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Redressing the pained body – practices not meant to overcome the condition, but to redress the condition through performance that works in and against the system. We are like the slaves who break tool
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Redressing the pained body – practices not meant to overcome the condition, but to redress the condition through performance that works in and against the system. We are like the slaves who break tools.Hartman 97 [Saidiya, Prof of African American History and Literature @ Columbia, Scenes of Subjection, p. 50-2] Exploiting the limits of the permissible, creating transient zones of freedom, and reelaborating innocent amusements were central features of everyday practice. Practice is, to use Michel de Certau’s phrase, “a way of operating” defined by “the non-autonomy of its field of action,” internal manipulations of the established order, and ephemeral victories. The tactics that compromise the everyday practices of the dominanted have neither the means to secure a territory outside the space of domination nor the power to keep or maintain what it is won in fleeting, surreptitious, and necessarily incomplete victories. The refashioning of permitted pleasures in the effort to undermine, transform, and redress the condition of enslavement was consonant with other forms of everyday practice. These efforts generally focused on the object status and castigated personhood of the slave, the pained and ravished body, severed affiliations and natal alienation, and the assertion of denied needs. Practice is not simply a way of naming these efforts but rather a way of thinking about the character of resistance, the precariousness of the assaults waged against domination, the fragmentary character of these efforts and the transient battles won, and the characteristics of a politics without a proper locus. The everyday practices of the enslaved encompassed an array of tactics such as work slowdowns, feigned illness, unlicensed travel, the destruction of property, theft, self-mutilation, dissimulation, physical confrontation with owners and overseers that document the resistance to slavery. These small-scale and everyday forms of resistance interrupted, reelaborated, and defied the constraints of everyday life under slavery ad exploited openings in the system for the use of the enslaved. What unites these varied tactics is the effort to redress the condition of the enslaved, restore the disrupted affiliations of the socially dead, challenge the authority and domination of the slaveholder, and alleviate the pained state of the captive body. However, these acts of redress are undertaken with the acknowledgement that conditions will most likely remain the same. This acknowledgement implies neither resignation nor fatalism but a recognition of the enormity of the breach instituted by slavery and the magnitude of domination. Redressijng the pained body ecompasses operating in and against the demands of the system, negotiating the disciplinary harnessing of the body, and counterinvesting in the body as a site of possibility. In this instance, pain must be recognized in its historicity and as the articulation of a social condition of brutal constraint, extreme need, and constant violence; in other words, it is the perpetuatl condition of ravishment. Pain is the normative condition that encompasses the legal subjectivity of the enslaved that is constructed along the lines of injury and punishment, the violation and suffering inextricably enmeshed with the pleasures of minstrelsy and melodrama, the operation of power on black bodies, and the life of property in which the full enjoyment of the slave as thing supersedes the admittedly tentative recognition of slavey humanity and permits the intemperate uses of chattel. This pain might best be described as the history that hurts—the still-unfolding narrative of captivity, dispossession, and domination that engenders the black subject in the Americas. If this pain has been largely unspoken and unrecognized, it is due to the sheer denial of black sentience rather than the inexpressibility of pain. The purpoted immunity of blacks to pain is absolutely essential to the spectacle of contented subjection or, at the very least, to discrediting the claims of pain. The black is both insensate and content, indifferent to pain and induced to work by threats of corporal punishment. These condtradictions are partly explained by the ambiguous and precarious status of the black in the “great chain of being”—in short, by the pathologizing of the black body—this abhorrence then serves to justify acts of violence that exceed normative standards of the humanely tolerable, though within the limits of the socially tolerable as concerned the black slave. In this regard, pain is essential to the making of productive slave laborers. The sheer enormity of this pain overwhelms or exceeds the limited forms of redress abilable to the enslaved. Thus the significance of the performative lies not in the ability to overcome this condition or provide remedy but in creating a context for the collective enunciation of this pain, transforming need into politics and