P.Madhu
Key Words:
Dispositif, Money, new world Slavery,
Abolition, Free labour, Network, Protocol
The
paper explains how money as a master dispositif
had guided history through institutions of servitude, slavery, its abolition
and free labour through networks of human relations. The first section of the paper deals
with the idea of money as dispositif.
Second section explains how the motive of accumulation of wealth had driven the
early modern Europeans into slave traders. Third section explains the abolition
of slavery is in continuity with the motive of accumulation. It is explained,
the free market for labour is a further extension of the same logic of wealth
accumulation through control and domination. The fourth section opens the
discussion towards imagining counter-dispositif.
Dispositif
is naturalised power, the second nature that
operates from within as our mentality organising our thought patterns,
attitudes, behavior and actions. It is an internal singularity, habitus,
functioning as strange attractor in enabling us to abstract sense from the
chaos of experiences. The internal singularity is an affect of historical and
biographical engagement with the network of the socius that empowers us to be
culturally conditioned sense making beings. Master
dispositif is the deep singularity that draws other cleavages of
mentalities towards it ‘naturally’ figuratively comparable to a deep valley
drawing streams towards it. In this paper, I argue, money beyond its multiple
appearances and usages such as, means of exchange, currency, cash apparatus, or
financial statement is a master dispositive,
primarily an internal psychic apparatus, drawn from our collective
historical ontology, that conditions our subjective perceptions.
The central argument here is that,
qua the master dispositif, money has
an agential role in guiding history. For instance, though the institutions of
servitude, slavery, slavery-abolition, and free-labour appear to us a progress
from servitude to freedom I argue, they are just various manifestations in
historical junctures since money as a master dispositif has possessed our internal cartography of pathways and
‘progress’. Said in Heideggerian terminology thrown into money’s dispositif is the state of das-man (Heidegger, 2008:212). Human
subject moments, as truth moments and authentic freedom, if have to have liberative
expressions, that should be through overcoming the eclipse of the Self and not in that being subjected to the dispositif that overwhelms (Badiou 2007; Zimmerman 1986).
I
Money is understood in multiple
ways. Mill, in the Principles,
described money as a veil, a
mode of exchanging things for one another,
by first exchanging a thing for money, and then exchanging money for something
else
(Mill, 1848:261). For Marx, money is “chemical power
of society” a “nexus” between “man and man,” “human life and society,” with
nature as “bond of all bonds”, cementing and separating them as “a true agent”
(Marx, 1973:377; Marx and Engles, 1992:5). “Science of money,” for Simmel, “is
situated in mental states, in social relations and in the logical structure of
reality and values, give money its meaning and its practical position” (Simmel,
2004:52). Money is also “bearer of options”, “stored value”
waiting for opportunities (Anderson, 1917: 425). For
Keynes, it is a store of ‘general
purchasing power’
discharged by debt and purchase contracts (Keynes, 1930:3).
In other words, economy of past as debt or credit is passed upon through
exchange to future as purchasing power through storehouses of present
valuations as the mechanism of money. For him, money is
co-extensive with current of socius1 in the making, “like certain
other essential elements in civilisation” (Keynes, 1930:11). Dispositif2
is Marx’s ‘chemical power, ’
gravitational pull of discursive formations.
Money is gravitational node made of multilinear
ensembles composed of lines of desires, aspirations and values that act as a singularity of attracting wants, ambitions and
values in triggering their perpetual inventiveness (Deleuze, 1988: 159; Bussolini,
2010: 85-107; Agamben, 2005).
Dispositif, as explained in this paper, is
a strange attractor, gravity, in the chaotic field of socius, the opus operatum3 structured by and structuring its
modus-operandi4 that structures internal dispositions of valuing
(Bourdieu,
1990:52).
Money
as commodity, veil, and a store of value or unit of wealth dehistoricises twice
away from the character of money. First, it dehistoricises money from history of its physical use and
accumulation. Second, caught into its chimera of
utility it is not enough recognised that it embodies a history of valuing. History of economy, is not merely a
history of physical money its accumulation and distribution,
but also that of its dispositif
pathways. Money by its dispositif power converted state into a ‘fiscal institution’ as it
was never before. Characterising its mutative role, Niall
Ferguson presents money as DNA made of ‘long
and tangled chains of human motivations, ’ scripting society and its
polity (Ferguson, 2002: 423). The
“code” of motivations made up by the multiplicity of force relations, for Foucault,
is dispositif (Foucault, 1998b:93).
Dispositif
for
Foucault is performative power,
produced from one moment to the next, from below. It is capillary power pervades the social field stretching deep into
construction of micropractices of its subjects and the “hermeneutics of the
psyche” embedded in “politics of the everyday life” (Fraser, 1989: 23). It is the
multiplicity of force relations immanent in social. It is all pervasive because
it comes from everywhere. Dispositif is not something devised at any “headquarters
that presides over its rationality” nor by “castes or groups which control the
state apparatus” but it is “psychic power” anonymously produced because of
calculations and tacit tactics of ordinary lives embedded in grid of power. Dispositif is productive power - repetitious,
inert and self-reproducing. It is the overall effect that emerges from all mobility
that frames routine of life politics. It is ‘knowledge’ and technique of life
skill learnt from socius that runs through the dynamic-mesh-work as its energy.
It forms the “dense web that passes through apparatuses and institutions,
without being exactly localised in them” (Foucault, 1998b: 96). Dispositif is grid of intelligibility,
moving substrate of force relations, of social order. It is not a power formed
from above as the unity of domination, the sovereignty of the state or a mode
of subjugation. It is not acquired, seized, shared or something one holds or
slips away. It is not an institution or a structure, but the force field of
complex strategical situations that endows those located in its influence over
the rules of the game as their internal dispositions. Nevertheless, it is crystallised
in the ‘state forms’5 and institutions which are nothing but the
affective structure of the ‘truth game’ deceptively projected as the source of
the power. Dispositif is the flow of interests that keeps network of
the social relations (Swedberg 2005).
The network is an assemblage6 created and continued
by schema of knowledge its actors are subjected in the process of its creation
and sustenance. For Weber, it consists of repeated acts of
exchange, and competition among actors (Weber, 1978: 82-85, 635). Network is
not just made up of its players, but made up by the emergent flows of
intersections,7 structural holes,8 invisible relations,9
competitive processes, and negotiations (Burke 1992). The
flow produces
and regulates customs, habits, and productive practices, “in
which mechanisms of command become ever more ‘democratic,’ ever more immanent
to the social field, distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the
citizens” (Hardt and Negri, 2000:299). I
argue in this paper, institution of slavery, movements towards its abolition and
the subsequent justification of free market for labour are the effects of the dispositif money and its apparatuses (Foucault,
1998b:92-102).
