Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  Was the coexistence of a culture of order and refinement and an aggressive empire an anomaly? To answer this question, which is one of the objectives of this chapter, it is important to recall the function of the picture (or the aesthetic) in the making of modern identity. Martin Heidegger has argued that one of the essential consequences of the modern age was “the production of objectivism” as a correlative to individualism: at precisely the moment that the human became a subject, freed from the bonds and obligations of tradition, it found itself in a world in which the nonindividual, in the form of the collective, “came to acceptance as having worth.”28 This claim—that the age of the individual was also the moment of emergence of the collective—is essential to understanding the paradoxes of the culture of taste in Britain, for it was in the crucial middle decades of the eighteenth century that a discourse was produced in which the valorization of the autonomous individual was dependent on conformity to a certain set of communal norms.29 The Kantian idea that taste was “the capacity for judging the conformity of the power of the imagination in its freedom with the legitimacy of the understanding” was not going to get very far in Britain.30 On the contrary, as Lord Kames argued in Elements of Criticism (which he dedicated to George III), the goal of the aesthetic project was to develop a theory of art to serve the social order: “The Fine Arts have ever been encouraged by wise Princes, not simply for private amusement, but for their beneficial influence in society. By uniting different ranks in the same elegant pleasures, they promote benevolence: by cherishing love of order, they enforce submission to government: and by inspiring a delicacy of feeling, they make regular government a double blessing.”31

  If there is one term that runs consistently through British theories of taste, it is regulation—the management of feelings, behavior, and government. Still, as major scholars of the order of art in the eighteenth century have noted, the category of taste and the idea of the aesthetic in general arose as part of a concerted attempt to stabilize the potentially excessive and disruptive aspects of commerce. This has led critics of the so-called ideology of the aesthetic to conclude that the turn to matters of taste was an attempt to force ethics, aesthetics, and politics into a harmonious existence: when the whole of social life is aestheticized, Terry Eagleton concludes, an image of a social order is made “so spontaneously cohesive that its members no longer need to think about it.”32 But as I have already indicated in my brief exploration of Larpent's world, it was precisely because the culture of taste was being asked to perform the task of harmonizing culture at odds with the lived experiences of modern society that it could not exist outside the pressures of everyday life and by extension its materiality. Thus, to talk about the culture of taste as an ideology is to recognize its capacity to mediate what Louis Althusser has called the lived relation between subjects on both the conscious and unconscious levels.33

  One way of contextualizing the world that produced cultured subjects, then, is to develop a genealogy of the idiom these people deployed in order to make sense of their world. This idiom—made up of terms such as taste and politeness that might strike us as archaic within the larger philosophical discourse of modern subjection pegged on rationality—was essential to the maintenance of the idea of modernity, or at least its perception. Take, for example, the vocabulary of politeness. On the surface it would appear to be nothing more than the commonsensical dictum that subjects should maintain a certain mode of behavior in public and in relation to one another. But in the middle of the eighteenth century, the notion of politeness would be promoted as the key word in the construction and presentation of British common culture and a potential unifier of private virtue and public commercial activities, the two poles that defined modern society. Indeed, politeness was considered so crucial to the conduct of Englishness that the distinguished jurist Sir William Blackstone would assert, in his influential Commentaries on the Laws of England, that the English were “a polite and commercial people.”34 Politeness came to define what the English were, or thought themselves to be; it provided the singular visual aesthetic and discourse through which generations of students have come to see and imagine modern England. The idea of politeness so powerfully defined the aesthetic of the eighteenth century in England that it was “stamped on the country houses and portraits” and inscribed in the “standard texts through which modern readers customarily encounter eighteenth-century literature.”35

  There was, however, another side to the ideal of politeness: it was also intimately connected to commercial activities and the rather impolite business of moneymaking; in an age of unprecedented economic expansion, questions of trade and exchange were considered not anterior to cultural refinement but expressive of it—their condition of possibility. It is thus not paradoxical that, as a social category, politeness came into being as a social norm at a time when the nature and meaning of commerce was being reevaluated. In effect, politeness would come “forever to be associated with the enterprise of an age of extraordinary economic growth, accompanied by the first clear signs of industrialization.”36 The consumer boom in England at the end of the eighteenth century—“the rapid transmission of new wants, for the rapid spread of new fashions, for class competition, social emulation and emulative spending”—demanded a recalibration of social relationships at the most basic level.37 The commercialization of society in areas as diverse as politics and leisure lay at the heart of the modernizing or, as Norbert Elias called it, “the civilizing process.”38

  Still, the idea of politeness in the age of commerce presents us with a few analytical knots that need to be untied. The most intractable of these was the tenuous idea of politeness as a private category, which was, nevertheless, authorized or legitimized by its perspicuity in the public realm. Here, again, Larpent provides us with an excellent case study. Her diaries showcase a life in which the most private behavior was seamlessly connected to the public life of an intellectual and cultured woman. Her everyday occupations reflect an almost effortless linkage of the mundaneness of domestic life (the mending of her son's handkerchief, for example) and the reading of popular and sometimes canonical texts of her day. Her daily movement from the scene of domesticity to the realm of high culture seems to overcome any assumed difference between these two spheres of social life. The act of keeping a diary—the putting of one's life into writing—was crucial in overcoming the private public dyad, which, according to Jürgen Habermas, was one of the transformative categories of modern culture.39

