One can glance at the early modern period and perceive an interesting field of knowledge / power at play in European society. One principle dynamic (or boundary, if the field metaphor wishes to be continued...) is an ontological impetus towards the transcendence of the human subject, a fold in which individuals are defined precisely at the moment at which rights are given to them, those rights being defined by the self-legitimating individual. This reification of the primacy of the individual subject, a movement toward Nietzsche and away from Aristotle, represents the birth of a subjectivity not requiring a transcendent God for its ontological priority, but rather the subject itself is legitimated by the very process of its observation. Truth no longer required the appeal to a divine origin in order to be authenticated, but rather the method of inquiry itself inscribed a particular authenticity, most appropriately, capitalized as Reason. Almost anything could be systematized and thus legitimated under the guise of rational thought, and that which did not fall under the rubric of the reason-able was excised and only entered into the historical record by a silence and/or a transgression whose control was necessary. Simultaneous to this development of the Self is the improvement of technologies and structural apparati which can be seen to curtail the agency of that ostensibly liberated subject (from the tyrannies of individual rules, either religious or secular; from the ignorance of illiteracy; from the prejudice of error brought on by irrational thought; etc...). There are several trajectories by which this latter course takes shape in the field of social relations, yet save for perhaps the most obvious tangents I do not wish to burden myself with their analysis here. Of principle interest to this present examination is the extent to which slavery came to define the human subject under colonialism. I wish to under take this examination leaving off questions of Other and Self in terms of racial absolutes, to which such analyses usually refer. The reason for this has less to do with the politics of colonialism, which was indeed a racialized phenomenon, than with the politics resulting from early capitalism.
The Other has to do with the violence necessarily enacted upon the Other during the gesture toward (archival) identity. As will be elaborated below using The Explorations of Captain James Cook In the Pacific, the violence inherent in the process of colony building has a reflexive gesture, as the savagery inscribed on the colonized subject – the blackness of their skin and characters – becomes evident in Cook himself. Identity is a construction which operates on the principles outlined in Derrida’s Archive Fever. Briefly stated, Derrida elaborates a conception of the archive as being the site of violence between affirmation and censorship, and it is this site where ritualized discourse allows a trace of the archon itself to enter the archive as the jouissance of its excising function. This function of the archons circumscribes identity to the point where the desire to exclude becomes the ontological priority of the act of archiving. In the case of Archive Fever itself, this function is allegorized as the ritualized act of circumcision. Consequently, the creation of a site of knowledge is a project more concerned with negation rather than a creative gesture. In terms of the performance of identity, it seems evident that a particular identity is chosen by a process of social interpellation. The individual actor cannot be categorized as an archon – an agent who negotiates the performance of individual identities – for their own behaviour. And yet, the enacting of an identity is itself an instance of jouissance, a pained creation signalling the termination of the subject from the infinitude of possibility. As such, the individual can be located in terms of the mark of violence, their bodies representing the Derridian gesture of circumcision. Thus individual identities can be observed as the negotiated compromise between the violence of absolute interpellation from external forces and personal agency. It are these structures of/for interpellation which are most relevant to the existence of slavery; as Deleuze and Guattari demonstrated in Anti-Oedipus, it is this element of fascism which permeates all of life under capitalism (or that particular flow of desire which leads to/from capitalism). Yet it is not a broad castigation of capitalist production which concerns me, but rather the specific desires found in capitalism which were expressed under English slave-trading.
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish can serve to elaborate a narrative of this development, and serves as a critical shadow for this present analysis. To extract a rather broad generality from this text and invert it somewhat with regard to English colonialism (in particular the economic use of the colonies, and not territoriality in a more abstract sense of material possession), It seems evident that for economic reasons the liberated individual subject required a subjugated other with which to define its own sense of liberty. Colonialism was not as simple a matter as suggested by legal mandates, as for example the orders Captain Cook gave to his men in Tahiti in 1769: “1st To Endeavour by every fair means to cultivate a friendship with the Natives and to treat them with all imaginable humanity” (ECJC 25). The Other becomes the unconscious of production, its repulsive rather than socially acceptable desires, and as such both Foucault and Deleuze witness the importance of this marginalised population in signalling the more authentic productive capacity of a society. Yet slaves must not be understood to be individuals excised from their rights in the sense of a lack, as in the acceptance of slavery in a wholly non-violent manner representing a lack of a certain ‘spark’ in the black person’s soul which would lead to a more open rebellion – Hannah More objects to the ostensibly widespread belief that Africans do not have a sense of pain or sentiment as Europeans (and are therefore lesser human subjects, if not non-subjects) in her poem Slavery, for example. In this sense, slaves should not themselves be viewed as an exteriorized population, but rather as a violent inclusion of non-willing bodies into modernity. It is equally not accurate to understand slavery and colonial occupation as separate entities within the field of colonial politics, but rather as contingent with the production of identities in a more structurally general sense. Kristeva notes in Strangers to Ourselves that “between the man and the citizen there is a scar: the foreigner” (98). It is this ‘scar’ which gives a real form and definition for citizenship (or national inclusion, in a more broad sense, as women and the poor were not rightly part of the citizen body). We should note that the foreigner in relation to the colonial experience only figures for the subjugated populations of colonial rule who are not enslaved. By taking the scar into oneself, or in other words allowing slavery as a fundamental element of production, the colonizing authorities were performing something else. One cannot understand the interpellation of slave-subjects using the metaphor of the scar (as a memory, as a historical trace upon the body), for slavery represses the sense of reflective time to allow subjectivity. There is no cogito in a very real sense for there is no allowable ‘I’ in the slave-subject whose identity is stripped of all agency.
The silence of the historical record manifests as that which is said by the metal devices used to curtail the speech of the slaves and open their mouths against their will. Franz Fanon in Black Skin White Masks describes language as acting in a constructive manner, as identity is formed simultaneously with the speaking subject. Yet the most influential element of identity is one that is assumed from an authoritative culture: “to speak ... means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization” (17-18). One can perhaps understand the silence imposed upon slaves in the eighteenth century as the mark of violence against their humanity in its most absolute sense. He posits the colonized subject as a shrunken and trembling Self, which can only find expression – a voice in cultural discourse – through the adoption of ‘blackness’, which derives from white constructions of that identity. As evidenced by the narratives later examined, slaves must remain as non-speaking subjects, for at this instant they remain patently non-human, and thus available for conscripted labour. Consequently, they are seen a priori as irrational at the moment of interpellation as subjects precisely for their supposed inhumanity, and are therefore eligible for the rather brutal (and sexually fetishistic) manner in which they were treated by their masters, as evidenced, for example, by Mary Prince’s autobiography. Indeed, the fetishistic element of slavery is perhaps its most symbolic gesture, as Marx, and later Deleuze and Guattari, focussed on desire as fundamental to all economic production. The latter theorists went so far as to state desire to be production itself, and in this light we can read the economic history of English colonialism with slavery as its engaging force as so much ejaculate writ large by each lash of the whip.
It is, however, rather inconceivable that colonialism spared subjects on either side of its power dynamic the psychological trauma of its continuation. To further Kristeva’s earlier point:
With the Freudian notion of the unconscious the involution of the strange in the psyche loses its pathological aspect and integrates within the assumed unity of human beings an otherness that is both biological and symbolic and becomes an integral part of the same.
(STO 181)
In other words, the otherness attributed to the irrational is merely the projection of the unconscious onto a material Other which is easily definable. In this sense there is no difference between Self and Other in any logical system: “uncanny, foreignness is within us: we are our own foreigners, we are divided. ... The other is my unconscious” (183). It is at this juncture that we must return to Foucault, who reminds us that both the repression and liberation of power equally reify a singular performance of authority. It is precisely at this point that a gap opens in which colonial anxieties pour. In this limnal space, a boundary for the psyche for both individual and institution, resistence can foment, and there are indeed artefacts of revolutionary gestures (scar tissue, to pardon an obvious metaphor) and colonial nervous conditions in the historical record. It is unlikely, however, that such anxieties were consciously understood by most, as in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries only a few notable thinkers and personalities excepted to slavery. To the average conservative citizen of England, the abolitionist cause was seen to itself reflect a certain irrationality with regard to normative identity structures.
