Mediatized Conflict

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| MEDIATIZED CONFLICT
Taylor’s essay productively brings to the fore the importance of ‘recognition’ in social
relations and how this is thought to have evolved historically from a medieval system of
honour premised on status hierarchy to modern notions of dignity based on equal
human rights and equal recognition; the only basis, he says, for democracy. Questions
of recognition, in other words, are not trivial matters; they are simultaneously ontological
and political and go to the core of social being and claims to democracy. Ideas
of ‘recognition’ have long informed major philosophical treatise and theoretical outlooks,
whether Jean Paul Sartre’s existential ruminations on ‘The Look’ in Being and
Nothingness and Simone De Beauvoir’s feminist views on the objectification of the
male as a positive norm positioning the female as Other in the Second Sex; Frantz
Fanon’s disquisition on ‘The Fact of Blackness’ in Black Skin, White Masks and
Edward Said’s excoriating critique of the Occident’s constructions of ‘the Orient’ and
Islam in Orientalism and Covering Islam; Ervin Goffman’s interactionist sociology
elaborated in The Presentation of Self and Stigma or, more recently, Judith Butler’s
ideas on the performative nature of gender and identity developed in Gender Trouble.
In these, and other, major works ideas of ‘recognition’ – and misrecognition – are
posited and theorized as inextricably bound up with ideas of self and relations of
dominance and oppression. Clearly, when aligned to the new politics of difference,
the concept also resonates with the importance of public recognition in the struggles
of diverse cultural minorities and lends weight to the ideas and practices of
‘multiculturalism’ – conceived in the broadest and most encompassing of ways. Ideas
of recognition, then, lend considerable support to minorities and others seeking to
enhance their representation within the media – whether in terms of improved media
access and portrayal (Hall 1988; West 1999), or through increased media control and
employment opportunities (Cottle 1997, 2000a). Here, representationally, things
become a little more complicated.
Despite the seeming synergy between philosophically informed ideas of ‘recognition’
and the new politics of difference, the fit may be less snug than at first presumed. A
number of problems can be briefly noted, each of which goes to the heart of the politics
of recognition and what can be expected or advocated in the context of media practices
and performance. Critical benchmarks inevitably shift depending on how we conceptualize
and theorize ideas of mediatized recognition and the politics of difference.
Each of the problems intimated below points to the necessity for a more politically
differentiated, sociologically grounded and culturally nuanced understanding of processes
of public ‘recognition’, as well as the need for a clearer sense of how exactly the
politics of recognition becomes mediatized in and through established media forms.
First, the evident heterogeneity of identities all presumed to be demanding ‘recognition’
is collapsed under the catch-all categories of ‘identity politics’ and the ‘new
politics of difference’. This is troublesome because not all of these struggles and claims
necessarily share the same concern with (much less ontologically based need for) ‘recognition’.
The politics and strategies of minority advance vary enormously in and
across, for example, different social movements, single-issue campaigns and ethnic or