Abolition, Sympathy, Governmentality

Kent Dickson California State Polytechnic University, Pomona April 20, 2008 Abolition, Sympathy, Governmentality Flora Tristán, the French-Peruvian feminist, socialist, and abolitionist, describes an event emblematic of the literary use of sympathy in her 1833 travel diary. It is a whipping scene. Taken to the house of the American consul in Praia, where her ship has put in, Tristán finds the man, in her words, “savagely beating a big negro lying at his feet. The man’s face was covered with blood. I ran forward to defend him against his oppressor, since slavery had paralyzed his strength” . Translations of Tristán by Jean Hawkes. All other translations mine. Just as the blood on the man’s face signifies the misery of the racialized other, so Tristán’s physical move to defend him signifies her status as a liberal, bourgeois humanitarian. She underscores both the visual source of this affective state and its strength when she states: “I cannot describe what a painful impression this dreadful scene had upon me.” A similar kind of literary use of sympathy, though not always rendered with such pathos, marks virtually all antislavery writings by Peruvian liberals from 1810 to emancipation in 1854. My proposal is that sympathy, emerging just after independence in antislavery writings, functioned as a form of elite sociality that helped define criollo liberals over and against the black and Indian populations “liberated” with the reform legislation of 1854. Rather than a sentiment naturally given, sympathy as I understand it is a discursive set of practices and statements arising in and in part constituting liberalism and republicanism. With Amit Rai, I see it as an imperative to emotional exchange between two subjects separated by an “essential difference of subjectivity and physical space”: an active, empowered, and bourgeois sympathizer, and a “seemingly passive, disempowered and often suffering object of sympathy” . Properly performed, the transaction of sympathy should be legible on the bodies of both sympathizer and the one with whom she sympathizes, often through tears. Sympathy enacts a paradox, however: working on the basis of identification, it is an agent of union, seeking to diminish the distance between the two unequal subjects, wanting to obliterate itself in the act of justice and amelioration. At the same time, it produces the difference it decries, for “although sympathy is posited as being universally lodged in our nature, its operation founds (bourgeois) culture, society, civilization” over against the other with whom she sympathizes—“the poor, the heathen, criminals, delinquents, deviants, prostitutes, slaves, colonial subjects, and the insane” . Sympathy thus acts as a force of coherence, binding bourgeois, liberal readers together in a national community of humanitarianism. I stress that it articulates this privileged subject always against a colonized or neo-colonial other, binding the two in national union and elaborating the structures of domination internal to the society in question. In Peru, I contend, sympathy helped define population (taken in the Foucauldian sense) after the twin colonial institutions of slavery and Indian labor tribute were dismantled by liberals in 1854. As a public emotion or affective state, sympathy clearly must be conceived discursively. However, in the texts I consider here, sympathy often takes a rhetorical guise—that is, it appears as part of conventional, even formulaic set-pieces. I owe my understanding of rhetorical structures of sympathy largely to Brycchan Carey’s discussion of it in I do not believe that this formulaic quality makes it less heartfelt: the sense of outrage and pity, and the urge to protect, that Tristán feels on seeing the beaten slave do not seem feigned, though certainly the reaction was conventional in the sense that it participated in a literary convention that had been around for a good fifty years. The rhetoric of sympathy marks all Peruvian anti-slavery texts, and some pro-slavery texts as well. In the archive of antislavery editorials, monographs, speeches and articles from the period 1810-1854, brief and what might be termed epithetic invocations of sympathy referencing (and discursively perpetuating) an already familiar formation are more common than lengthy descriptive passages. Countless sympathetic epithets punctuate these texts, from buzzwords and brief phrases such as “liberty,” “the whip,” and “destitutes without refuge;” to short descriptive passages such as “the soil… irrigated with the sweat of the slave;” to slightly less frequent longer phrases where slaves, for instance, are “trampled, vexed, whipped, [having] no free will, in a word,… salable articles, beasts of burden, pieces of furniture.” “…la esclavitud se opone al buen orden de la sociedad, porque donde ella