The Transcendent Rational Self: or, How to Tickle a 300 year-old Subject

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.
– Stendhal



The eighteenth century can be examined as a period charting the development of the autonomy and legitimacy of the individual subject within both philosophic and cultural discourse as emerging from the Enlightenment project. This is indeed a highly reductionist and therefore thoroughly naive interpretation of European history, but it does successfully correlate with the emersion of aesthetic discourse as a self-sufficient entity in philosophy. It is my belief that these two conceptual streams are inextricably bound and fundamental to the artistic output of the era. This is not the space for a lengthy audit of western philosophy as an ideational totality, or even for an attempt to negotiate its many oppositions, occlusions, and lacunae. Rather, I wish to use elements of Kantian and Hobbesian thought along with several examples from English poetry to reflect a certain archaeology which would be more amentaceous in a much longer examination than is presently undertaken.

Fundamental to this examination is the development of the study of humanity itself, for the Enlightenment can be observed as the increasing interiorization of the critical faculties onto the Self. In this regard Pope’s An Essay on Man is successfully emblematic: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man” (II, 1-2). As I will later elaborate, this humanist focus does not exclude God to the extent that the first line might suggest, and indeed the final line of the opening stanza outlines the importance of a transcendent absolute for the realization of humanity’s potential, as the poet desires an epistemology that will “vindicate the ways of God to man” (I, 16). The lines following this statement delineate the extent to which humanity can apply its faculty for reason, as originating with the conception of humanity crafted in the image of God: “Say first, of God above, or man below, / What can we reason, but from what we know?” (I, 17-8). The rather infamous Great Chain of Being extends from divine perfection to all that it has created: “behold the chain of love / combining all below and all above” (III, 7-8). In Pope’s epistemological framework, love represents the sublime which is humanity’s gesture to transcend itself. Love is both compassion and desire, the former of which unites organisms while the latter imposes a continual reinvigoration of intellectual processes. The purpose of human endeavour is to understand existence as a rationally ordered reflection of God’s perfection, and the will of humanity to understand its environment reflects the generative (and performative) impulse of the Word of creation:

Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,
Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;
Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,
Correct old time, and regulate the sun;
Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere,
To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;
II, 19-24

This image is precisely a conception of humanity modelled after God, analogous to Genesis 1:27. As a related yet chronologically divergent aside, George Herbert’s Prayer (I) from 1633 also inscribes the generative Word upon the lips of humanity: “Prayer, the church’s banquet, angel’s age, / God’s breath in man returning to his birth” (1-2). Here, both prayer and those who pray simultaneously create each other in the image of God. All of creation is contained within this prayer – “The six-days world transposing in an hour, / a kind of tune” (7-8) – and thus the infinitude of temporality is itself compressed as one finite performative utterance.

To return from this momentary tangent, no longer was the human environment one in which the human subject stood in awe – in the most absolute sense of the term as a sense of beauty and terror of the irrational unknown – of its surroundings, but rather all of existence could ostensibly be rationalized in order to control and direct such understanding. While medieval thought had positioned the human body and its consequent sensory experiences as a corruption of the truth represented in the divine, Enlightenment discourse reinterpreted truth as empirical evidence demonstrating the sublimity and absolute nature of the divine. Descartes had charted all of existence within the empirical framework of numerical quantization. His epistemological system, with the famous cogito ergo sum principally emblematic of his ideology as a whole, exposes the human subject as its locus. Descartes’s cogito posits the conscious subject as transcendent to, and thus autonomous from, nature, and thus the split between consciousness and object reaches its most logical extreme. The Self is itself made transcendent as the I of this dictum, as a subject always-already existing in the duality of object and actor, a nostalgia for both past and present. The mind becomes a preternatural construction, hierarchized above nature and the body, and in a very real sense serves to prefigure divinity itself. In this capacity the mind-body split is extended to the origin of knowledge production. Cogito ergo sum was the monolithic phallus reflecting a cultural sense of masculine identity as self-contained, sovereign, and transcendent. As Mary Wollstonecraft so eloquently pointed out, the Enlightenment project was an a priori exclusion of women as a negative Other that had to be controlled and contained in order to be understood. It is a notable irony that the importance of morality to such an epistemological system, as I will describe below, is consequent with the violent colonization of the Other in order to control the degree to which it informs the Self.

