls "witnessing" which goes "beyond recognition." Witnessing involves opening oneself up to difference, exceeding the more conventional boundaries of recognition to the point of de-centering the autonomous self. If oppression consists of restricting agency by denying individuals the ability to respond and to be responded to, then a more effective ethics of recognition must allow for an opening up of subjective possibility for response. The paradigm of recognition fails because it remains within a hierarchical, subject-object relational framework. Both asking for and conferring recognition are practices that support a vision of subjects as fundamentally alienated. Instead, Oliver argues, we owe it to each other to move toward a conception of ourselves that links us more intimately to one another through the act of witnessing.

But what, exactly, are we witnessing, and how is witnessing different from recognition? We witness those experiences and stories that have contributed to the marginalization of the subject we understand as the other. Witnessing is a practice dedicated to the project of reconceiving the other as a subject, which requires a more rigorous, open encounter with difference than mere recognition as it is understood in contemporary discourses (particularly discourses of multiculturalism, diversity and inclusion). Moreover, Oliver maintains that most models of recognition encourage the self to find core similarities between herself and the other as a way of ensuring the recognizee is adequately recognized. Witnessing is more than an encounter with sameness, or historical truth, and more radical than recognition. It is an encounter with testimony, which brings with it all kinds of attendant political and epistemological questions [End Page 146] regarding credibility. Witnessing does not take sameness, but rather difference, as that which is most valuable between self and other. Recognition does not require a substantial rethinking of the self's own subjectivity and subjective constitution, nor does it necessarily entail bringing questions of love, touch, vision and interpersonal energies to bear on relations with others. Moreover, and perhaps most at the heart of the borders of self and other, recognition does not open the self up to what Oliver beautifully calls "the adventure of otherness" (p. 20). Witnessing, however, does.

Would we understand the shortcomings of recognition-based models of overcoming oppression? Indeed, would we understand subjectivity differently if we took othered subjectivity—that is, the subjectivity of the oppressed—as our point of departure? Oliver claims that critical theorists who maintain that the other is an essential participant in subject-formation nevertheless do not endow the other with much subjectivity. In most critical accounts, the other remains, as it were, othered, despite being "recognized." Oliver understands witnessing in both of its common conceptions: not only as a kind of seeing the other, but also as a believing, a "bearing witness" to otherness. However, because oppression is, fundamentally, a restriction of agency, we cannot witness under conditions of oppression. Critical theories of recognition still lack models of true witnessing of the other—interpersonal processes that go beyond mere dialectical recognition, toward describing something more like love. Sketching out such a model is the experiment Oliver pursues.

Beginning with a close reading of the recognition model of subjectivity that Frantz Fanon offers in Black Skin, White Masks, Oliver carefully builds her argument against...