Turn – Imposing rights onto the slave / Making the slave human is a technique of slave subjection

Turn – Imposing rights onto the slave / Making the slave human is a technique of slave subjection

However, suppose that the recognition of humanity held out the promise not of

liberating the flesh or redeeming one's suffering but rather of intensifying it? Or what if this acknowledgment was little more than a pretext for punishment, dissimu­ lation of the violence of chattel slavery and the sanction given it by the law and the state, and an instantiation of racial hierarchy? What if the presumed endowments of man-conscience, sentiment, and reason-rather than assuring liberty or negating slavery acted to yoke slavery and freedom? Or what if the heart, the soul, and the mind were simply the inroads of discipline rather than that which confirmed the crime of slavery and proved that blacks were men and brothers, as Charlie Moses had hoped.

Here I am interested in the ways that the recognition of humanity and individuality

acted to tether, bind, and oppress. For instance, although the captive's bifurcated existence as both an object of property and a person (whether understood as a legal subject formally endowed with limited rights and protections, a submissive, culpa­ ble or criminal agent, or one possessing restricted capacities for self-fashioning) has been recognized as one of the striking contradictions of chattel slavery, the constittF. tion of this humanity remains to be considered. In other words, the law's recognition of slave humanity has been dismissed as ineffectual and as a volte-face of an imperiled institution. Or, worse yet, it has been lauded as evidence of the hegemony of paternalism and the integral relations between masters and slaves. Similarly, the failure of Reconstruction generally has been thought of as a failure of imple­ mentation-that is, the state's indifference toward blacks and unwillingness to en­ sure basic rights and entitlements sufficed to explain the racist retrenchment of the postwar period. I approach these issues from a slightly different vantage point and thus consider the outrages of slavery not only in terms of the object status of the enslaved as beasts of burden and chattel but also as they involve notions of slave humanity. Rather than declare paternalism an ideology, understood in the orthodox sense as a false and distorted representation of social relations, I am concerned with the savage encroachments of power that take place through notions of t•eform, consent, and protection. As I will argue later, rather than bespeaking the mutuality of social relations or the expressive and affective capacities of the subject, senti­ ment, enjoyment, affinity, will, and desire facilitated subjugation, domination, and terror precisely by preying upon the flesh, the heart, and the soul. It was often the case that benevolent correctives and declarations of slave humanity intensified the bt•utal exercise of power upon the captive body rather than ameliorating the chattel condition.

Likewise, in considering the metamorphosis of chattel into man catalyzed by the

obolition of slavery, I think it is important to consider the failure of Reconstruction

wt simply as a matter of policy or as evidence of a flagging commitment to black

'ights, which is undeniably the case, but also in terms of the limits of emancipation, he ambiguous legacy of universalism, the exclusions constitutive of liberalism, and he blameworthiness of the freed individual. Therefore I exmnine the role of rights in

'acilitating relations of domination, the new forms of bondage enabled by propri­

:torial notions of the self, and the pedagogical and legislative efforts aimed at ransforming the formerly enslaved into rational, acquisitive, and responsible indi­ liduaJs. From this vantage point, emancipation appears less the grand event of iberation than a point of transition between modes of servitude and racial subjec­ ion. As well, it leads us to question whether the rights of man and citizen are

•ealizable or whether the appellation "human" can be borne equally by all.6

In response to these questions, I contend that the recognition of the humanity of he slave did not redress the abuses of the institution nor the wanton use of the

:aptive warranted by his or her status as chattel, since in most instances the acknowl­

:dgment of the slave as subject was a complement to the arrangements of chattel

Jroperty rather than its remedy; nor did self-possession liberate the former slave

'rom his or her bonds but rather sought to replace the whip with the compulsory

:ontract and the collar with a guilty conscience. Put differently, I argue that the Jarbarism of slavery did not express itself singularly in the constitution of the slave ts object but also in the forms of subjectivity and circumscribed humanity imputed to

:he enslaved; by the same token, the failures of Reconstruction cannot be recounted \

mlely as a series of legal reversals or troop withdrawals; they also need to be located

1n the very language of persons, rights, and libetties. For these reasons the book

:xamines the forms of violence and domination enabled by the recognition of hu­ manity, licensed by the invocation of rights, and justified on the grounds of liberty md freedom.

To suffer always means to suffer before the master. In staging suffering and bringing it into proximity in the debate space, the AFF creates a false equivalence between their suffering and the suffering of others. This is the rendering commodity of the other in the political economy of debate that points to how white supremacy functions in the mundane and everyday, such as this debate round.

