Tag: fugitive slave act

Daniel Greene – Digital Dark Matters

a review of Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke University Press, 2015)

by Daniel Greene

~

The Book of Negroes was the first census of black residents of North America. In it, the British military took down the names of some three thousand ex-slaves between April and November of 1783, alongside details of appearance and personality, destination and, if applicable, previous owner. The self-emancipated—some free, some indentured to English or German soldiers—were seeking passage to Canada or Europe, and lobbied the defeated British Loyalists fleeing New York City for their place in the Book. The Book of Negroes thus functioned as “the first government-issued document for state-regulated migration between the United States and Canada that explicitly linked corporeal markers to the right to travel” (67). An index of slave society in turmoil, its data fields were populated with careful gradations of labor power, denoting the value of black life within slave capitalism: “nearly worn out,” “healthy negress,” “stout labourer.” Much of the data in The Book of Negroes was absorbed from so-called Birch Certificates, issued by a British Brigadier General of that name, which acted as passports certifying the freedom of ex-slaves and their right to travel abroad. The Certificates became evidence submitted by ex-slaves arguing for their inclusion in the Book of Negroes, and became sites of contention for those slave-owners looking to reclaim people they saw as property.

If, as Simone Browne argues in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, “the Book of Negroes [was] a searchable database for the future tracking of those listed in it” (83), the details of preparing, editing, monitoring, sorting and circulating these data become direct matters of (black) life and death. Ex-slaves would fight for their legibility within the system through their use of Birch Certificates and the like; but they had often arrived in New York in the first place through a series of fights to remain illegible to the “many start-ups in slave-catching” that arose to do the work of distant slavers. Aliases, costumes, forged documents and the like were on the one hand used to remain invisible to the surveillance mechanisms geared towards capture, and on the other hand used to become visible to the surveillance mechanisms—like the Book—that could potentially offer freedom. Those ex-slaves who failed to appear as the right sort of data were effectively “put on a no-sail list” (68), and either held in New York City or re-rendered into property and delivered back to the slave-owner.

Start-ups, passports, no-sail lists, databases: These may appear anachronistic at first, modern technological thinking out of sync with colonial America. But Browne deploys these labels with care and precision, like much else in this remarkable book. Dark Matters reframes our contemporary thinking about surveillance, and digital media more broadly, through a simple question with challenging answers: What if our mental map of the global surveillance apparatus began not with 9/11 but with the slave ship? Surveillance is considered here not as a specific technological development but a practice of tracking people and putting them into place. Browne demonstrates how certain people have long been imagined as out of place and that technologies of control and order were developed in order to diagnose, map, and correct these conditions: “Surveillance is nothing new to black folks. It is a fact of antiblackness” (10). That this ”fact” is often invisible even in our studies of surveillance and digital media more broadly speaks, perversely, to the power of white supremacy to structure our vision of the world. Browne’s apparent anachronisms make stranger the techniques of surveillance with which we are familiar, revealing the dark matter that has structured their use and development this whole time. Difficult to visualize, Browne shows us how to trace this dark matter through its effects: the ordering of people into place, and the escape from that order through “freedom acts” of obfuscation, sabotage, and trickery.

This then is a book about new (and very old) methods of research in surveillance studies in particular, and digital studies in general, centered in black studies—particularly the work of critical theorists of race such as Saidiya Hartman and Sylvia Wynter who find in chattel slavery a prototypical modernity. More broadly, it is a book about new ways of engaging with our technocultural present, centered in the black diasporic experience of slavery and its afterlife. Frantz Fanon is a key figure throughout. Browne introduces us to her own approach through an early reflection on the revolutionary philosopher’s dying days in Washington, DC, overcome with paranoia over the very real surveillance to which he suspected he was subjected. Browne’s FOIA requests to the CIA regarding their tracking of Fanon during his time at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center returned only a newspaper clipping, a book review, and a heavily redacted FBI memo reporting on Fanon’s travels. So she digs further into the archive, finding in Fanon’s lectures at the University of Tunis, delivered in the late 1950s after being expelled from Algeria by French colonial authorities, a critical exploration of policing and surveillance. Fanon’s psychiatric imagination, granting such visceral connection between white supremacist institutions and lived black experience in The Wretched of the Earth, here addresses the new techniques of ‘control by quantification’—punch clocks, time sheets, phone taps, and CCTV—in factories and department stores, and the alienation engendered in the surveilled.

