File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0308, message 30


Date: Sun, 03 Aug 2003 20:41:03 +0100
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk>
Subject: master and slave (powerless)


Judy/all

A brief and rough note aiming to clarify the meaning of the master/slave 
part of the 'powerless' comment as requested.
Here I am going to paraphrase Hegel to clarify the master and slave 
concept: In Hegel’s Phenomenology the self-consciousness being is under 
under interrogation, from hereon in I am going to refer top them as 
‘persons’. A person to exist needs to reference the other to establish 
an awareness of the self. To understand precisely what a person requires 
from the other Hegel states that it is recognition and acknowledgement. 
Without this Hegel produces the idea that self-consciousness is 
threatened by the existence of another person who does not acknowledge 
me as a person. [Existential psychiatry/psychology c.f. Gregory Bateson 
in the US and Laing in Europe works as an extension of this idea….]
The need for recognition is of course mutual. Hegel informs us that 
self-consciousness seeks to be pure, and to do so it must demonstrate 
that it is not simply attached to mere material objects. However 
self-consciousness is attached to material things, it is inextricably 
attached to its own living body, and also to the other from whom it 
needs recognition and acknowledgement. Consequently then to prove that 
the person is not attached to either of these material things it is 
necessary to engage in a life and death struggle with the other person, 
by seeking to harm and kill the other one shows that one is not attached 
to the other. Hegel states that the initial relationship of two persons 
is not peaceful recognition but struggle.
This is a difficult and risky thought for Hegel appears to be arguing 
that struggle is not the result of accidentally existing social 
processes but a necessary aspect of the proving that you are a person. 
This rather dark understanding of what it is to be a person can be 
thought however; as being that it is sometimes necessary for some people 
to risk their lives and existences to prove their independence from the 
material, their bodies and the others., as such the proof would not have 
to universally repeated for each person.
Initially it is understood that each individual is intending to kill the 
other, but this is not really what is required. For it will ensure that 
the other is dead and the survivor will have destroyed the source of the 
recognition that enables s/he to establish and awareness of self. 
Consequently then the dominator requires that the other must survive 
because the person is important to him/her - but the equivalence between 
the two persons is destroyed and one based on the other being 
subservient is constructed. The former becomes the master and the 
latter, the subservient one becomes the slave.
Hegel defines the division, the difference between the rulers and the 
ruled in this way. But this is not a stable system. It may appear that 
the m aster has everything, the slave works in the material world and 
can enjoy the subservient slave and the results of their labor. But 
consider the need of the master for recognition and acknowledgement, 
s/he may be recognized by the slave but for the salve the master is 
merely a ‘thing’, and certainly not an equivalent consciousness at all. 
The master then does not receive the recognition that s/he desires.
As Hegel points out the situation of the slave is not as it may first 
appear to be, of course the slave will lack adequate recognition and 
acknowledgement because for the master s/he is a mere object, a thing. 
But on the other hand s/he does work in and on the material world. 
Whilst the master may receive the temporal pleasures of consumption, the 
slave makes and remakes the material objects on which s/he works, 
tranformsing the material into something permanent, an object exterior 
to the self. In this process the slave becomes more aware of his/her own 
self-consciousness for the transformed material is something objective. 
In the act of construction, including whilst under the control of 
another, the slave discovers that s/he has a mind (of their own).

Some decades later Marx translated this concept into alienated labour… 
but this is another theory entirely

Anything irritating or inaccurate is mine not Hegel's...

regards
steve



   

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