Network of relations mediated by and mediating dispositif is a dense web that delivers
everything everywhere, making the space collapsible or stretchable into local
or global according to the contingencies of its flows and currents. Networks are
systems of interrelationality shared radically horizontal (Galloway and
Thacker, 2007:30). Time, of network is not a duration that stretches from the
past to the future; rather it is an activity of formulating newer
assemblages from the repositories of anytime anywhere. Network acts like the
neural network that uses archives of memories at junctures of new challenges.
In other words, networks are not constrained by linearity of neat history
culled off from cumbersome struggles of multiple contemporariness. It has all
the struggles of multiple contemporariness as its repository to draw up new
assemblages. Time of network is instances assembled from repositories of any
time as opposed to individuality of permanencies or durations (Deleuze, 2004b:288).
Dispositif
is the protocol of networking assemblages. The protocols of networks emerge
through the complex relationship between autonomous, interconnected agents. Protocols
regulate flow, direct netspace, codes relationships, connect life-forms and act
in manifold modes of individuation that arrange and remix both human and
nonhuman elements (Latour 2007). The political action of networks is based on
human actors and nonhuman apparatuses. Cash is one such nonhuman apparatus. Networks
have both human and nonhuman functioning as active nodes as agency producing
edges of the network. Edges are the effects of the causality implied in nodes,
they crystallise into institutions that in turn passively carry out actions
(Galloway and Thacker, 2007:33). Institutions of slavery, legislations against
its abolition, and establishments of free market for labour are instances for
institutional edges of the desires, ambitions projections expressed through
monetary apparatuses. Networks are through and through multiplicities struggling
to become and unbecome by pulls and pushes of aggregate interconnections of
dissimilar subnetworks. Subnet topologies are always in a tense relation and
transition, collusion and direct opposition with other forms within networks.
However, there could be currents of singularity condition them to have certain
transition than the other. Money, since occupied its position as an apparatus
of valuing increasingly pervading the whole of the socius, I argue, has taken
the role of master dispositif modulating
history by its dispositif power. No
one controls network; nevertheless, it is controlled. Money modulates network its
current and thereby the socius, so much so as if it had been naturalised as the
God of the network (Marx 1844).
Thinking
by networks and dispositifs is in
contradiction with explaining human activities by truisms of natural laws.10
Natural law, in the post-foundationist understanding is a set of anthropomorphic
frames that naturalised the ‘nature’ (Crowe, 1977:232). Nevertheless, historically,
natural laws were interpreting reality by mathematical abstractions or stemmed
from observations or experiments. The idea of nature is born out of epistemic
ruptures with the theologically justified anthropomorphic truisms. The word nature
was coined in the thirteenth century Europe from the Latin root ‘natura’ which implied the sense of
‘course of things, ’ constitution, quality, and the origin (nasci) as science was in its nascent
state taking on to explain empirical regularities. In the beginning of the
discourse on nature, family of phrases (Wittgenstein, 2009:35-38) explaining the
‘natural’ (lui naturale), were -instinctus
naturae,11
legistica tradition,12 Jus naturale13- the
concepts prioritised methodologically understanding the nature from observation,
experiment and by secular means. Potential threat from secular
interpretation of nature to the theological truisms was counterpoised by
reassemblage of natural law by the powerful singularities of theocratic and
aristocratic influences. As a result, precepts
of natural law were replaced by anthropomorphic and theocratic constructs of
natura naturans,14 abstractio totius,15 Jus
gentium16 and ratio superior17 (Kanne 1979; Crowe, 1977: 136-165) that
naturalised totalising schema of the ‘eternal law’ of nature from ‘divine
providence’ (Crowe: 1977:53-71; Datson and Stolleis, 2008:6). Ironically, the
sprout of arguments of ‘nature’ emerging from practice of technology,
experiments, observations, jurisprudence and mathematical logic that were
potentially deposing elite dispositions was restored as axiomatic principles
justifying the totalising moral logic of ‘divine order’. Nature, which has little to do
with the “normalcy of functioning” as social order, had been discursively
assembled into a concoction of ‘natural law’ by the theocratic milieu of the
thirteenth century had been reinvented by laws of market, economics and even
that of the physical universe. For centuries, the perspective had mucked
economic logic into explanatory closures because tautology of ‘natural law’ was
believed to “guarantee… [the] good and legitimate by providing for a check and
a reasoning about what is not good” (Schall 1993). For instance, Edmund Burke
in his economic treatise on scarcity wrote, “laws of commerce, which are laws
of nature, and consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of
softening the divine displeasure to remove any calamity under which we suffer”
(Burke 1795). Nevertheless, by the second half of the seventeenth century
Europe, secular and rational interpretation of nature was gaining acceptance
parallel to its theological appropriation (Datson and Stolleis, 2008:10). The
‘laws of nature’ as the law of moral order has its genealogy with that of the
disciplinary dispositif than in the
order of things as exist ‘naturally’ (Foucault 2002). Hierarchising the nature
and its fixed ‘laws’ as axiomatic homogeneity, versus, nomadising 18 it as transitory ‘dispositif affect’
of heterogeneous assemblage is an ongoing politics. The battle affects by driving
us to take sides either with understanding the social by ‘laws’ or ‘rhetoric’
(Grant, 2001:1381; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2012).
Separated from rhetoric, philosophy
and political economy, economics has become a ‘Scientistic’19
discipline dedicated towards exploring its laws and statistical patterns
(McCloskey 1998; Bourdieu,
1991: 95-96). Explained in terms of laws, in effect, the discipline justified
accumulation and naturalised unequal distribution of wealth, ‘objectively’. Instead
of discovering laws, such studies often settled for fairy tales.20
Kuznets, equipped with data of historical
series of economic performance of the United States from 1913 to 1948,
justified the utopia of conservatives that all is well with income inequality,
because the natural laws of economics would
automatically restore equality at its advanced phase. All
that was needed to be assured of the benign laws and be educated of the skills
to reap benefits of it, which the study assumed was already happening (Piketty,
2014:11). Thanks
to Piketty, for he has put the distributional question back at the heart of
economic analysis. He sounds a clarion
call that dawn will never come as accumulation has a greater phase and
gravity than distribution and with that phase, unless intervened, people and
nature would soon be reduced to fodder that feed the super rich, who by tactics
would ‘sustain’ the world, with further promises of dawn from their towers of
ideology.
Nevertheless,
he also presented his finding as a law, r>g inequality, that is if the return on investments
(r) greater than wealth the investment generated (g) that will make the unequal
world and thus exploitative (Picketty, 2014: 25). The
study of money in its gross history of physical use itself reveals that history
of distribution of wealth has always been deeply political and cannot be
reduced to apolitical laws of economics (Picketty, 2014:20). Economists by the obsession for pure and objective laws
governing the economy converted the discipline into a domain of secular theocracy,
an oxymoron (Honnefelder 1995). Since numerical manoeuvrability of
the values ascribed to money has patterns and regularity, a science is made out
of them with ‘laws’ resemble that of physics.
