specters of the atlantic (ian baucom)

8/10/2019 Specters of the Atlantic (Ian Baucom)

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Ian Baucom

The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 100, Number 1, Winter 2001,

pp. 61-82 (Article)

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Ian Baucom

Specters of the Atlantic

The sea is slavery. . . . Sea receives a body as if that

body has come to rest on a cushion, one that givesway to the bodys weight and folds round it like an

envelope. Over three days such bodies, no, ,

are flung at this sea. Each lands with a sound that

the sea absorbs and silences. . . . Those bodies have

their lives written on salt water. The sea current turns

pages of memory. One hundred and thirty one souls

roam the Atlantic with countless others. When the

wind is heard it is their breath, their speech. The sea

is therefore home.

The Zong is on the high seas. Men, women and chil-

dren are thrown overboard by the Captain and his

crew. There is no fear or shame in this piece of in-

formation. There is only the fact of the Zong and its

unending voyage and those deaths that cannot be un-

done. Where death has begun but remains unfinished

because it recurs. Where there is only the record of the

sea. . . . Those spirits feed on the story of themselves.

The past is laid to rest when it is told.

Fred DAguiar,Feeding the Ghosts

So begins and ends the Guyanese writer FredDAguiars Feeding the Ghosts, a novelistic ac-count of the massacre by drowning of

slaves aboard the slave ship Zong, a murder

TheSouth Atlantic Quarterly:, Winter .Copyright by Duke University Press.


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62 Ian Baucom

ordered by the ships captain, Luke Collingwood, when he became aware

that he had steered his ship off course, that his supplies of water and food

were running out, that his cargo would perish before he could steer it to

port, and that the only way for him to guarantee a profit to himself and the

vessels Liverpool owners was to jettison all those sickly slaves who, by con-

tinuing to consume water, were threatening the welfare of their fellows

and then to claim compensation for these jettisoned goods under the sal-

vage clause of the Zongs marine insurance policy. Collingwood orderedthe murders, and on his return to London, when the insurers would not

pay, he and the ships owners sued. A bizarre series of court cases followed.

Collingwood died before the suit could reach court, but the owners pursued

the case, whose successful outcome, from their point of view, depended ontheir need to prove that the slaves had indeed existed, that their agent had

had them murdered, and that such a massacre was not only necessary but,

under the operating laws of property, had conferred on each of the slaves

bodies a measurable and recoverable quantity of valuethat, indeed, the

only question of justice pertinent to this case was the question of the insur-

ance companys obligation to compensate the shipowners for their loss.1

On which point, let me pause for just a moment, for it is precisely with

regard to questions of justice and value that the case of theZonghas a bear-ing upon that contemporary discourse of memory that I want to discuss,

a discourse in which the theory of value upon which a politics of diasporic

remembrance founds itself originates in a refusal to identify either value

or justice with that law of exchange which was the true law governing the

outcome of theZongtrials. For if it was a commercial triumph of the ex-change principle that permitted the courts to find, as they did, that Colling-

wood had produced something of value in each of those moments in which a

slaves body hit the surface of the sea, that each such miniapocalypse was not

only an apocalypse of death but an apocalypse of money, an apocalypse in

which, through the metaphoric imagination of capital, death and the money

form name one another as literal equivalents, then it was also a conceptu-

alization ofjusticeas exchange, the triumph of a classical thinking of jus-tice codified for Enlightenment modernity in Hegels Philosophy of Right,that permitted what were to become a series of court inquiries into the

eighteenth-century laws of marine insurance to confirm those fundamen-

tal and complementary laws of capital which dictate that justice is done and

value produced when one thing is exchanged for another. By such think-


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Specters of the Atlantic 63

ing, justice is little more than a means of measuring the fungibility of all

things, a way, in Hegels terms, of discovering, even in cases where the

damage done amounts to destruction and is irreparable, that damage is, in-

deed, reversible, that something can be substituted for the lost thing, some-

thing that will take the place of its specific qualitative character, some-

thing, in this case, called money.2 If such conceptions of justice, value, and

insurance emerge from theZongtrials as capitals contribution to the his-tory of mourning, then the notions of justice and value that emerge from

a contemporary politics of black Atlantic remembrance, a politics in which

the case of the Zonghas once more become a central event, articulate afar more complex understanding of what it means to exchange one thing

for another: an understanding that is at once recognizably melancholic andcountermelancholic, equally devoted to the singular and to the notion of ex-

change but devoted, in that case, to a reconceptualization of the protocols

of exchange fundamentally consonant with that implied by a hauntological

rethinking of justice.

What I ultimately want to suggest by tracing such questions through a

series of recent narratives of the Zongmassacre is that a contemporary blackAtlantic allegoresis of the middle passage animates its hauntological interro-

gation of a classical discourse on justice and exchange by repeatedly posingthe question of value as a problem of naming and seeing: of knowing how to

name what we see and how to value what we name when we view this event

from a distance of two hundred years, or indeed from whatever distance

separates the viewing ofsuchan atrocity fromthisatrocious scene. Indeed,as I hope to suggest, the very difference implicit in the decision to seethisscene as such a scene or as an undecidable complement of this and such

scenes, not only figures the relationship between a classical and a poststruc-

tural theory of justice, but also allegorizes those black Atlantic negotiations

of the exchangeable and the singular that are my primary object of inquiry.

But that is the end point of my argument and I am still at the beginning,

still back in those courtrooms, one presided over by Lord Mansfield and

attended not only by the litigants but also by Granville Sharpe, who had been

informed of the case by Ouladah Equianoh, and who had funded an appeal

of the first verdict, which had gone in favor of the shipowners. The owners

won the appeal also. But Sharpe, who dispatched a stream of letters on the

massacre to the London papers, the Admiralty courts, the prime minister,

and various abolitionist organizations, was able to help make that a Pyrrhic


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64 Ian Baucom

victory. Thanks in large part to his efforts, insurance law was changed, and if

histories of abolition are anything to go by, the abolitionist cause itself owed

a good deal of its early energy to outrage occasioned by the murder. Certainly

the case of theZongacquired a good deal of notoriety in the late eighteenthand early nineteenth centuries. The massacre, recorded in the trial docu-

ments, the pages of the Morning Chronicle, and in one letter after another inGranville Sharpes set of transatlantic correspondences, was soon recounted

once again by John Newton, Ottobah Cuguano, and Thomas Clarkson.3

And in , the story of the massacre began to assume what has been,

until the past decade or so, its canonical form as a monument to the horrors

of the slave trade.Canonical formmay however be less precise thangeneric

form, for in that year, in the debates on the abolition of the slave trade held inthe House of Commons, the story of the massacre was retold: though now

not as the story of a particular historical event, the story of something that,

to return to Hegels words, had a specific qualitative character, but as one

in a series of equivalent stories, a story of suffering in which (to quote Hegel

once more) the universal quality of the damage, i.e. its value, must . . .

take the place of its specific qualitative character. 4 This substitution was

effected by William Wilberforce as, without mentioning the ship by name,

he resketched the events aboard theZongin an effort to convince his audi-ence that counter to the assertions of his opponents, slave captains did in-

deed make slaves walk the plank. 5 And again it must be stressed that he

did so with questions of both justice and value in mind, that he did so, in

part, to increase the didactic value of his story, or indeed, by the terms of

Hegels purely speculative philosophy of right, in order to lend that story

any value whatsoever. For by such terms it is only when a story of this sort

can be understood, precisely, as a story of this sort, as one in an equivalent

series of such stories, that it can have value. And that is becausevalue, forHegel, pertains only to that which escapes specificity, that which enters into

a circulation of exchangeable equivalents. If the unexchangeable is, in conse-

quence, that which has no value, it is also, on this account, that which dwells

outside the domain of justice. For the demand that justice places upon its ob-

jects is, precisely, that those objects disclose their value, that they surrender

themselves to its market of substitutive recompense. If justice, thus con-

ceived, abominates the singular, then its fantasy, however paradoxical this

may seem, is the fantasy of absolute damage, the fantasy of the erasure of

the singular. Such justice is not, then, that which protects us from damage.


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It is damage absolutized. Only by stripping a thing of all that is specific to

it can such justice speak its name.

As with things, so, in this case, with narrativeswhich means, not that

Wilberforce was thinking ofThe Philosophy of Rightwhen he told his tale, butthat his rhetoric displays the working of the same logic. What Wilberforce

seems to have sensed was that his story was imperiled by its very specificity,

that its value would attenuate to a zero point the more unique it became.

The story, in other words, had to become generic if it was to have any use,

if Wilberforce was to inspire in his audience anything but melancholy, any-

thing but a paralyzed regret before the absolute specificity of a scene of irre-

versible human damage. And if that was Wilberforces impulse, an impulse

to ground the value of memory in the substitution of the generic for thesingular, the series for the event, then it is an impulse that has proven ex-

tremely difficult to resist. Over the past two centuries, when theZonghasbeen invoked, it has repeatedly been invoked in a serialized, dematerialized

relation to itself, invoked not as irredeemably singular but of value precisely

because it can be read as equivalent either with the slave trade itself or with

that anxious, Heidegerrian experience of modernity which, in Paul Gilroys

and Edouard Glissants work, is an experience of confronting an ontopologi-

cal displacement, of being thrown from a knowable placeworld into thebewilderments of a delocalized, despecified world space. If Wilberforces

discourse and J. M. W. Turners canvasSlavers Throwing Overboard theDead and DyingTyphoon Coming On(renamedThe Slave Ship) inaugurateand epitomize the former mode of serialization as they situate the problem

of the Zongwithin a classical discourse on justice, then Glissants CaribbeanDiscoursesandPoetics of Relation are paradigmatic of the later impulse toequate the massacre aboard theZongwith a global logic and the experienceof modernity.

To be sure, the Martinican novelist and philosopher does not mention theZongmassacre by name. But something like that event, some revenant ver-sion or afterimage of it is central to his two most celebrated works. Indeed,

if we read between Caribbean Discourses and Poetics of Relation, it quickly be-comes apparent that the two texts are held together by a singular scene that

seems to have been haunting Glissant for well over a decade, a scene at least

genealogically related to that with which I began, a scene of slaves drown-

ing. First present in Caribbean Discourses as something called to his mind by

a phrase in one of Edward Brathwaites works (The unity is submarine),


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66 Ian Baucom

that scene repeats itself not only in the first section of the later Poetics ofRelation(repeats itself, indeed,asthe occasion for the opening meditationsofPoetics of Relation,asthe scene of terror from which Glissants poeticstakes its departure) but, metaleptically, in the epigraphs that introduce that

book. Here, in the earlier work, Caribbean Discourses, is what Brathwaitescomment causes Glissant to see:

