Here, Hutcheson assembled a whole economy of the senses—taste, feelings, color, and pleasure—and turned this sensorium into the key for a modern identity and universal truth claims.
There is one more thing to be added to this repertoire of senses and sensations before the negative sensorium of blackness can be measured against it, and that is the representational value of labor and its connection to the moral order. In their attempt to establish a link between political economy and moral value, some of the most influential theorists of the eighteenth century, most notably Adam Smith, appropriated the aesthetic as the category that mediated economics and morality. For Smith, an aesthetic sensibility was “often the secret motive of the most serious and important pursuits of both private and public life.”94 But Smith's most important contribution to modern philosophy was perhaps his introduction, into debates on political economy, of the concept of labor as what Foucault has called “a domain of reflection not previously aware of it.”95 Smith's achievement, argues Foucault, was to relate the notion of wealth to that of labor, making it the “means of analysing exchangeable wealth” and a “functioning representation element,” even a pleasurable pursuit. By locating work in the “interior time of an organic structure which grows in accordance with its own necessity and develops in accordance with autochthonous laws—the time of capital and production,” the Scottish moral philosopher had made a breakthrough in the valuation of what might previously have been considered simple taste.96
Smith's breakthrough theory of labor arose from two critical shifts that he made in The Wealth of Nations. First, he understood that the annual labor of a nation was the aggregate total of “all the necessaries and conveniences of life which it annually consumes, and which consist always, either in the immediate produce of that labour, or in what is purchased with that produce from other nations.”97 Second, Smith was able to connect the value of labor to that of need and exchange: “The value of any commodity, therefore, to the person who possesses it and who means not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labour which it enables him to purchase or command.”98 For Smith, then, a labor theory of value represented an advancement of sociability. Labor could not be valued solely on the basis of its utilitarianism; its value also needed to take into account the larger social and communal goals that enabled sociability. Connected to sentiments and actions that could be conceived or imagined to reflect the wisdom of God, work would become virtuous, a manifestation, to borrow Charles Taylor's words, of a providential design; here, the “self-regulating system of production and exchange is a prime manifestation of the interlocking providential order of nature; it binds the productive, that is, those who follow the designated human vocation, into a mutually sustaining harmony.”99
Now, if one keeps in mind the tripartite connection between a productive subject, a designated human vocation, and the desire for mutual social harmony, one can clearly understand the necessity and paradox of the slave's exclusion from the modern sensorium in the same way he had been excluded from the order of reason and the culture of taste. The necessity for exclusion was that one could not assign a set of affirmative attributes such as reason or taste to a group of people—African slaves, for example—and continue claiming that slavery was their natural condition. The paradox arises out of the slaves' primary identity as subjects of labor, for here modern culture had to confront the fact that slaves worked, yet most derived no pleasure from their work; that they contributed immensely to the wealth of the nation, yet their labor worked against their self-interest since it led to the breakup of their families, alienation of their communities, and the truncation of their history.
In order to understand this exclusion in more specific terms, one needs to recall the fact that in all of its manifestations, as it emerged and was recycled in the eighteenth century and after, the aesthetic ideology presupposed a subject, a human being with the capacity to reflect, to say I.100 The subject who emerged in the eighteenth century—or rather the ways of talking about the subject that emerged in this period—was one who was capable of reflecting on his or her condition of existence, one who was able to ground phenomena to “an underlying activity” and, in turn, to explain its relation to that world. In this context, the act of reflection would function as “the free act of an I and its acts.”101 The subject of modernity was a subject who could act freely. All debates on aesthetic theory seem to be agreed on this point.102 However, if subjectivity was premised on the capacity for individual autonomy and self-reflection—the ability to say I—then the slave, defined as socially dead or as chattel, would have no such status in theory or discourse. And by extension or implication, the African, whether free or enslaved, could not have the capacity for sense and sensibility that was a precondition for understanding. “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling,”
Kant asserted in a passage from The Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, because they were beholden to the religion of fetishism, which, by its very nature, precluded self-consciousness or reflection.103 And it was precisely this ostensible incapacity for autonomous judgment that locked African slaves in the negative dialectic of modernity. Defined as nonsubjects in European discourses on art, culture, and taste, African slaves were not capable of reflection, and because they were incapable of reflection they fell short of subjecthood. This insidious dialectic would continue to drive pro-slavery ideologies and, more devastatingly, the logic of the laws that regulated slavery.