Browne’s recovery of this work grounds a creative extension of Fanon’s thinking into surveillance practices and surveillance studies. From his concept of “epidermalization”—“the imposition of race on the body” (7)—Browne builds a theory of racializing surveillance. Like many other key terms in Dark Matters, this names an empirical phenomenon—the crafting of racial boundaries through tracking and monitoring—and critiques the “absented presence” (13) of race in surveillance studies. Its opposition is found in dark sousveillance, a revision of Steve Mann’s term for watching the watchers that, again, describes both the freedom acts of black folks against a visual field saturated with racism, as well as an epistemology capable of perceiving, studying, and deconstructing apparatuses of racial surveillance.

Each chapter of Dark Matters presents a different archive of racializing surveillance paired with reflections on black cultural production Browne reads as dark sousveillance. At each turn, Browne encourages us to see in slavery and its afterlife new modes of control, old ways of studying them, and potential paths of resistance. Her most direct critique of surveillance studies comes in Chapter 1’s precise exegesis of the key ideas that emerge from reading Jeremy Bentham’s plans for the Panopticon and Foucault’s study of it—the signal archive and theory of the field—against the plans for the slave ship Brookes. It turns out Bentham travelled on a ship transporting slaves during the trip where he sketched out the Panopticon, a model penitentiary wherein, through the clever use of lights, mirrors, and partitions, prisoners are totally isolated from one another and never sure whether they are being monitored or not. The archetype for modern power as self-discipline is thus nurtured, counter to its own telling, alongside sovereign violence. Browne’s reading of archives from the slave ship, the auction block, and the plantation reveal the careful biopolitics that created “blackness as a saleable commodity in the Western Hemisphere” (42). She asks how “the view from ‘under the hatches’” of Bentham’s Turkish ship, transporting, in his words, “18 young negresses (slaves),” might change our narrative about the emergence of disciplinary power and the modern management of life as a resource. It becomes clear that the power to instill self-governance through surveillance did not subordinate but rather partnered with the brutal spectacle of sovereign power that was intended to educate enslaved people on the limits of their humanity. This correction to the Foucauldian narrative is sorely necessary in a field, and a general political conversation about surveillance, that too often focuses on the technical novelty of drones, to give one example, without a connection to a generation learning to fear the skies.

“Stowage of the British slave ship Brookes under the regulated slave trade act of 1788.” Illustration. 1788. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division Washington, D.C.

These sorts of theoretical course corrections are among the most valuable lessons in Dark Matters. There is fastidious empirical work here, particularly in Chapter 2’s exploration of the Book of Negroes and colonial New York’s lantern laws requiring all black and indigenous people to bear lights after dark. But this empirical work is not the book’s focus, nor its main promise. That promise comes in prompting new empirical and political questions about how we see surveillance and what it means, and for whom, through an archaeology of black life under surveillance (indeed, Chapter 4, on airport surveillance, is the one I find weakest largely because it abandons this archaeological technique and focuses wholly on the present). Chapter 1’s reading of Charles William Tait’s prescriptions for slave management, for example, is part of a broader turn in the study of the history of capitalism where the roots of modern business practices like data-driven human resource management are traced to the supposedly pre-modern slave economy. Chapter 3’s assertion that slave branding “was a biometric technology…a measure of slavery’s making, marking, and marketing of the black subject as commodity” (91) does similar work, making strange the contemporary security technologies that purport the reveal racial truths which unwilling subjects do not give up. Facial recognition technologies and other biometrics are calibrated based on what Browne calls a “prototypical whiteness…privileged in enrollment, measurement, and recognition processes…reliant upon dark matter for its own meaning” (162). Particularly in the context of border control, these default settings reveal the calculations built into our security technologies regarding who “counts” enough to be recognized. Calculations grounded in an unceasing desire for new means with which to draw clear-cut racial boundaries.

The point here is not that a direct line of technological development can be drawn from brands to facial recognition or from lanterns to ankle bracelets. Rather, if racism, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, is “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” then what Browne points to are methods of group differentiation, the means by which the value of black lives are calculated and how those calculations are stored, transmitted, and concretized in institutional life. If Browne’s cultural studies approach neglects a sustained empirical engagement with a particular mode of racializing surveillance—say, the uneven geography produced by the Fugitive Slave Act, mentioned in passing in relation to “start-ups in slave catching”—it is because she has taken on the unenviable task of shifting the focus of whole fields to dark matter previously ignored, opening a series of doors through which readers can glimpse the technologies that make race.

