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Of course, Fraser said, Foucault had provided “a rich empirical account of the early stages in the emergence of some distinctively modern modalities of power.” In Foucault, she said, “modern power is ‘capillary’; … [it] operates at the lowest extremities of the social body in everyday social practices; … such power touches people’s lives more fundamentally through their social practices than through their beliefs.” But for all his empirical insights, Fraser argued, Foucault’s work was riven with “normative confusions … I find no clues in Foucault’s writings as to what his alternative norms might be. I see no hints as to how concretely to interpret ‘domination,’ ‘subjugation,’ ‘subjection,’ etc., in some completely new ‘post-liberal’ fashion.” Or worse, in Nietzschean bleakness: “Power is productive, ineliminable, and, therefore, normatively neutral.”⁴³¹

Axel Honneth, then a student of Jürgen Habermas,^§AS2.0a was at the Praxis meeting in Dubrovnik. He would later be appointed a director of the Institute for Social Research, the famed Frankfurt School.^§MS0b Fraser and Honneth were to become comradely protagonists, debating the tangle of antagonistic interests that is modernity.

Honneth’s argument was that social theory and political practice in the twentieth century had become overly focused on economic inequalities, prioritizing the working class over other social classifications such as gender or ethnic identities, and class antagonisms over other social fault lines. In order to rectify the consequent omissions and blind spots, he proposed that any social analysis begin with “recognition” as an elemental form of intersubjective activity, an original empathy first learned by small children in their developmental phase.

On this measure, we can analyze and critique the subsequent objectification of others. “Misrecognition” in the form of sexism, says Honneth, turns women into objects. The misrecognition that is slavery turns bodies into objects according to race.⁴³² He pointed to the rise of a politics of recognition in the social movements of the late twentieth century. These ground their programs in “identity claims,” including feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonialist, and a panoply of other agendas.⁴³³

Nancy Fraser, in response, argued that “[f]ar from comprehending the totality of moral life, recognition for me is one crucial but limited dimension of social justice.” In a chapter for a book honoring the work of György Márkus,^§AS2.4.2b she argued that recognition was not merely a matter of identity; it was also a matter of practically lived status, and the swing to identity politics in the late twentieth century had gone too far, to the neglect of economic injustices.⁴³⁴

So, Fraser proposed “two analytically distinct orders of subordination: class stratification, rooted primarily in economic system mechanisms, and status hierarchy, based largely in institutionalized patterns of cultural value … Whereas class stratification corresponds to maldistribution, status hierarchy corresponds to misrecognition.” Her conclusion, and her measure: “both orders of subordination violate a single overarching principle of justice, the principle of participatory parity.”⁴³⁵

If Fraser retains misrecognition but adds back maldistribution, we want to suggest that there are three great fissures of inequality and social antagonism in our latest modernity: material conditions (social class, locale, and family); corporeal attributes (age, race, sex and sexuality, physical and mental abilities); and cultural forms (language, ethnos, and communities of commitment).⁴³⁶

As for our multimodal grammar, in modern times, every text, every image, every space, every embodied gesture, every verbal utterance, is riddled with these antagonisms. Every such meaning can be parsed for the differential interests of the parties to participation in meaning. And when we parse, we may want to act to achieve at least greater, or ideally balanced, parity of participation – in other words, to change.

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⁴³¹ Nancy Fraser, 1981, “Foucault on Modern Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions,” Praxis International 1(3):272–87, pp. 272, 283, 285.

⁴³² Axel Honneth, 2008, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

⁴³³ Axel Honneth, 2003, “Redistribution as Recognition: A Reply to Nancy Fraser,” pp. 110–97 in Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, edited by N. Fraser and A. Honneth, London: Verso.

⁴³⁴ Nancy Fraser, 2002, “Integrating Redistribution and Recognition: On Class and Status in Contemporary Society,” pp. 149–65 in Culture and Enlightenment: Essays for György Márkus, edited by J. Grumley, P. Crittenden, and P. Johnson, Aldershot: Ashgate.

⁴³⁵ Nancy Fraser, 2003, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition: A Rejoinder to Axel Honneth,” pp. 198–236 in Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, edited by N. Fraser and A. Honneth, London: Verso, p. 218; Nancy Fraser, 2008, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Postsocialist’ Age,” pp. 11–41 in Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics, edited by K. Olson, London: Verso; Nancy Fraser, 2009, “Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History,” New Left Review (56):97–117.

⁴³⁶ Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope, 2016b, “Learner Differences in Theory and Practice,” Open Review of Educational Research 3(1):85–132; Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope, 2012, New Learning: Elements of a Science of Education (Edn 2), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Chapter 5.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 318–320. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Nancy Fraser’s “Parity of Participation” §AS2.5.1a