Something about habitual(ized) recognition

This one is going to be a bit of a theoretical one, but I'll try to keep it short...  ┐( ˘_˘)┌

I have been thinking about Honneth's concepts of recognition and reification in relation to the concept of habitualization as presented by Viktor Shklovsky (1917), and I thought I'd share some of my reflections.

I'll start by explaining Shklovsky's habitualization.

For Shklovsky, to perceive is to be actively engaged in the cognitive activity of processing sensory impressions; perception is cognition. Naturally we attend and feel the world around us, very similar to Honneth's describtion of care and engaged praxis, extracted from Heidegger and Lukács, respectively.

Despite this natual 'connectedness', perception may be overthrown by what Shklovsky calls algebrization (or habitualization, they're more or less synonymous). Algebrization describes the process by which phenomena and activities become 'economized', i.e. reduced, for the sake of mental efficiency; habitualization is an unconscious cognitive system that automatically associates impressions with an archive of known concepts, bypassing the active perceptual processes. E.g. each time we take in the impressions of a stone, whatever those impressions may be, we unconsciously build an understanding of the concept of stone, and when this concept becomes sufficiently encompassing, we stop perceiving every stone we encounter, and instead recognize the stone by an unconscious mechanism that associates the impressions with the concept.

This mechanism is effective, but essentially severs the 'connectedness' with the world, as significant and and meaningful impressions become increasingly reduced to abstract symbols and formulae. In regards to habitualization, recognition denotes a lesser form of perception, wherein "we", as conscious human beings, do not take part in the world around us, but disconnect ourselves, and let unconscious categorization mechanisms be our "window into reality". Dewey also mentioned this understanding of recognition in Art as Experience (1934), where recognition "arrests" perception, acting, unconsciously, before active perception gets a chance.

I already see a bit of reification in there, but what I'm really getting at is that maybe the difference between Honneth's concepts of recognition and reification is a matter of degree; that reification is not just the suppression of recognition, but an over-development of recognition. Honneth's writes that the ability to recognize, and in turn empathize with and understand other people, needs time to develop, because being able to see the world from someone else's perspective is an intricate and difficult process. 'Recognition as economized perception' may be exactly the same as 'recognition as empathetic human understanding'.

The way I see it, the process of relating to another human is such a complicated process - because of the complex nature of human existence - that there needs to be some degree of automation in that process to elevate human-human interaction onto an emotional and personally interested level. To understand another person we need intrinsic understanding the human shape, facial structure, expressions, emotions, language, etc. before we can begin to engage with the person  inside that general shell. But at the same time we may run the risk of over-simplifying, of reducing the aspects of the human in front of us to such a degree that their non-generalized aspects become symbolic or formulaic.

Seen this way, a person that is recognized and a person that is reified are not subject to different cognitive treatment, but different degrees of the same cognitive practice. To recognize  another human is to appropriately algebrize/simplify their general traits so that a deeper and more personal interaction may take place. To reifiy another human is to apply the same algebrization to their individual characteristics. Imagine a scale of how much a person may be algebrized, where one end represents a person so complex that they cannot be understood in any personal, profound way (here there is no algebrization), and the other end represents a person so reduced and symbolic that whatever understanding there may be is meaningless to that individual (here algebrization is complete).


I made a little visualization to help clarify what I'm trying to say:

I want to point out that, in this view, reification is inevitable, as habitualization is a constant and relentless automatic process that we cannot rid ourselves of. Luckily there are remedies for habitualization, Shklovsky pointed in the direction of dehabitualization as the technique of art, but I think I'll stop here for now.

Anyhow, those are just my thoughts. I hope it made some sense ( ⚆ _ ⚆ )

Also here are the references:

• Honneth, A. (2008). Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (M. Jay, ed.). New York, Oxford University Press
• Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York, NY: Perigee.
• Shklovsky, V. (2013). Art as Technique. In R. J. Lane (Ed.), Global literary theory: an anthology (pp. 7–20). New York: Routledge. (Original text from 1917)

- Mikkel