Interestingly, one can readily note the degree to which reason was used as a counter to itself, in terms of aesthetic discourse. In a very real fashion, certain elements of eighteenth century aesthetics tried to seek an outside to the jurisdiction of the rational mind. As mentioned above, frequently this gesture required a transcendent divine source, usually referencing the Platonic idealized forms, in order to justify aesthetics as a truth within an empirical framework. In other words, philosophers such as Hobbes and Kant needed to include the irrational, in its most absolute form as a divine presence, as part of the epistemological system which rationalized knowledge. For Hobbes, the former is best encapsulated early in chapter XVII: “the Lawes of Nature ... of themselves, without the terrour of some Power, to cause them to be observed, are contrary to our naturall Passions, that carry us to Partiality, Pride, Revenge, and the like” (223). In other words, the Self must be controlled by an Other to which it is fundamentally dependent. Over the course of the text, Hobbes outlines a material substitute for divine intervention, namely the transcendence of the state, which serves to act as a physical manifestation of divine reason filtered through human virtue.

For Kant, such a dependence on metaphysical theories functions as the syncretic basis for Reason itself. As he argues in his Critiques, reason is the ontological and a priori judgement of information as filtered by human experience. It is reason which defines Objective experience, and thus makes sense of the world in both a rational and symbolic way. Art is no different than science in this context, for each is an examination of rational possibility. There is a fundamental distinction between the two that must be considered, however. Art requires aesthetics in order to reify itself as an artistic gesture different from a non-artistic gesture or event, such as can be defined within the realm of the ‘mundane vulgarity’ of the common. To use a wholly absurd example, it is possible to distinguish an aesthetic sense in the desire to eat a bowl of soup in front of an audience in the manner of the Brechtian Theatre of the Absurd, yet such an action would not signify an aesthetic gesture when the context of its performance in front of an audience expecting theatre is absent. In this sense, the Self of the artistic gesture requires an external observer in order to reify it(S)elf as objet d’art. This external entity is typically a projection of the Self into a transcendent space which nostalgically examines the origins of its transcendence. Thus, we can agree with both Martin Buber and Jacques Derrida when they complete the Self by means of the negational aspects of the Other. In other words, the artistic gesture is the recognition of the importance of the non-Self – that which is not a manifest element of the Self – as fundamental to the conception of the Self within productive terms. The aesthetic is the negotiation of a subjectivity which negates itself in order to reify itself.

In order to unpack this last statement with a little detail, a brief examination of aesthetics and subjectivity is required. In Leviathan, Hobbes points out that aesthetics derive from sense perception, and as a consequence are not qualities inherent in the object itself:

Which Object worketh on the Eyes, Eares, and other parts of man’s body;
and by diversity of working, produceth diversity of Apparences. The
Originall of them all, is that which we call SENSE; (For there is no conception
in a mans mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten
upon the organs of Sense.) The rest are derived from that originall.
(85)

Information is determined in its most primal form by the senses themselves, and any interpretive gesture on the part of the observer must be accomplished with the awareness that it is not the object which is being judged, but rather the representation of that object to the Self. Thus the process of critical inquiry is not distinct from the object in question, but rather judgement and object (or to rephrase, the sensory stimulus) are contingent and can be seen to occupy the same continuum of Self (as equally interior and exterior). While Hobbes did not formulate this process of judgement to the degree that Kantian philosophy was to in the century following his own writing, at least in the important regard of the will of the individual subject Hobbes prefigured Kantian thought. It is at this point that aesthetics becomes associated with reason, as each mirrors the triumph of the will of the subject in Enlightenment discourse. I do not presently wish to unnecessarily cloud this (already somewhat occluded) examination, yet it seems clear that morality is the conjoining element of the natural and the transcendent, for it is morality which signals the intention of judgement (and by extension, of aesthetics) to make the Self a universal, and by consequence a transcendent, entity. In its most absolute sense, aesthetics reflect not the object of critical study but rather the critical study of the Self projected externally. As Hobbes outlined in the first section of Leviathan, “men measure, not only other men, but all other things, by themselves” (87). Stated alternately, beauty is not a property of an object proper, but rather it is a representation of that object to the Self as a conceptual figuration shaped and created by the process of the Self applying judgment to that which is interpreted by sense perception as a non-Self.

