Scenes of Subjection

“[H]ow does one give expression to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is the consequence of the benumbing spectacle, or contend with the narcissistic identification that obliterates the other, or the prurience that too often is the response to such displays? This was the challenge faced by Douglass and other foes of slavery, and this is the task I take up here.”

Hartman takes up the challenging question of whether Black pain can be witnessed without participating in that pain by becoming a voyeur. This is a question that abolitionists, Black and white, have had to contend with and that anti-racist work must continue to consider as it finds new ways of responding ethically to Black pain.

“I am interested in the ways that the recognition of humanity and individuality acted to tether, bind, and oppress.”

Hartman refuses what she sees as the worn-out and myopically privileged ways of approaching and recognizing enslaved people. Hartman’s refusal challenges the notion that slavery only modifies personhood or humanity: “Enslaved person” does not adequately represent the rupture, break, and violence of slavery, and Hartman argues that new frameworks that exceed liberal humanism must be created in any approach to enslaved being.

“In the scene of subjection, agency is produced or feigned by means of terror and violence; sentiment and reciprocal relations, or mutuality, secure the extreme domination of slavery.”

Hartman observes that the violence of slavery pretends not to refuse the agency of enslaved people; rather, agency is acknowledged and even “elicited” in violence. This experience of the agency of enslaved people is then placed within a rhetoric of reciprocity that assumes that enslaver and enslaved exist in a dynamic of “mutuality.” This feigned agency, Hartman argues, enables the enslavers’ domination over enslaved people.

“The obliteration and engulfment of the slave and/or black occurred, as well, by slipping on blackness and stepping into the skin of the other; and by way of an empathic identification in which the self stands in for and subsumes the other.”

White imagination of Blackness, whether in support of slavery or opposed to slavery, consumes enslaved existence. In the case of abolitionists, who work toward the end of slaver violence, there is an ironic insertion of themselves into Blackness that destroys Blackness in their attempt to create an “empathic identification” for the reader.

“The conflation of coercion and consent underscores the limits of will and capacity in a state of extreme domination.”

Hartman argues that there is no such thing as Black “consent” with whites within the extreme oppression of slavery. Coercion can never be avoided in a relation based on total subjugation and thus true consent is a priori impossible.

“What does it mean that the violence of slavery or the pained existence of the enslaved, if discernible, is only so in the most heinous and egregious examples and not in the quotidian routines of slavery? As well, is not the difficulty of empathy related to both the devaluation and the valuation of black life?”

Hartman asks why abolitionist and scholarly attention alike has focused on slavery’s most graphic physical displays of violence. She asserts that reproducing this violence textually, even when in support of anti-racism, demonstrates how opaque Black pain is to whites and invokes the very problem it attempts to solve. Scholarship and activists instead need to approach enslavement through the “quotidian” practices of enslaved people rather than the spectacular violence of the enslaver.

“The mutability of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his embodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion.”

The Black body as commodity ensures its fungibility, as it is constantly changing value and has no intrinsic value. The Black body is also viewed in this commodification as an extension of the “master’s body,” a prosthetic that reflects the master’s power and also expands that power, so that the master is always present and “occupies” the enslaved person.

“Shocking displays too easily obfuscate the more mundane and socially endurable forms of terror.”

The dramatic and graphic staging of slavery’s violence, though presented in abolitionist texts to refute pro-slavery arguments that slavery was “humane,” distract and even hide the entirely undramatic, seemingly nonviolent forms of terror that are a constant reality of enslavement.

“Sambo did not design the stagecraft of slavery, as apologists would have it, but was one of its effects.”

Sambo is a pro-slavery figure of propaganda created to represent the comfort and even pleasure of enslaved people in their domination. This figure is created for enslavers and is not a reflection of the reality of enslaved people.

“The purported immunity of blacks to pain is absolutely essential to the spectacle of contented subjection or, at the very least, to discrediting the claims of pain.”

Slavery apologists argued that enslaved people were suited and even “made” for slavery by insisting that they had a much higher tolerance for pain; what might be considered inhumane for other humans was therefore not inhumane for enslaved people. Thus, a situation that might be painful for a white person was, according to this logic, even pleasurable for enslaved people.

“This requires that we forgo simply celebrating slave agency and instead endeavor to scrutinize and investigate the forms, dispositions, and constraints of action and the disfigured and liminal status of the agents of such acts.”

Hartman parts ways with what is considered radical scholarship in refusing to endow or celebrate “slave agency.” Instead, she turns her scholarship toward the disfigurement of “agents,” creating a framework that considers the ways that agency is denied and qualified; this framework contrasts with others that naively celebrates agency as somehow whole under the crushing force of slavery.

“Contrary to identity providing the ground of community, identity is figured as the desired negation of the very set of constraints that create commonality: the yearning to be liberated from the condition of enslavement facilitates the networks of affiliation and identification.”

Hartman refutes the assumption of identity grounded organically or innately, outside of the context of enslavement, in “Blackness.” Ironically, it is the attempt to unravel the conditions that have created “community” (slavery) that form the foundation for commonality that has created community. In addition, she notes that relations between enslaved people were grounded as much in conflict and betrayal as they were in trust and cooperation.

“What is most important here are the ways memory acts in the service of redress, not an inventory of the world lost.”