Two famous cases support this contention. In a landmark, though not well known, decision issued in the North Carolina Circuit Court in 1829, Judge Thomas Ruffin ruled that the intentional injuring of a slave was not a crime, because the enslaved, as property, existed outside the domain of subjecthood and by implication the realm of feelings:
With slavery…the end is the profit of the master, his security and the public safety; the subject, one doomed in his own person, and his posterity, to live without knowledge, and without the capacity to make anything his own, and to toil that another may reap his fruits. What moral considerations such as a father might give to a son shall be addressed to such a being, to convince him what it is impossible but that the most stupid must feel and know can never be true—that he is thus to labour upon a principle of natural duty, or for the sake of his own personal happiness. Such services can only be expected from one who has no will of his own; who surrenders his will in implicit obedience in the consequence only of uncontrolled authority over the body. There is nothing else which can operate to produce the effect. The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect.104
“The power of the master must be absolute, to render the submission of the slave perfect”—that phrase alone sums up the doctrine of power in the culture of slavery.
And Ruffin's was not the last word on the legality and necessity of subordination and thus the foreclosure of the slaves from the domain of freedom. The presupposition that slaves had no rights, that as far as the law was concerned they were already nonsubjects, would find its most famous resonance in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. In a landmark ruling that was to dominate American law concerning freedom and the Bill of Rights for almost a century, the chief justice of the United States, Robert B. Taney, declared that the black “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”:
They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no o
ne thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.105
Beneath this inflammatory rhetoric, however, was a mode of reasoning that reflected a masterful understanding of the terms of the exclusion of the black subject—what Taney called “the unfortunate race”—from the domain of the human. He understood that race, rather than the mere act of enslavement, was the basis of the blacks' exclusion from the realm of law, freedom, and rights.
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What counterclaims could black slaves make against the power of the law that already presupposed their exclusion from its purview? What philosophical and juridical categories could they deploy to counter what Orlando Patterson has aptly described as their “secular excommunication”?106 Throughout the nineteenth century, there was a sustained aesthetic and conceptual attempt by blacks in colonial Africa and the Americas to emerge out of the confinement of the law and the ideology of the aesthetic that associated Africans and people of African descent with ugliness. Unfortunately, the invocation of black rights under the law and the domain of taste would dissolve when confronted by the power of a negative sensorium that the institutions of racial categorization had developed to explain African difference. For when it came to matters of sentiment, or sense and sensibility, the general tendency among the custodians of European Africanism was not to focus on black lack, as had been the case in debates about reason and rationality, but to consign the African to a sensory order mired in dirt, mud, odor, and simple bad taste. Not surprisingly, the association of blackness with uncleanliness—and, by implication, moral disorder—would come from not only those who had a specific interest in maligning the enslaved African in order to sustain the profits made in sugar cane, cotton, or rice fields, but also those engaged in the intellectual project of taste as supposedly an autonomous domain of modern identity.
Belonging solidly in the first category was Edward Long, the historian and apologist of the West Indian planter class, who insisted that the “rancid exhalation” of the blacks was innate, a sign of their bestial nature. For Long, the “bestial or fetid smell” of the African was a sign of stupidity; he was not in doubt that “the most stupid of the Negroe race, are the most offensive.”107 As if this were not enough, Long went on to support his theory of innate black uncleanliness and stupidity by retelling the story of a Jamaican slave who had tried to observe the rules of hygiene to no avail, her desire for absolution constantly defeated by the olfactory order of blackness. In an attempt to get rid of her odor, the slave in question, a household maid, had washed her body twice a day and observed strict diet rules to no avail. Long dismissed such efforts at cleanliness as futile challenges against the order of blackness, comparing them to the proverbial attempt to “wash the Black-a-moor white.” All the black maid's efforts at cleanliness, Long noted gleefully, had come to no purpose, and “her mistress found there was no remedy but to change her for another attendant, somewhat less odoriferous.”108
Debates about black smell, however, went beyond the planters' desire to malign the slave in order to rationalize the order of enslavement. The general association of blacks with an offensive sensory order, what Mark Smith has called an “olfactory ontology,” was, together with theories about color, an important instrument in the arsenal of philosophers of taste. Lord Kames, the distinguished Scottish philosopher, argued, “The black color of the Negroes, thick lips, flat nose, crisped woolly hair, and rank smell, distinguish them from every other race of men.”109 And when Oliver Goldsmith argued that black skin had “strength of which gives a roughness to the feel,” his mind was most probably focused on the color of whiteness, the fair complexion, which, he asserted, was “the most beautiful to the eye” and “a transparent covering to the soul.”110 Similarly, ideals of honor, considered by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, among others, to be the key to white identity in the antebellum South, “existed in intimate relation to its opposite: shame”;”the fears and projections of ignominy” could