  Attempts to blur the distinction between the private and public spheres through regulated modes of conduct concealed both the tensions that informed them and the constraints that persisted even after their enforced reconciliation. To the extent that it could not be legislated, politeness was a mode of private behavior that depended on the desires and choices of individuals. And yet, in order to become a socially acceptable category, politeness had to be presented as a public act for modes of behavior acquired value through their exhibition, where culture was “characterized by an emphasis upon social display” and cultured sites became “places of self-presentation in which audiences made publicly visible their wealth, status, social and sexual charms.”40 Furthermore, where politeness did not come naturally to certain social classes, such as the lower classes, it needed to be regulated by what Lord Shaftesbury called a “sensus communis.” 41 Although Shaftesbury considered the ideal of politeness to thrive in conditions of liberty, he believed that its promotion as the reigning code of conduct might need to be enforced through “rigorous Prescription.”42 Within the culture of the aristocracy, where politeness might be assumed to come naturally, reconciling private interiors with the public domain presented its own difficulties of representation—namely, how to achieve a balance between communal duty and personal desire.

  The tension between public duty and private desire was evident in the great country houses that came to define refinement and politeness. Monumental buildings, such as Castle Howard, designed for Charles How
ard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, by John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor between 1699 and 1712 (fig. 2.4), were already perceived as visible expressions of a new, stylized way of living and being. In such buildings, commerce had acquired an aesthetic form, one associated with a “civilized if secular outlook” with “its faith in a measured code of manners, its attachment to elegance and stateliness, its oligarchic politics and aristocratic fashions.”43 Conceived and built when the culture of taste was in its infancy but completed when it was at its peak, Castle Howard would come to reflect the tensions between an unregulated private desire and the measured code of manners expected of the leisured class.

  More significantly, the evident transformations in the architecture of Castle Howard reflected changing notions of taste in the course of the long eighteenth century. Originally conceived in the Baroque style of the late seventeenth century, the building reflected what one critic has termed a “cumulative symmetry” and “carefully articulated relationships” that were not at odds with the then reigning idea of order and control: “Each element in the composition—the main block, the curved colonnades, and the little palaces which form the wings—has its own sufficient life, yet by a skilful transmission of units through the entire design absolute congruity is achieved.”44 Although Castle Howard's exteriors were notable for their ornate façades, elaborately carved coronets, ciphers, and coats of arms, these fit into the dominant idea that ornateness was not in itself inimical to social order. But as the building continued to be constructed through the Palladian period, which is closely associated with the culture of taste, its new wings came to reflect the sober and measured style favored by the Whig aristocracy. In both cases, however, the Baroque and Palladian still invested heavily in the idea of symmetry and control over the extravagance of the neoclassical or Gothic styles that were to supersede them at the end of the century.

  2.4 The garden front of Castle Howard in Yorkshire, England. Early eighteenth century. From Colen Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus.

  The differences that are important to this argument, then, are not those between the Baroque and the Palladian as measures of the way the culture of taste understood the relationship between form and social space, but the distinction between exteriors and interiors. For what is startling about Castle Howard is the radical contrast between its carefully articulated exteriors and the extravagant interior, especially the domed entrance hall and gallery, filled with expensive furniture, statues, and china, and the works of some of the leading European painters, including Peter Paul Rubens, Sir Anthony van Dyck, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. The contrast between a symmetrical exterior and an extravagant interior reflected the bifurcated order in which the culture of taste thrived: on one side, controlled and measured exteriors; on the other, an extravagant display of the best art objects that money could buy. This bifurcated fashioning of cultural life would eventually call attention to the essential interpretative problem that the culture of taste would present to its interlocutors: how could the world of money be reconciled to the sensuousness of culture?

  Anna Larpent was obviously not in the same class as Charles Howard or the colonial barons I discuss in the next chapter, but she stands out for her acute sense of how the exteriors and interiors of modern life could be reconciled. In this sense, middle-class subjects were ahead of their aristocratic contemporaries in understanding how the two spheres of social life could be reconciled. Yet neither in Larpent's diary nor in the refined world of Castle Howard is there a hint of the nature of the political economy of the period, especially the crass commercial activities that had compelled Richard Steele to warn that “the most polite Age” was in “danger of being the most vicious.”45 An aggressive commercial culture rooted in imperial control and expansion had enabled the culture of taste, but it had become its unspoken, almost unspeakable, event. Also unspoken and often unspeakable were the other bodies in this equation—the millions of African slaves, whose bodies were a key ingredient in the production of the wealth that made the culture of consumption possible.