Hartman refuses Africanist “memory,” insisting that Africa is the location of rupture from which the new “community” of American Blackness begins with the Middle Passage. The recognition of loss, rather than connection or locatedness, is what is being recognized in practices of redress.

“The recognition and/or stipulation of agency as criminality served to identify personhood with punishment. Within the terms of the law, the enslaved was either a will-less object or a chastened subject.”

The legal recognition of enslaved personhood did not liberate enslaved people but was the means by which subjection to legal categorization as either criminal or mortified object (though enslavement itself was not considered a form of violence or mortification) occurred. Legal subjectivity as applied to an enslaved person ensured a location within violence, either as pure victim or pure criminal and refused a subjectivity that existed outside of social death.

“This scale of subjective value, this metric of lesser humanity, was a complement rather than a corrective to the violence that was the foundation of slave law. While this acknowledgement of slave humanity was intended to establish criminal liability for acts of violence committed upon slaves, in the end it relied upon the diminutions in the value of property in determining and recognizing injury.”

In extreme acts of violence (though the fact of enslavement was not considered, by law, violent), an enslaved person was rendered a subject, but this was not in service of a recognition of the vulnerability of an enslaved person. Instead, harm done to the enslaved person is displaced onto the enslaver, who claims that injury as their own and recoups financial loss. Thus, the recognition of the subjectivity of enslaved people was grounded in commodification, refused slave injury, and perpetuated slavery.

“The very term ‘deliberate calculation,’ in contrast to ‘free choice,’ illuminates the incommensurability of consent and its indebtedness to a contractual model of social relations. Choice is a legal entitlement beyond the scope of the enslaved, who are reduced to chattel, unprotected by law.”

Hartman cites Harriet Jacobs’s discussion of her “deliberate calculation” of sexual partner and thus father of her children as a means of securing protection from her enslaver. Sex as a “calculation” distinguishes it from the “choice” of sexual relations and sexual partner that is only available outside of slavery. Thus, the seeming agency of seduction must be reconsidered, as all forms of an enslaved person’s agency must be reconsidered, as in fact restricted and liminal. Hartman says that we must be certain not to equate calculation with choice.

“This implicit critique of the limits of freedom, prefigured by the ‘loophole of retreat,’ anticipated the burdened individuality that awaited the emancipated masses whose only resource was newly acquired property in the self.”

This last sentence of Chapter 3 and thus Part 1 anticipates the “burdened individuality” that marks the legal subjection that occurs with emancipation. The “loophole of retreat” that is Jacobs’s grandmother’s attic offers a remove from slavery for Jacobs, but it is nonetheless burdensome because the space is so small that she cannot occupy it fully. Emancipated legal subjectivity, too, will offer a “remove” from slavery but does not allow a fullness of self that can comfortably stretch out in the world of freedom because the world that slavery has created is still present, yet no longer acknowledged legally. Property-in-self becomes a burden in its terrible weight of responsibility and obligation that is imposed on emancipated people in the absence of any support. “Individuality” weighs the freed person down rather than lifting them up.

“I characterize the nascent individualism of emancipation as ‘burdened individuality’ in order to underline the double bind of freedom: being freed from slavery and free of resources, emancipated and subordinated, self-possessed and indebted, equal and inferior, liberated and encumbered, sovereign and dominated, citizen and subject.”

Emancipation is not a clean break from slavery in which “freedom” inheres. While one is free of commodified bondage, one is also “free,” or deprived, of necessary resources as a result of having been enslaved. Thus, the individualism that emancipation created also set up the freed person for subjugation and exploitation, a heavy existence and not a freedom that was “light.”

“The free(d) individual was nothing if not burdened, responsible, and obligated.”

The freed person existed in a state of constant obligation and responsibility, always assumed to be blameworthy, always assumed to be deficient. “Responsibility” in emancipation entailed a performance of productivity and humility, of success that was always leavened by apology for that success and, more broadly, for existence itself.

“Responsibility and restraint all too easily yielded to a condition of involuntary servitude, and culpability inevitably gave way to indebtedness.”

“Responsibility” for the freed person entailed responsibility not only for the self but for the world that created the intolerable conditions of slavery that continued to determine Black life. This was a responsibility that was violently misdirected, and the failure to take on this unfair responsibility often resulted in the punishment of involuntary servitude and debt peonage.

“Emancipation instituted indebtedness.”

Without any financial resources at all, emancipated enslaved people inevitably were crushed by debt, which forced them to sell their future labor and “voluntarily” become and indentured servant.

“The emphasis on self-making in the conferral of formal equality illumined the tension between equality and redress within a liberal framework.”

With the granting of civil rights for all men that occurred with the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, “equality” was, in a legal context, achieved for men. Yet this legal equality did not occur on the same ground for everyone. By abstractly declaring the rights of all men, the redress that would have acknowledged the different places from which Blacks and whites were experiencing their rights differently was obscured by the liberal framework in which rights discourse was packaged.

“Basically, subjugation was to be undone by the conferral of formal equality; this was believed to be sufficient to abolish slavery and sever the present from the preceding centuries of enslavement.”

The conferral of rights was assumed to “solve” the problem of slavery’s legacy, as if becoming a citizen eradicated the trauma of slavery and its ongoing violent effects.