Here then is a space cleared for surveillance studies, and digital studies more broadly, in an historical moment when so many are loudly proclaiming that Black Lives Matter, when the dark sousveillance of smartphone recordings has made the violence of institutional racism impossible to ignore. Work in digital studies has readily and repeatedly unearthed the capitalist imperatives built into our phones, feeds, and friends lists. Shoshanna Zuboff’s recent work on “surveillance capitalism” is perhaps a bellwether here: a rich theorization of the data accumulation imperative that transforms intra-capitalist competition, the nature of the contract, and the paths of everyday life. But her account of the growth of an extractive data economy that leads to a Big Other of behavior modification does not so far have a place for race.

This is not a call on my part to sprinkle a missing ingredient atop a shoddy analysis in order to check a box. Zuboff is critiqued here precisely because she is among our most thoughtful, careful critics of contemporary capitalism. Rather, Browne’s account of surveillance capitalism—though she does not call it that—shows that race does not need to be introduced to the critical frame from outside. That dark matter has always been present, shaping what is visible even if it goes unseen itself. This manifests in at least two ways in Zuboff’s critique of the Big Other. First, her critique of Google’s accumulation of “data exhaust” is framed primarily as a ‘pull’ of ever more sites and sensors into Google’s maw, passively given up users. But there is a great deal of “push” here as well. The accumulation of consumable data also occurs through the very human work of solving CAPTCHAs and scanning books. The latter is the subject of an iconic photo that shows the brown hand of a Google Books scanner—a low-wage subcontractor, index finger wrapped in plastic to avoid cuts from a day of page-turning—caught on a scanned page. Second, for Zuboff part of the frightening novelty of Google’s data extraction regime is its “formal indifference” to individual users, as well as to existing legal regimes that might impede the extraction of population-scale data. This, she argues, stands in marked contrast to the midcentury capitalist regimes which embraced a degree of democracy in order to prop up both political legitimacy and effective demand. But this was a democratic compromise limited in time and space. Extractive capitalist regimes of the past and present, including those producing the conflict minerals so necessary for hardware running Google services, have been marked by, at best, formal indifference in the North to conditions in the South. An analysis of surveillance capitalism’s struggle for hegemony would be greatly enriched by a consideration of how industrial capitalism legitimated itself in the metropole at the expense of the colony. Nor is this racial-economic dynamic and its political legitimation purely a cross-continental concern. US prisons have long extracted value from the incarcerated, racialized as second-class citizens. Today this practice continues, but surveillance technologies like ankle bracelets extend this extraction beyond prison walls, often at parolees’ expense.

A Google Books scanner’s hand, caught working on WEB Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. Via The Art of Google Books.

Capitalism has always, as Browne’s notes on plantation surveillance make clear, been racial capitalism. Capital enters the world arrayed in the blood of primitive accumulation, and reproduces itself in part through the violent differentiation of labor powers. While the accumulation imperative has long been accepted as a value shaping media’s design and use, it is unfortunate that race has largely entered the frame of digital studies, and particularly, as Jessie Daniels argues, internet studies, through a study of either racial variables (e.g., “race” inheres to the body of the nonwhite person and causes other social phenomena) or racial identities (e.g., race is represented through minority cultural production, racism is produced through individual prejudice). There are perhaps good institutional reasons for this framing, owing to disciplinary training and the like, beyond the colorblind political ethic of much contemporary liberalism. But it has left us without digital stories of race (although there are certainly exceptions, particularly in the work of writers like Lisa Nakamura and her collaborators), perceived to be a niche concern, on par with our digital stories of capitalism—much less digital stories of racial capitalism.

Browne provides a path forward for a study of race and technology more attuned to institutions and structures, to the long shadows old violence casts on our daily, digital lives. This slim, rich book is ultimately a reflection on method, on learning new ways to see. “Technology is made of people!” is where so many of our critiques end, discovering, once again, the values we build into machines. This is where Dark Matters begins. And it proceeds through slave ships, databases, branding irons, iris scanners, airports, and fingerprints to map the built project of racism and the work it takes to pass unnoticed in those halls or steal the map and draw something else entirely.

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Daniel Greene holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Maryland. He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research, studying the future of work and the future of unemployment. He lives online at dmgreene.net.

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December 14, 2016
Great American Author Series: A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Prodigal Political Emerson

by Sarah Blythe
~

Much like the other volumes in the series, the chief aim of A Political Companion to Emerson is to challenge the notion that a particular author is much more politically minded than past scholarship has allowed. Ralph Waldo Emerson was no stranger to such censure, even within his own lifetime. The most biting assessment comes from fellow author, Rebecca Harding Davis, who reflected on her interactions with Emerson and his “Atlantic coterie” in her 1904 cultural memoir, Bits of Gossip. She describes the coterie as thinking “they were guiding the real world,” while in fact “they stood quite outside of it, and never would see what it was.”¹ Of Emerson as an individual, she had only this chilly assessment: “He took from each man his drop of stored honey, and after that the man counted for no more to him than any other robbed bee.”² This version of Emerson—the alienated dreamer, or worse, the intellectual vampire—is certainly unfair but not altogether groundless. Some of Emerson’s writings can be off-putting at times, especially when taken out of context. Most famously, in Emerson’s hymn to nonconformity—“Self-Reliance”—the transcendentalist professes such a radical disavowal of social obligations in pursuit of genius that his individualism seemingly transforms into something akin to an unfeeling libertarianism. He first proclaims he will “shun father and mother and wife and brother” when his genius calls, writing on “the lintels of the door-post, Whim,” and in the next breath flippantly disregards his obligation to the poor: “Are they my poor?”³ But to suggest that Emerson is simply coldly rejecting his social obligations or taking an apolitical stance is to willfully misunderstand him.

The primary achievement of A Political Companion to Emerson, then, is in righting this complicated, and oft-skewed version of the famous transcendentalist. As several of the critics in this volume point out, Emerson is posturing here. He aims for shock in his attack on “the thousandfold Relief Societies” that merely conform instead of reform and thus offer relief to no one.⁴ Ever the “reluctant reformer” (as Lawrence Buell terms him in his recent biography), this younger, ³more idealistic Emerson ultimately confirms his commitment to self-reliance even when faced with the pragmatic realities of slavery and other social injustices later in life.⁵ It is only after his death that Emerson became increasingly estranged from these moments of political activism. Defanged of his radical politics and abolitionist stance beginning with Holmes’s and Cabot’s biographies in the 1880s, this depoliticized version of Emerson was perpetuated by critics through the 1980s, who tended to emphasize his passive self-reliant (and apolitical) individualism, as volume editors Alan M. Levine and Daniel S. Malachuk highlight in their lengthy introduction (16-17). Within this context, Emerson is a prime candidate for sustained political study, the first of its kind in Emerson studies.

Youthful scholars more familiar with Emerson criticism of the last twenty years will be surprised that he was ever so roughly handled by late-nineteenth- and earlier twentieth century Emerson scholars. It may seem strange to image an author, who wrote so movingly about abolition, de-politicized first by his contemporaries and later by the academy. Some readers might even question the value of pushing against such fossilized scholarship. However, working through A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson, from its “classic” re-readings of Emerson’s political mind from the 1990s through more current twenty-first century scholarship, readers will perceive not just a dynamic picture of the famous transcendentalist’s political mind, but also a multi-vocal intellectual history of political scholarship on Emerson. As a political companion, the collection sketches the complicated and sometimes contradictory development of Emerson’s political thinking as much as the complicated and contradictory development of scholarly uses of Emerson’s political thinking. Dissonant and melodious, frustrating and engaging, the authors and texts thankfully do not present an explicit or clear picture of Emerson’s politics; but nor should they. The selected authors instead rub up against each other, praising and censuring accordingly, but never quite coming to consensus, forming the kind of dissensus that Emerson would heartily approve.

A substantial volume (thirteen essays in all), the book is divided into four sections beginning with four “classic” texts on Emerson by notable political theorists and philosophers: William Carey McWilliams, Judith Shklar, George Kateb and Stanely Cavell. In choosing a chapter from McWilliams’s formidable 1973 study of national manhood, The Idea of Fraternity in America, to begin their collection, Levine and Malachuk forward a version (albeit mild) of the apolitical Emerson the volume is designed to contradict. But this is done to effect. McWilliams argues that Emerson wasn’t so much an apolitical thinker but a political idealist who believed that human progress would eventually abolish slavery and the United States would become a “political brotherhood.” For McWilliams, Emerson “firmly believed that progress did not require a movement; it was written in the motion of nature, and would come of itself” (46). Because the political brotherhood was inevitable, Emerson was able to eschew politics, McWilliams maintains. While McWilliams briefly concedes that Emerson’s rhetorical use of fraternity has allowed numerous critics to cast Emerson as a philosopher of democracy, he ultimately concludes that, “Emerson’s was a doctrine of activity, individualistic romanticism, not democracy” (48-9). Emerson, then, is not a champion of democracy but of individualism in such a reading. McWilliams’s essay may seem out of place given the aim of this volume, but it represents an important shift from previous attacks on Emerson’s self-reliant individualism: McWilliams does not completely depoliticize Emerson but instead makes him politically passive. It is this version of Emerson’s political passivism that later essays in this volume vividly confront.

The second “classic” text by Judith Shklar likewise reconsiders the notion that Emerson’s individualism was at odds with democracy. Where McWilliams sees in Emersonian thinking a call for a progressive political brotherhood, Shklar finds reconciliation between democracy and individualism in Emerson’s skepticism. Focusing on Representative Men and “Self-Reliance,” Shklar suggests that skepticism and democracy were joined in Emerson’s mind because individuals participating in a democracy necessarily have doubts about the opinions of fellow citizens (65-66). But Emerson’s purpose in writing Representative Men is not merely to praise Montaigne’s skepticism, Shklar maintains, but to demonstrate the “absolute necessity of great men for revealing the possibilities of reason, imagination, discovery, and beauty” without “begrudging the great men their glory, not because he was small minded but because an uncritical belief in great people was not compatible with his democratic convictions” (59). Because Emerson thought we were all reformers, there must be doubts, Shklar ultimately insists.

Shklar’s essay is in many ways a platform for her working out of her own political theory to contend with the current problems of American democracy and has been used as such by fellow political theorists. Shklar finds redemption in political skepticism. In this sense, the editors might have been better served using Sacvan Bercovitch’s “Emerson, Individualism, and the Ambiguities of Dissent” (published in 1990) in the South Atlantic Quarterly instead of Shklar’s more politically provocative piece. Bercovitch’s essay comes to roughly the same conclusion—finding in Emersonian thinking a space for dissent within a democratic consensus—and has had a greater impact on American literary studies than Shklar’s treatise.

The final two authors in this first section—Cavell and Kateb—are most aptly selected. In Buell’s fitting assessment, “No one has written more searchingly about Emerson’s theory of self-reliance than George Kateb.”⁶ As the essay selected for this volume demonstrates, Kateb has come to understand Emerson’s self-reliance as promoting an individualism that works within instead of against democracy. Emerson’s problem with democracy, as Kateb notes, is that it requires “association,” which has the potential to disturb self-reliance. But since Emerson calls for self-reform in his self-reliance, Kateb finds in Emerson a means to defend the individual against institutional regulation. Elsewhere Kateb calls this means “negative individuality,” or the kind of character that disobeys unjust conventions and laws.⁷ The resulting struggle for self-reliance, in Kateb’s estimation, “is a struggle against being used” (87). Stanley Cavell is also invested in the philosophical matter of instrumentalism, but he finds a more suitable answer in Emerson’s skepticism or his “averse thinking” as the title suggests, connecting Emerson directly to the philosophy of Heidegger and Nietzsche. That said, much like Shklar’s skepticism, Cavell’s “averse thinking” has had more impact in philosophy and political theory than Emerson studies or the study of American literature but it is a worthy inclusion none-the-less.

Part 2 of this volume is ambiguously titled “Emerson’s Self-Reliance Properly Understood,” but it might be better identified as “Emerson’s Self-Reliance and the Politics of Slavery.” The three essays contained in it look more carefully at Emerson’s self-reliance in the context of a democracy that suffers slavery, arguably the most troubling aspect of Emerson’s writings. Jack Turner, James H. Read, and to a lesser extent Len Gougeon, each explore Emerson’s philosophy of self-reliance in conjunction with slavery and social reform. Both Turner and Read call attention to Emerson’s increasingly public abolitionist stance beginning with the passing of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 precisely because it made him and every other northern explicitly complicit to slavery, an institution which likewise denied slave and master the ability to realize self-reliance.

~

Dissonant and melodious, frustrating and engaging, the authors and texts thankfully do not present an explicit or clear picture of Emerson’s politics; but nor should they.

