September 05, 2003

Hegel, recognition, Croc Festivals

I have just come back from a few days in the Upper Spencer Gulf region of South Australia. I happened to attend the Croc Festival in PortAugusta on Wednesday night. This is a festival of primary and secondary school children in the region who come together for three days for a variety of daytime activities. They--a mixture of white and indigneous kids----also put on a performance in the evening. The performance is designed by the children with help by the school. The form of the performance was mostly dance to pre-recorded (American) music.

Though reconciliation is a contested word in our political institutions, the Croc Festival is reconciliation on the ground. The ethos of the children was one of a diverse people working together co-operatively for common goals, and having lots of fun doing so.

Whilst flying back to Adelaide early yesterday morning the sun was rising over the dramatic landscape. I could not but help think of Hegel and his conception of politics as a struggle for recognition. At the Croc Festival there was recognition of white by blacks and blacks by whites. At the festival recognition of the other was the condition for the possibility of individuality and freedom, since our subjectivity and self develops only in its interactions with the other.

On Hegel's account the formation of the self presupposes reciprocal relations between subjectsin that neither individual will achieve the status of autonomous agent until each is confirmed by the other as independent. Secondly, the process of the formation of our subjectivity within situations of disrespect, or the exclusion of individuals, leads to a struggle for recognition from the national community in order to confirm claims to autonomy. Structurally excluded individuals, such as indigenous people, want to be acknowledged as independent, self-respecting moral beings by the national community.

This model is appropriate to reconcilation on the ground in Australia for several reassns. For Hegel, the context in which the relations of intersubjective recogniton take place is the nation; relations of recognition requires some kind of dialogue between individuals; the struggle for recogntion takes place within a communal ethos that is already embedded in the national community---ie., an ethical life that has some form of social solidarity or shed values and goals.

Hegel's presuppositions were the presuppositions of the Croc Festival.

Did this also apply to the earlier more colonizer/colonized relationships between blacks and whites? Or was Hegel's theory of recognition an inadequate model for relations beween self and other in the colonial context of the nineteenth century?

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 5, 2003 08:53 AM | TrackBack
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