Gikandi and the Modern Subject

What is the slave’s relationship to the master and what is the master’s to the slave. It is hard to ignore Hegel’s model, bizarre though it is in seeing agency and subjectivity being possible for the slave more than for the master. The slave does not and is not in need of the recognition of the other since, having resigned himself, herself, to obedience, docility, labor, servitude, there is no point in seeking recognition from the other who sees the slave only as a thing compelled to obey. For Gikandi, this being is chattel, lacking subjectivity. But how does subjectivity come about for master and for slave? If the master depends on the slave, and not other masters, for her subjectivity, then it is framed by a relationship that is marked by all or nothing: the master has all the agency, the slave none due to the obligation to obey the will of the other, the master. But the master as other is not only dependent on his dependencies, his slaves, for labor and recognition; the master, as other, depends on the slave for a relationship in which the master can recognize himself. If the slave refuses, the master becomes decentered. There is a development Hegel envisions whereby the slave moves toward self-recognition by her work in which she sees her labor mixed in with her products, with her sense of herself as a person, an agent, a producer, a maker, thus emerging. The master fails to accomplish this position, having produced nothing with his own labor and seeing the products as having been made by the slave. It isn’t enough to own the slave and the products of his labor for the master since there is no recognition of himself in those products. “Through this rediscovery of himself by himself, the bondsman realizes that it is precisely in his work wherein he seemed to have only an alienated existence that he acquires a mind of his own” (Hegel 118–19; par. 196).1 The lord enjoys the object, but his enjoyment stops short of any recognition of a consciousness involved in the object and the work in creating it. Simultaneously, the slave cannot extend control over the object to the point of establishing total independence of it: “[the bondsman’s] negating of it . . . cannot go to the length of being altogether done with it to the point of annihilation; in other words, he only works on it” (par. 190), in contrast to the lord whose relationship to the object is always mediated. In the work of the slave comes the possibility of self-consciousness; the lord fails to achieve this. “. . . the lord, who has interposed

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• The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media

  Walter Benjamin, Michael W Jennings et al.•Work of Art in the Age of Its…•2008

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• Slavery and the Culture of Taste

  Open Access•Simon Gikandi•Slavery and the culture of taste•2011

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