Some of the source documents that can be used to examine the nature of the archive of colonialism were created with records of initial contact between cultures. The Explorations of Captain James Cook underscores Adorno’s terse interpretation of Kantian philosophy in Problems of Moral Philosophy, namely that “reason cannot be divorced from self-preservation” (93-4). Thus, when Cook kills the natives for a variety of issues, mostly involving theft, murder is justified as a necessary solution, and consequently rationalized by his editor: “as so often happened, a native theft led to a native death” (ECJC 157). It is possible to read a sense of abuse of authority when Cook makes contact with the native Tahitians. The behaviour of both parties is similar save for the existence of European firearms, which allow the English a degree of material authority to enforce their judgement. Thus, a theft by the Tahitians is met with an increasing amount of criminal activity: “a resolution was passed to detain all the large canoes that were in the Bay, and to seize upon Tootaha and some others ... and keep them in Custody untill the Quad_t was produced” (30). It is the strength of the written inscription, the resolution, – a mark of desire with the archive – which differentiates this action from legal policing and vengeful retaliation. Perhaps more interesting, at least in terms of the social imperative to repress desire, explicated in Anti-Oedipus as contingent with all systems of social production, are the various instances in which Cook attests to the moral corruption of the island inhabitants. This is most prominent in his descriptions of their sexuality, from the anxieties that he expresses concerning a virginity / fertility ceremony performed by some youth in Tahiti, to the sexual diseases that spring from intimate contact between the native peoples and his crew. Notably, he seems to undermine his own beliefs when stating that “this Second Visit of ours hath not mended the morals of the Natives of either sex” (128) followed by a description of European activities in new world which are of a more highly brutalized magnitude. It seems likely that his desire to observe a war between two factions (during the Second Voyage) is the ritualized purging of violence from the psyche akin to Roman gladiatorial combat; an arena for the sacrifice of the Self, a transcendent instinct for annihilation. Like a child playing with toy soldiers, Cook relays his excited anticipation:
I must confess I would have stayed five days longer ... but it seem’d that they wanted us to be gone first. ... Thus we were deprived of seeing the whole of this grand Fleet and perhaps too of being Spectators of a Sea Fight, a Sight [excitement rises!], I am well convinced, well worth the seeing. I took some pains to inform my Self in what manner they joined Battle and fought at Sea
(161)
Interestingly, the islands themselves figure as a playful sandbox in a very real sense, as foreign animals are introduced as the resulting consequences are briefly observed. It seems that the European subject believed the subjugated Other to be an experimental subject, in which use was ascribed and violently constricted. There is an apparent epistemological approach here evident, namely that the Other is used to define and expand the subjective limits of the Self. A test-subject is manipulated within a certain degree of operation and judged accordingly. That which gets defined as Reason is that expression of judgment allowed by the strength of military technology. As Cook (and a near infinite amount of other points and foci of cross-cultural contact) demonstrates, sometimes the irrational beast needs to be shot in order to stimulate and promulgate rational knowledge.
At this point it is possible to regard slavery, not as two sides of a coin (or perhaps more accurately with the aforementioned child and sandbox), following Hegel, but rather as some abolitionst writers themselves had, providing a more subtle understanding of their social structures. Knowing the more intimate details of capitalism – as a teleology leading through Marxian analysis, to production-desire of Deleuzian thought – we are long past Hegel’s dialectic of Master and Slave. Rather the system of production which required slavery to be inscribed into its economic fundament recognized a more widespread abuse of the disenfranchised. Clarkson emphasizes precisely this point by examining the lives of sailors in the British Navy, and more specifically those involved in the slave trade. Sailors were rounded up either by force or by liquor and entered into a situation of indentured servitude: “seamen also were boarded in these houses, who, when the slave-ships were going out, but at no other time, were encouraged to spend more than they had money to pay for; and to these, when they had exceeded, but one alternative was given, namely, a slave-vessel, or a jail” (History 1459). This statement points toward a more generalized form of slavery that was indeed persistent throughout the empire, regardless of racial anxieties the British might have felt toward the subjugated populations in the Empire. Quite rightly, Clarkson recognizes the continuum which formed the slave economy, harming both ‘master’ and ‘slave’: “the trade was, in short, one mass of iniquity from the beginning to the end”. In this guise, the “savage man-stealer” (1457) were the productive desires of the nation which subjugated both black and poor British. Clarkson’s tract is as equally sentimentalized as More’s poem, yet ostensibly had a greater impact upon British consciousness due to its more rationalized and journalistic composition. It was a sentimental appeal to the sympathies of the British reading public, intended to demonstrate the horrors and suffering experienced by those who were forced into servitude. The cruelly cramped conditions on board the slave ships, in which “death was a witness which could not deceive them” (1463), represented an inconceivably inhumane treatment of potential Christians – “Africa ... freed from the vicious and barbarous effects of this traffic, may be in a better state to comprehend and receive the sublime truths of the Christian religion” (1464). More damning, however, is the fact that Clarkson implicates the British in the supposed savagery and ‘blackness’ of those deemed inhuman to the point of absolute bondage. It is illogical to assume that the British would be spared any psychological anxiety:
Do they experience no corruption of their nature, or become chargeable with no violation of right, who, when they go with their ships to this continent, know the enormities which their visits there will occasion, who buy their fellow-creature man, and this, knowing the way in which he comes into their hands, and who chain, and imprison, and scourge him? Do the moral feelings of those persons escape without injury, whose hearts are hardened?
(1458)
It is this connection between the guilty and the source of their guilt which anticipates an empathic response from the reader, as reason alone is not enough to encourage the rejection of an economic system which was itself seen to epitomize a rational ordering. Clarkson relates that it was the debasing of English society by a reliance on trade tied to a slave economy which precipitated a consequential depravity among the slaves themselves: “when the moral springs of the mind are poisoned, we lose the most excellent part of the constitution of our nature, and the divine image is no longer perceptible in us” (1464). We can understand the latter part of this sentence as a veiled condemnation of English Anglicanism, as well as referencing Clarkson’s filiation with Quaker beliefs, although he himself was an ordained Anglican. Likewise, it is possible to read a double meaning in Clarkson’s earlier question, “Is there no crime in adopting a system, which keeps down all the noble faculties of their souls, and which positively debases and corrupts their nature?” (1458). Just as Foucault implicates the observer with the observed in his understanding of the panopticon, Clarkson originates any moral corruptions that English society fashionably attributed to slaves with the system imposed by the English, and ultimately to a corruption of the English religion. He finds this corruption so repulsive that he is driven to a state of absolute irrationality – and indeed to hysteria, to engender the codes of interpellation. It is at this point that the structures (Reason, order, ‘England’, etc...) interpellating the subjects of empire collapse in upon themselves. Clarkson’s sickness denies the isolation of colonized and colonizing subjects, and signals a very material inversion of the absolute tyranny of the body of the Other as occurs in what can be called subhuman bondage. Consequently, we can understand this sickness as consistent with Foucault’s conception of the prison: as one in which both guard and prisoner are equally circumscribed in their agency. Kristeva’s scar has been written upon Clarkson’s skin as equally as those who haunt his conscience: “I was kept continually harassed: my mind was confined to one gloomy and heart-breaking subject for months. It had no respite, and my health began now materially to suffer” (1460). It is this scar which marks the simultaneous existence of the archive as national identity and the forced manipulation of bodies by early capitalism. The point of illness marks the entrance of psychology into history, as the immanence of bodily experience intersects the interpellating structures which code social discourse and economic practise. Like disease we can view this phenomenon as a contagion, as a structure which encodes desire and production. The “contagious ... crime of the oppressor” (1464) is the self-perpetuating system in which both master and slave are involved, representing both the desire to control populations in order to build a nation in imperialist terms as well as the jouissance experienced during the process of archiving a nation’s history. An almost sexual zeal is attributed to the tortures perpetuated against slaves: “the truth was, that, for the sake of exercise, these miserable wretches, loaded with chains and oppressed by disease, were forced to dance by the terror of the lash, and sometimes by the actual use of it” (1463).
