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[...] when misrecognition is equated with prejudice in the minds of the oppressors, overcoming it seems to require policing their beliefs, an approach that is illiberal and authoritarian. For the status model, in contrast, misrecognition is a matter of externally manifest and publicly verifiable impediments to some people's standing as full members of society. To redress it, again, means to overcome subordination. This in turn means changing institutions and social practices--once again, by deinstitutionalizing patterns of cultural value that impede parity of participation and replacing them with patterns that foster it.
[...] Fair democratic deliberation concerning the merits of recognition claims requires parity of participation for all actual and possible deliberators. That in turn requires just distribution and reciprocal recognition. Thus, there is an unavoidable circularity in this account: claims for recognition can only be justified under conditions of participatory parity, which conditions include reciprocal recognition. [...]
The solution, accordingly, is not to abolish the circularity in theory. It is rather to work to abolish it in practice by changing social reality. [...]
it's an asymptote
[...] Unlike Marxist theory, likewise, I do not conceive class as a relation to the means of production. In my conception, rather, class is an order of objective subordination derived from economic arrangements that deny some actors the means and resources they need for participatory parity.
[...] markets do not simply dissolve status distinctions; rather, they instrumentalize them, bending pre-existing patterns of cultural value to capitalist purposes. For example, racial hierarchies that long predated capitalism were not abolished with the dismantling of New World slavery or even of Jim Crow, but reconfigured to suit a market society. No longer explicitly codified in law, and no longer socially legitimate, racist norms have been wired into the infrastructure of capitalist labor markets. Thus, the net result of marketization is the modernization, not supersession, of status subordination.
The distinction between affirmation and transformation can be applied, first of all, to the perspective of distributive justice. In this perspective, the paradigmatic example of an affirmative strategy is the liberal welfare state, which aims to redress maldistribution through income transfers. Relying heavily on public assistance, this approach seeks to increase the consumption share of the disadvantaged, while leaving intact the underlying economic structure. In contrast, the classic example of a transformative strategy is socialism. Here the aim is to redress unjust distribution at the root--by transforming the framework that generates it. Far from simply altering the end-state distribution of consumption shares, this approach would change the division of labor, the forms of ownership, and other deep structures of the economic system.
she says later that affirmative strategies can actually promote misrecognition (e.g., liberal welfare state programs that mark the poor as "needy")
[...] grants would guarantee a minimum standard of living to every citizen, regardless of labor force participation, while leaving intact the deep structure of capitalist property rights. Thus, in the abstract they appear to be affirmative. That appearance would jibe with reality, moreover in a neoliberal regime, where the grants would effectively subsidize employers of low-wage, temporary labor and possibly depress wages overall. In a social democracy, however, the effects could be dramatically different. According to proponents, if the level of the grants were set high enough, Basic Income would alter the balance of power between capital and labor, creating a more favorable terrain on which to pursue further change. The long-term result could be to undermine the commodification of labor power. In that case, an apparently affirmative remedy for maldistribution would have deeply transformative effects with respect to economic class subordination.
[...] nonreformist reforms seek to spark transformations in the status order--not only directly, by immediate institutional intervention, but also politically, by changing the terrain on which future struggles for recognition are waged. Thus, for recognition as for distribution, this approach represents a via media between affirmation and transformation that combines the best features of both.
[...] Albert Hirschman also basically assumes that we are facing a shift from "divisible" to "indivisible" conflicts, whose peculiarity consists in the fact that the contested good--precisely consists in the fact that the contested good--precisely this "collective identity"--cannot be parceled out from the standpoint of distributive justice. [...]
[...] Humor is a meditation upon death. It is by this difference that we are best able to understand the nature of a life lived in the comic mode. The fact that I will not live two hundred years, let alone forever, is what is preventing me from writing my gelastical magnum opus. It is also what makes gelastics possible in the first place: that we are mortal, and therefore doomed. [...]
But could there really be no liberation short of offing the tyrant? Is there not another species of emancipation in flights of the spirit, even if they change nothing in our material reality? The playing field of the imagination is infinite, after all. So even though humor forces us back into our heavy bodies--and even though, therefore, we can never mistake a gelastic experience for an aesthetic one--nevertheless in the gelastic mode too we experience a variety of freedom. [...]