The laws, including the laws of
physics have the theological genealogy associated with the Law Giver, a faith
overpowered scientists in the nascent periods of science.
The Catholic version of natural law, its Protestant appropriation, the
enlightenment modernity, the ideology of money21 and its allied
constructs of man,22 property,23 individual and the
consequent libertarian adaptation of the ideas belong to the same set of
discursive formation. Drawn by similar
sets of singularity the ideational climate territorialised first the European
mind and spread elsewhere forming the global assemblage (Collier, 2007:4). Much that has been christened as
natural laws are historically and biographically granted cultural dispositions.
It is increasingly understood that “even physical scientists have been revising
their conceptions of the nature and significance of scientific laws” (Taylor, 1929:1). Laws, when invoked, contain politics through claims of
‘natural’ authority. Money is the politics of
valuation and validation. Numbers and their crunching have politics beneath. Inquiries
into ideological ecologies of laws and explanations bring forth them in
perspective. The concepts of money and its derivative sets of ideas like property,
tax,24 market, labour, value or ownership are not the ahistorical a priory truths- rather they are socially
contingent historical ontologies of truth
games. They
are sets of anachronistic explanandums
flowing backward from present to past towards colonising past and future
through the political currents of the present. Obviously, conventions of calculations,
exchange for returns, property ownership, and the ‘liberty’ to punish
trespassers are cultural and historical products than anything fundamental to
the human nature (Graeber, 2014: 90-92; Mauss 1967).
Money functions more than a medium
and operates as an engine of history conditioning its momentum and direction, as
dispositif.
Nodes of money program it. Money
reflects networking of relationships beyond creditors and debtors. It passes
its judgement on survival or abolition of systems. Money directs history as the
organism nerved with all the veins of values meshworking its grids. Money
objectifies and depersonalises (Simmel, 2004: 288), thereby it creates history
beyond the expressed subjective positions (Patnaik, 2009:1). Wondering at money,
Marx notes,
Money
abuses all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities. It has,
therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their
proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence, this
essence dominates him and he worships it (Marx, 1964:37).
Money
links valuators beyond their space and time. With
money, we invest in the future preordaining singularities that drive the present,
and even ordain the past towards the future. Values
embodied in money reflect the values of the social. It networks
human ambitions, both projected and shady, to shape the world and its destiny.
Money is not merely a neutral
medium of the ‘real’ exchange of goods and services that naturally piles up
with relatively worthier as some economists hold (Smithin, 2000:1). Money is the carrier of declared and non-declared, seen and
unseen, counted and uncounted values and validations. It is substituted for
power, influence and commitment
(Ganssman, 1988). The heightened calculative
potential of money that has given its scientific attribute, has deprived money
its ‘quality’ and converted it into an autopoetic engine of ‘quantity’. Simmel
observes,
With reference to money, we do not
ask what and how, but how much. This quality or lack of quality of money first
emerges in all its psychological purity, however, only after it has been
acquired. Only when money is transformed into positive values does it become
evident that the quantity exclusively determines the importance of money,
namely its power as a means (Simmel, 2004:260).
Once, it reaches the hands by
whatsoever the capillary power of valuations facilitated it, all that matters
is its quantity, thus creates the power equations of haves and have-nots, in
the conventional sense of power. Claims of scientific understanding of money
are mostly about its ‘pure’ quantity and movement. Quantitative
differentiations money makes by its possession, however, creates newer flows of
capillary power encompassing the whole lots of networks of relationships. Money, Weber held, is not mere
voucher; rather, it is the result of power struggles and compromises (Weber, 1978:107). Value money holds is the residual
net-worth of values of all participants, which is generally biased towards its
haves than of its have-nots (Weber,
1978: 172).25
Money
is the historically contingent dispositif that territorialises and deteritorialises flow and path of history
(Deleuze, 2004b: 559-562). A dispositif
enacts net-worth of its valuing towards making history, cotemporality and
ebbs into the future. It is a master dispositif, like language, by which beings are caught into their compelling
discourses (Agamben 2005; Foucault, 2002: xxi). “[N]ot only makes money the
measure of man, but it also makes man the measure of the value of money,”
Simmel views (Simmel, 2004: 358). A certain set of values it carries finds its
currency in certain cultural geography whereas certain other values become
appealing and emerge operative in other locations. Money disburses values unknown
and of distant geographies to new locations and creates creoles and political hybrids
of new valuations. Money triggers transitions in the value system by connecting
temporalities and geographies, thereby grid of valuation transcends itself. The
grid of money as it spreads across space and time of multiple discourses it
mediates interferences of multiple spectrums of values and by it becomes
mediated. Objectification, individuation, measurement, unitising, utility,
ownership, commoditisation, division of labour and any such aspect of secular
modernity are indeed flows from the master dispositif, money. It is both the psychiatric power
(Bussolini 2010: 86) of dispositif
and the quantitative apparatus, it creates in the process. What emerges visible
in the process is the physical apparatus of money as it is monopolised by
sovereign states as the instrument of valuing. As a dispositif, it is the psychic apparatus produces power not
according to right, but as a technique, not as the law, but through normalisation,
not by legislative instruments of punishments, but through gravitating internal
dispositions exercised at all the levels of the psyche beyond the regulatory
apparatuses of the sovereign states. A keen observer cannot miss that it is the
inner dynamics of dispositif that produces
its outer edges of observable apparatuses. Nevertheless, the edges serve as the
passive apparatus conducting and reproducing the current of dispositif. Essence of the apparatus is
in dispositif making it up.
Seemingly, money is legally valid
tender issued by sovereign states. However, the geography of money belies the
appearance. Money as the physical apparatus has already overgrown out of the
power of sovereign state determined by the market (Cohen, 1998:3). States
continue with the supply and control of national designations of money, but no
longer automatically privileged to control the apparatus. Capturing the
scenario, it is pointed out as early as in 1992, while the phenomenon had become
faintly observable,
The state now finds itself
confronted by ever more elaborate layers organisation which criss-cross its territorial boundaries…The image of the
world where space is appropriated and exclusively controlled by sovereign
states is a conceptual tool of doubtful utility (Camilleri and Falk, 1992: 4,
250).
Ebb
and flow of money are determined by market while they are results of all-pervading
capillary power of psychic dispositif. The apparatus at the edge
functioning as the sovereign states, or institutions of servitude, slavery,
legislative bodies or institutions of charity has but remain transformed or
retained by dispositif charges
produced at the nodes of network relations. The grid of valuation of money works
as the tree of oeconomy26
passing its logic from the opus operatum to
modus operandi and vice-versa. Money explained by the mathematics of virtual is a field of
attractor virtually formed by converging desires, expectations, motives and judgements from
various vector
coordinates that act as the singularity passing on the long term tendencies of
valuation upon socius in the making (Delanda, 2005:9-41). The gross reality of
the economics of the physical money has its ethological
genesis in the subtler socius and its politics, which Marx termed as ‘silent
force of economic relations’ (Marx, 1954:874).