existe no hay el verdadero respeto a las personas y ese que es uno de los fundamentos sociales más importantes, no puede existir donde no hay igualdad ante la ley, igualdad que se destruye cuando una parte de los seres humanos que la compone, son atropellados, vejados, azotados, no tienen voluntad propia, en una palabra, cuando se les convierte en cosa vendible, en una bestia de carga, en un mueble de uso.” None of the articles make sympathy the main point; rather, bits of sympathetic rhetoric complement unsentimental and, as it were, “hard” antislavery arguments about economics, religion, philosophy, or political convenience. The most fully-developed sympathetic passages are descriptions of slaves’ suffering bodies that seem calculated to produce tears: The spirit trembles to see these rational creatures naked and suffering from the cold, wet, and bitter inclement air: they die by the thousands and every year new companies are brought to succeed them in labor and in death. My pen falls from my hand and I exclaim with the famous thinker: Oh unhappy moment when the Americas were discovered! “El espíritu se estremece al ver a estos racionales desnudos, sufriendo el frío, el agua, el aire agudo y destemplado: mueren a millares y todos los años ingresan nuevas partidas para sucederlos en el trabajo y en la muerte. A mí se me cae la pluma de la mano y exclamo con el célebre pensador: ¡Oh momento infeliz en que se descubrieron las Américas!” This passage, the earliest I have found, performs sympathy with a physical gesture of dismay when the pen drops from the writer’s hand: it is certainly written on his body. The year (1810) and location (Cádiz) of Vidaurre’s text are critical, for it was during the Napoleonic invasion of Spain that objectors, sequestered in the Andalusian port, hammered out Spain’s first program of liberalism. Vidaurre, a Peruvian representative to the congress, shows that sympathetic rhetoric was tied to liberalism from its inception in the Hispanic world. As Brycchan Carey reminds us, “the quintessential sentimental moment is when one or more of the characters begin to weep. At these moments, it is often made clear that the reader is supposed to weep too” . Here in Manuel Lorenzo de Vidaurre’s Plan del Perú we are as close as we will get to the mannered weeping of the eighteenth-century man of sensibility. Moving forward through time, from 1810 to 1836, another passage from Tristán’s travel journal provides another good example of a lengthy sympathetic passage. She is now outside Lima on one of the sugar plantations of the Peruvian coast. Her host, the planter, shows her a cell where two female slaves are imprisoned. They had let their children die by neglecting to give them milk; both of them were crouching completely naked in a corner. One was eating raw maize; the other, who was young and very beautiful, turned her large eyes upon me in a look which seemed to say: I let my child die because I knew he would never be free like you, and I would sooner have him dead than a slave. The sight of the woman upset me. Beneath a black skin there may well be a proud and noble soul; the negroes passed with brutal suddenness from independence to slavery and among them there must be some indomitable spirits who suffer torments and die without ever submitting to the yoke. One reason why Tristán has been embraced by Peruvian critics is that she is an early practitioner of the romantic costumbrista sketch—a genre that would hold Peruvian letters in its iron grip for decades to come. In this description, however, her intent is clearly pedagogical. Here, sympathy, she plainly hopes with Edmund Burke, “hinders us from shunning scenes of misery; and the pain we feel, prompts us to relieve ourselves in relieving those who suffer” . In Peru sympathetic rhetoric must have seemed at once new and hackneyed—something invaluable and at the same time overwrought. Nothing like it appears in eighteenth-century letters. It therefore did not make its appearance until after the somewhat mannered vogue for sensibility had gone out style in Britain. This might be one reason why sympathetic rhetoric in these texts invariably has a sort of formulaic predictability: bad prose and clichéd sentiment are rampant. Has no generous heart raised its voice higher than the degrading sound of these oppressive chains? Has none asked what principle and foundation humiliates his respected parents or dear children? What? Has the heart of those vain tyrants felt nothing, seeing the bloody furrow left by tears on the cheeks of their unhappy victims? “¡Qué! ¿no ha habido un corazón generoso que levantara la voz más alto que el sonido degradante de esas opresoras cadenas, y hubiera preguntado el principio, el fundamento de la humillación de sus respetados padres o de sus queridos hijos? ¡Qué! ¿no ha sentido nada el corazón de