But by the end of the eighteenth century, a consensus seemed to emerge on the role of manners, taste, beauty, and sensibility in the making of the new social order. At this time, Burke would confidently declare that manners were not only of more importance than laws but were also its foundation: “Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”74 A free market economy, it was assumed, enhanced freedom “by deepening consumption down through the social spectrum.”75
4
The march of the culture of taste toward clarity, unanimity, and utility had to overcome significant roadblocks that constitute an important context for my discussion. The most obvious roadblock to the project of reconciling commerce and taste was that in order for high culture to have value as an exclusive category, it needed to draw and maintain distinct symbolic boundaries. These boundaries were of two kinds. The first one was structural: as Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier have noted, the very idea of high culture as the preserve of elites has often depended on its mobilization “to evaluate or signal status or to create status groups and monopolize privileges.”76 The second roadblock was symbolic and conceptual: high culture was enabled by the expansion of trade and the rise of industrialization, but in order to come into being as a separate sphere it had to negate its connection to the competitive and often ruthless world of commerce.77 Still, attempts to delink culture from its deep roots in commerce were constantly thwarted by groups whose relationship to the reigning doctrines was considered marginal or tangential. Women, for example, served as “a persistent reminder of the libidinal energies which the culture could unleash and which were so difficult to control.”78 My book will add slaves to the calibration of repression and denial.
A first step in this direction is to recognize the dialectical relationship between culture and commerce, to underscore the fact that in the long eighteenth century, culture had come to be valued because it was a commodity, and commodities had became treasured as cultural objects. The most prominent case of the mutual enhancement of commodity and culture was the pottery business associated with Josiah Wedgwood, based at Stoke-on-Trent. Wedgwood's success arose from both his technical mastery of porcelain and his sense of the market. He realized that pottery had acquired aesthetic value and was treasured for its fashionability rather than its innate merit; he also understood that irrespective of their utility and function, his products would be valued because of the economic power and prestige of the class that consumed them—”the monarchy, the nobility, and the art connoisseurs.”79 Firmly established within the domain of commerce, Wedgwood set out to expand the horizon of art, to reconcile utility and aesthetic value. Through his close collaboration with Joseph Wright of Derby, for example, Wedgwood would “secure royal and aristocratic patronage to secure the social cachet of his wares” and then hire artists like Wright to embody his enterprise in art.80 While other artists of the age, most prominently William Hogarth and Sir Joshua Reynolds, needed to produce treatises in order to justify the place of art in a commercial culture, Wedgwood and Wright seemed almost oblivious to the inherited assumption that art and commerce were mutually exclusive.81
And Wedgwood did not just have a cunning sense of the interlock of the work of art and commerce; he also had a proper understanding of fashionable markets wherever he could find them—in the dining rooms of the wealthy as well as in the hearts of abolitionists—and it is this keen sense of the market of objects and feelings that assured the success of both his china and antislavery emblems.82 Wedgwood understood how sensibility itself could emerge from the intersection of art, commerce, and social protest and how feelings themselves could be presented in the marketplace. Nowhere is this linkage between the work of art, sensibility, and the market more apparent than in the medallion Wedgwood produced for the Quaker-led Society for the Abolition of Slavery in 1788 (fig. 1.5). To the extent that the medallion was not intended for monetary gain, it is not accurate to say that Wedgwood had tailored the feelings evoked by this piece for the marketplace; and yet there is clear evidence that, as with his famous porcelain, he had cast this work to reach the largest audience possible. When he sent the medallion to Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia in February 1788, Wedgwood expressed the hope that it would lead to the final completion of the cause against slavery and usher in “an epoch before unknown to the World,” giving relief to millions of slaves, who were its immediate objects of representation, so that “the subject of freedom [would] be more canvassed and better understood in the enlightened nations.”83 The medallion, Franklin was to note, had an effect “equal to that of the best written Pamphlet, in procuring favour to those oppressed People.”84
1.5 Josiah Wedgwood and Sons, jasper medallion decorated with a slave in chains and inscribed with “Am I not a Man and a Brother.” 1790s. Ceramic. English School (eighteenth century).