II
Dispositif of money, in a cultural context
conducive to it, acts by converting the objects measured by money as money
itself. In the ‘new world,’ slaves were money itself, a medium of transaction
like other mediums of transactions: cloths, cow, tobacco, salt and other stuff.
For that reason, Simmel notes, it was
stated whoever serves money is ‘slave’s slave’ (Simmel, 2004:140, 246). The new
world slavery begins with the psychic effluence of colonisers for ‘plenty of good
land’ available elsewhere (Smith, 2007: 365). The intense desire to grab land
as property from ‘barbarians’ (Smith, 2007: 288) elsewhere dispossessing
infidels had its support even from the Papal Bull.27 It was in
continuation with the mercantile rush for gold and silver (Ferguson, 2008:
20-27), and Smithian call for the wealth of nations.
Smith noted,
In the plenty of good land, the
European colonies established in America and the West Indies resemble, and even
greatly surpass, those of ancient Greece. In their dependency upon the mother
state, they resemble those of ancient Rome; but their great distance from
Europe has in all of them alleviated more or less the effects of this
dependency (Smith, 2007: 365).
Smith
presents as if a superior race gets entry into a land and amicably they
negotiate with the local ‘barbarians’ (Smith, 2007: 288) and imagines the
disproportion
between the great extent of the land [with the new owners] and the small number
of the people, which commonly takes place in new colonies, makes it difficult
for him to get this labour and would result He does not, therefore, dispute
about wages, but is willing to employ labour at any price. The high wages of
labour encourage population (Smith, 2007: 365).
However,
the recorded history reveals, the occupation by ‘superior’ race at ‘plenty of
good land’ differently. The new world was a haven of bought slaves and intense
slave trading by influential profiteering as never preceded in such intensity
in known human history. Slave trade and investment in the purchase of chattel
slaves flourished in the context.28 Du Bois summarises the treatment of the
slaves as property:
In colonies like
those in the West Indies and in South Carolina and Georgia, the rapid
importation into America of a multitude of savages gave rise to a system of
slavery far different from that which the late Civil War abolished. The
strikingly harsh and even inhuman slave codes in these colonies show this. Crucifixion, burning, and
starvation were legal modes of punishment (Du
Bois, 2007:6).
The
New-Atlantic-slavery is the product of a mentality, the dispositif materialised
out of the internal disposition of the West considering itself civilised and
the rest as “wandering
savages and
poor barbarians” (Smith, 2007:319) of the “waste
lands of the greatest natural fertility” (Smith, 2007: 365). A social
relation of interdependence takes decades of trust establishment in a
non-monetary society. Obligations and even relations of dominance were
prevalent. What was new with the dispositions of early modern occupiers of the
West was that, the land they have occupied and labourers they have ‘purchased’
were claimed to be properties with ‘absolute ownership’ they were legally
entitled. Their absolute dominium, to make the matter worse, was believed to be
divinely ordained as they were projected by their premium of thinkers of
‘liberty’ (Brewer and Staves, 2007: 1-18). With the purchasing power of money,
longer drawn of social process had become faster and unambiguous. Eric Williams
rightly remarks, “When slavery is adopted, it is not
adopted as the choice over free labour; there is no choice at all” (Williams,
1944:6). Unlike often claimed, the reasons for slavery,
is neither civilisational nor moral advancements, but the opus operatum of their economic logic found its way in
their modus operandi of wealth accumulation. Nothing
but through rituals of monetary exchange the slave owners could be rationalised
to hold other human beings as a property with absolute ownership right where
the owner and the owned had no culturally mediated previous association. With new world
slavery, money is exchanged between buyers and owners by which another person
caught and chained from elsewhere becomes a property of the purchaser
absolutely without any reciprocal rewards.
New world slavery is different from
other forms of human dominations in degrees, intensity and by genealogy (Blackburn,
1998:4; Drescher, 2002:9). It was not an instance of
primordial instinct to enslave relapsed. Neither
was it one among many kinds of slavery arrayed in a conceptual museum from time
immemorial to the present. The curatorial arrangement of
chattel slavery with other forms of social dominations in encyclopaedic order
imposes a semblance of world order from times immemorial spread across culture
in normalising the counter event,29 its newness hiding its
genealogical rupture from the past (Foucault, 1998a: 178). For instance, James Townley, a missionary apologist begins his
treatise on abolition of slavery with, the statement,
Slavery, in various forms, has existed from the
earliest periods of historical record. It appears to have originated in the
brutal selfishness of lawless power; and though occasionally, and temporarily
modified by the influence of civilisation, or the impulse of humanity, yet it
never received effectual and permanent resistance, except from the
authoritative precepts of divine revelation, and the mild but energetic
principles of the gospel of Christ
(Townley, 1800: x)
Nevertheless, even serious
scholarship has fallen into the trap of normalising slavery through linking it
with primordiality.
For
Karl Marx, the slavery is a relapse “imposed without disguise upon new world”
(Marx, 1847: 50). Weber, anachronistically mixes two
forms of spatio-temporally disconnected slave conditions one from the ancient
Rome and the other from the American experience with slavery in the new world,
and universalises slavery for its poor reproduction and lack of efficiency,
violating his own methodological stipulation of not “to describe the economic
institutions of Antiquity in modern terms”
(Weber, 1976: 45, 397-398). Slavery,
with the onset of modernity, from its epicentre, the European continent, is
pursued by the elitist among its citizens, in an organised manner perplexed even
the brightest minds as they were confident of ‘the march of civilisation’ into
progression. Commenting on the uneasiness of
classical Social Science literature on the question of slavery, Robert Blackburn,
a historian of new world slavery comments,
Exploring
the many ways in which American slavery proved compatible with elements of
modernity will help to dispel the tendency of classical Social Science - from
Adam Smith to Ludwig von Mises, Auguste Comte to Max Weber - to identify
slavery with traditionalism, patrimonialism and backwardness (Blackburn,
1998:4)
Ideas of progression of history, clash
of civilisations and march of superior race (Mateer
1883:66) and the claims of ‘manifest destiny’ had
such a gravity that pulled even the best-known radicals as subjected to the compelling
dispositif (Merk, 1963:ix, 24-60).
The spirit of new world slavery, Newman
sees, had existed in the ‘integral characteristics of the early modern English
society’ in its organisation of labour and the compulsion to work (Newman,
2013:17). Tracing the history of mindset,
that later flourished into full-fledged modern slavery, he writes,
the Ordinance of Labourers (1349) and the ‘Statute
of the Labourers (1351) were intended, at least in part, to check the potential
increase in the power and independence in this land-rich labour-poor
environment by mandating and protecting the rights of masters.
