Spectres of the Atlantic

Wednesday 20 March 2024

notes

Summary & notes for the book Specters of the Atlantic by Ian Baucom. Published in 2005 by Duke University Press.

Chapter 1

Baucom begins in Liverpool, with a petition sent – yet, importantly, left unread – to the Lords Commissioners of the Admirality, who oversaw much of the administration of the Atlantic slave-trade, in July 1783. The letter detailed the story of the Zong massacre, written and sent by anti-slavery campaigner Granville Sharp. Baucom therefore begins, quite intentionally, by positioning this book as a counterarchive – the “...book is a history of that unacknowledged letter, [...] the silence it writes into the history of empire and the modern, and the efforts that have been made to broach that silence” (Baucom, 2005, page 4).

What is acknowledged by the Lords Commissioners, in the logs of proceedings for which we have records, paints a “surreal” picture of their day-to-day business. Baucom gives the example of minutes from July 3, 1783 in which: the widow of a late Captain is awarded 100 pounds a year and half pay; a Lieutenant, who lost his right thigh in action, is awarded 5 shillings a day and half pay; etc. In this sense the Lords Commissioners “do not emerge [...] as the architects of history, but as its petty clerks, accountants...” What such a macabre focus shows therefore, is the triumph of a “monetarizing anatomization of the body” – the triumph of something like bookkeeping over “an embodied knowledge of history” (Baucom, 2005, page 5–7).

Liverpool, numbering as it does among the capitals of ‘shipping, trading and finance’ developed during this time period, is then, for Baucom, a capital of what he calls ‘the long twentieth century.’ This claim is intended as a corollary to Benjamin's ‘Exposé’ of the 1930s, in which Paris is claimed as the ‘Capital of the Nineteenth Century’1. What, for Benjamin, marks Paris' importance during the c19th is the manner in which the commodity form takes hold within Parisian life, and how this articulates and extends an ‘increasingly global culture system’ and how the “fetish character of commodities [stands] at [its] center” (Baucom, 2005, page 8–9).

For Benjamin – as articulated by Baucom — the key principle of the commodity (and the global system from which it springs) is the production and ‘petrification’ of exchange values. What c19th Paris highlights is the development of a system of exchange “whose central activity was the display, inspection, collection, and consumption of [...] commodities, [...] whose signature aesthetic object was [... for Benjamin] the allegorical fragment”. This relation to allegory (and specifically the allegorical form developed in c17th Europe) is important, as it “enacts the central logic of commodifcation by conferring on its subject matter an abstract signification analogous to the economic value that capital processes of exchange confer upon the commodity.”2 This leads into a system of identification inherent to commodity fetishism: even those economically excluded from circuits of consumption are, to quote Benjamin, “imbued with the exchange value of commodities to the point of identifying with it”, obscuring for all the labour from which these commodities ultimately derive. Paris, with its Haussmannian boulevards, inflected though the allegorical prose of the flaneur (as in Baudelaire), thus stages itself as the ‘world center of commodity fetishism’ (Baucom, 2005, page 9).

Liverpool (and the Zong in particular) is to Baucom, therefore, what Paris is to Benjamin – in that it articulates and extends a set of logics which condition capitalist, colonial modernity as we experience it today. In developing this analysis Baucom highlights the commodification of the slaves themselves, how none of the names of the 440 people purchased by Luke Collingwood (captain of the Zong) survive, and yet their ‘values’ (“30 pounds a head”, or £13,200 in total) do. In keeping with the ‘monetarizing anatomization of the body’, Baucom writes that “what we [do] know of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is that among the other violences it inflicted [...] was the violence of becoming a ‘type’”, a type of person, nonperson, property, money or commodity. (Baucom, 2005, page 11).

More generally, the question of what was or was not known to the British administrators and insurers of the c18th begins to articulate the logics of financialisation Baucom is counterposing to Benjamin's focus on commoditization – what we might call something like an actuarial imaginary3 or actuarial epistemology. By insuring the Zong's ‘cargo’ for over £15,000 while knowing ‘little more than the name of the ship and its captain’ the role of a certain type of ‘imagination’ is foregrounded and accredited. Baucom concretizes this shift in referencing both: the struggle between an empirical (evidentiary) and a contractural (credible) epistemology, one which is played out in the debates (and court cases) between slave traders and abolitionists during this time period; and the well documented economic transition between the 'old landed and new moneyed classes'. (Baucom, 2005, page 15-16)

Here Baucom turns to the analysis of scholars such as J.G.A. Pocock and Michael McKeon, who demonstrate the ways in which the emergence of the novel itself mirrors broader epistemological shifts in c18th British public life: “...whose ontolgy is to the precusor genres of genealogical history and genealogical romance what mobile property is to landed property and whose theory of knowledge is to a classical historical epistemology what credibility is to evidence.” The Zong trials are then, for Baucom, also a test of the ‘novelization’ of this new collective imaginary – its protocols of ownership, underwriting and valuation. (Baucom, 2005, page 16)

In a very basic sense this ‘test’ puts the lie to the idea that there was no material evidence of the slave trade in Britain during this time, and furthermore shows how this evidence operates on a ‘belated’ temporal logic (the time and distance of the slave trade effectively requiring merchants to conduct business on credit). This again relies on a reversal of those protocols of value creation central to commodity captal – here, “value does not follow but precedes exchange”, exchange does not create value so much as retrospectively confirm it, offering “belated evidence to what already exists.” Returning to Benjamin's schema – in which the nineteenth century ‘enthroned’ the commodity-as-allegory of the seventeenth – we can see the ‘long twentieth century’ as that moment which “makes sovereign the value form legally secured in the Zong's marine insurance contract.” Just as Benjamin's nineteenth century inherits or is ‘encoded’ by the seventeenth, the long twentieth inherits the eighteenth. (Baucom, 2005, page 17-18)

But how – or rather why – is it that these anachronistic moments ‘encode’ one another? What philosophy of history can account for the repetition in (or over) the nineteenth century of the seventeenth?

Here Baucom turns to Richard Halpern, in his analysis of Benjamin's linking between the allegorical and commodity form – as Halpern writes: “the commodity is, in essence, practical allegory [... devaluing] its own thingly existence, as does allegory, in order to signify an invisible realm of values...” whether that of ‘meaning’ or ‘exchange’.4 Building on this, he turns to Frederic Jameson, whose “explanation, or explication, of such reptitions emerges from his theory of genre.” For Jameson, genres seek to ‘resolve’ (or at least ‘encode’) the “concrete experiences and ideologies of their particular historical moments”, they “survive by carrying within themselves [...] the signature ideologies of their formative moments, which they then rewrite onto the subsequent historical moments in which they are redeployed.” Genre critique is then, for Jameson, the analysis of what he calls ‘formal sedimentation’: “The ideology of form itself, thus sedimented, persists into the later, more complex structure.”5 (Baucom, 2005, page 19)

And yet still, absent within these accounts, is, for Baucom, a “theory of causality for such recurrences.” While Jameson shows the ways in which “generic repetition signals the political restaging of some earlier ideological contest, he does not tell us why a particular genre should survive”. Here the frame of Baucom's question is subtle, asking: “...why, in this case, the repeated generic instance (nineteenth-century allegory) should temporally coincide with the original rise to dominance of the ideology it is said to encode (commodity capital) rather than signaling the belated return to dominnace of that ideology.” (Baucom, 2005, page 19-20)

Here Halpern's conceptualisation – of the commodity as ‘allegory in the sphere of social practice’ (practical allegory) – is positioned as an answer. Reversing the traditional Marxian analytic of ‘base and superstructure’ Halpern argues that the commodity “cannot offer a historical-materialist ‘explanation’ of allegory [...but rather] occupies the inverse position: it is not what underlies allegory but what exceeds [or surpasses] it.” Allegory is rendered ‘obsolete’ by way of the commodity-form's perfection and globalisation of its logic of representation: allegory is not the literary ‘effect’ of commodity capitalism, it is instead “something closer to an epistemological condition of possibility [...], a mode of representation which enables [...] an intensification [of this form of capital].” (Baucom, 2005, page 21)

So what “happens to that logic of representation, that phenomenology, over the course of the intervening century?” What then of the relationship between the eighteenth and twentieth? Here Baucom turns to Giovanni Arrighi and his ‘oscillating’ theory of capitalism's historical repetitions and intensifications. In doing so Baucom maps Benjamin's ‘repetocentric’ periodizations of capital on to Arrighi's analysis of its long and short dureés, arguing that something like “Benjamin's cultural materialism [is required] to reveal the ways in which the oscillating forms of capital inform and are informed by the shifting phenomenologies and recycled generic protocols of cultural practice.”6 (Baucom, 2005, page 23)

For both Arrighi and Benjamin “time does not pass, it accumulates”: for Benjamin, time accumulates, above all, in things (in the commodities we have been discussing); and for Arrighi, it does so in what John Ruggie calls capital's ‘spaces-of-flows’ (in the warehouses, store windows, quarters of high-finance, stock exchanges, etc)7. From this observation Arrighi constructs a history of capital constructed through periodic dureés or “systemic cycles of accumulation”, each containing within it the “elements of Marx's general formula for capital MCM'”. Baucom then maps Benjamin's seventeenth and nineteenth centuries onto Arrighi's cycles not so much as ‘periods’ in their own right, as “the midpoints (the commodity moments) of the larger cycles within which they are encompassed” (specifically the centrepoints of the Dutch and British cycles). (Baucom, 2005, page 25-26)

Returing then to the Zong, Baucom seeks to position the historical moment in which it sailed within this schema, with paricular focus on the MM' phases (which overlap the MCM') during which “capital seems to turn its back entirely on the thingly world, sets itself free from the material constraints of production and distribution, and revels in its pure capacity to breed money from money...” These are moments which Arrighi describes as ‘moving forward and backward simultaneously’, in which “old regimes [of accumulation] are repeatedy resurrected as soon as the hegemony that superseded them is in its turn superseded...”, an ‘accumulation of primitivity’ in which “apparently ‘late’ or ‘mature’ finance capital [...] finds itself succeeded by the more ‘primitive’ commodity form that it, in its turn, has just succeeded.” (Baucom, 2005, page 27-28)

Footnotes

  1. Walter Benjamin, Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1969) [link] ↩

  2. The quote Baucom provides from Benjamin's Arcades Project is perhaps clearer: “The key to the allegorical form, is bound up with the specific signification which the commodity acquires by virtue of its price. The singular debasement of things through their signification, something characteristic of seventeenth-century allegory, corresponds to the singular debasement of things through their price as commodities.” For more on this read: Bainard Cowan, Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory (1981) [link] ↩

  3. A term proposed by Lauren Berlant in The Epistemology of State Emotion [link] and developed by Ben Dibley and Brett Neilson in Climate Crisis and the Actuarial Imaginary: 'The War on Global Warming' [link]. ↩

  4. Richard Halpern, Shakespeare among the Moderns (1997) [link]. Baucom also cites Susan Buck-Morss and her conceptualisation within the Arcades of a ‘counterallegorical‘ project which can ‘awaken’ the meanings which lay within them. ↩

  5. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) ↩

  6. Later Baucom writes: ”If Arrighi's model holds true we could predict that the two commodity moments of interest to Benjamin would each be preceded and followed by a money phase, a moment in which capital acucmulates, primarily, not in the commodity form but in the paper, credit, stock, or other speculative forms of finance capital. If Arrighi's model, in its turn, is reread through Benjamin, then we could further predict that each of those money phases would coincide with or be accompanied and enabled by a series of epistemolofical transformations and the emergence – or reemergence – of a set of cultural forms which dialectically encode and make possible these reorientations of capital. Arrighi's history of capital, I am thus suggesting, provides the grounds for a historicization of Benjamin, while the methodological framework of Benjamin's analyses of aesthetic and cultural forms provides the grounds for an epistemolofical counterhistoricization of Arrighi.” (Baucom, 2005, page 26) ↩

  7. The passage of Arrighi which Baucom cites, by way of explanation, is as follows: “Marx's general formula for capital (MCM') can therefore be interpreted as depicting not just the logic of individual capital investments, but also a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism as a world system. The central aspect of this pattern is the alternation of epochs of material expansion (MC phases of capital accumulation) with phrases of financial rebirth and expansion (CM') phases. In phases of material expansion money capital ‘sets in motion’ an increasing mass of commodities (including commoditized labor-power and gifts of nature); and in phases of financial expansion an increasing mass of money capital ‘sets itself free’ from its commodity form, and accumulatio proceeds through financial deals (as in Marx's abridged formula MM'). Together, the two epochs or phases constitute a full systemic cycle of accumulation.” Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (1994) ↩