To my mind this expression [The unity is submarine] can only evoke

all those Africans weighed down with ball and chain and thrown over-

board whenever a slave ship was pursued by enemy vessels and felt too

weak to put up a fight.They sowed in the depths the seeds of an invisible

presence. And so transversality, and not the universal transcendence ofthe sublime, has come to light. It took us a long time to learn this. Weare the roots of a cross-cultural relationship. . . . We thereby live, we

have the good fortune of living, this shared process of cultural muta-

tion, this convergence that frees us from uniformity.6

And here, some years later, is the reapparition of that scene (a reapparition

that is staged on the second page ofPoetics of Relationbut that, in a sense,does not wait until that page is turned to present itself again, that encroaches

on the readers eye as an intimation of dj vu the moment the eye, scan-ning the books epigraphs, sees there, again, the line by Brathwaite [The

unity is submarine] alongside one by Derek Walcott [The sea is history]

and sees in anticipation, and in memory, what Glissant himself is about to

see again):

The next abyss was the depths of the sea.Whenever a fleet of ships gave

chase to slave ships, it was easiest just to lighten the boat by throw-

ing cargo overboard, weighing it down with balls and chains. These

underwater signposts mark the course between the Gold Coast and theLeeward Islands. Navigating the green splendor of the seas . . . still

brings to mind, coming to light like seaweed, these lowest depths, these

deeps. . . . In actual fact the abyss is a tautology: the entire ocean, the

entire sea gently collapsing in the end into the pleasures of sand, makes

one vast beginning, but a beginning whose time is marked by these

balls and chains gone green. . . .

For though this experience made you, original victim floating toward

the seas abysses, an exception, it became something shared and madeus, the descendants, one people among others. Peoples do not live on


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exception. Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of

shared knowledge. This experience of the abyss can now be said to be

the best element of exchange.7

The reversal that structures Glissants first image of this scene, the reversal

that replaces an image of terror with an image of promise, a knowledge of

endings with a knowledge of beginnings, is once again present here, though

now that reversal manifests itself not only as an essentially performative

act (in J. L. Austins sense of the word) but as a tropological argument, as

a poetics whose organizing figures (exception, exchange, relation)

name Glissants attempt to grasp and make sense of the reversal he had

earlier merely insisted upon.Indeed, this passage from exception to relation, this passage from a vision

of exceptional suffering and of those violently excepted from history to a

vision of a unity, a solidarity, functions as a shorthand code for, or conden-

sation of, Glissants entire poetics of relation. Crucially, however, what me-

diates that reversal, what enables that passage (from endings to beginnings,

from terror to promise, from exception to relation), is a second, implied re-

versal: a reversal of what, with reference to the slave trade, we commonly

understandexchangeto entail. For if, in this context,exchangesuggests not

merely a formal, Marxian, logic of dematerialization, a stripping away ofthe exceptional quality of things in their transit from use values to ex-

change values, but an absolutization of such dedifferentiating protocols, an

apocalyptic stripping away of the exceptional quality of persons in their tran-

sit from humanness to money, then, however counterintuitive this might

seem, what Glissant suggests is that exchange must be apprehended, in pre-cisely such moments, not only as a word forlossbut as a word forgain.Ex-change, in this sense, once more names a form of substitution, though here

what replaces exceptionality is not fungibility but relation, whererelationisa word for an antimelancholic politics of memory, and a word for those new

forms of culture, identity, and solidarity that emerge from even this most

violent scene of Atlantic exchange.

Ifexchange, for Glissant, is a word that names an unending process, an en-during drama of historical transformations in which anything we might be

inclined to regard as an event survives its happening as an endless series

of aftereffects, it does, nevertheless, seem to have a point of beginning or, at

the least, a first point of application. Certainly that is the case for the scenewith which I began. For at the heart of this scene, at the dense nodal point of


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this scene of substitutions, reversals, abandonments, recoveries, losses, and

gains, at the absolute zero point of relational contact, is that image of the

drowning human body, an image of the body lessinthanasa contact zone,an image of a body impoverished and strangely rewarded by exchange.

And if that metamorphic body functions for Glissant as an entirely gene-

alogical body, as something that is at once the originary body in a genealogy

of creole identity anda body in insurrection against the disciplinary regimesthat seek to produce it (whether as a marketable exchange value or as the

waste matter of cross-Atlantic imperial exchange), then, in this, Glissant is

by no means alone. Indeed, in recent years, it has sometimes seemed that

this body, this vanishing but not vanished, drowning but transformed, lost

but repeating body has come to function in black Atlantic narrative, aes-thetic, and commemorative practices much as the entombed body of the

unknown soldier functions in Benedict Andersons account of nationalism.8

Glissants citations and epigraphs provide a glimpse of the archive that

has been organizing itself as a sort of textual cenotaph to this figure and of

the manner in which that archive has assembled itself less as a repository

or monument than as an actofcommunicative and textual exchange. Thetwo epigraphs of Glissants Poetics of Relation are, as I have mentioned, from

Edward Brathwaite (The unity is submarine) and Derek Walcott (The seais history). Walcotts poem, in its turn, both alludes to Brathwaite (as the

Jamaican poets The unity is submarine is transformed into the subtle . . .

submarine expanse into which Walcott leads his readers) and is cited by

DAguiar as one of the epigraphs to Feeding the Ghosts. DAguiars novel(whose second epigraph is, like Glissants, drawn from Brathwaite) origi-

nated, in its turn, from his reading of Michelle Cliffs Abeng, in which theZongmassacre figures as a fleeting background memory, and from his studyof TurnersSlaverscanvas, the English painters depiction of theZongmassacre, a painting that not only haunts DAguiars novel and David Daby-

deens collection of poemsTurnerbut to which Paul Gilroy has directed hisattention in bothSmall ActsandThe Black Atlantic. Closing his discussionof the canvas inThe Black Atlantic, Gilroy comments: Its exile in Boston[where it has been since John Ruskin sold it in ] is yet another pointer

toward the shape of the Atlantic as a system of cultural exchanges.9 This

seems an apt comment, though to my mind, it is less the wanderings of

Turners canvas than the cross-Atlantic conversation that has been occupy-

ing the attention of these British, Guyanese, Jamaican, and Saint Lucian


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writers, the circular exchange of images and epigraphs as they have bor-

rowed each others language to orient their collective gaze on this image of

a drowning body that truly points to the shape of the Atlantic as a system

of cultural and communicative exchanges.

My point in tracing these linkages is not simply that writers borrow from

one another or that the genealogy of any of these works must entail a gene-

alogy of these recyclings, quotations, allusions, and borrowings (though that

is, quite obviously, the case) or even that it is through just such intertex-

tual exchanges that GlissantsPoetics of Relationdemonstrates the truth ofits insights, that it is in this dispersed but relatedcorpusthat the body Glis-sant signposts as foundational to both a discours antillaisand a poetics of

relation returns as a transversal, cross-cultural body of writing. Rather,it is the logic by which that body of writing relates the body it writes,

with which I am concerned, the logic which marks the former as a ceno-

taph to the latter, the logic which marks the body of writing as both the

burial ground and the resurrection of the written body, the logic which thus

codes this poetics as not only a form of memorializing the body but also

a mode of allegorizing it, which indeed, so conflates allegory and memory

as to make allegory the privileged form of relational memory, though, to

be sure, a form haunted, as is always the case with allegory, by the literal,material, bodily presence it at once names and displaces by its relational

poetics of exchange. That allegory is itself a mode of exchange, indeed that

it is an aesthetic form which at once models itself on, proceeds from, and

licenses those substitutionary acts of the imagination fundamental to the

creation of capital exchange values, is, of course, an insight we owe to Wal-

ter Benjamin.10 That there might be something else at work in a diasporic

allegoresis of the middle passage, that this kind of allegorical exchange of

the specific qualitative character of an event for its universal significance,

that is, its value, might generate not a condemnation but a radical appre-

ciation of the value of exchange, is a notion we owe to Glissant as his texts

repeatedly stage their abyssal descent into the depths of the sea (). For

what Glissant discovers there is not only an ending but a beginning, an

array of underwater signposts () that are boththe enduring, recurring,uncannily resurfacing signs of the violence of the slave trade and of the loss

of the placeworldand, for Glissant, the signs of the unification of the dispa-rate, the commonly inherited remains of a history that has become some-

thing shared (). Thus, as the line from Brathwaites own meditation on


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70 Ian Baucom

precisely the same scene predicts, what Glissant finds here is unity: the

unity of the creolized where creolization is understood both as the unifica-

tion of the disparate and as the diasporization of the unified, as a gathering

in scattering.

The scene of the utter loss of place, the scene, in Heideggers terms, of

the subjects entry into theunheimlich, unhomely, or, perhaps, anti-homelyexpanses of an unmarked world space, thus becomes for Glissant a scene of

replacement, a scene, as DAguiar has it, where what seemed to figure theloss of home is therefore home.11 Such is also the insight of Walcotts poem

The Sea Is History. For as that poem takes its readers on a tour of the great

underwater cemeteries of the Atlantic, it finds in that subtle submarine

expanse the monuments of a cross-Atlantic community of belonging, themonuments that make the depths of the sea a place of memory (as Pierre

Nora has it), which can be shared by the Martinican philosopher, the Jamai-

can historian, the Saint Lucian poet, and the black British novelist.12 But

there is still something else to be discovered here, something that Glissant

insists we find: a modern force, indeed, modernity itself, a modernity in

which this experience of history, this transit from place to space, this

discovery of the zones of displacement as our new places of belonging, this

rewriting of the self under the signposts of the creolized, is paradigmaticof a global experience of the modern. Our boats are open, Glissant con-

cludes the introductory section ofPoetics of Relation, and we sail them foreveryone ().

There is an extraordinary generosity to this pledge and an invitation to re-

think the relation of the global to the logics of exchange. For if our accounts

of the global tend to identify globalization (as modernizaton) with a pro-

cess whereby the local, the vernacular, and the heterogeneous are exchanged

for the uniform, the dedifferentiated, and the homogenized, accounts most

familiar to us as some or other version of the end of history (accounts in

which, unsurprisingly, the story of the globalization of the exchange prin-

ciple is represented as the story of the birth of justice),Glissants comments

suggest that we should read this process as reversible. Difference, here,

however, is not understood as something external to exchange but, as Glis-

sant has it, the best element of exchange. It is from within what Giovanni

Arrighi calls global capitals spaces of flow that, for Glissant, difference re-

turns as the relational counternarrative of globalization.13 Arrighi tends to

identify such spaces of flow with the metropolitan centers of finance capi-


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tal, and he associates their rise with the slave-trading joint stock companies

that over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries consoli-

dated the Dutch and English dominance of global capital. What Glissants

text suggests is that if this is not only an accurate history of capital but a

credible history of our long twentieth century, then such a history needs

to attend not only to the metropolitan sites of capitals distribution and re-

turn but also to the border zones of exchange, to the slave ships, colonies,

and plantations, which are also spaces of flow, spaces that are, to be sure,

spaces of dedifferentiation but spaces that also, by concentrating difference,

enjamb it, multiply it, or, as Glissant and Fredric Jameson in their differ-

ent ways might say, relate it. In such spaces, exchange is seen to exhibit a

double logic, the logic, one might suggest, of creolization, the logic of thesimultaneous erasure and multiplication of difference.

And it is because he can read the globes spaces of flow as subject to such

a reversible, double logic of creolizing exchange that Glissant can discover

in the sort of scene with which his text and this essay began not an injunc-

tion to melancholy but the double promise of relation, the promise of an in-

herited solidarity and the promise of the connective, rhizomic identity of the

nonidentical: For though this experience made you, original victim float-

ing toward the seas abysses, an exception, it became something shared andmade us, the descendants, one people among others. People do not live on

exception. Relation is not made up of things that are foreign but of shared

knowledge. This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best ele-

ment of exchange (). Glissants entire poetics is concentrated here, as is a

generalized poetics of the postcolonial, that by-now-familiar hybridity poet-

ics that seeks to redeem the violences and losses of history by discovering

within a Manichaean economy of colonial loss a compensatory economy of

postcolonial gain. However compelling this might be, however appealing it

may be to read the reading protocols of the postcolonial as protocols that

turn exchange against itself, that reverse its reversals, I want to pause to

consider what it is that permitsthatexchange to take place. For Glissant,what lies between the time of death and the time of relation, what must be

cleared away to make way for relation, is, in his terms, exception. Ifexcep-tion, in the passage I have cited, is Glissants word for the moment of drown-ing, exception or, perhaps more accurately, exceptionality is not merely an-

terior to relation but is that which blocks relation, as it is that which blocks

the moment of living on. To live on is then to refuse the exceptionality of


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72 Ian Baucom

the exceptional, to refuse to permit the exceptional to live on as a haunting,

troubling, foreign element within the present. Relation is thus apprehen-

sible asa form of completed mourning and an act of burial, a clearing away of

the dead. The past is laid to rest when it is told, DAguiar insists in closing

his text.14 To which we can imagine Glissant responding: The past is laid

to rest when it isrelated.

I have been suggesting that in turning our eye to the scene of the Zongmas-sacre we are asked to make a choice, asked to make both a more compli-

cated and a more familiar choice than we might at first think. That choice

will be familiar because regardless of whether the details of this case are al-ready known to us, this sort of case and the difficulty of responding to the

claims this sort of past makes upon the present certainly are.One might, in-

deed, historicize a late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century contempo-

raneity by suggesting that what demarcates this as a quasi-coherent, period-

izable moment are not simply the varied triumphs of global capital but the

struggle to find some way of doing justice to this sort of past, whether

by the commissioners of South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commis-

sion, the state builders of postconflictual polities in Cambodia, NorthernIreland, or Argentina, the critical practitioners of trauma theory, or the nar-

rative and philosophical intellectuals of cultural haunting. Even to construct

so provisional a list of the type of case to which this massacre could be said

to belong, whether as one in a series of paradigmatically modern events

or as one in a series of like histories whose likeness we must both make

sense of (if we are to uncover how they emerge from more than isolable acts

of human evil) and refuse (if we are to avoid rendering them interchange-

able and interchangeably available to a general grammar of reading), reveals

why the nature of such a choice is so complex, so constantly battering itself

against the rocks of the imperative and the objectionable.

In making these decisions we are asked to choose more than whether we

will remember or forget, whether we will be just or unjust. Such choices,

and the meaning of their outcome, are accompanied or perhaps preceded by

the decision to see what we see either as an exceptional scene of human

suffering or as a sort of scene: a scene of the injustices of the slave trade,

a scene of the modern, a scene of the worst and best elements of exchange.

Andifwearetobejust,ifwearetodojusticetothisterribleknowledge,then


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our impulse, I think, is frequently to incline toward the second of these two

options, to substitute for the specific, qualitative character of this event

a knowledge of its universal character or, more probably, given our gen-

eral shyness of universals, its global, imperial, modern, or episystemic char-

acter, that is, its value. In doing soif this is, in fact, how our choice

inclines usnot only do we demonstrate the critical advantages of a way

of reading and reveal the insights of a historical materialism that, in Wal-

ter Benjamins fine phrase, trains itself to do justice to its object by as-

sembl[ing] large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely

cut components, 15 but we also, more troublingly, register the grinning tri-

umph over such thought of what Hegel called the cunning of reason, reg-

ister, in fact, a latent but persistent Hegelianism in our standard concep-tions of justice and reading as we identify both justice and reading, however

implicitly, with the principles of exchange. Though here, to be sure, what

exchange generates is not money but something like conceptuality or sys-

tematicity, in Glissants case a concept of relation that functions as belated

compensation for the loss of the exceptional and that, thus, equates con-

ceptuality not only with justice but also, and perhaps most troublingly,

with insurance. As a theory of justice, such systemic concept building, I am

thus suggesting, constantly runs the risk of articulating itself as a form of in-surance, either by substituting for the singularity of any given experience of

loss an actuarial knowledge of that losss systemic value and meaning or by

offering itself as a mode of compensation in which systematic understand-

ing and (in the case at hand) a global theory of relationality, creolization, or

hybridity promise to reverse damage by conferring a conceptual exchange

value on all those things whose loss it at once inventories and absolutizes.