But in this interplay of culture and commodities, much more was at stake than the incorporation of the lived experience of slavery into the sphere of art. As I have already noted, the overwhelming desire for refinement in the eighteenth century signified the emergence of new kinds of British subjectivities and modes of regulating the social order. When Archibald Alison argued, in an essay published in 1790, that the fine arts produced “the emotions of taste,” a set of feelings and a form of propriety that could be distinguished from more unruly passions such as sexual desire and materialism, he was endorsing a view shared by the major artists, writers, and intellectuals of the period.85 From Edmund Burke to Oliver Goldsmith, the work of art, rather than systems of logic or rationality (the other major categories and concerns of the age), was placed at the center of all social relations and became the key to understanding human nature. Now it was assumed that culture and commerce were twinned in the process of producing new subjects: commerce enabled culture, art, and taste, which were, in turn, deployed as modes of cultivation and politeness, differentiating the subject of taste from the savagery and barbarism of a previous time and of other cultures and experiences. This differentiation would be achieved through a process of repression and denial in which those who didn't fit into the structures of feelings and institutional practices associated with taste were left out of its domain altogether.
Throughout the eighteenth century, the most prominent advocates of a culture of taste posited their task as, first and foremost, the promotion of sensibility and politeness as the counterpoint to the uncouthness of trade, and the presentation of the former as the determinative value. In other words, rather than providing the impetus for the destructiveness of body and mind that worried Shaftesbury, commerce and consumption would be chaperoned by politeness, a set of expectations in which individuals would be enjoined to control their passions. Consequently, politeness would become a social mandate, the demand that individuals give up excessive or unruly desires, the libidinal forms of acquisitiveness and competition, and establish “harmony with a propertied society.”86 It is this quest for harmony that led Adam Smith to conclude that the end of pleasure and happiness was not simply utilitarian, as his fellow Scot David Hume had argued, but was “the regular and harmonious movement of the system”: “The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it.”87 Smith's goal was to bring the pleasure principle, the police, and the extension of trade and manufacture into one social whole; in the regime of sense and sensibility, means and ends would be synchronized. His observations here are worth quoting in detail:
The same principle, the same love of system, the same regard to the beauty of order, of art and contrivance, frequently serves to recommend those institutions which tend to promote th
e public welfare. When a patriot exerts himself for the improvement of any part of the public police, his conduct does not always arise from pure sympathy with the happiness of those who are to reap the benefit of it. It is not commonly from a fellow-feeling with carriers and waggoners that a public-spirited man encourages the mending of high roads. When the legislature establishes premiums and other encouragements to advance the linen or woollen manufactures, its conduct seldom proceeds from pure sympathy with the wearer of cheap or fine cloth, and much less from that with the manufacturer or merchant. The perfection of police, the extension of trade and manufactures, are noble and magnificent objects. The contemplation of them pleases us, and we are interested in whatever can tend to advance them. They make part of the great system of government, and the wheels of the political machine seem to move with more harmony and ease by means of them. We take pleasure in beholding the perfection of so beautiful and grand a system, and we are uneasy till we remove any obstruction that can in the least disturb or encumber the regularity of its motions. All constitutions of government, however, are valued only in proportion as they tend to promote the happiness of those who live under them. This is their sole use and end. From a certain spirit of system, however, from a certain love of art and contrivance, 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.88
Central to Smith's project, then, was the belief that what lay at the heart of the civilizing process—and modern identity in general—was the recognition that commercial activities (the means) were not anterior to cultural refinement (the ends) but were indeed constitutive of it. In this context, even Hume's utilitarianism seemed appropriate, because it recognized that the effectuation of the arts and a flourishing of commerce enabled each other, that the existence of a thriving marketplace made cultural refinement possible. More specifically, Hume recognized that commercial work, represented by the industrial and mechanical arts, produced the refined liberal self: “Industry and refinement in the mechanical arts generally produce some refinements in the liberal; nor can one be carried to perfection, without being accompanied, in some degree, with the other. The same age, which produces great philosophers and politicians, renowned generals and poets, usually abounds with skilful weavers, and ship-carpenters…. The spirit of the age affects all the arts; and the minds of men, being once roused from their lethargy and put into fermentation, turn themselves on all sides, and carry improvements into every art and science.”89 Here we can witness the consolidation of a discourse in which art and its appreciation would provide a mode of managing the world engendered by commerce. My focus is on what was excluded from the discourse of taste and the series of omissions, repressions, and conceptual failures that were its condition of possibility.