Despite this aggrandization of the Self, in the pre-Freudian teleology of Enlightenment thought metaphysics is required to explain (and allow) the irrational. For Kant, an object perceived by a human subject is different from the true object itself – the Ding an sich, or thing-in-itself, which is the ostensible cause of all perceived phenomena. This object in its ‘natural’ state is thus transcendent over the human observer; it is something that cannot be understood in its totality. It is by means of the application of judgement that the object enters into the semantic space of knowledge production (and thus a natural object is represented as a transcendent one). As Adorno formulated in one of his published lectures, “reason is the absolute that holds sway in us all and is supposed to indicate to us what is good and what evil” (Adorno: 93). Thus reason as a gesture toward transcendence mediates experience between the transcendent and the empirical. Yet it should be understood that God is itself viewed as existing in a non-Objective form, and thus it is a priori immune to the application of reason. God is not the sublime, but rather the sublime is a signal path (or system of symbols arranged in a rhizomatic fashion) between judgement and its idealized source of origination, which of course within this teleology is God.

The extension of judgement into the imaginative undertaken in the gesture to understand God represents the manifestation of the sublime in human sensory experience, and thus constitutes the foundation of aesthetics. In the sense of bridging the limitations of subjective experience, the sublime can be seen to represent a negotiation between contradictions, such as freedom and determination, which Kantian thought tries to rationalize. By entering into the otherwise closed system of objective phenomena (or in other words, a phenomenon which creates sensory data by its very existence: volume, weight, motion, etc), judgement inscribes the Self-in-judgement onto the Object of its gaze. This a priori inscription of the Self reifies itself as a transcendent identification – as Beauty, for example: what is beautiful is determined as such on the grounds of giving pleasure to the Ego (in the Freudian sense of both the pleasure principle and death drive libidinously invigorating the subject, an explication which is notoriously beyond the scope of this present examination). Humanity has reached the logical extent of this Promethean gesture, by reifying itself as contingent with a divine essence which underwrites the entire epistemological system of language and signification. Consequently, it is possible to understand the sublime as a consequence of subjectivity itself. That which is ‘self-evident’, or in Kantian terms that which is the given, is that which is most in question within philosophical inquiry since the eighteenth century. As Adorno points out in one of his lectures, “Schopenhauer was perhaps the first to point out that the given is not limited to sense-data, but in some fashion also contains the deity who is supposed to have been the cause of whatever is given” (76). There can be no sense of the aesthetic without a subject, and the subject of the Critiques is one requiring a God in order to rationalize the irrational and provide the foundational essence of the entire Kantian epistemological system.

The outcome of the Enlightenment project should not be misunderstood as a unifying and totalizing one in the sense of its being universally accepted. Many were highly critical of the limitations of reason and scientific inquiry. Of course, one of the principle criticisms Pope expresses in his An Essay on Man is the hubris of humanity in attempting to transcend its own morality by overstressing reason beyond humility: “Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule– / Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!” (II, 29-30). There is in Pope no Prometheus to serve as the sacrificial lamb for humanity’s intellectual benefit, and consequently humanity alone must overcome its pride. Swift demonstrates a similar, and notably less hesitant, contempt when Gulliver visits the Laputians in Book III of his Travels, and the scientific method is satirized in the absurd and superfluous enquiries of the various scientists. The earlier poet John Wilmot was equally as critical of reason, which frequently caused humans to err in contradiction to desire and impulse. In his Satire Against Mankind (1680), reason is likened to a sea which drowns humanity, despite the “Books [which] bear him up awhile, and make him try / To swim with bladders of philosophy” (20-1). While the uncontrolled application of reason is found to be a hollow virtue for humanity – “I’d be a dog, a monkey, or a bear, / Or anything but that vain animal / Who is so proud of being rational” (5-7) – it is evident that by the middle of the text, Wilmot is praising the critical application of reason as representing the will of the individual:

Thus, whilst against false reasoning I inveigh,
I own right reason, which I would obey:
That reason which distinguishes by sense
And gives us rules of good and ill from thence,
That bounds desires with a reforming will
To keep ‘em more in vigor, not to kill.
Your reason hinders, mine helps to enjoy,
Renewing appetites yours would destroy.
(98-105)

In a very real sense this attitude prefigures the Kantian conception of judgement, in which the individual subject is given an ontological priority over its objective surroundings.

