Slavery and the Culture of Taste
Page 3
The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that arises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through special gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color.13
This view was a common one in the highest European intellectual circles. In fact, the specter of blackness haunted all attempts to elaborate and valorize the discourse of modern freedom, and by the middle of the eighteenth century, when the order of slavery came to be seen as the central cog in the machinery of commerce and the wealth of nations, blackness—once exalted as a symbol of sanctity in the last great cycle of paintings of the Adoration of Christ at the end of the sixteenth century and the Baroque painters mentioned above—had come to represent what Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, writing in a different context, have called “the rock bottom of symbolic form.”14
The “rock bottom” of black representation can even be found in the most unexpected places, such as the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raissoné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, published in Paris between 1751 and 1772. Here, under the entry “Nègre,” written by M. le Romain, the language and authority of natural science were deployed to set the black apart from the rest of humanity. The African, defined as a “Man who inhabits different parts of the earth, from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn,” was identified as the figure of radical difference: “Africa has no other inhabitants but the blacks. Not only the color, but also the facial traits distinguish them from other men: large and flat noses, thick lips, and wool instead of hair. They appear to constitute a new species of mankind.”15 The 1798 American edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica went a step further, exiling the African from the human community in rabid and libelous terms:
NEGRO, Homo pelli nigra, a name given to a variety of the human species, who are entirely black, and are found in the Torrid zone, especially in that part of Africa which lies within the tropics. In the complexion of negroes we meet with various shades; but they likewise differ far from other men in all the features of their face. Round cheeks, high cheek-bones, a forehead somewhat elevated, a short, broad, flat nose, thick lips, small ears, ugliness, and irregularity of shape, characterize their external appearance. The negro women have the loins greatly depressed, and very large buttocks, which give the back the shape of a saddle. Vices the most notorious seem to be the portion of this unhappy race: idleness, treachery, revenge, cruelty, impudence, stealing, lying, profanity, debauchery, nastiness and intemperance, are said to have extinguished the principles of natural law, and to have silenced the reproofs of conscience. They are strangers to every sentiment of compassion, and are an awful example of the corruption of man when left to himself.16
While it is true that the most powerful arguments against slavery were made by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, it is hard to find a more virulent description of the black than this one authorized by the institutions of modern knowledge, built on scientific explanation, geographical difference, and physiology.
But my main concern here is not why the great philosophers of freedom sought to exclude the black from the narrative of universal reason. Rather, I am interested in the emergence and shaping of a discourse predicated on the need or desire to quarantine one aspect of social life—the tasteful, the beautiful, and the civil—from a public domain saturated by diverse forms of commerce, including the sale of black bodies in the modern marketplace. For if one were looking for a methodological link among a group of philosophers as diverse as the German idealists, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and the English Whigs, it is perhaps to be found in the articulation of a discourse of social life in which the qualities that distinguished the modern self were transcendental of the “array of cultural materials” that actually constituted the modern self.17 For Kant, to use a common example, the issue of transcendentalism was simple: in order to have a proper understanding of moral behavior, the age needed “to discover rules or principles of conduct which are logically independent of experience and which are capable of contradiction.”18 Even Adam Smith, who was much more concerned with questions of utility and the production of goods to satisfy immediate desires, was keen to separate the means of wealth from its ends: from “a certain love of art and contrivance,” Smith noted, “we sometimes seem to value the means more than the end, and to be eager to promote the happiness of our fellow-creatures, rather from a view to perfect and improve a certain beautiful and orderly system, than from any immediate sense or feeling of what they either suffer or enjoy.”19
In the new value system rooted in rationality, the analytic spirit would march triumphantly “to conquer reality” and accomplish “its great task of reducing the multiplicity of natural phenomena to a single universal rule.”20 Thus, whether we are dealing with the rule of reason or matters of taste, the project of modernity was premised on the search for rules in which the larger concerns of the world, including the slavery that reached its zenith in the period of Enlightenment, would be sublimated to an idealistic structure. Considered to be a detritus that came between the modern mind and pure concepts, experience had to be processed through higher forms such as reason and the aesthetic. In fact, the turn to a systematic aesthetic theory, one of the major features of the age of Enlightenment, was premised on the belief that it was in the field of art and its judgment that the traditional opposition between reason and imagination could be reconciled. However, the ideology of the aesthetic was predicated on the capacity of the aesthetic or the sensual to be posited as analogical to reason. This is considered to be the achievement of German aesthetic theory from Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's Reflections on Poetry, first published in 1735, to Immanuel Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment.21 Here, in the transcendental project of aesthetic practice and judgment, materials that were considered anterior to the process of European self-fashioning, such as slaves, Indians, and the poor, were confined to notational margins and footnotes; the Enlightenment's world picture was adumbrated by “a geographical consciousness based on the distinctiveness of the part of the world that came to be called ‘Europe.'”22
Europe could not function as an idea or structure of identity without its real or imagined others, who, since the beginnings of modernity at the end of the sixteenth century, were increasingly being incorporated into the modern world picture. Of course, people considered to be others had been central to the emergence and consolidation of a European identity since the Middle Ages, but in the modern period, alterity had become more than a simple inscription of the differences of other peoples, other cultures, other histories; it had now assumed a structural function: the designator of what enabled Europe, or whatever geographical area took that name, to assume a position of cultural superiority and supremacy. This new sense of European superiority was reflected in the new maps placing Northern Europe at the center of the world, or in monumental works of art, such as Giovanni Batista Tiepolo's frescoes at the palace of the prince-bishop of Wurzburg, which place the allegories of Asia, Africa, and America alongside a domineering Europe.23 And as slavery was consolidated and later challenged in the course of the eighteenth century, there was a significant shift: from earlier European views of Africans as agents who could be considered, even tentatively, to belong to the human community to their reduction to objects of trade or figures in the shadows of modernity.