  3

  And it is precisely at this point when the culture of taste seems most silent about the material conditions that enabled it, that Nealee, the woman in my second story, enters the scene of modern culture and its apparatus of representation. As I have already noted, the colonial library does not contain much information about her existence, and except for snippets about the last years of her life contained in Park's Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, she would be considered absent from the imperial archive. Her truncated presence, however, is crucial to a contrapuntal reading of the colonial library and its texts, for what we glimpse in those few pages devoted to her is a life presented under erasure; in her presence and absence we encounter a repertoire of experience that disturbs the epistemological frame of the imperial archive itself.46 How do we, then, read Nealee's last days sous rature (under erasure) in the narrative of Mungo Park?

  Let us start with what we know about her: We know that she was an African from the Sene-Gambia region of West Africa, captured in war and sold into slavery at the end of the eighteenth century. We know that in roughly the same years that Anna Larpent was transforming herself into a subject of politeness and taste, Nealee was being held captive in the Bambara kingdom of Segu for three years before she was sold to an African slave trader called Karfa, who put her on a coffle headed for the Atlantic coast on April 24, 1797. We know that Nealee was born in a world where slavery, as a commodity and mode of exchange, was highly treasured, a place where bodies for sale were valued as much as gold dust.47

  How did this world of commodified black bodies appear to Park, a man born and brought up in the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment, educated as a scientist at the University of Edinburgh, thus feeding from the culture of taste in one of its intellectual centers? As a Calvinist, Park may not have shown much interest in the consumption of culture, but he could not have ignored the codes that regulated behavior in his time, so we can assume that his encounter with the world of African slavery was both strange and eerily familiar. The culture of African slavery perhaps did not present itself as a modernist institution, but because its existence depended on the demands of the modern economies of Europe and the Americas, it was attuned to the rules of supply and demand, an economic term first used and popularized by Park's fellow Scots James Denham-Steuart and Adam Smith. Here in the Sahel, as in other world trading centers, the exchange of credit and goods was what made the wheels of time move, and, on the surface, economic transactions would appear to be quite ordinary. This ordinariness is evident in Park's description of the laws of supply and demand that were at work at the slave market of Kamalia: “About a week after the departure of Karfa, three Moors arrived at Kamalia with a considerable quantity of salt, and other merchandize, which they had obtained on credit, from a merchant of Fezzan, who had lately arrived at Kancaba. Their engagement was to pay him his price when the goods were sold, which they expected would be in the course of a month. Being rigid Bushreens, they were accommodated with two of Karfa's huts, and sold their goods to very great advantage.”48 There was no hint that this was anything but an ordinary marketplace.

  But beyond the ordinariness of this scene of exchange, there was an added dimension to the system of trade in the Sahel: here, slaves were a prominent part of the commercial nexus, mediating both the exchange of goods and the nature, if not structure, of social relationships. Rather than being a radical deviation from the order of things, Parks noted, slavery mediated both the exchange of goods and private affairs such as marriage: “On the 24th of January, Karfa returned to Kamalia with a number of people, and thirteen prime slaves which he had purchased. He like-wise brought with him a young girl whom he had married at Kancaba, as his fourth wife, and had given her parents three prime slaves for her. She was kindly received at the door of the Baloon by Karfa's other wives, who conducted their new acquaintance and co-partner into one of the best huts, which they had caused to be swept and white-washed, on purpos
e to receive her.”49 What Park was observing here was not a spectacular event but a casual everyday transaction, one in which the exchange of slaves for valuable goods was not different from the use of gold or even salt in such matters. In fact, slaves were a more common form of exchange than either gold or salt. Here is Park again: “The slaves which Karfa had brought with him were all of them prisoners of war; they had been taken by the Bambarran army in the kingdoms of Wassela and Kaarta, and carried to Sego, where some of them had remained three years in irons. From Sego they were sent, in company with a number of other captives, up the Niger in two large canoes, and offered for sale at Yamina, Bammakoo, and Kancaba; at which places the greater number of the captives were bartered for gold-dust, and the remainder sent forward to Kankaree.”50

  It would appear extraordinary that a bride had been exchanged for slaves, or that bodies were bartered for gold dust, but what is perhaps more interesting about Park's account is the quotidian nature of these transactions and the matter-of-fact tone he adopted in describing enslavement in the political economy of the Sahel. There was no hint that the explorer considered this to be a scene of moral luck.51 Indeed, morality as a whole seems to be absent from the interrelations between the free and enslaved in the emerging global markets of the eighteenth century. The absence of moral judgment does not, however, preclude conceptual connections. Like Larpent, Nealee was caught in the middle of the political economy of modern life, an experience that, to loop back to Charles Taylor's phrase, was categorized by a sense of ordinariness.52 But, unlike Larpent, Nealee was not free; she was the enforced object of this ordinariness, not its subject—the consumed, not the consumer. In fact, what would finally force Park's account to break through the quotidian character of slave trading, or rather the use of slaves as objects of trade, were the images of shackled captives, including Nealee, on their long march to the West African coast and its slave ports: