My position in relation to these debates will become clearer by the end of this chapter, but I hesitate to condemn the ideology of the aesthetic as a form of mystification or alienation, or to endorse the idealistic claims made for art as a form of cognition outside the mechanization of social life. In response to the claims made on behalf of the aesthetic, I want to hold on to the possibility that the realm of the sensuous could simultaneously function as the site in which the black body was imprisoned but also as the conduit for its liberation. Whether we are dealing with questions of aesthetic judgment or the realm of taste, the compulsion for a redemptive hermeneutics through an appeal to sensuousness cannot be dismissed out of hand. As the last two chapters of this book will show, for those who were trapped in the political and moral economy of slavery, the presentation of the self through the work of art or an engagement with culture as a weapon against commodification had the capacity to salvage the human identity of Africans in their sites of repression and denial.
Consider the example of Ignatius Sancho. In both his self-representation as a man of letters and in the historic painting by Thomas Gainsborough, Sancho, born a slave in the middle passage, could become a compelling, indeed, a model, modern subject (fig. 1.4). Here we have an unquestionable affirmation of the intimate relation between subjectivity and representation and of the prism of the aesthetic as an “exemplary form of modern reflection.”39 Sancho's correspondence and transactions with other subjects of taste—people such as John Meheux, member of the Indian Board of Trade in London, or Lawrence Sterne, famous novelist—were the means through which this former slave could reflect on his human identity and emplace himself in the modern public sphere.40
Here is Sancho writing to Meheux:
I am uneasy about your health—I do not like your silence—let some good body or other give me a line, just to say how you are—I will, if I can, see you on Sunday…. Now, my dear M[eheux], I know you have a persuasive eloquence among the women—try your oratorical powers.—You have many women—and I am sure there must be a great deal of charity amongst them—Mind, we ask no money—only rags—mere literal rags—patience is a ragged virtue—therefore strip the girls, dear M[eheux], strip them of what they can spare—a few superfluous worn-out garments—but leave them pity benevolence—the charities—goodness of heart—love——and the blessings of yours truly with affection, or something very like it,
I. SANCHO41
In an epistolary transaction like this one covering the pleasurable habits of the London metropolitan culture in the middle of the eighteenth century, it was difficult to detect any distinction between Sancho, the former slave, the child of the middle passage, and Meheux, a distinguished English gentleman working for the board that oversaw the governance of India. Sancho was effectively performing the culture of taste as a gesture of affiliation; in the realm of art the former slave could reimagine himself as a human subject.42
It is now taken for granted by scholars, ranging from the Frankfurt School and neo-Marxism to poststructuralists of various kinds, that the failure of the aesthetic was inherent in its self-positioning as the fulfillment of reason rather than its opposite. No one can write about the redemptive claims of art, especially in the context of slavery and the Holocaust, without confronting Adorno's admonition that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But Adorno also recognized that the task facing cultural criticism was how to develop a method for understanding “the dialectic of culture and barbarism” at its limits, outside the concepts that had enabled it.43 In Negative Dialectics Adorno argued that he had set out “to free dialectics from…affirmative traits without reducing its determinacy,” and this implied “a critique of the foundation concept as well as the primacy of substantive thought.”44
1.4 Thomas Gainsborough, Ignatius Sancho. 1768. Oil on canvas.
One way of troubling the relation between the ideology of the aesthetic and the political economy of modernity, then, is to shift focus from continental European debates on the aesthetic as an epistemological or metaphysical category to British discourses on taste, which emerged under the pressure of the expanding horizons of commercial life in the middle of the eighteenth century. Kant, as is well known, denied the British tradition of taste any claims to philosophical reflection because, as Howard Caygill has noted, “it did not properly account for the universality and necessity of its judgements,” and it tended to confuse sensibility and rationality or to endow the former with “the properties of rational law.”45 Kant's complaint was that the British aesthetic tradition was not transcendental or universal enough to claim the status of philosophical reflection: “To make psychological observations, as Burke did in his treatise on the beautiful and sublime, thus to assemble material for the systematic connection of empirical rules in the future without aiming to understand them, is probably the sole duty of empirical psychology, which can hardly even aspire to rank as a philosophical science.”46
One could, of course, argue that what brought British theorists of taste closer to adjudicating the relation between the realm of art and conduct and the experiences of everyday life was precisely their inability to differentiate sense and sensibility from the properties of rationality and, by extension, their substitution of psychology for empirical rules. Keenly attuned to the daily tensions between commerce and sensibility, British writers on taste were able to generate a set of discourses in which the subjects' phenomenal or sensuous experience could be brought face-to-face with the materiality of modern society. Here, a concern with matters aesthetic was not considered part of an attempt to transcend the world of commerce, but to develop rules and standards that would enable the modern subject to reconcile the opposing demands of the production of goods and civic responsibility. This was the point affirmed by Edmund Burke in the last paragraph of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, where he asserted that his design had not been “to enter into the criticism of the sublime and beautiful in any art, but to attempt to lay down such principles as may tend to ascertain, to distinguish, and to form a sort of standard for them; which purposes I thought might be best effected by an enquiry into the properties of such things in nature as raise love and astonishment in us; and by shewing in what manner they operated to produce these passions.”47