It is perhaps most fitting to summarize this somewhat rhizomatic present examination, a (pointedly anachronistic!) comment from Walter Benjamin can best exemplify the aesthetic conceptualisation I have outlined above:

Truth does not enter into relationships, particularly intentional ones.
The object of knowledge, determined as it is by the intention inherent
in the concept, is not the truth. Truth is an intentionless state of being,
made up of ideas.... Truth is the death of intention.
(Benjamin: 35-6)

If we are to take Benjamin at his word, then truth is not consequent with the sublime, which is the relation between the transcendent and the material. Such is hardly an optimistic proposition for Enlightenment epistemological systems, for it suggests that to endeavour towards the sublime is merely to quest after spectres. Morality is useless in this context, for as Nietzsche was so famously to demonstrate, all moralities are constrained by the conditions of their origination. Only within a universe defined in terms of divine generation does morality based on the sublime remain legitimate. This is one of the key limitations of Kantian philosophy, and served as one of the principle entry points for the dismantling of his thought. We can suppose that it will not be until the humanities attempts to transpose the current scientific discourse concerning chaos principles into critical studies that the sublime and truth can be ratified as a mutually inclusive system of knowledge production.

QZH

Bibliography: A Rhizome and not a Grocery List...

All primary literary sources quoted from http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/index.cfm except as noted.


Adorno, Theodor W. Problems of Moral Philosophy. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2001.

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London:
NLB, 1977.

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Touchstone, 1996.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. C.B. Macpherson. London: Penguin, 1985.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason, and other writings in moral philosophy. Trans.Lewis Black. London: Garland, 1976.

—— Critique of Judgement. Trans. Werner Pluhar. New York: Hackett, 1987.

Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. New York: Random House, 1992.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. London: Penguin, 1990.

Salva Me: Slavery, or how the sun makes one feel when stuck indoors

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.)

Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah

Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah is fundamentally an examination of the consciousness of the colonial imperative, alternately the drive for conquest over the Other. This is accomplished primarily within the discourse of subject relocation, as the author provokes in the reader a desire to reclaim the Other, a gesture enacted as a requisite for the understanding of the Self. In a very real sense, this examination is not only a manifestation of the Foucauldian conception of the science of ordering, itself fundamental to the ideation of Enlightenment philosophy as espoused by Kant and Hegel, onto an imagined colonial identity. In other words, by speaking through the colonized Other and looking back at the Self, Hamilton’s text suggests a project of forgiveness and purification on the part of the imperial project, or at least the progressive elements of the consciousness of said project, which mirrors the ritualized forms of purification championed by Hindu society, according to several characters in the novel. That this conception of a subjective consciousness is examined within both the (relatively concrete) narrative field as well as the (conceptually abstract) structural field itself reflects the author’s awareness in the totalizing gestures of cultural and economic imperialism. Such a totalizing conception of the imperial project should not be taken as itself a absolute, but rather as a mode of cultural interpretation, for Hamilton herself problematizes the degree to which any ideological structure can be universalized.