not be understood apart from “the usages of honor.”111 And crucially, the fear of shame and ignominy was projected onto the black slave, who became, as it were, the Pharmakon, the scapegoat who would function as both the remedy and poison of white slave culture.112 Now the desire for honor as a subscription to communal standards of judgment and the necessity of a ritual scapegoat onto which notions of shame would be ascribed was the fulcrum around which the moral economy of slaveholding cultures revolved. To quote Wyatt-Brown, “In slaveholding cultures, the contrast between the free and the unfree—the autonomy of one, the abjectness of the other—prompts an awareness of moral, as well as political and social stratification. Not all honor societies were slaveholding. Yet no slaveholding culture could casually set aside the strictures of honor. The very de-basement of the slave added much to the master's honor, since the latter's claim to self-sufficiency rested upon the prestige, power, and wealth that accrued from the benefits of controlling others.”113 The slave was thus locked in a distorted sensorium, and black difference, whether embodied in color or smell, and the deep and continuous desire to provide scientific or philosophical explanations of it were attempts to secure white identity in the drama of what anthropologist Mary Douglas has termed ritual cleanliness.114
But how did slaves themselves confront this negative sensorium and its associated technologies of exclusion? How did they overcome their confinement to the order of dirt and scum to affirm their being in the public arena? Indeed, what do scholars mean when they say that African slaves crossing the Atlantic brought with them what Rex Nettleford, the Jamaican cultural scholar, has called “cultural equipage”?115 Two of the most important visual representations to come out of the world of African slavery—Slave Play in Suriname, a 1707 painting by the Dutch artist Dirk van Valkenburg (fig. 5.12), and The Old Plantation, a late eighteenth-century work by an anonymous artist from South Carolina (fig. 5.13)—provide fascinating clues to the meaning of the terms culture and equipage. They are also indices of the changing form of slave work and play as counterpoints to the negative sensorium that enhanced white moral order in the culture of slavery.
Van Valkenburg's painting is considered to be one of the earliest representations of the role of performance in the reconstruction of African subjects and communities in the Americas. The painting contains several elements that suggest an aesthetic culture among the enslaved was closely connected to the task of community building: For one, there is the simple conception of the scene of play as the gathering of a community, one that was self-conscious of both its horizontal and vertical relationships.116 Here, all the important ingredients of a vibrant community—from everyday objects of play, such as drums, pets, and gourds, to couples and children in active relationships—are inscribed in what would appear to be their ordinariness.
It is perhaps the case that Van Valkenburg, like most European painters of his generation, was probably more interested in the black body for its visual effect rather than its social presence. This explains his use of color to contrast the well-oiled bodies of the Africans with their simple white, blue, and red garments. However, what is most compelling about his picture is its presentation of the site of play as one of autonomy and self-assertion. In Slave Play, then, there are no signs of slave masters or the infrastructure of enslavement; on the contrary, what is being displayed and thus re-created are song and dance as activities that were transcendental of the slave economy of colonial Suriname. This sense of autonomy is evident in the relation of parts to the whole: everything seems to be part of a larger pattern of communal life, one that moves to its own rhyme and rhythm, oblivious to the larger structure of control, which has been excluded from the picture. The picture represents the presence of the circle of Africanist cultures that has been observed across the geography of slavery.117
5.12 Dirk van Valkenburg, Slave Play in Suriname.” 1707
. Oil on canvas.
5.13 Anonymous, The Old Plantation, South Carolina. Circa 1790.
A second facet in the representation of the Africans in Van Valkenburg's work is that it contains no docile bodies; rather, what is highlighted is the movement of peoples who have breadth and depth and a sense of inwardness that seems to go against the record of cultural deracination discussed in the earlier sections of this chapter. These are not the naked bodies of the middle passage or Long's odiferous slaves. This is not a portrait of cultural lack. In fact, several aspects of the painting seem deliberately intended to emphasize the deeply symbolic cultural presence of Africa in the plantation. There is, for example, the portrait of two sparring men (in the front of the hut door) engaged in what Robert Farris Thompson has identified as “a game of footwork that derives from the Kongo nsunsa dance.”118 Then there is the portrait of a kissing couple to the right of the picture, a rare erotic moment in the iconography of slavery, and surely the sign of another kind of sensuousness at odds with the toxicology described by Long.
Finally, there is a subtle signal of cultural connection in the painting. This is the white flag flying over the hut, which Thompson has read as a shrine, understood as a ritual mark of belonging, an altar, a place of primal identification. If we consider the altar to be the centerpiece of the picture, then what we see in Van Valkenburg's painting are the key ingredients of a community that, in spite of its harrowing passage across the Atlantic, has retained or recaptured its moral orientation enough to recall and rehearse African cultural forms in their most intimate details, sustain an autonomous community, engage in sensuous relationships, and establish ritual markers of kinship and ancestry. In short, the slaves observed by Van Valkenburg in Suriname at the beginning of the eighteenth century display an African cultural equipage that would become important in the making of an alternative imagined community of the African in America in a diachronic process of remembering and forgetting.119
Slavery and the Culture of Taste Page 31