The contrast between Rembrandt's painting and Troxxilla's inventory discussed at the beginning of this chapter was certainly not unusual, but it signifies a more complex shift in the imagi
nation of African others under the pressures of slavery and the slave trade. Indeed, one of the central arguments I will make in this book is that slavery—and especially the powerful moral, visual, and economic claims associated with it—had a salient effect on what one may call the interiorized realm of the European experience—namely, the space of sense and sensibility. These shifts were reflected in the histories, discourses, and images in which African difference and its attendant barbarism were invoked as the counterpoint to modern civilization or civility.
As always, it was the visible and iconographic view that represented these shifts. Consider this example: In 1643 the Christian king of the kingdom of the Congo, Dom Garcia II, sent one of his ambassadors to Recife to see Johan Maurits, the Dutch governor of the Netherlands' possessions in Brazil. In a painting of the ambassador, often attributed to Albert Eckhout (fig. 1.2), the Congolese envoy is represented wearing a broad hat with feathers, a black velvet coat with gold and silver trimmings, and a sash of the same colors, all symbolizing power, prestige, and presence. At a time when the Congolese were considered by Europeans to be equal partners in global trade and cultural exchange, the location of their ambassador at the center of a European portrait was not unusual or extraordinary.
1.2 Albert Eckhout, Congolese Envoy to Recife in Dutch Brazil. From Allison Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World, 122.
In contrast, Frans van der Mijn's 1742 painting of the Dutch governor of the slave fort of Elmina (fig. 1.3) indicates the increasing diminishment of black figures in the European imagination and the domination of the slave interest in the construct of the modern social imaginary. Here we have the portrait of the European man at the top of the world, the agent of a Dutch empire that by 1700 had “extended trade and established outposts in western and southern Africa, Asia, and the Americas.”24 By the time the Dutch established their hegemony on the West African coast, slavery had replaced gold as the major commodity of trade, a fact that led to a new addition—the figure of the slave—to the iconography of power and prestige. It is not accidental, then, argues Alison Blakely in Blacks in the Dutch World, that the period in which the slave trade accounted for most of Dutch wealth and power also led to the production of the largest category of paintings with blacks as adjuncts to the portraits of “Dutch burgher families, groups, and individuals.”25 According to Blakely, this kind of art, in which the portrait of an aristocratic was framed by a black shadow, was produced in the Low Countries more than anywhere else in the world. These portraits were intended primarily to project the power and prestige brought on by the new trade, “to celebrate achievement and to leave a lasting record for posterity.”26 Confronted with the diversity of the human world, the modern spirit seemed unable to incorporate the difference that it nevertheless needed to imagine its modernity, and hence authorized itself by inventing a hierarchical structure in which the whiteness of Europe would be refracted by the shadows cast by others.
3
My goal in this book is not to recover the figure of the black from the margins of the modern world picture and to restore it to an imaginary or nonexistent center; rather, I have set out to recognize this marginalized figure, often denied even the status of the human, as occupying an essential and constitutive role in the construct of the interiority of modernity itself. I aim to read this figure and the project of modernity—especially its economy of sense and sensibility or taste—contrapuntally, thus, to give slavery, the great unspeakable of our age, an obtrusive identity and to bring it “into active contact with current theoretical concerns.”27 This contrapuntal reading provokes several intractable questions: How do we reconcile the world that Rembrandt imagined when he was painting Two Negroes and his careful and calculated focus on the distinctiveness of his two models, their human qualities and individual differences, with Troxxilla's receipt for African bodies crossing the Atlantic Ocean to enrich the coffers of the Dutch golden age? How does one explain the transformation of the African from the center of Rembrandt's portrait to a mere shadow on the margins of Van der Mijn's man of trade?