cultivating pleasure as a limited response to need and a desperately insufficient form of redress. Politics of the Slave has no proper locus. None the less in stealing away (fugitivity) the slave anticipates a kind of coming freedom. This ressitance is radical.Hartman 97 [Saidiya, Prof of African American History and Literature @ Columbia, Scenes of Subjection, p. 62-4] In considering the determinations and limits of practice it becomes evident that resistances are engendered in everyday forms of practice and that these resis tances are excluded from the locus of the "political proper. "33 Both aspects of this assessment are significant because too often the interventions and challenges of the dominated have been obscured when measured against traditional notions of the political and its central features: the unencumbered self, the citizen, the self possessed individual, and the volitional and autonomous subject. The importance of the concept of practice is that it enables us to recognize the agency of the dominated and the limited and transient nature of that agency. The key features of practice central to this examination of the agency of the enslaved are the nonautonomy of the field of action; provisional ways of operating within the dominant space; local, multiple, and dispersed sites of resistance that have not been strategically codified or integrated; and the nonautonomy and pained constitution of the slave as person. The barring of these practices from the political, as traditionally conceived, has a range of consequences and effects that concern the constitution of the subject, the fea sibility and appropriateness of certain forms of action, the incommensurability of liberal notions of will and autonomy as standards for evaluating subaltern behavior, the inscription of agency as criminal or, at the very least, as deserving of punish ment, and the inadequacy and incompleteness of redress. Thus when thinking about these practices as the ''infrapolitics of the dominated,'' to use James Scott's term, or as a "politics of a lower frequency," to use Paul Gilroy's term, it is impm1ant to note both the effects yielded by the popular ille galities or popular intransigence of the enslaved and their remove from the proper locus of the political.34 This is especially important in the case of the enslaved if we are to engage the particularities of the subject constitution and object status of the enslaved. The bourgeois individual, the unencumbered self, and the featureless person that give meaning to the term "political" in its conventional usage, with all the attendant assumptions about the relation of the subject and the state, cannot incorporate the enslaved, for how does one express an individual will hen one is without individual rights? After all, the rights of tbe self-possessed mdlVldual and the set of property relations that define liberty depend upon, if not require, the bla k as will-less actant and sublime object. If white independence, freedom, and equahty were purchased with slave labor, then what possibilities or opportunities exist for the black captive vessel of white ideality?35 . . The slave is the object or the ground that makes posstble the extstence of the bourgeois subject and, by negation or contradistinction, defines liberty, citizens ip, and the enclosures of the social body. As Edmund Morgan has argued, the meanmg and the guarantee of (white) equality depended upon the presence of slaves. White men were "equal in not being slaves."36 The slave is indisputa ly outside the normative terms of individuality to such a degree that the very exerctse of agency ts seen as a contravention of another's unlimiied rights to the object. (Even labor is not considered agency because it is the property of another, extracted by coercive means, and part of the bestial capacities of the black; it simply persomfies the.power and dominion of the owner.) Not surprisingly, the agency of the enslaved ts only intelligible or recognizable as crime and the designation of personhood burde ed with incredible duties and responsibilities that serve to enhance the represstve mechanisms of power, denote the limits of socially tolerablfo ms of violence, an intensify and legitimate violence in the guise of protection, JUStice, and the reco m tion of slave humanity. This official acknowledgment of agency and .hum mty, rather than challenging or contradicting the object status and absolute subjugatton of the enslaved as chattel, reinscribes it in the terms of personhood. . Though this examination of slave agency primarily conces issues of.res stance, restitution, and redress, it is equally attentive to the constramts of dommatton and the brutal exercise of power that give form to resistance. Mindful of the aforeme tioned concerns regarding the subject, this exploration of agency and resistance is less concerned with issues of heroic action and oppositional consciousness than with the inadvertent, contingent, and submerged forms of contestation. This approach emphasizes both the preponderance of resistance and the absence of a proper locus that would grant autonomy to those practices. These practices are significant in that they are local assaults and pedestrian