esos envanecidos tiranos, al ver el surco sangriento que las lágrimas de sus desgraciadas víctimas, dejaban al correr en sus pálidas mejillas?” Perhaps Latin America’s perennial anxiety of belatedness already haunted liberals of the time, for one can’t avoid the impression that these kind of outbursts were slightly embarrassing. Even so, they possessed a ready-made quality that must have been somewhat comforting as well. These are set-pieces, dropped into texts making other arguments. They take on something of the aspect of ornamental illustrations. And yet, for reasons I’ll address below, I believe they were not merely decorative, but enunciated a vital program of liberals and therefore could not simply be done away with. The text cited above underscores the centrality of “heart” in liberal arguments: “has no generous heart raised its voice? […] Has the heart of those vain tyrants felt nothing?” I would argue that liberals viewed the affective argument as an essential cornerstone of their cause. It was something they couldn’t do without. When they showered unreasonable praise on one of their own, it was invariably for “philosophical, humanitarian and religious” reasons . And yet here we may detect a contradiction: liberals were often also at pains to marginalize sympathy in their articles, preferring to feature more “serious” arguments. They wanted to curtail or limit sympathy, even as they maintained it always at the margins of their discourse. Following Hume’s reasoning about the heart in oratory, liberals acted as if they believed that “the principle of every passion and of every sentiment, is in every man; and when touched properly, they rise to life, and warm the heart” . But they also took pains to answer conservative challenges. Sympathy, “philanthropy,” and humanitarianism were mistrusted by conservatives, perhaps because they appealed, as Carey argues in the case of England, to “the undereducated, in particular to the young, to women, and to people whose social position denied them a formal education” . Along with the slaveholder Sr. Lavalle, whom Flora Tristán was visiting when she saw the imprisoned slaves, conservatives threw up their hands and said: ‘Mademoiselle, your views on slavery prove nothing except that you have a good heart and far too much imagination. All these beautiful dreams are superb in poetry, but I am only an old planter, and I am sorry to say that not one of your fine ideas would ever work’ Pro-slavery arguments, resting largely on economic necessity and to a lesser extent on property rights, purported to deal in cold practicalities. This may be one reason liberals acted as if they were ashamed of sympathy by making conscious efforts to marginalize it in their arguments. El Comercio, the paper from which I’ve drawn many of my examples, on at least two occasions focused attention away from the feminized rhetoric of sympathy onto “hard,” masculine, practical arguments: “Señor D. Lucas Fonseca has written an article for yesterday’s Correo Peruano,” the editors write on August 8, 1845, “in which, in agreement with us on the principles of humanity repugnant to slavery, he declares that we have looked at the question only from that point of view. We did not think that was the case: we believed that if we had recourse to principles of humanity and civilization, it was only incidentally, and that we had proved….” “El Sr. D. Lucas Fonseca ha escrito un artículo impreso en el «Correo Peruano» de ayer, en el que, de acuerdo con nosotros en los principios de la humanidad que repugnan el sistema de esclavitura, da a entender que hemos mirado la cuestión sólo bajo ese punto de vista. No lo creíamos así: nos parecía que si habíamos ocurrido a los principios de humanidad y civilización, sólo fue incidentalmente y que habíamos probado que no hay naciones americanos que nos pueden vender esclavos; que no tenemos medios para traerlos y hacerlos llegar hasta nosotros, aun cuando hubiese mercados extrangeros donde comprarlos; que teniéndolos se opondría el tráfico a un principio social, establecido en nuestra organización política; y que los ejemplos citados por la Comisión del Senado no eran los más oportunos para probar que debía permitirse la introducción de esclavos en el Perú.” There follows a litany of arguments in favor of abolition based on economics and political concerns. Liberals, then, were anxious to distance themselves or marginalize sympathy even as they found it indispensable. I would suggest that the act of denying sympathy itself maintains the centrality of sympathy. Conservatives responded to liberals by moving to the middle in a similar fashion: they used sympathetic language in their own arguments, claiming a “philanthropic” feelings for their own. Discussing property rights of owners with respect to slaves, Pando asserts that indeed slaves are