It is for such reasons, I think, that Gayatri Spivak has been lamenting

the absence of a developed critique of value within postcolonial discourse,

an absence she attempts to remedy by outlining what I understand to be a

melancholy theory of value that functions as something like an analogue

of Derridas spectrological theory of justice. Theory, however, is of courseprecisely the necessary and the wrong word, a dilemma Spivak attempts to

resolve by calling for the development of differentiated strategiesof justicecommonly grounded in the unexchangeability of the singular. This singu-

larwhich I would gloss as something like the exceptional in Glissants

work, the irreducible in Derridas, and the wound in Adornosis acces-

sible for Spivak as the withdrawn, the cryptic, the word not spoken by J. M.


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74 Ian Baucom

Coetzees Friday. It is that thing on which melancholy goes to work by not

working itself through, that thing which melancholy refuses to surrender

or exchange, that thing which melancholy values because it is utterly non-

fungible, without substitute, the very form of incommensurable form, and,

hence, for Hegel, that which is without value and without the domain of

justice and, for Spivak, that which is invaluable, exceptional, the priceless

fundamentofjustice.As Spivak is aware, however, this mode of reading carries its own nostal-

gic dangers, dangers against which herCritique of Postcolonial Reasoncon-stantly attempts to guard itself even as it cultivates its hermeneutic of the

inexchangeable singular. Spivak proposes a number of strategic courses by

which this danger may be evaded, perhaps the most enigmatic but also, Ibelieve, the most promising of which is that we read for the singular by way

of the archive and the example.16 Ironically, it is precisely this move, this

linking of the singular to the example, that reopens her text to that specu-

lative mode of value creation against whose encroachments she is equally,

resolutely, on her guard. But to get some sense of how this might be and of

how it might inform a reading of the Zongmassacre as at once a singularand, in the most terrible sense, an exemplary modern event, we need to get

some fuller sense of what Spivak means by the singular.The singular first appears in Spivaks Critique in a footnote on Derridas

comments on the signature: The interest here, she notes, is not merely

speculative. It has something to do with the fact that, reading literature,

we learn to learn from the singular and the unverifiable ( n). Thereafter,

the term appears in a cluster of passages surrounding a reading of Coetzees

Foe before metastasizing, through that reading, into the variant forms of thewithheld and the cryptic and then reappearing in its original form in the

subsequent chapters of the text:

The named marginal is as much a concealment as a disclosure of the

margin, and where s/he discloses, s/he is singular. . . . To meditate on

the figure of the wholly other as margin, I will look at a novel in English,Foe. ()

Coetzees novel figures the singular and unverifiable margin, the re-

fracting barrier over against the wholly other that one assumes in the

dark. The native informant disappears in that shelter. ()


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Friday . . . is the unemphatic agent of withholding in the text. For every

territorial space that is value coded by colonialism andevery commandof metropolitan anticolonialism for the native to yield his voice, there

is a space of withholding, marked by a secret that may not be a secret

but cannot be unlocked. The native, whatever that might mean, is

not only a victim but also an agent. The curious guardian at the margin

who will not inform. ()

There is an enormous amount of work taking place here, work I can at

best shorthand thus. The singular, as that first footnote suggests, while not

precisely an antispeculative device (the interest here is not merely specu-

lative), is something that exists at a remove from pure speculation (readabstraction, as at once a capital and an epistemological protocol: specu-

lation thus as a pun on financial and theoretical forms of value creation).

A reinscription of Derrida, the singular thus also reworks Gilles Deleuze,

as something whose value has not been coded, as, indeed, one of those

decoded [i.e., not-yet or no-longer coded] flows, which, in her Deleuzian

moments, is one of Spivaks alternate terms for the native informant fore-

closed within a system animated by its dread of such spaces of withhold-

ing (). The native informant is thus singular to the extent to which

he or she discloses a space of withholdingwithinthe territorialized ambitsof Enlightenment reason, imperial civilizing mission, multinational finan-

cialization of the globe, and metropolitan speculative theory; singular to

the extent to which he or she marks off a cryptic, secretive space (a sort

of internalized margin), discloses the presence of that withheld space,

but guards its secret. The singular is thus, in Spivaks example, the with-

held secret of Fridays missing tongue, the cryptic silence that occupies

that space, withholds it from coding, refuses to subject this Kantian raw

man to that Enlightenment project of cultural education which will not somuch civilize him or render him receptive to the categorical imperative as

erase him. That the singular, thus understood, is also in the terms of two of

Spivaks key sources (Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok) a species of melan-

choly is not an element of her stated argument, though the ghost of melan-

choly certainly haunts that argument.

It is not the problem of melancholy, however, but another problem that

I want to consider, the problem of the singular as, precisely, a form of ex-

ample, the problem exemplified here by Fridays exemplification of the sin-


17/23


18/23


suggest is that to look back at this scene is to experience a sort of temporal

double consciousness, a recoding along the axis of time of that knowledge

of undecidability and that imperative of decision implicit within the experi-

ence of the impossible. To witness this event is to regard something that

appears both in the guise of the event and in the form of the series, to see

what we see as if we are seeing again what we are seeing for the first time, to

encounter history as dj vu.This is, as the title of DAguiars text suggests,

a ghost scene, an apparitional scene, a scene, as Derrida has it, in which

the initial appearance is the appearance of that which reappears, a scene in

DAguiars words in which the eye grows accustomed to rehearsal, to re-

peats and returns, a scene in which the event is serialized not only in rela-

tion to a roughly synchronic set of like events but in a diachronic relation toitself.17 Even if we regard nothing but the massacre in its moment, in isola-

tion from its return as image and text and memory, the event is serialized

because the unity of the slaughter breaks down into, and is composed by,

each of its fatal moments: moments in which a scene that is simulta-

neously the same and different plays out before our eyes over and over and

over again, so that to speak of the Zong, or the case of the Zong, is alreadyto speak of the identity of the nonidentical. The recursive, repetitive form

of DAguiars novela novel that finds itself obliged to tell its tale not oncebut serially: first in a synoptic preface, then in a set of harrowing chapters

in which each of the murders is counted off one after the other, then

again in an account of the ensuing trials, once more through the memory

of a solitary survivor, and, finally, again in the texts epilogueis, in many

respects, a response to this collapsing of the series into the event and the

refraction of the event through the series: a response one might say to the

violence of actuarial reason.

Played out between the poles of the and the , the narrative attempts

to account for an event that can be conceived as an event only by projecting

disparate but mutually familiar images onto a single screen, a screen on

whose surface we see, as if we were seeing it again, something we are seeing

for the first time. And if this is so, then the visual disturbance occasioned by

such a sight is, as we know from our experiences of dj vu, also a temporal

disturbance, an experience of inhabiting a contemporaneity that is not con-

temporary with itself, an experience of inhabiting what we might think of as

a heterochronic order of time. Heterochronicity, in this sense, is that which

inhabits the uneasy interregnum between the time of melancholy and the


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78 Ian Baucom

time of mourning, the time of singularity and the time of exchange, the mo-

ment of the exceptional and the reiterative instant of the recurrently and

paradigmatically modern. Heterochronic time, thus, is very much like the

time of dj vu. It is a time of uncertainty, of bewilderment, of not being

able to determine the status of that which lies before our eyes, and of being

unable to decide whether the thing has or has not been seen before, whether

it is exceptional or serial, and whether it belongs to a now or a then, as

we manage, fail, or refuse to encounter in the afterimages of theZongmas-sacre images of an exceptional or a serial event, images of a brutally singular

or a brutally exemplary violation, images of an isolable atrocity in the his-

tory of the transatlantic slave trade or images of a punishing modernity

recurrently replaying itself in every corner of the globe.

However we might choose to see this massacre, it is, I want to conclude by

suggesting, precisely within such an order of time that, over the centuries,

theZonghas appeared, most famously in its canonical visual incarnation inTurners canvas, a canvas that manages to concentrate virtually every

aspect of the problems of memory, justice, value, and time I have been dis-

cussing. First exhibited at the world antislavery convention in Lon-don, the painting was displayed as a sort of visual equivalent (if I can permit

myself that word) of Wilberforces speech before the House of Commons.

Turner had been reading the recently republished edition of Thomas Clark-

sonsEssay on the slavery and commerce of the human species, where he hadcome across an account of the Zongmurders and discovered in that mas-sacre the epitome of all that was wrong with the slave trade. Three decades

after Wilberforces address, and nearly sixty years after the massacre took

place, Turner sensed that the event retained its didactic value, though like

Wilberforce, that that value was independent of the named particularities

of the case. Thus, perhaps the most significant feature of the canvas is its

name or, indeed, the name that is missing from it, the name of the ship and

the event that inspired its painting, the name that haunts the canvas but is

not accommodated by it. In this setting, the painting, once again, enlists theZongin a classical discourse on justice as it asks its viewers once more torecall and to choose, but to choose on the basis of an act of recollection that

has made foreign to itself the peculiar, exceptional, singular qualities of the

event it serves to recollect.


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But the painting also requests another choice, a form of choice that would

have been familiar to Turner from something else he was reading while

working on the canvas: Walter Scotts Waverley novels, which Robert Cadell,

Scotts publisher, had commissioned Turner to illustrate. Indeed, the can-

vas manages not only to depict the massacre as though it were a scene from

a historical novel but to make it an allegory of that romantic and Scottish

Enlightenment philosophy of history which, as James Chandler and Homer

Brown have suggested, Scotts historical novels, in their turn, served to illus-

trate.18 Central to that philosophy of history, and to Scotts novels, was a

sense that the experience of modernity was not, as the Continental Enlight-

enment suggested, one of the synchronization of experience, the reduction

of historical time to a single, dominant base time, the homogenizing, level-ing, everywhere-available time of modernity, but the experience of a con-

temporaneity that was not contemporaneous with itself, an experience of

time as that which was fractured, broken, constellated by a heterogeneous

array of local regimes of time. Scotts novels work by tracing the wanderings

of a character across such an uneven geography of timetypically the High-

lands and the Lowlands, territories that he treats, in Raymond Williamss

terms, as the geographies of the residual and the emergent, the custom-

ary and the cosmopolitan19

and obliging that character to make a choicefor one order of time or another. That choice is, however, always predeter-

mined, because Scott figures any time but the time of cosmopolitan capital

as wounded, dying, and worthy, finally, of no more than sympathy and an

honorable burial. The typical posture of Scotts protagonists is thus, as Ian

Duncan suggests, the posture of a belated but sympathetic spectator, the

posture of one who looks on at scenes of suffering and death, sympathizes

with the dying and the dead, and then moves on to inhabit a modernity

cleansed, in Saree Makdisis terms, of the ghosts issuing forth from the

past.20 Turners canvas, with its ship of the dying and the dead, its mute ap-

peal for its spectators sympathy, captures this paradigmatic scene exactly,

not least because opposite the canvas Turner hung another, Rockets and BlueLight, an image of the coming of steam power, of the mechanization of thesea, of the modernization of Britains imperium.