(Newman, 2013:19).
Continuing
with the trend, the Vagrancy Act of 1824, that mandated slavery upon anyone
caught to be wandering homeless or jobless for more than once, reveals inner
inscriptions of the British about the epochal change in their treatment of
labour. Tracing
the origin of the chattel slavery in British colonies, Newman
recounts the story of shipping tens of thousands of jobless people, vagrants,
criminals and prisoners of war from England to Barbados islands, from the mid-seventeenth
century, to West Africa as bonded labourers responding to insatiable needs for
labour by the planters
(Newman, 2013: 34). Planters
imported labour from England because native Blacks then, despite local practices of bonded servitudes, were not
familiar with the total unfreedom of the round the clock labour the planters
would extract in sugar production.
The British planters had to
inculcate its ‘work ethics’ through slave ‘education’ and other means (Newman, 2013: 133). By 1650
Barbados was not only became the greatest wealth-producing area in the
English-speaking world, but also emerged the apt model for accumulating wealth (Newman, 2013: 91).
Newman presents the story of the
natives of Barbados who were gradually trapped into the new-slavery. He
narrates how they became victims of massive transatlantic slave trade and ended
in the new world of America (Newman, 2013: 247). Newman convincingly shows that
it is not the West African primordial slavery, but the early modern ‘servant regime’ prevalent among the Whites was the
impetus for new world slavery (Newman, 2013: 245). Newman’s book repeats the
observations made by other scholars that slave labour later gains racial
character (Newman, 2013: 253). Its racial character is evident by the fact the
White caste by default remained free from inheritance of slavery whereas the
Blacks by default inherit slavery if not given manumission30
(Drescher,
2002: 10). History of Atlantic slavery has shown us that at accumulated desires
for domination and expansion that had been lingering in the European minds
steadily supplied by its early modernity had found its expression, materialisation
and legitimacy and the same had later emerged sophisticated with labels of
capitalism and growth. It
is a counter event erupted
by the intersection of economic, religious, political interests of
In sum, slave
trade has its germination in the British idea of how labour should be organised
and utilised. Interestingly, the same spirit is invoked positively in Max
Weber’s Spirit of Capitalism (Weber
2012). Other forms of social dominance prevailed
elsewhere were in the world qualitatively different,31 as they have
different genealogy.32 Social schemas of
dominance gradually brewing into existence have least to be compared with a new
proprietor of distant land purchasing slaves to amass wealth using their
servitude. “The new-slavery”, it is observed, was “modern” in spirit
(Blackburn, 1998: 4). Its modernity comes from the character of money with which the
slaves were purchased. Other forms of servitudes33
that are often bracketed with new world
slavery are conventions of obligations and indebtedness that reinforce
hierarchic or holonarchic34
interdependences especially in non-monetary social orders. They are not modern
institutions like new world slavery. New world slavery
converted all obligations into monetary terms with attached price tags. Slaves
in the new-slavery are saleable commodities. To make
something salable it had to be ripped off or disembedded from its context
(Paul, 1993: 41-71). Neither the object purchased nor
the context to which the object belongs had any right over each other. It has the characteristic of monetary economy inscribed on
it. For that reason, what Weber presents as the ‘spirit of capitalism’ is also
the spirit of new-slavery. The spirit of new-slavery
and capitalism is the spirit of money. “This is why
they could be bought and sold or even killed: because the only relation they had was to their
owners” observes Graeber (2014:146). It is not
accidental that several of the processes that define slavery, also define
modernity: property, ownership, purchase, transaction, taxation, identity, time
frames, labour, price tags, return on investment, maintenance cost, national
sentiment, administration, individuation, instrumental rationality, alienation
and the list continues. This is because new-slavery and
modernity share the same spirit, the spirit of money. Never before the invention of
money, what one owes to the other was neatly measured or thoroughly
objectified. The purchased are property, the dominium characterised as the absolute
power of the person over the thing (Graeber, 2014: 202). Money, property and
even slavery are often misrecognised as if they were natural a priori.35
III
Often,
the abolition of slavery was presented as a conscientious heroic step ahead of
a few enlightened British souls in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century.36 Abolition was a global project,37
though slavery itself of the same kind and intensity was never global.38
Abolitionists bracketed
all forms of non-monetary interdependencies, obligations and their consequent
social dominations with slavery.
It was projected as both the charity of Protestant Christianity and achievement
of the rebellion by the enslaved.39 It is also pointed out that it is wrong to
consider,
first, that revolts were always
ways of fighting slavery; and second, that the decision to end the system of
slavery in most Western nations was for the most part the outcome of such
revolts (Drescher & Emmer, 2010: 5).
For,
mostly slave rebellions were rebelling for their own freedom, but not against
the system of slavery.40 Abolition in the colonies through proselytisation
was a means towards the appropriation of free labour and a step towards
gripping colonial hold.41
If
keenly observed, it becomes clear that the abolition is the result of slavery
becoming unaffordable symbolically and economically. Adam Smith, sharing the spirit of
the elite class of his period writes,
It appears from the experience of all ages and
nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than
that performed by slaves… the work done by slaves, though it
appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A
person who can acquire no property can have no other interest than to eat
as much, and to labour as little as
possible
(Smith, 2007: 252).
It was noted by historians of
slavery that “the economic superiority of hiring over servile labour, the new,
more “flexible” system of “free” labour was essential for the Western expansion
and development” (Drescher 2002:5). By the time abolition was
projected as radical or moral goodness of the British, it was already well-articulated
commonsensical knowledge that maintaining slave labour is not viable,
competitive or profitable viz a viz
consuming the fruit of the free labour. ‘Fruitlessness of compulsive labour’ had
been an already learnt experiential ‘truth’ in Briton as early as in the mid-late
eighteenth century where it was observed in The
Morning Chronicle of 15 September 1785, “… in every workhouse in the
kingdom. There is in proof too, the felon in the hulks, who produce not a
fourth part of the ballast which is raised in adjourning barges, where men are
working on their own account” (Drescher, 2002: 18). The popular mood against
the costly labour of lazy slaves was part of newspaper editorials and coffee
table discussions of the British culture at that time (Drescher,
1987:242). John Elliot Cairnes capturing the
mindset prevalent at the climate of abolition writes,
[Slave labour] is unskilful; it is wanting in
versatility. It is given reluctantly, and consequently the industry of the
slave can only be depended on so long as he is watched.
[…] Secondly, slave labour is unskilful, and this, not only because the slave,
having no interest in his work, has no inducement to exert his higher
faculties, but because, from the ignorance to which he is of necessity
condemned, he is incapable of doing so. […] But further, slave labour is
eminently defective in point of versatility. The difficulty of teaching the
slave anything is so great,
that the only chance of turning his labour to profit is, when he has once learnt
a lesson, to keep him to that lesson for life. Where slaves, therefore, are
employed there can be no variety of production (Cairnes, 1863:39).