property, “sad, repugnant, abominable property, but property that should be respected like all other kinds; property that will be extinguished one day by progress, if human perfectibility fetches up against no reefs or obstacles…” “…propiedad triste, repugnante, abominable, pero que debe ser respetada como todas; propiedad que será extinguida algún día por los progresos de la razón, si la perfectibilidad humana no encuentra escollos y obstáculos en algún gran catástrofe del globo.” José María de Pando, Reclamación de los vulnerados derechos de los hacendados de las provincias litorales del departamento de Lima, (Lima: J.M. Concha, 1833) 7-8. Sympathy runs through this archive, as we’ve see in the preceding examples. Often the sympathetic argument is invoked as a rhetorical flourish within a larger argument. Authors schematically allude to a well-understood architecture of response to which they need only make a passing appeal. A basic paradox is evident in that liberal authors treat sympathy as a sine qua non of their argument while also seeming anxious to banish it to the margins of their discourse. I resolve this paradox by arguing that sympathy did essential work for the solidifying liberal consensus, and therefore was in fact indispensable. It functioned as a technique of governmentality (to borrow another term from Foucault) in the tightly organized republican hierarchies that replaced sovereign forms of control emerging from the colony. Liberals may have cringed at the distastefully “feminine,” “soft,” or undisciplined excesses of sympathetic rhetoric, but they could not do without it, for it functioned as a key enabler of emerging disciplines such as indigenismo, which constructed the new bourgeois subjectivity against a racialized other. To reprise Foucault briefly, “governmentality” describes a new way of understanding the state emerging in his late work, particularly in The History of Sexuality, the 1978 and 1979 Collège de France lectures, “Technologies of the Self” and “Governmentality.” He traces shifts in the usage of terms like “economy” and “government” from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, detecting a decay in the juridical framework of sovereignty and the use of a family paradigm for government. The paterfamilias had in some original sense ‘governed’ his household through the right management of an ‘economy’; he exercised a solicitous care for life vis-à-vis his family. Even as the model of the father-prince fell out of use, these originally private senses of government and economy migrated upward. To “govern” ceased to be to exercise sovereign control over territory with the goal of preserving and strengthen it; rather than the power of death, the new governments began to exercise a care for life: “One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” . A series of savoirs of state and techniques of governmentality allowed a loosening in the exercise of power, which now flooded the discursive and material fields of human life. Government is defined as a right manner of disposing things so as to lead not to the form of the common good, as the jurists’ texts would have said, but to an end which is ‘convenient’ for each…. [W]ith government it is a question not of imposing law on men, but of disposing things: that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics—to arrange things in such a way that, through a certain number of means, such and such ends may be achieved…. Within the perspective of government, law is not what is important…” A new savoir (absolute knowledge) of state arises with population as its target and statistics as its science; government controls population through a series of disciplinary institutions. Foucault stresses the centrality of this new target of power: Prior to the emergence of population, it was impossible to conceive the art of government except on the model of the family, in terms of economy conceived as the management of the family; from the moment when, on the contrary, population appears absolutely irreducible to the family, the latter becomes of secondary importance compared to population, as an element internal to population: no longer, that is to say, a model, but a segment.” What we see in Peruvian anti-slavery discourse, and in the developing discourse on Indians that would grow into literary indigenismo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is precisely the emergence of population and the articulation of new, more diffuse mechanisms of control in the service of bourgeois liberals. Liberals give several indications that the shift Foucault identifies and Rai critically adopts in his genealogy of sympathy coincided with the abolition debate in Peru. First, they are at pains to engage a conservative rhetoric of paternalism and tutelage toward slaves evident in the eighteenth-century edicts of the Bourbon