challenges to slavery, the slave owner, the law and the state and, at the same time, they are provisional and short-lived and exploit the cleavages of the social order. However, the focus on the contingent and transient character of these practices is not an attempt to underestimate the magnitude of these acts, for they are fraught with utopian and transformative impulses that are unrealiz able within the terms of the current order precisely because of the scope of these implicit, understated, and allegorical claims for emancipation, redress, and restitu tion. The plurality of resistances enacted in everyday life is produced by and details the relations and mechanisms of power. The dangers posed by these practices and the threats issued to the dominant order provide a map of the specific mechanisms of repression and power in antebellum social relations. For example, both the very incongruence or incommensurability of purpmted dangers posed by slave gatherings and the great force used to meet and crush them document the crisis of slavery and the attempt to manage this crisis by a combined strategy of patemalism and brutal repression. In the context of crisis, infinitesimal assaults to the slave order acquire even greatet· signilicance. The import of these practices is evidenced not only in the testimony of the enslaved or the formerly enslaved and the terms in which they represent their experience but in the power exercised both to encourage and manage slave amusements and to constrain, prohibit, and police such activities. The disrup tions caused by a small act like sneaking off to a dance or attending a praise meeting catalyzed a chain of events that was disruptive, short-lived, and, to some degree, expected. The enslaved defied and redefined their condition of absolute subjection In acts of minor transgression: movement without a pass to visit a loved one, stealing, unpermitted gatherings, etcetera. Certainly it would be difficult to describe such acts as revolt or as a threat to bring the state to its knees, yet the very excess of force that met such acts certainly serves ,to illustrate the tetmr that is part and parcel of the everyday landscape of slavery and, more important, the difficulty of action in such circumstances. How is resistance registered in a context in which being found with a pen or pencil is almost as bad as having murdered your master, according to Elijah Green? Or in which being caught at a dance without a pass might result in being stripped and given twenty-five lashes if you're lucky or a severe and life-threatening beating if you aren't? How does one enact resistance within the space of the permissible or exploit the "concessions" of slave owners without merely reproducing the mechanisms of dominance? What shape does resistance or rebellion acquire when the force of repression is virtually without limit, when terror resides within the limits of socially tolerable, when the innocuous and the insurgent meet an equal force of punishment, or when the clan destine and the surreptitious mark an infinite array of dangers? In this context, might not a rendezvous· at an unauthorized dance, attending a secret meeting, or sneaking off to visit your companion suddenly come to appear as insmgent, or, at the very least, as quite dangerous, even when the "threats" posed are not articulated in the form of direct confrontation but expressed in quite different terms? As Toby Jones recalled, such gatherings engendered a liberatory and utopian structure of feelings. Raymond Williams defines a structure of feelings as "a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange.' '38 This inchoate and practical consciousness is expressed by Jones as tbe recollective anticipation of freedom and by others as an impulse or "instinct that we was going to be free. "39 Obviously, this structure of feeling existed in a troubled relation to slavery, for if a slave entertaining thoughts of freedom was discovered, he would be lucky to escape with a beating. Other slaves were usually forced to witness this beating and threat ened with the same treatment if they were caught.40 As one ex-slave commented, "Whipping darkies was the joy of the white man back in those days."41 John McAdams recounted that even small challenges to slavery could have disas trous effects: ''The only way the slaves could go from one plantation to another was tbey had to have a pass from their Mas[t]er or Mistress; if they went without a pass, woe be unto that negro, for the mas[t]er oftbe place would ask us for om·pass, and if we could not show one, it was just too bad. He would give us one of the worst whippings we ever got. Of course I use to slip off and go to see my girl on another farm, but I was very careful that I did not let anyone catch us."42 Even a child's display of rebelliousness could be met with the threat of death. As a child, Susan Snow would "fight and scratch" with other children, black and white. In order to break her of Ibis habit, her master forced her to look at the bodies of slaves who had been hanged for harming a white man.43 Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 434.89 Kb. Share with your friends:
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