A similarly fetishistic description of the slave-master’s relationship to his servants is given in Mary Prince’s account of her life. Although the text itself is ostensibly in her own voice, in both style and rhetoric the account seems to have been a construction of her editor, Thomas Pringle. In light of this fact, it is not possible to view her descriptions of slave life as an authentic account, yet its importance is as a filter or gloss and not as the inscription of a voice from the subjugated. Perhaps because of this, a high degree of sexual tension is apparent in this account of forced submission. The experience of the two slave boys is the language of de Sade, with pleasure and pain being of equal suffering and invoking a similar expression of release:
Both my master and mistress seemed to think that they had a right to ill-use them at their pleasure; and very often accompanied their commands with blows, whether the children were behaving well or ill. I have seen their flesh ragged and raw with licks. – Lick–Lick– they were never secure one moment from a blow, and their lives were passed in continual fear. My mistress was not contented with using the whip, but often pinched their cheeks and arms in the most cruel manner.
(HMP 1441)
Later, the ritual of punishment as performed by the master of the house reverses the symbolic outcome of the sexual function, as a pregnant woman is tied and beaten until she loses her child:
My master flew into a terrible passion, and ordered the poor creature to be stripped quite naked, notwithstanding her pregnancy, and to be tied up to a tree in the yard. He then flogged her as hard as he could lick, both with the whip and cow-skin, till she was all over streaming with blood. He rested [post-coitus...?], and then beat her again and again. Her shrieks were terrible.
(1441-2)
As Prince makes evident in her account, the scars created out of slavery did speak where the slaves themselves could not, as they served as body memories which were themselves traced into the archive of nationality. Seen in this regard, it is possible to view the archive – and perhaps even rational thought itself, if we here implicate Descartes – in a general sense and the English nation in the particular as the means by which desire, which must be interpreted as a highly localized phenomenon, encodes social discourse. As the work of the English abolitionists attest, one must make an appeal beyond reason alone in order to accomplish any sense of justice and equality between peoples, as reason is a product of specific desires and is wrongfully enshrined as a transcendent absolute.
There is no manner in which the ghosts of colonialism can be exhumed and interrogated. We do not ourselves possess the rituals necessary to bring voice to the silenced space in which those who have been violently excised from the archive of civilization. Only a profound silence – the intake of water as the final communicative gesture between Friday and Susan in Coetzee’s Foe, ostensibly terminating the latter’s (symbolic) life with one performative gesture – marks the trace of slaves themselves, who were made individuals only to lose that status (to exist as a non-status, a limnal boundary) in order to be re-inscribed as machines of production in the most absolute and fascistic sense. In a very real sense however, it is important to recognize that slavery was itself fundamental to the Enlightenment as a trace of the emergence of the individual human subject.
Background and Bibliography
The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 1: The British Isles, 1830-1865. Ed. C. Peter Ripley. New York: U of North Carolina P, 1985.
Adorno, Theodor W. Problems of Moral Philosophy. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2001.
Brathwaite, E. K. History of the Voice. London: New Beacon Books, 1984.
Clarkson, Thomas. “The History of the Rise, Progress, & Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament”. From Eng. 747 coursepack. (1456-64.)
Cook, James. The Explorations of Captain James Cook In The Pacific. Ed. A.G. Price. New York: Dover, 1971.
Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. B. Massumi. Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Fanon, Franz. Black Skin White Masks. Trans. C.L. Markmann. London: Paladin, 1970.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline & Punish. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1979.
Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.
Prince, Mary. “The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave”. From Eng 747 coursepack. (1440-
43.)
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