Obviously, slavery was ‘abolished’
as it was economically pragmatic to enslave free labour instead of owning an
unfree slave. Slavery was abolished because the
British capitalism no longer had use of the institution. Economic
ideology had been always in the backdrop of the expansion of slavery, its
abolition and in the projection of ‘free labour’ as freedom (Waldstreicher, 2006:
183-185). Wherever, there was better bargain, it was observed, slavery was
still maintained, even after its abolition (Mill, 1882:252; Major, 2012: 189-197; Raman, 2010: 89-90). As Eric Williams argued in his
seminal work on Capitalism and Slavery, Slavery financed industrial revolution
– industrial revolution devised free labour (Williams,
1944:52). Free labour in colonies as was a new-slavery
introduced in the British colonies, as the chattel slavery as well as
culturally prevalent forms of social dominance were economically and
symbolically unviable in the emerging new social assemblage. Nevertheless, the new-slavery in the form of free labour was
freedom to a limited extent for the people humiliated by the local forms of
social dominance and servitudes. However, it was a triple benefit for the
colonialists as labour appropriation, symbolic victory over the native
dominators and strengthening of the colonists hold could be achieved by the
single strategy of abolition.
Historically,
contrary to the expectations, abolition had intensified racial bias, as former
slaves had become millions of “poor rates” who were feared making “Inroads into
property” to “steal
for their support”
(Anonymous, 1830:198). At this climate, idleness was gaining the currency of
being the most evil. Even the
radical president of America, Thomas Jefferson, pronounced, that the idle among
the freed slaves should be sent “out of the country” (Greene, 1987:1055). The Church
as the religious institution was important then, more than for its claim to
divine connections. It rose to prominence in a new way as it had a secular role
of denouncing idleness 42 of the labour, inculcating ‘labour
morality’ and ‘educating’ the labour in the years following abolition. Hence, at
the behest of
abolition the Church played a crucial role in raising slave schools all over
the world as it took the responsibility of “curing the idleness” as a “New
medicine for poverty”, where
the erstwhile slaves were indoctrinated to overcome poverty through hard work,
labour and “individual responsibility” (Tawney, 1926:
226). The congenial temper of the time
was, “setting the poor on work”. The religion was shifting its emphasis on the
obligation of charity to “the duty of work”. Pamphlets, that echoed slave education reads “The law of God” in
the post-abolition socius was interpreted as, “he that will not work, let him
not eat”.
It was declared, “the greatest of evils is idleness, that
the poor are the victims, not of circumstances, but of their own idle irregular
wicked courses” (Tawney, 1926. 219-222). Making the labour less idled and more responsible was the ‘New
medicine for poverty’ doctrine. The
doctrine is newborn as the ‘spirit of capitalism’ in Weber’s seminal work on
the Protestant Ethics. The medicine was administered through
churches in all locations of The British Imperium. Mobilised by the spirit James Burgh, a
revolutionary protagonist, proposed “to seize all the idle and disorderly
persons, who have been three times complained before the magistrate and to set
them to work, during a certain time, for the benefit of great trading, or
manufacturing companies” (Burgh, 1775: 220-221). Schooling the labour towards greater
responsibility had a pastoral dimension of labour appropriation, and a measure
towards alleviating moral and economic impact of abolition. Abolition in socius of
culturally knit relations of labour, as that was prevalent in India, one of the
colonies of the British Empire, Ravi Raman observes, had its impact of enhanced
supply of labour for the colonial proprietors and planters (Raman, 2010:67). The proselytisation, baptisms and evangelical
activism following the ‘abolition of slavery’ harvested disciplined labour for the property owners, plantations and
prepared the world for the burgeoning industrialization. In addition, it is not accidental that the
world was becoming more ‘secular’ with reduced attendance in the churches,
because, the Church itself, the erstwhile ideological institution for preparing
the labour is replaced by secular institutions supplying sustained labour.
Interestingly, slavery, abolition and free labour were
different manifestations of the same momentum of dispositif.
The
economy, it was recognised, would perform better through purchase of labour
than enslaving labourer. It was at the behest of the economic growth and expansion,
slavery had to be given up. It was also ‘grounded in rigorous and elaborate
economic analyses’ in terms of profitability, viability, and competitiveness
(Drescher, 2002:4). The shift towards free labour happens within the discursive
transition of socius preparing itself for the industrial revolution. In Mill’s
words, the “free market for labour” was indispensable for industry and free
trade (Mill, 1882: 553). But
for abolition of non-market social
dependencies, labour would not have become freely purchasable.43
Economic Compulsions, and not the goodwill of abolitionists or civilisational
advancement destined the abolition.
IV
Money as a dispositif had
constantly drawn the will of socius upon the social and driven it into phases
of servitudes, slavery, its abolition and appropriation of free labour. Money,
is a master dispositive that
continues laying its rails, pathways and trajectories (Bourdieu, 1990:57). The
culture of valuations programmed money as dispositif of the socius. Money, the
apparatus invented to evaluate objects became the object of value itself.
Further, the apparatus made humans its apparatus and mobilised their history to
greater and sophisticated servitudes, interestingly, though its subjects were consistently
belied of greater freedom. Money,
with its capacity for unambiguous accounting naturalised its truth games. Money
replaced religion, God, and nature. Money
has made humans its property:
the possessed and owned by its dispositif power. Money is still not
a finished product. It is becoming and shaping us to become in its moulds.
Money is our active faith turned into force, activity and struggle. It is
the dispositif, the cumulative gravity of socius in the
making. Nevertheless, a reflexive will to power, would
torpedo the dispositif de-singularising
its current.
De-singuralizing the current of protocol cannot be achieved by the convention of
anthropomorphic countervailing strategies like strikes, armed revolutions or
‘progressive’ legislations from the sovereign powers of authority alone. Dispositif is the unhuman power and
hence its resistance too should be unhuman. The politics of counter protocol is the politics of desingularising networks
by demodulating the nodes. Counter-protocols should attend the tensions and
contradictions within the system (Galloway and Thaker, 2007: 98). System of
networks has to be de-disposited through deconstructing the justifications
sustain them. The network may have to be re-assembled with the countervailing
forces historically resisted the current dispositif
but lost in its battle by the swarms of nodes torpedoed the counter-modulation
thereby spoiling the communication between the active nodes and effective
edges. The prowess of the assembled set of network is sustained by resisting
the de-singularising force fields of void, its null set. Power of unseen,
uncounted, unnumbered, unnamed at the burst of events torpedo the protocol.
Recognising the events that ruptures the protocol and cultivating a fidelity
extending the evanescence of ruptures could be expected to transform the chains
of modulations towards reassembling network altogether differently (Badiou
2007). With the collapse of truisms that sustains networks, they would not
withstand the swirls of transitions. Networks can be transformed through praxic
alternatives at the capillary productions and sustenance of dispositif.