monarchs. Their strategy most often is to adopt the paternalist rhetoric, arguing that the responsibilities of the owners included preparing slaves for freedom. It was a kind of rhetoric that, after abolition, continued to see slaves as incapable of “self-government,” and led to various attempts at “education.” As but one example among many, I will cite the lawyer Juan J. Quntanilla, who argues that nations on the path to granting their slaves freedom have a duty to “immediately address their intelligence, develop it, protect it, prepare it for governing itself, and when this has been accomplished, little by little pass laws, according to the circumstances of the country, that slavery might be slowly abolished” . “dirijirse inmediatamente a la inteligencia de ellos, desarrollarla, protejerla, ponerla en estado de gobernarse por si misma, y cuando esto se haya comenzado, ir dictando poco a poco diferentes leyes, según las circunstancias del país, para que por medio de ellas se vaya aboliendo lentamente la esclavitud, y al fin quede ser estirpado del todo” (sic). Second, several articles argue specifically for developing statistics on slave populations, a push that would seem to situate the move to republicanism within the transformation from sovereignty to savoirs of state. El Comercio’s editorials in favor of statistics provide eloquent confirmation that as slavery was ending, Peru’s liberals cast about for the instruments with which to mark off newly emerging population: We believe that to treat this matter accurately one should begin by establishing the number of slaves that today are occupied in agricultural labors along the coast, determining the number of women, old people and children; the acreage of sugar cane, vineyards, corn, beans, etc., the daily hours worked, the treatment given them, the quantity and quality of food, the sicknesses to which they are subject, the mortality rate among them, and the total product of this forced labor… […] None of this do we know, and we take advantage of this occasion to deplore the lack of statistics. There is no question of great practical interest that cannot be aided with that indispensable key of government, statistics. To govern without it is to deliver oneself to the stupidest of tyrannies: the tyranny of “perhaps”…. El Comercio, August 20, 1845. “Creemos que para tratar esta materia con acierto debería empezarse por fijar el número de esclavos que hoy se ocupan en la agricultura de la costa, determinando el de mujeres, viejos y niños; las fanegadas que cultivan de caña, viñas, maíz, frijoles etc., las horas que diariamente emplean en el trabajo, el trato que se les da, la calidad y cantidad del alimento que toman, las enfermedades a que están sujetos, la proporción de su mortalidad, y el total producto de este trabajo forzado… […] Nada de esto sabemos y aprovechamos de esta ocasión para deplorar la falta que hace de estadística. No se presenta cuestión alguna de grande interés practica en que no se eche de menos esa clave indispensable de los gobiernos, la estadística; gobernar sin ella, lo hemos dicho, es entregarse a la más estúpida de las tiranías, la del acaso….” Finally, there is the urge to progress through European immigration, which amounts to a sort of passive eugenics. The biological factor in population comes to the fore. In an argument common to several Latin American republics, Peruvians saw a guarantee of economic progress in the whitening of population that would result: “We need robust arms but let them also bring intelligent heads, heads capable of adjusting quicker than the negro to understanding our agricultural methods and practicing it,” says one article (El Comercio, August 7, 1845); and another: “Immigration, then, from among the laborers of the noonday of Europe…. And let us at all costs introduce a colony of Scotchmen industrious and moral; it is the only thing that might give life to our agriculture and movement to our populations” (El Comercio, August 20, 1845). The word “población,” of course, means both “town” and “population” in Spanish, but I think the message is clear. These examples locate the rhetoric of sympathy, emerging first in antislavery texts, within a larger shift from sovereignty to governmentality taking place in early republican Peru. They confirm that not only did sympathy play a key role in abolition, but also that it helped delineate majority Indian and minority Black populations after emancipation and the end of the Indian tribute laws. Through sympathy, the criollo bourgeoisie re-articulated relationships of domination between Lima and the never decolonized hinterlands in a process that was to continue through the development of indigenista fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century, but which, as I hope to have shown, was initiated in antislavery writings. Works Cited PAGE 1