It is instructive that in key sections of his Enquiry, Burke would give “the properties of things” precedence over the ideas or feelings that they generated, for as was true for the writings of many of his contemporaries in the crucial 1750s and 1760s, a turn to matters of taste was also an attempt to account for the meaning and nature of trade or the production of wealth. Indeed, for theorists such Adam Smith, there was an intractable bond between utility and pleasure. A concern with beauty and taste, Smith noted in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, was “often the secret motive of the most serious and important pursuits of both private and public life.”48 And it is not incidental that the theories of taste propounded by Burke and Smith, powerful men with vested interests in matters of empire and governmentality, were haunted by the materiality of social life, especially the excessive values generated by luxurious living. Taste was not the path to transcendence, but a centrifugal force that enabled subjects to confront a world of social energies and desires. Taste, and the realm of the senses in general, would become “active, energetic, almost carnal; a matter of immediate sensation, whether culinary or sexual.”49
What I will be calling the culture of taste in this book, then, is a general reference to a set of practices and ideas that are now considered central to British society in the eighteenth century but are particularly associated with the middle decades of the period. The literature on the emergence of taste as a cultural category and the theories informing it is now extensive, and my goal is to pinpoint those aspects that would ultimately make the category of taste a key mediator between British modernity and what I will call its repressive tendencies—namely, the attempt to use culture to conceal the intimate conn
ection between modern subjectivity and the political economy of slavery.50
Briefly, the project of taste was intended to overcome the traditional dissociation of culture, considered to be an object of “aesthetic veneration,” from the “profane commodity” that was its condition of possibility.51 The reconciliation of these two spheres of social life—that of culture and the commodity—was necessitated by the radical commercialization of British society in the eighteenth century and the transformation of consumption into a distinctive social value. The expansion of empire and trade led to consumer revolution in Britain in the eighteenth century as “more men and women than ever before in human history enjoyed the experience of acquiring material possessions.”52 What was new was not just the individual's desire to consume expensive goods, but also his or her ability to have access to new objects of consumption, many of them produced in the empire. The massive expansion of trade triggered what Neil McKendrick has described as “such a convulsion of getting and spending, such an eruption of new prosperity, and such an explosion of new production and marketing techniques, that a greater proportion of the population than in any previous society in human history was able to enjoy the pleasures of buying consumer goods.” No longer limited to the purchase of basic necessities but also “decencies and luxuries,” consumption would generate a radical transformation in behavior and social attitudes.53
But the new structure of consumption would provoke an even more important transformation in the domain of what would later come to be known as high culture. For where one would have expected culture to be denied its claim to exclusiveness by its ties to commerce, especially in an age when aesthetic debates revolved around the autonomy of art, the commercialization of culture actually led to its revaluation. Paradoxically, culture acquired new value because it was now considered to be a commodity. At the same time, as diverse forms of entertainment became available and accessible to the public, the sphere of culture was expanded across class and gender lines. Previously considered antithetical, commerce and culture began to be reconciled, or to maintain the illusion of comity.54 By 1753, when William Hogarth published his Analysis of Beauty, “written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste,” a new idiom, one revolving around ideas of civility and manners, now occupied the center of debates about British identity.55
There were two salient indicators of the ascendance of a culture of taste and its irruption into the public domain: one was the saturation of the common culture by discourses about taste and ancillary categories such as beauty and manners; the other was the expression, and later overcoming, of the traditional opposition between commerce and virtue. From the publication of Lord Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), continuing with Francis Hutcheson's Inquiry into the Originals of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), and ending with Archibald Alison's Essay on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), a primary, though not exclusive, concern of British intellectuals was the invocation of taste as a cognate for a set of cultural practices that were expected to provide stability in an age of change and crisis. A culture of taste, it was assumed, would serve as what Robert W. Jones has aptly called a “discursive counter.”56 In effect, taste was elevated into a political discourse through which other concerns of the age, including its anxiety about commerce, could be processed, mediated, and regulated.57 The entry of the category of taste into the domain of politics—and of politics in the field of manners—signaled a larger transformation of British society during this period, one that cut across genders, social classes, and even regions, informing and ultimately transforming all of them.58 By the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, for example, birthright and rank were no longer considered to be the golden standards in determining modes of behavior or social relationships. Where before social rank had been the determinant of one's position in society, the consumption of culture now determined the character and quality of the self.59
