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Frames of Recognition under Global Capitalism: Eastern European Migrants in British Fiction

assumptions about situations of recognition but need to be understood by a context-specific approach, as Jacinda Swanson has argued, that takes into account the complicated and often contradictory nature of hegemonic formations which “shape different parts of the social world in specific and diverse ways, and thus interpellate and affect individuals differently” (2005, 107). 5 Theoretical and Literary Models: A Conclusion Korte, B., & Regard, F. (Eds.). (2014). Narrating poverty and precarity in britain. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from acu on 2017-08-18 19:13:35. C o p y r i g h t © 2 0 1 4 . D e G r u y t e r . A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . In comparison, The Road Home at first sight presents a more pleasing, because generically conventional and coherent story than the much more untidy and less easily classifiable narrative of Antigona and Me. As the analysis has shown, however, the unevenness and unpredictability of Clanchy’s text corresponds to the haphazard nature of the protagonist’s precarious existence, and, in contrast to Tremain’s novel, it is accompanied by a substantial degree of self-reflexivity as to the representability of a subject so very different from the author’s own range of experience. The Road Home has more than once been praised for its emotional empathy,77 and Tremain herself takes pride in being able to fathom “the unfamiliar, even the unknowable” in her writing (qtd. in Sceats 2005, 166). This betrays an unquestioning belief in the power of the literary imagination to act as a universal tool of understanding which never even so much as considers the possibility that the imagination itself might be severely limited in its scope by its own situatedness in a specific frame of reference to which it automatically reduces what it perceives. Lev’s successful adaptation to Western capitalism is achieved at the expense of the erasure of his home country’s past and implies a process of homogenization, which effectively negates the Other’s difference or otherness (Hetzel et al. 2011, 7– 8). In light of Butler’s outline of the mechanisms of recognition, Tremain’s claim that Lev, by the end of the book, “is fully human and knowable to us and we are more knowable to ourselves” (qtd. in Crişu 2010, 365) seems an almost ironic instance of misrecognition and reveals perhaps first and foremost the specific frame of recognition in which Lev is allowed to attain to the status of the human. Clanchy, on the other hand, is very much aware of this danger and uses the gap between self and other to explore the destabilization of the self through the incommensurability of the Other and to probe her own standards of recognition, that is, her own ethical frame of reference (Hetzel 2011, 31). According to Clanchy, the imagination is no adequate tool to bridge that gap completely: “I couldn’t pretend to imagine being her, because one of the things she taught me was that our two cultures had made us profoundly, not superficially, different” (5). Beyond a comparison between Tremain’s and Clanchy’s approaches to representing migration from Eastern Europe, confronting the literary material with the theoretical framework outlined also proves instructive. A number of scholars have criticized Butler for her high level of abstraction that lacks historical differentiation, especially with respect to the complex mechanisms of contemporary capitalist society (Fraser 1997, 282–284), and is not sufficiently capable of describing the complicated ins and outs of actual lives and their various forms of embeddedness in different Korte, B., & Regard, F. (Eds.). (2014). Narrating poverty and precarity in britain. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from acu on 2017-08-18 19:13:35. C o p y r i g h t © 2 0 1 4 . D e G r u y t e r . A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . communities (McIvor 2012, 421). The intricacies around subjectivity, agency and recognition developed in Clanchy’s text support this view. Specifically Antigona’s handling of the various and sometimes contradictory forms of recognition she is exposed to or has access to as well as her self-willed use of agency and her attachment to different social environments that help her to cope with and resist oppressive forms of recognition (Allen 2006, 217–218) produces unpredictable effects not accounted for by Butler’s monolithic model. McIvor emphasizes the diverse and context-specific nature of situations of recognition when he states that “we are responsive to a plurality of faces, and each of these faces has more than one face” (2012, 421). Furthermore, the ethical obligation Butler derives from her view of precariousness as a condition of human existence that implies a “fundamental dependency on anonymous others” (2004, xii) as well as her evocation of “egalitarian standards” or “basic egalitarian norms” (2009, 22) makes a universalising claim that remains unsubstantiated. By doing so, she prioritizes a Western tradition of philosophical thinking and evokes a global community that does not really exist. Instead, there are communities with different and often enough incompatible regimes of truth and different understandings of recognition and its terms. If we add the fact that the laws of politics are not always coincidental with the laws of ethics, it becomes clear that Butler’s position constitutes less a cogent political rationale than a rational appeal that may or may not be heeded.