5
Leading scholars of consumption and culture in Britain, from John Plumb and Neil McKendrick to Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, have noted how significant acts of denial or negation came to function as the raison d'etre for the emergence of culture or leisure as social categories.90 Moreover, discursive and philosophical debates on the period have tended to uphold Howard Caygill's argument that British writers, having accepted taste as a faculty of judgment, came to be caught between the tensions that informed rationality and sensibility as conceptual categories; the discourse on the nature and function of taste ended up turning it into “an intangible medium of exchange between the rational will of providence and the irrational individual sentiment.”91 A culture of taste informed by denial became disembodied. The study of gender and race has been one important site in which these acts of denial and disembodiment have been confronted and exposed. Brewer has noted, for example, how women functioned as “a persistent reminder of the libidinal energies which the culture could unleash and which were difficult to control.”92 New and revisionist historians of the eighteenth century have rediscovered “after decades of comparative neglect, the imperial dimensions of British domestic culture, politics, and social relations are starting to come into focus, significantly revising our conceptualization of Englishness and Britishness and the categories through which ‘colonizers' and ‘colonized' are understood.”93 Drawing on both poststructuralist and postcolonial theory, the “new” eighteenth-century studies has led to “the revision or problematization of period, canon, tradition, and genre in eighteenth-century studies.”94
My book continues but also revises the terms of this questioning of repressed others in the making of modernity and the culture of taste. Indeed, a central argument in this chapter and the rest of this book will be that while a grammar of restitution—that is, the recovery of what has previously been neglected or elided in previous discourses—has made imperial margins indispensible to our understanding of Britishness, it has not fully accounted for the specific role of slavery and blackness in the shaping of the ideas and ideals of taste. For when we focus on questions of taste in relation to slavery, what we encounter is not simply the denial of a specific mode of commerce that was necessary for the consumption of culture, or even the censoring of others out of the new order of civility and virtue, but their careful orchestration as part of this order, in absentia, on the margins, but still part of a presence, what Derrida would call a trace, both inside and outside the system, a residue of what exists but cannot be acknowledged.95 The trace is the signifier of at least four paradoxes that are crucial to understanding the relation between the presence of taste and the absence of slavery in the manifest discourse of modern subjectivity.
Paradox 1: Presence/Absence
Others—women, slaves, and the poor—were not totally excluded from the discourse of modern identity; rather, they were deployed in a subliminal, subordinate, or suppressed relation to the culture of taste. Consider, for example, the Earl of Shaftesbury's discourse on the aesthetic: it promoted the cult of the gentleman as the custodian of taste and in the process seemed to exclude the lower classes from the elevated culture of sensibility. And yet the lower classes were not entirely excluded from the moral geography of civility, for Shaftesbury recognized that the poor constituted a crucial counterpoint for the ideal gentleman. A gentleman, he contended, was a person who held values at odds with the “the vulgar habits of the people as well as the luxurious living identified with the court.”96 Similarly, although there were many aesthetic and moral constraints on how the poor could be represented in English landscape paintings in the eighteenth century, the rural poor could not be totally excluded from the domain of art; indeed, as John Barrell has noted in The Dark Side of the Landscape, they became essential to the decor “of the drawing rooms of the polite.”97 Here, the very social classes that were considered to be outside the domain of taste functioned as counterpoints to the ideals of polite behavior or even as figures of desire; that which was outside the manifest framework of the dominant cultural signifiers was essential to their meaning.
Paradox 2: Pain and Beauty
This paradox, which has been discussed at length by Marcus Wood in his study of the iconography of slavery, is related to the larger relationship between art and the regime of punishment and pain: “How can aesthetic criteria be applied to describe the torture and mass destruction of our own kind? How is it possible to make something beautiful out of, and to perceive beauty within, something which has contaminated human values to such a degree as to be beyond the assumed idealisations of truth and art, beyond the known facts and beyond the manipulations of rhetoric?”98 Slaves could occupy important symbolic roles in English portraiture as figures of status; erotic black figures would be part of massive projects commissioned by colonial governors, such as Sir William Young of the Windward Islands; and supporters of abolitionism, most notably Wedgwood and William Blake, would deploy the figure of the suffering black in support of their cause, but the question of how the enslaved could be represented
in images whose goal was to elicit pleasure would continue to persist.99
Paradox 3: Slavery in Absentia
Slavery was referred to as the “peculiar institution,” but nowhere was this peculiarity more obvious than in Britain itself. Were there slaves in Britain? The question might appear misplaced given the active role of Britain in the purchase, transportation, and sale of African slaves from the 1560s to 1807, but within the domestic English space itself, the presence of slavery and the kind of moral demands it made on subjects of taste is more complicated than one might first assume. Now, it is true that slavery was woven into the British social fabric in diverse ways: British subjects and agents were actively involved in the slave trade, in the settlement and development of the slave colonies, and later played an influential role in the abolition of the slave trade and the development of a powerful antislavery discourse. In short, slavery was preponderant abroad, in the British colonies, and clearly evident at home. In fact, the question of slavery was central to British domestic politics and the shaping of the identity of the United Kingdom.
Slavery and the Culture of Taste Page 5