The epistolary structure of the novel is itself a means by which the colonial experience is represented. It is not a travel narrative in the sense typical for English popular literary interests, in which a civil Englishman enters into a realm of the unknown and forcefully controls it, despite the little moments de jouissance in which the protagonist is on the verge of being consumed by a violently threatening Other. In a very real sense, cannibalism represents the limit to which the violence of colonialism can be exteriorized and projected onto the subjects of that violence (those who receive its effects). Colonialism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the impetus for controlling a subjugated population is inscribed onto imperial subjects as a defence mechanism against the perceived irrational barbarities of the former. Hamilton utilises fictitious correspondence between members of the Indian aristocracy as the organizing principle for her text. This structure serves to demonstrate the ramifications of colonialism from the subjective position of the subjugated, contrary to the typical literary practice exemplified by Robinson Crusoe. In her novel, consumption as a psychological anxiety precipitating and resultant from the drive to colonize is turned in upon itself, as the act of cannibalism is one involving the subjective localization of the colonial (Indian) subject. Accordingly, the narrative gaze is that of the colonized Other examining the customs of English society from an ostensibly exterior subjective position. In this sense, the voice of the Other is used as a means by which the reader can enter into an exotic and romanticised alterity, a field in which the self-reflective gaze of the imperial subject reifies both colonized and colonizer. Ostensibly this is done as an apologetic gesture, an attempt at reconciliation while simultaneously masks and reifies the guilt felt by the subjugation of a society to imperialism.

In this capacity, it is not surprising that rituals of cleansing and forgiveness are highlighted throughout the text, be it Sheemaal’s comparisson of the English and Indian ceremonies of the Purekah on p. 136 or the various purification rituals performed by the Rajah before eating, holding “court”, and other social phenomena. Throughout the text, references are made to the Rajah’s interest in the institutions and offices of English society, and this curiosity serves to elaborate a more fundamental concern. Following Foucault’s archaeologies of Western culture in both Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization, institutions can be understood as ritualized behaviours made concretely manifest in very openly political terms, or more precisely, in obvious economic terms of power and control (who gains agency over banking, religion, and education, for example). Late in the text, the Rajah describes what he believes to be one of the principle ideological structures which governs the English economy. He is highly critical of the degree to which non-religious, and in his eyes consequently amoral, sentiments inform the behaviour of the citizenry. Christianity is not wholly accepted by the English, who do not truly practise the Christian doctrine: “if this is really the religion of Christ, how falsely are people often called Christians” (240). Early in the text, Sheermaal accuses them of mistreating their servants, contrary to the more enlightened practises of the Hindu people. In the fourth letter, he describes the manner in which humans are stored and traded like any other trade commodity, with no importance save a healthy return of investment. Later in the text, the Rajah is appalled by the slave trade surrounding the navy, in which forced conscription is exercised by press gangs. In the tenth letter, he comments on the English (and more widely the European) proclivity for war, and accords the degree of control over the minds of warring Christians to an almost fundamentalist zeal for individual gain: “when a significant number of Christian men are united together, to form an army ... they shall be licensed to commit murder, at the command, and by the authority, of their religious superiors.... [This] shall no longer be termed, Murder; but Glory!” (170). Indeed, it seems as though he is reacting to the institutionalization of a certain kind of violence; it is not the ritualized and violent annihilation of the self which is fundamental to a thorough understanding of the Hindu Vedas, but rather the violent control of the Other, which is enacted in order to limit the degree to which Otherness informs the Self. Early in the text, Maandaara prefigures the Rajah’s letters toward the end of the text by expressing a degree of abhorrence toward the forms of violence ritualized in English culture, and the extent to which such beliefs and practises can disrupt Hindu culture, for example, the British slaughter and consumption of sacred cows described on p. 104. Indeed, his fear of infiltration from the English parallels similar feelings in English consciousness, which serves as fundamental to the impulse of social domination evidenced by colonialism. He indicates that this corrupted religion – these “Christians of the new system” – is heavily tied to a mercantilist ideology of individualism and the aggressive accumulation of wealth: poverty is consequently “stigmatised with a degree of infamy ... by their very laws, and under the immediate inspection of their sage magistrates, it is punished in the most exemplary manner ... [and] is evident throughout the tenor of law”.