The scenes of subjection considered here-the coerced spectacles orchestrated to encourage the trade in black flesh; scenes of tort re and festivity; the tragedy of virtuous women and the antics of outrageous darkies-all turn upon the simulation of agency and the excesses of black enjoyment. The affiliation of performance and blackness can be attributed to the spectacularization of black pain and racist conceptions of Negro nature as carefree, infantile, hedonistic, and indifferent to suffering and to an interested misreading of the interdependence of labor and song common an3ong the enslaved. 14 The constitution of blackness as an abject and degraded condition and the fascination with the other's enjoyment went hand in hand. Moroever blacks were envisioned fundamentally as vehicles for white enjoyment, in all sundry and unspeakable expressions; this was as much the consequence of the chattel status of the captive as it was of the excess enjoyment imputed to the other, for those forced to dance on the decks of slave ships crossing the Middle Passage, step it up lively on the auction block, and amuse the master and his friends were seen as the purveyors of pleasure. The amazing popularity of the "darkies" of the minstrel stage must be considered in this light. Contending variants of racism, ranging from the proslavery plantation pastoralism to the romantic racialism of abolitionists, similarly constituted the African as childish, primitive, contented, and endowed with great mimetic capacities. Essentially, these characteristics defined the infamous and renowned Sambo. This history is of central importance when evaluating the politics of pleasure, the uses of slave property, the constitution of the subject, and the tactics of resistance. Indeed, the convergence of terror and enjoyment cannot be understood outside it.

AT: But what we are doing is really real!

We know, performances are real. But your performances are also staged for our enjoyment. This reduces Otherness with a capital O to other with a lowercase o that is the becoming commodity of otherness of white supremacist late capitalism. This is the logic of neoliberal multiculturalism and it turns case.

Grace 2000 (Victoria, Professor of Sociology at Canterbury University, Baudrillard’s Challenge 88-91)

Baudrillard develops his most sustained discussion of the erasure of ‘Otherness’ and the proliferation of ‘difference’ in The Transparency of Evil (TE). His critique distinguishes ‘difference’ from a form of otherness that is radical, in which there is no scale of values upon which otherness can be registered. Baudrillard is emphatic that not only is otherness not the same as difference, but difference is what destroys otherness. Differences are indeed differentiated along a single scale of values. In an interview with Le Journal des Psychologues he says that difference is diversification, ‘it is the spectre of modality’, making it distinct from alterity in a way he describes there as ‘absolute’ (Gane 1993: 173). The ‘hell of the same’ (the void in the second quotation cited at the beginning of this section) is deflected by the hyperreal ‘melodrama of difference’ (both being chapter titles in TE). Simulation of a spectacular, everproliferating display of ‘difference’ is entirely consistent with the logic of sign value. Baudrillard claims that otherness can now be considered to be subject to the law of the market, and in fact, as a rare item, is highly valued. The ‘Other’ is no longer to be conquered, exterminated, hated, excluded, or seduced but rather now to be understood, liberated, recognised, valued, ‘coddled’, resurrected as ‘different’. This distinction between a form of ‘otherness’ that is indeed structurally irreducible, neither comparable nor opposable, and a form of ‘difference’ that is precisely predicated on establishing criteria against which difference is ascertained,3 is central to the critique offered here of feminist insistence on ‘irreducible difference’. For this feminist proclamation to be meaningful we need some kind of structural critique of the social, political, economic, and semiotic structuring of difference and otherness. Baudrillard’s analysis shifts the ground considerably. It makes additional questions pertinent; for example, what is at stake contemporarily in insisting on the importance of ‘irreducible difference’? His work suggests that this kind of question has to be addressed through a critique of the political economy of the sign. At least. With reference to Baudrillard’s ‘melodrama of difference’, the word ‘melodrama’ has the sense of ‘decidedly overdone’. A dictionary definition is: ‘sensational dramatic piece with crude appeals to emotions and usually happy ending’. The ‘usually happy ending’ is rather ironic given its humanist appeal, and the ‘happy ending’ of cultural hybridity would see the end of the apparent anachronism of racism, a form of discrimination Baudrillard analyses as precisely prescribed by ‘difference’ (I will elaborate on this below). Baudrillard uses the term ‘melodrama’ in conjunction with ‘psychodrama’ and ‘sociodrama’ to critique contemporary discourses and practices of ‘otherness’, both of which conjure the centrality of simulation to the scene of ‘cultural difference’, and metaphorically depict the simulated and dramatised absence of the other, with its ‘melodramatic’ undertones of crude emotionality.