A
dispositif exists defying their
rupture by virtue of the linkages and force fields sustain it. It exists
because it signifies ‘the truth’ in the ecology of its existence that obscures its
a-signifying puissance. Dispositif is
not a means to an end as it acts in the case of money. It is the potential of
freedom contrived in a network of significations. It binds us ‘productively’
within the network towards producing our own unfreedom. Dispositif acts from within as its internal dispositions echo networks
of significations within which it is habituated. However, the essence of dispositif is not unfreedom. The content of socius within which the dispositif is found is not the essence
of dispositif. Dispositif is the all-pervading productive force historically
caught within the predatory logic of capitalism and its euphemistic promises of
freedom. Servitude, slavery, its abolition and free labour, as I have presented
the cases, are historically continuing logic of deceits demonstrated with the
apparatus of money. Orders of the Papacy, logics of natural law, legislations
of abolition, constructs of the free market were giving the content and context
of dispositif by which it produced a
social order that has no meaning beyond what its signifying networks were
concealing. Dispositif is the techne and the art of
mind. It is the creative faculty of opening up. “It reveals whatever does not
bring itself forth” (Heidegger, 1977:12). What is decisive in dispositif does not lay the
manipulations we are subjected to within the epistemic soup of the socius, but
in ‘revealing’. Its revealing is not manufacturing, but bringing forth. Money
as the apparatus concealed our dispositif
within its epistemic closures and guided history through ‘modernity’. It has reined
us through the conventions of valuing exerting unreasonable demand on fellow
humans, ecology using the most powerful stuffs created out of human imagination
such as God, religion and the free - market. For the unconcealment of dispositif to happen, it is essential that we
begin our correspondence with what dispositif
actually is rather than being caught into the web of networks that conceals and
forbids its potency. It requires opening up to the a-signifying questionings
than being contained in the signifying answers.
Unlike
declared by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the God of tradition is not dead,
but merely went through metamorphosis and reborn as the ‘modern’. The meta-discourse
of the epoch of ‘modernity’ is mediated by the apparatus of money that is
naturalized by the historical ontology of subjectivations recreated through
internal currents of dispositifs
producing the network of social relations.
In other words, the simulacra of dispositifs
resonate to produce the discursive meshwork of socius mutually reinforcing
their vibrations. Except by invoking active praxis aspect counter-modulating
the resonance one is retransmitting the vibration of discourse across the
network. The external manifestations of multiple forms of dominations in their
renewedly justified forms are manifestations of the vibrancy passes through the
strings of network. Life is not subjectivation. To be alive is to be free. It
means not subjecting life to the vibrancies of discourses. Nurturing the
counter-dispositif active aspect of
life against the current is empowerment. Empowerment reclaims the subject and
truth (Badiou, 2007). We emerge as subjects by repelling subjectivations. One
does not know which trepidation would torpedo the simulacra of the current
unfreedom.
Notes
1. The
socius is the social ‘body without organ’. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
first used the word in their book, “Anti Oedipus” (2004a: 153-159) to indicate
liveliness of the social, a vast reservoir of potential traits, connections,
affects and movements. Socius is the terrain of coding, recoding and decoding.
2. Dispositif
is
sometimes translated as despositor, that which influences dispositions. Dispositif
is a particular constellation of
heterogeneous elements and the system of relations between them which are
according to Foucault are the relations of power and knowledge that constitutes
humans as the subjects of knowledge, which is power itself (Foucault 1980:94)
3. Result
of practices
4. Mode
of practices
5. State
forms are ‘states of power’ that makes production a "mode."( Deleuze
and Guattari, 2004b: 429)
6. A
wide variety of wholes constructed from heterogeneous parts (Deleuze, 2004b:554-556)
7. The
intersection happens in players, Burk qualifies, “ but where it occurs is
distinct from the causal force released by its occurrence. People and organisations
are not so much the source of action as the vehicles for structurally
induced action” (Burke, 1992:181
8. Structural
holes as defined by Robert Burt is, “disconnections and non-equivalences
between players in the arena”. “The
causal force of structural holes”, for
Burts, “resides in the pattern of relationships that intersect in a player's
network”. (Burke, 1992: 1-2, 181)
9. Relations
of nonredundancy visible only by their absence; Burke observes, they connect
invisible pieces of players (Burke,
1992:181)
10. The
‘natural law’ of early modernity and enlightenment has its genesis in Thomas
Aquinas’s (c. 1224–1274) doctrine that holds, it is the dictate from the ruler,
the God for the community he rules (Aquinas, Summa TheologiaeI-IIae, 91, 1; Hochstrasser 2000). The natural law
is universal, immutable (Fox 1910). The Natural Law of Catholic faith belongs
to different origin, genealogy and historical context than that ascribed to
Plato in the history of ideas. Plato’s nature is the ideal, what the world is
not, the ideal presupposing a rupture from existence; the Catholic version is
“embodied in the moral and civil order as evidence of its divine fashioning,
albeit in a form diminished by the Fall of Man” (Hochstrasser, 2002:1607-1610). Badiou opens us to the interpretation
that Plato’s idealism unlike the ‘natural law’ of the enlightenment morality,
is a gateway to ‘inconsistent multiplicity’ that expands ‘the question of being
today’ beyond the ontology of ‘One and the many’ (Badiou 2012)
11. Natural
instincts
12. Drawn
from observed from the patterns and conventions.
13. The
laws learnt naturally by all animals, including humans. Natural Law (ius
naturale) for early Romas is what nature teaches the animals (Datson and
Stolleis, 2008:6)
14. Determined
by the divine providence from above
15. Abstracted
from the total
16. Laws
of the nobility and civilised
17. Superior
rationality
18. Nomos
vs Logos; Nomos = arrangements of a surface; Logos = Laws of depth. Laws as
they emerge in the context (Lefebvre,
2008:236)
19. Scientism
is an attempt to treat substances, including human society and its history as
if it were a decisive ingredient measurable through tenets of positivism.
Scientistic abdication, Bourdieu argues, ruins political conviction.
20. Interestingly,
the fairy tales too have arisen in coterminous with the enlightenment morals of
work and fortune. For instance, see the collection of fairy tales of Marcet,
Jane Haldimand (Marcet, 1833). They are discursively different from the tales
of aborigines or the stories and mythologies prior to the enlightenment
era. However, the ‘minority’ of fairy
tales that resisted those justified natural law as that of Oscar Wild (Killeen
2007).