Atheism is linked to the renunciation of Nature, and indeed perception itself in its once absolute (ie: religious, as per St. Augustine) and Platonic conceptions. Industrialization remains a shadow to this censoring of the Natural. By endeavouring to remove elements of (perceived) chaos from such rituals, thus ostensibly making them both more concrete and absolute, power is reclaimed away from the Other onto the Self, for it is the localization of subjective experience that allows the Foucauldian conception of knowledge / power to be realized. In a rather vulgar sense, it is absolute subjectivity which allows the performance of identity to occur at its most potent, and the institutionalization of subjects within the discourse of national politics serves to remedy the question of free will which serves as the basis of Enlightenment philosophy. To invoke a rather overused (at least in the polemics of Marxist interpretation) example, the interpellative gestures involved in the exercise of authority serve to qualify the interpellated subject as one whose identity is only fully realized in the act of sublimation to the state apparatus. It is for this reason that Mahatma Gandhi’s politics of self-annihilation were so confounding to the imperial apparatus of control, for there was no “subject” with which the state could respond; such, however, is the future of Indian colonial history which served as the illogical outcome of the process of colonization as elaborated in Hamilton’s text.

The quasi-scientific categorization of Indian culture which opens the text, book-ended with a functional glossary of Hindi terms, is emblematic of this gesture to order. It represents a quantification and hierarchization of the legitimate or authentic – data which is judged in- or admissible, itself a mark entered upon the archive of cultural legitimacy understood in the vein of Derrida’s censors in Archive Fever, where agents exercising varying degrees of power / knowledge legitimate themselves as guardians of culture by virtue of their exclusionary function. Any sense of truth, or indeed of subjective authenticity, emerges from the process of archiving that “truth”. The judgement of the censors reflects the structural apparati which created the archons themselves as agents of power, in the process reifying the very ideological field in which truth (and by extension, any sense of the real) is determined. Judgement is given sentimental value according to taste and education, and accordingly reflects a very clear ideological positions antithetical to the principles of the universalist impulse to which it gestures. Thus that which is deemed admissible into the archive is that which can be rationalized as authentic. Of course, that which is deemed authentic under such circumstances must be understood in the relative conditions for such an appraisal argued by the Rajah throughout most of the novel. It is this element of the text which is the most ontologically problematic, as this sense of relativism is in fact emergent from a universalizing principle of European rationalism. This is perhaps best represented in the character of the student Delomond, who speaks with the conviction and exclusionary self-aggrandizement of Enlightenment discourse: “the connection between philosophy and virtue is “so natural, that it is only their separation that can excite surprise; for is not the very basis of science, a sincere and disinterested love of truth? ... it promotes a detestation of everything that is mean or base” (208). In a very real sense, truth is ontologically dependent on this specific process of critical inquiry – the infamous scientific method which emerged in the 17th century. As Doctor Severan explains, “there are few predominant dispositions of the mind, which may not be analysed and traced through their origin and progress by any one who will give himself the trouble to pursue the necessary process” (214). Of course, Delomond’s last statement reflects the entry of judgement into discourse, and consequently the individual exercises its sense of evaluation along the principles outlined by Derridian thought, namely in a process which transfers meaning from context to subject as outlined a moment ago. In his opening letter, calls for a localist outlook relative to the whole of society, describing the utopian system of law as one of representational democracy: “all laws are therefore issued by the sanction of their representatives; every separate district, town, and community, choosing from among themselves, the persons most distinguished for piety, wisdom, learning, and integrety, impart to them the power of acting in the name of the whole” (85). This statement closely mirrors the thought of the period, from Locke to Hume, concerning the primacy of the individual subject for the legitimacy of the political system. The Rajah’s initial acceptance of English culture as a totality signals the inscription of colonial values onto his position within Hindu society. In other words, the most efficient manner in which the British could subjugate the Indian population was to convince the ruling class of the benefits of English civilization.