Baudrillard’s argument that racism is an artefact of the institution of difference is integrally related to the structure of differentiation and the axiological and semiological form of its logic. To differentiate in the hyperreal mode of simulation is to discriminate: to establish differences that, generated from the model, are nothing more than more of the same. Racism, Baudrillard argues, does not exist ‘so long as the other remains Other’ (TE: 129). When the Other is foreign, strange, ‘other’, for example, within the order of the symbolic in Baudrillard’s critical terms, there is no scale of equivalence or difference against which discrimination can be performed. Encounter and transformation are fully open and reversible, in all forms (including the agonistic encounter of violence and death). Racism becomes possible when ‘the other becomes merely different’ as then the other becomes ‘dangerously similar’. This is the moment, according to Baudrillard, when ‘the inclination to keep the other at a distance comes into being’ (TE: 129). The intolerable introjection of difference in the case of the construction of ‘the subject’ as ‘different’, or traversed by a multiplicity of ‘differences’, means the other must be exorcised: the differences of the other must be made materially manifest. The inevitability of a fluctuation, oscillation, vacillation of differences in a differential system means the ‘happy ending’ will always be illusory. ‘Difference’ (of others) is fetishised as the icon that keeps ‘the subject’ different.

As the biological bases of racism are exposed as pure fallacy in theoretical and genetic terms, and as the principles of democracy have advanced since the Enlightenment, racism should have declined. Logically, as Baudrillard claims in his book The Perfect Crime (PC), this should have been the case, yet he observes that as cultures become increasingly hybrid, racism actually grows stronger (PC: 131– 2). He analyses this contra-indication in terms of the increasing fetishisation of difference and the loss of the encounter with the Other, and in the erosion of the singularity of cultures qua increasing simulation of differentiation. The ‘relation’ within the order of ‘cultural difference’ is phobic, according to Baudrillard: a kind of reflex that is fundamentally irrational in terms of the logic of the system. The ‘other’ is idealised, and: because it is an ideal other, this relationship is an exponential one: nothing can stop it, since the whole trend of our culture is towards a fanatically pursued differential construction, a perpetual extrapolation of the same from the other. (PC: 132)

‘Autistic culture by dint of fake altruism’, he adds, recapturing the cultural imperative of the western hyperreal ‘culture’ to recognise, value, liberate, and understand difference. On the other hand, racism can equally result from the opposite sentiment; that of a desperate attempt to manifest the other as an evil to be overwhelmed. Either way, both the benevolence of the humanitarian and the hatred of the racist seek out the ‘other’ for reasons symptomatic of the fetishisation of difference. As the increasingly cult-like dedication to differences escalates with its concurrent impulse to increasing homogeneity,4 another ‘other’ emerges.

Baudrillard comments on the figure of the alien as a ‘monstrous metaphor’ for the ‘viral Other’, which is, in his words, ‘the compound form of all the varieties of otherness done to death by our system’ (TE: 130). I remember thinking recently how there must be some significance to the outpouring of ‘alien’ movies (on television especially) and wondered if this was the final frontier of ‘otherness’ to be ‘done to death’ (what else is left?). I recall also being disturbed, as I watched one such movie, to reflect on my accepting without question the imperative of exterminating the aliens who (that?) were going to invade and transform human society in evil ways. Baudrillard emphasises that this metaphor of alien ‘Other’ seizes on what he describes as a ‘viral and automatic’ form of racism that perpetuates itself in a way that cannot be countered by a humanism of difference. Viral in the sense of self-generating and invisibly infecting, reconstructing: a ‘virus of difference’, played out through minute variations in the order of signs.

Such a form of monstrous otherness is also the product of what Baudrillard calls an ‘obsessional differentiation’ (TE: 130), emanating from the compulsion of the ‘self’ (same) to manifest signs of ‘difference’ in the form of the ‘other’. The problematic structure of this self(same)–other(different) dynamic, Baudrillard argues, demonstrates the weakness of those ‘dialectical’ theories of otherness which ‘aspire to promote the proper use of otherness’ (TE: 130). Racism, especially in its current viral and immanent form, makes it clear that there is no such thing as the ‘proper use of difference’. This point links again with my concerns about the emptiness of feminist claims for the importance of ‘irreducible differences’ in the absence of a structural critique.

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