21. Money
as numismatic objects traced back to the ancestry are objects of different discursive
constellations different from economic rationality of keeping an account of
dues and debts. Kurke distinguishing modern money with that of ancient Greek
suggests, “in a strictly controlled gift exchange circuits… there is no place
for money as a means of exchange” (1999: 11). The modern money is a consequence
to the idea of measuring the worth of individuals in relation to net-worth of
one’s gain or lose vis a vis the
other in an environment where their worth is constantly accounted. The logic
does not extend beyond enlightenment modernity and hence the ancient coins are
discursively of different category than modern money. Kurke further states, “if
we are to properly understand the meanings of money we must situate coinage
squarely in the frame of political and social contestations…” (1999:22). The
ancient money it is suggested is a symbolic value, a ‘pure sign’ to which even
the its ‘amount’ is irrelevant and hence had no transactional value in the
everyday economic exchanges (1999:238).
22. Foucault discovered that the ‘Man’ as an entity of
constant double-essences (on the one hand, as natural individual and object in
the natural world obedient to indiscriminate
dictates of its laws and on the other hand, as a free-willed agent uniquely
capable of comprehending and altering his world around) is a consequence of the
discursive formation of the enlightenment modernity (Foucault, 2002:309). Paradoxically, the free-willed creature, Foucault
observes, nevertheless is thrown into the status of das-man (Heidegger, 2008: 164-168), subjected to the dispositif . The
ideas of man, money and natural laws share the same set of dispositif that had its expression in colonial expansion,
chattel slavery, abolition of slavery, idealization of free labour, the
formation of nation states, industrial revolution and the rest followed.
23. The idea of ‘property’ shares its genealogy with
other related words: ‘nature’,
‘quality’, ‘one’s own’, ‘special characteristic’, ‘proper’, ‘intrinsic’,
‘inherent’, ‘regular’, ‘normal’, ‘genuine’, ‘thorough, complete, perfect etc.,
from the etymological root ‘proprius’ John Locke (1689), see sec.25,
Chapter V, On Property; (Madhu, 2010: 94).
24. Franklin
(1907): In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.
25. Writing
about money, Weber (1978:287) writes, “its acts are determined by its own
financial interests and those of important economic groups”
26. Oeconomy (Oikonomia) is the Upward
continuum of activities; i.e., from micro level economic or administrative
activities to the economy of the state
and administration through multiple domains.
For Agamben, Oikonomia (oikos=
house) is an economy conceived as an immanent order emerges out of a
complicated system of relations, the dispositif (Agamben 2007)
27. Papal
Bull of the year 1455 destined captivity and slavery upon the infidels.
28. Du
Bois documents that the slave trade was
a lucrative practice by the British Colonialists as early as in the first half
of the seventeenth century (2007:6-13). The trade practice intensified by
establishing “The Company of royal adventures trading to Africa” charted by
Charles II in 1662. The slave trade was
then held, “highly Beneficial and Advantageous to this Kingdom, and to the
Plantations and Colonies thereunto belonging”.
Du Bois observes, “the slave trade was the very life of the colonies
had, by 1700, become an almost unquestioned axiom in British practical
economics”.
29. An
event for Badiou (Badiou 2007) is the
burst of the ‘truth’ that breaks the prevailing set of routine. A counter event
on the contrary, is a burst, but that makes a subject subjected to a new mode
of inauthenticity, the untruth.
30. Manumission
is generally understood as the goodwill gesture of the master towards their
slaves. However, research findings also suggest, slave owners acquiring more
slaves after manumitting the older and weaker slaves, the incidences of forcing
the slaves to buy their manumission through additional hard work for a period.
(Whiteman, 2000: 4, 52, 60; Walker, 1963: 263). Manumissions converted the chattel slaves into wage slaves. It is argued
that it enhanced master’s power and control over slaves (Kleijwegt, 2006: 14, 20) .
31. “The
slavery of the Ancient World had been far more diversified, both in the pattern
of employment and in its ethnic composition, ... New world slavery was a curse
that even the grandchildren of the grandchildren of the original African
captive found it exceedingly difficult to escape. This was a strong, even
unprecedented, species of enslavement… Slavery existed in Africa prior to the
Atlantic trade, and long continued to have a social meaning there which was
very different to that prevailing in the Americas”. (Blackburn, 1998:3-5)
32. Genealogy
is a methodological approach by which we trace first occurrences of a
phenomenon in its historical context. It is a method of tracing the
heterogeneity of ethological complexities out of which a new phenomenon is
synthesized.
33. Other
forms servitudes and discriminatory orders such as caste discriminations in
India, Mainty in Madagascar, Osu in Nigeria,
Burakumin of Japan etc., do not share the same genealogy as the slavery of the new
world.
35. "For centuries slavery was 'imagined' as an immutable
part of natural social order. Hence it was utopian to advocate its abolition” ( Kim 1984:81)
36. For
Marxists slavery gave way to feudalism in a natural progression because of
internal contradictions in the slave system (Daviss 1966). Historians of the Church
and missionary held that slavery had to be abolished owing to Christian values
(Roberts 1833). For UNESCO (2014), “The first fighters of slavery were the
captives and the slaves themselves”. It is also observed the abolition of
slavery is a reaction by the British Parliament to absolve ill reputation of
having been in transatlantic slave trader for over three centuries. The mood of
the British is captured, it is said, by the statement of William
Pitt the Younger, in the House of Commons in April 1792, “No nation in Europe
has plunged so deeply into this guilt as Great Britain” while he was
talking in favour of abolition
(Thomas1997: 235-261). For some
others, abolition was purely a government action (Blouet 1991: 391-409).
37. “Britain
was the site …mass movement to abolish the slave trade within its own
jurisdiction. [Towards] the end of the British transatlantic trade in 1807, the
scope of the movement’s ambitions quickly assumed global dimensions…. Britain’s
leadership also engendered an element of national triumpalism in British
historiography” (Drescher, 2002:3-4).
38. Abolition
was equated to proselytising the potential free labour of into Protestant
Christianity. Abolitionists pressurized ministries all over the world to free
labour from whatsoever unfree labour relationships. Samuel Roberts notes in his
historical account of ‘abolition of slavery’ notes, “With the Ministries
themselves it was foolishness [to abolish slavery] for they did it from
compulsion.. but with God’s wisdom, for it was right, and it will be beneficial
in the end to all parties” (Roberts
1833: Townley 1800). The abolition of
British Slavery, “is but one step— an important one, I
grant—in the prosecution of the great work assign … is …destined to be an
instrument in enlightening other Gentile nations” (Townley, 1800:22).
40. Dresche
and Emmer show how most of the rebels themselves had slaves and assisted the
colonial forces in putting down slave rebellions.
41. For
instance the Church history document, states conversion was at the empire
building because “a strong and friendly Christian community will be a support
for the British power in Malabar” (Jeffrey, 2014: 6; Thomas, CY, 2014)
42.
For instance, enslavement of Africans
perpetually was justified as “the ordinary punishment of such idle
vagrants” (Hutcheson, 1840: 202)
References
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