It is this Preliminary Explication which serves to most wholly exemplify the colonial project, as the agency and autonomy of the colonized (quantized, categorized) subjects are most blatantly denied. There is no examination of the contradictions and irrationalities evidenced by a social body, but rather one can interpret this section as an explanation of social characteristics within absolute terms. This section is far too reductive in outlook, and serves to oppose the beliefs of some post-colonial critics that “all identity is individual, but there is no individual identity that is not historical, or, in orther words, constructed within a field of social values, norms of behaviour, and collective symbols”. Consequently, the social castes serve as a uniform entity ideologically mobilized in order to rationalize social control; in the very real history of English colonization of India, the controlling castes – the brahmin – were used to more efficiently control the Ryots, or Indian peasantry, which vastly outnumbered any military force Britain could station in the country. Similarly reductive is the distillation of English society into the three classes of People of Family, People without Family, and People of style. The degree of individuation espoused by Enlightenment philosophy is ontologically antithetical to this particular rationalist impulse. And yet the sequence involving the Rajah’s experience with the English legal system – localized as a Hall of Justice, and more specifically as “the Magistrate seated in his chair” (251) – demonstrates the degree to which enlightenment logic can deconstruct its own principles. Citing Locke and Berkely among others, the defence council argues that identity (and by extension truth) is not a constant, but is defined by the moment of its expression, and is consequently situationally based: “what is right? what is wrong? what is vice? what is virtue? but terms merely relative” (254). Reason itself is not an absolute entity existing a priori in human subjectivity. Rather, it is the system of meaning – Foucault’s science of order – emerging from the conscious subject and projected externally. It seems evident that this sequence is intended to serve as a parody of the judicial system and its ontological faults as a social institution intended to dictate the properly moral behaviour of humanity, especially in relation to the legal corruptions of justice within capitalist society, as outlined on p. 241.

As elaborated by Foucault, a society of control requires a consistent indoctrination of specific ideological practises. It is for this reason that Hamilton examines the nature of the English educational system, which for the most part excluded women from any degree of involvement. Through many of the letters, a philosophy of equal educational opportunity is elaborated. Indeed, the status of women is ostensibly juxtaposed with that of the colonial subject, each as a subject lacking agency due to the Enlightenment discourse of control. In a very real sense, women is socialized as being antithetical and in a binary relation to Enlightenment philosophy: “the education of boys is, in same degree, calculated to open, and gradually prepare the mind for the reception of knowledge; that of girls, on the contrary, is from their very cradles, inimical to the cultivation of any one rational idea” (221). Reason is itself a censoring of that which is not male, or perhaps more precisely, that which is male defines reason by virtue of an endeavour to control the influence of what is deemed outside of the subjective discourse of masculinity proper. As Julia Kristeva outlines in Strangers to Ourselves (and further elaborated in Nations without Nationalism), “women have the luck and the responsibility of being boundary subjects: body and thought, biology and language .... origin and judgement, nation and world” (STO, 35). Hamilton’s solution to this problem is itself highly problematic, for, in appealing to the importance of education for female agency and realization of ability, she invokes the same masculinized control of the production and dissemination of knowledge. The fifth letter perhaps best exemplifies this imperative, as it outlines the benefits of providing women with the same ‘rational’ education that men received. It is not the engendering of knowledge which is itself most problematic, but rather that Hamilton ignores the socio-economic aspects of education as well, namely that the poor did not have the means to be themselves educated.

As the philosophical trajectory of the novel – despite an ostensible relocation to an anti-imperial ideological position – remains tied to a discriminate assumption of the voice of the subjects of colonialism, I believe that it reflects a less than equitable relationship between England and India. The Indian subject, viewed in its most absolute sense, has no voice or sense of agency. Several breaks in the narrative suggest an attempt to provide an Other for discourse itself, as though Hamilton were aware of the conceptual limitations of her text. There are several temporal breaks in the Rajah’s correspondence, most easily evidenced by the editorial interjection on page 144. In the postmodern, this gesture might have taken the form of the annihilation of the medium itself; one can see for example, the dissolution of the structure of the film in regard to the ability to authentically represent a variety of subjectivities in Abbas Kiarostami’s 1997 film Taste of Cherry for example, in which all narrative focus locus meaning with the interruption of the “real world” into that of the film itself, questioning the very notion of the “Real” to which representation is gauged. Concurrently, there is no Britain described in Hamilton’s text that is not the projection of a self-reflexive subjectivity onto the Other which is subject to imperial control; it is in many respects supportive of the subjugation of the Indian subjects which the novel ostensibly wishes to liberate. Consequently, the novel can be seen to sustain the dominant ideological position exercised by the imperial Will, thus supporting the repressive institutional structures of colonialism. That being said, there is a degree to which I liked the book...