With that painting in place opposite Turners tis sixty years since can-

vas (the subtitle, we will recall, of ScottsWaverley), the image of theZongmassacre as a scene in a historical novel is complete. Not only complete but

completed, for what Turner effects by locating the case of the Zongwithin


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80 Ian Baucom

these generic conventions is both to acknowledge the unevenness of time,

the uncanny, repetitive presentness of the past within the present, andtosmooth out that unevenness: by containing the massacre within past time,

by appearing to enjoin a choice between that past and the emergent, mod-

ernized present but indicating that there really is no choice, only an occasion

for sympathy and a decent burial (of the dead, of the slave trade) that the

living might live on unhaunted by these specters of the Atlantic.

Turners solution to the questions that the Zongputs to the problems ofjustice and memory, a solution borrowed from the progressive romance of

Scotts historical novel, is, at first glance, not unique. It also appears to be

Glissants solution, the solution ofPoetics of Relation, which also begins by

enjoining us to look on at just such a scene of suffering and death, de-mands our sympathy, and then lays those dead to rest. And it is the solution

that DAguiar seems to desire in the final sentence of his novel. But it is also,

as the melancholy reiterativity of that novel knows, as Glissant demonstrates

through his persistent return to this singular scene of loss, and as I have

attempted to argue here, a false solution. Time does not pass, it accumu-

lates, most densely, perhaps, within the wake of those modernity-forming

spaces of flow that have governed and driven our long twentieth centurys

cycles of capital accumulation. And the dead, whose ghosts provide us withthe figures by which we recognize and deny the cumulative burdens of his-

tory, the dead, whose apparitions weigh as lightly and as heavily upon the

present as that phantasmagoric nightmare of all past generations which, in

Marxs fable, deposits its strange weight upon the minds of the living, the

dead do not precede but inhabit the split scenes of Turners exhibition hall,

the globes relational, creolizing spaces of flow, and the historical imaginary

of a cross-Atlantic world that in the terms I have used is a world in which the

best elements of exchange are the endless temporal exchanges of a hetero-

chronic modernity, a modernity, in Benjamins words, in which our now-

being is charged to the bursting point with time, a modernity in which,

as Gilroy has it, one of the greatest challenges available to us is the challenge

of learning what it means to live nonsynchronously.21 When the American

painter George Inness saw Turners canvas in Boston, he dismissed it as a

trivial piece of work, sniffing that it has as much to do with human affec-

tions and thoughts as a ghost. 22 To which I can only respond: exactly. That

is its value.


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Notes

A very brief portion of this essay appears in my review of Gayatri Chakravorty SpivaksA Cri-

tique of Postcolonial ReasoninNepantla: Views from South. ().

I draw the preceding and following details of the massacre and ensuing court cases from

a variety of sources published and archival, among the most significant of which are

Prince Hoare,Memoirs of Granville Sharp(London, ); Averil Mackenzie-Grieve,The

Last Years of the English Slave TradeLiverpool, (London, ); Robert Weis-

bord, The Case of the Slave-Ship Zong,History Today(August ): ; and an

unpublished transcript of the trial at the Court of Kings Bench held in the archives of the

National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, Ref. no. REC/.

Friedrich Hegel,The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, ), .

See Thomas Clarkson,An essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species, particu-

larly the African(Philadelphia, ); Ottobah Cuguano,Thoughts and Sentiments on theEvil of the wicked slavery and commerce of the human species (London, ); John Newton,

Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade(London, ).

Hegel,Philosophy of Right, .

Substance of the Debates on a Resolution for Abolishing the Slave Trade Which Was Moved in

the House of Commons on the th June, (London, ), .

Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourses: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottes-

ville, VA, ), .

Edouard Glissant,Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI, ), , .

See Benedict Anderson,Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism, rev. ed. (London, ), . Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA,

), .

For Walter Benjamins discussion of the relationship between allegory and exchange, see

The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, ),

, . For a superb discussion of Benjamins argument, see Richard Halpern,

Shakespeare among the Moderns(Ithaca, NY, ), .

Fred DAguiar,Feeding the Ghosts(London, ), .

Derek Walcott, The Sea Is History, in CollectedPoems: (New York, ),

. On places of memory, see Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History:Les Lieux de

Memoire,Representations (spring ): . See Giovanni Arrighi,The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our

Times(London, ).

DAguiar,Feeding the Ghosts, .

Benjamin,Arcades Project, .

See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the

Vanishing Present(Cambridge, MA, ). Spivak makes this suggestion, using virtually

the same language each time, on several occasions in her Critique: To reopen the frac-

ture without succumbing to a nostalgia for lost origins, the literary critic must turn to the

archives of imperial governance (); if, as critics, we wish to reopen the epistemic frac-

ture of imperialism without succumbing to the nostalgia for lost origins, we must turn


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specters of the atlantic (ian baucom)

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