There are two ways of going about this task, and they are both valid, although they present us with a different set of problems: one concerns the role of the modern system of art in the fashioning of a European identity; the other relates to specific British conceptual and discursive attempts to reconcile commerce and taste. I will sketch both sides of this narrative of modernity because I want to trouble the boundaries that divide continental European debates on aesthetic judgment from the British culture of taste and also question the conceptual boundaries that have hitherto separated the political economy of slavery from the institution of high culture.
1.3 Frans van der Mijn, Jan Pranger, Director General of the Gold Coast (1730-1734). 1742.
Let me start with the idea and institution of art, without doubt one of the key pillars of both modernity and the culture of taste. Modernity and the idea of the aesthetic constitute a powerful dialectic in Europe in the eighteenth century, and they inform each other in remarkable ways. As Paul Oskar Kristeller observed in a seminal survey of the emergence of the modern system of the arts, the dawn of modernity made the idea of art possible; in turn, the institutionalization of modernity made the emergence and consolidation of some dominant ideas about the aesthetic—“taste and sentiment, genius, originality and creative imagination”—central to modern conversations about the self.28 A key component of the modernizing gesture of European culture in the eighteenth century was the location of art at the center of systems of knowledge and its wide acceptance, among elites and courtiers alike, as a key cognate in the definition of what constituted a modern social life. In the eighteenth century, perhaps for the first time in European history, “the various arts were compared with each other and discussed on the basis of common principles.”29 And if the role of art in society dominated intellectual debates in almost every major European country, it was because of a certain modern craving for a second order of representation in which the sensuousness of human life could be realized and private desire and public duty, already separated in the categorical imperative of rationality, would be reconciled. But perhaps one of the most important developments in the history of art in the eighteenth century was its democratization, or, more appropriately, its shift from being a preoccupation of elites and their academies, or courts and their courtiers, to “an amateur public.”30 The gist of this transformation was caught by Joseph Addison in a memorable hyperbole in Spectator 10: “It was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy down from Heaven, to inhabit among Men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought philosophy out of the Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in the Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and Coffee-Houses.”31
The process of democratizing the arts, however, was delimited by the transcendental claims associated with the aesthetic realm. For precisely at the point when it was given special value in the social sphere, art was also asked to stand apart from other domains of lived experience. Indeed, one of the most persistent claims made about art in Europe, at least since the eighteenth century, is what has come to be known as its “ephemerality”—its existence “outside the framework of use and purpose which defines human life.”32 Criticism or judgment of art, even when it was by amateurs, was necessitated by a persistent and widespread desire to establish a fundamental division between art and life. Here, as in the discussions surrounding reason and rationality, the ideology of the aesthetic would become the product of a process of purification, the purging of those categories that seemed to interfere with the drive toward autonomy and disinterested judgment.
Looking back on this tradition of aesthetic judgment, Ernst Cassirer would go on to argue that it was in aesthetic theory that “the pure necessity of philosophic thought” would come to fruition, even claiming it was in the sphere of the aesthetic that a synthesis of the critical and productive functions of thought would be achieved.33 Before this period, Cassirer claimed, thought had been d
efined by a struggle between nature and culture, or between scientific and artistic ideals; theories of art struggled to justify themselves in the court of reason and always seemed to fall short. But with the foundation of a systematic aesthetics, a process associated with Alexander Baumgarten, “a new intellectual synthesis opens up.”34 Whereas the criticism of art previously had been predicated on concepts outside the aesthetic domain, now art would become the source of the categories that judged it. Aesthetics—the system of judging art—would thus become a science.35
The project of turning the aesthetic into a science, however, was bedeviled by problems from the start; although some advocates of an autonomous aesthetic continued to hold out the possibility that it might provide a higher order of truth, debates about the role of art in the social order were dominated by a recognition of the gap between works of art as material objects and the idealistic or transcendental goals that informed them.36 It now seems apparent that an aesthetic project that was understood to be “the culmination of Idealist philosophy, or perhaps even Western metaphysics as a whole” would sooner or later come up against its limits.37 Indeed, if the aesthetic seemed to have fallen out of favor for most of the twentieth century (that is, until its supposed return in the 1990s), it was because when explored from the end or limit of modernity, the work of art seemed to perform, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno posited it, the same function as enchantment or magic, to serve as a form of deception: “The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.”38