As most of the major novels of the eighteenth century illustrate vividly, money, rather than rank, had become the major mediator of social relationships, the authorized agent of regulating behavior.60 Rather than serving as the immutable marker of class boundaries, taste had become an agent for prying the old class system; the upper ranks now seemed open to people with money and education; the availability of imports, such as East Indian textiles, provided greater choices of dress and furnishings; and, of course, colonial wealth reinvented the category of the gentleman.61 The disappearance of sumptuary laws during this period was a visible indicator of how far-reaching and deep these changes were, for when consumption, which was tied to the ability to pay for goods and services, was accepted as the arbiter of social standing, there was no longer an impetus to maintain hierarchy by statute. Indeed, sumptuary laws, which had instituted dress to denote social station, were now considered an affront to liberty.62
But the process of reconciling commerce and taste also created deep anxieties. For one, it generated an “orgy of spending,” and this came to be presented as a sign of the excesses associated with new money. The general feeling was that the radical transformations in private behavior triggered by consumption had the potential to disrupt the social order.63 It seemed as if there was no longer a common standard by which to judge behavior; the age of politeness lived under the shadow of excess, leading Sir Richard Steele to worry that “the most polite Age” was “in danger of being the most vicious.”64 Commerce and commercialization, figures of aggressive acquisitiveness and free spending, seemed to be at odds with the doctrine of politeness and regulated behavior that was at the core of the culture of taste. Moreover, there was a suspicion that commerce, lacking an inherent moral value in itself, needed a set of principles to regulate it, to ameliorate its roughness, and to harmonize it with the ideals of virtue that were central to how the culture imagined itself. This is why debates about art, culture, the aesthetic, or taste in the early eighteenth century seemed constantly driven by a torsion of anxiety created by the drive for consumption, expanding trade, and the need to regulate behavior. There was a need for a new cultural space where these two components would overcome their dialectical and diametrical nature and become part of a totality in which the ideals of a modern identity would be rehearsed, replayed, and affirmed. But where would this space be located, and what would be its nature?
In 1675 King Charles had forbidden the operation of coffeehouses in England, arguing that these houses of leisure, later to emerge as the new centers of the new culture of taste, were distracting tradespeople from their businesses, leading to indolence, and spreading malicious and scandalous reports that led “to the defamation of his Majesty's government and to the disturbance of the peace and quiet of the realm.”65 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, coffeehouses and other places of leisure, including operas and luxury gardens, were being recognized not as dens of sedition but as regulatory forums.
Coffeehouses, however, were just the outward symbol of a larger revolution in the British public sphere. From the end of the seventeenth century onward, the project of British political and aesthetic philosophy was primarily the search for, and development of, discursive practices and principles that would be able to govern conduct in an age when old standards were out of joint with the new order of commerce. This was a time when what had been assumed to be Augustan order barely concealed often bitter and confused debates “over the relations between reason, virtue, and passion.”66 Within the confusions and debates that underlay the surface equanimity of the Augustan order, discourses about taste became “part of the search for new social standards and new forms of regulating behavior.”67 Concerned that indulgence, the inevitable consequence of unregulated consumption, was fatal to the body and mind and that “luxury, riot, and debauch” were “contrary to the true enjoyment of life,” the Earl of Shaftesbury would embark on an aesthetic project in which the principle of private pleasure would be subordinated to and enhanced by social good or
public virtue.68
But the acceptance of taste as a regulatory mechanism had not come about without doubt. For most of the 1750s, writers on taste had been preoccupied with the amorphousness of the concept itself: how could a category such as taste, or even ancillary ones such as civility and beauty, be asked to perform such important cultural work and yet be surrounded by “great inconsistence and contrariety”?69 That was the question posed by David Hume in 1757 as he tried to figure out whether such a subjective category as beauty could be judged on the basis of unanimous rules:
The sentiments of men often differ with regard to beauty and deformity of all kinds, even while their general discourse is the same. There are certain terms in every language, which import blame, and others praise; and all men, who use the same tongue, must agree in the application of them. Every voice is raised in applauding elegance, propriety, simplicity, spirit in writing; and in blaming fustian, affectation, coldness, and a false brilliancy: But when critics come to particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes, and it is found, that they have affixed a very different meaning to their expression.70
The problem that was bothering Hume in “Of the Standard of Taste”—how to establish standards of taste in the face of subjective responses to phenomena—seemed to trouble a significant number of British philosophers and literary critics in the middle of the eighteenth century. This problem had bothered Samuel Johnson in 1751 as he reflected on the vagueness and undifferentiated nature of beauty, “different in different minds and diversified by time or place.”71 And in his Enquiry, Burke constantly worried about the lack of “concurrence in any uniform or settled principals which relate to taste”; concerned that “the term taste like all figurative terms” was not “extremely accurate,” he thought it was “liable to uncertainty and confusion.”72 Concerned that the word beauty was surrounded by “a confusion of ideas” that made “our reasonings upon subjects of this kind “extremely inaccurate and inconclusive,” Burke, like Hogarth, wanted to fix the standards of taste. This could be done, he averred, “from a diligent examination of our passions in our own breasts; from a careful survey of the properties of things which we find by experience to influence those passions; and from a sober and attentive investigation of the laws of nature, by which those properties are capable of affecting the body, and thus of exciting our passions. If this could be done, it was imagined that the rules deducible from such an enquiry might be applied to the imitative arts, and to whatever else they concerned, without much difficulty.”73
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