~

In Turner’s careful reading of Emerson’s “ethics of citizenship,” he discerns a “complex interplay” of two key ideas: self-reliance and complicity (126-7). While Turner is attentive to the fact that Emerson never addressed these two terms directly (complicity and self-reliance), he finds in Emerson’s antislavery writings and his abolitionist activities a clear demonstration of his (Emerson’s) belief in their incompatibility, for complicity is just another name for conformity. Turner is likewise careful to not exaggerate Emerson’s activism, noting that he was reluctant to speak out about slavery until the Fugitive Slave Law required more action of him. In the end, Turner finds in Emerson’s ethics of citizenship “a politics of self-reliance that allows for moral compromise” and “a promising model for meeting the contemporary challenge of civic engagement (142).

Moving from Turner’s ethics of citizenship, Gougen and Read focus on the complicating factors informing Emerson’s self-reliance as well as his changing relation to the abolition movement as new laws began to force citizens into conformity and complicity with the institution of slavery. Clearly the traumatic events of the mid-nineteenth century troubled Emerson’s definition of self-reliance. Emerson responded, Read claims, by embracing John Brown and his radical politics and speaking out against slavery more vociferously. Both acts are deeply political for Read: speaking out against slavery in antebellum America was tantamount to taking action against it (162). In this context, Emerson’s self-reliance becomes a model for moral compromise and a means of taking action against slavery “without along the way compromising or suffocating one’s own intellectual and practical self-reliance” (153). But most importantly, Read contributes a picture of Emerson as a growing intellectual mind who recognized the limits of his self-reliant philosophy later in life and strove to reconcile these limits in a democracy that denied self-reliance to slave and master alike. Along these lines, Gougeon looks beyond Emerson’s self-reliant treatise to see how Emerson used his transcendental philosophy in the service of social reform. This philosophy allows for every person (regardless of race) to participate in the universal (the “Over-Soul”) “providing the basis for both individual self-reliance and a collective identity” (186). For Gougeon, Emersonian social reform may begin with the individual, but it does not end there; self-reform leads to social reform. And, like Read and Turner, Gougeon also highlights Emerson’s evolving transcendental thinking, demonstrating a commitment to “rotation” and “becoming.”

Part 3 of the collection is dedicated to probing Emerson’s transcendental philosophy in an effort to recover Emerson’s transcendentalism without setting it apart from his political philosophy. As numerous critics in this volume note, Emerson has been as much denuded of his transcendental philosophy as his political philosophy. The essays put forward in this section, then, “retranscendentalize” Emerson whilst they repoliticize his thinking, locating in Emersonian transcendentalism no opposition to political engagement. Alan M. Levine grapples with Emerson’s skepticism, concluding that Emerson’s doubt was fundamental to his transcendental beliefs, while Daniel S. Malachuk battles past scholarship that has effectively detranscendentalized Emerson, obscuring the commitment to equality in his transcendental thinking. Finally, Shannon L. Mariotti examines Emerson’s metaphors of vision, questioning his ability to see problems clearly with transcendental sight. Noting a change in his thinking around 1844, Mariotti concludes that Emerson came to question the validity of his transcendental vision, ultimately finding a middle ground in his transcendental visual practice of “focal distancing.” Mariotti’s essay ultimately explores a version of Emersonian political theory that reconciles his transcendental idealism with the practicalities of social reform.

The fourth and final section is also the most knotty, designed to cast Emerson as a devout liberal (or progressive) democrat. While Emerson’s progressive democratic leanings are undeniable (Buell goes so far as to claim Emerson personified the Union ideal for moderates as well as progressives during the Civil War), the three contributors concluding this volume emphasize (or perhaps over-emphasize) certain aspects of liberal democracy said to be embraced by Emerson.⁸

Neal Dolan’s recent account of Emerson’s theories of commerce aims to reinterpret our understanding of his vision of liberal democracy. In doing so, Dolan offers a new interpretation of Emerson’s use of the language of ownership, commerce, and property. At once muddled and overly rigid, Dolan’s argument maintains that Emerson uses the language of property and commerce to “symbolically resolve a cultural dilemma” between old world economics and new world economics (344). For Dolan, Emerson championed America’s liberal democratic values against European feudal-aristocratic social systems on the one hand; on the other, he was weary of the American tendency to “reduce all relationships to marketplace calculations” (344). Dolan concludes that “Emerson inflected this economic idiom in distinctive ways in an attempt to raise his audiences understanding of their rightful property, and thus of their rightful selves, to a yet higher, more spiritual, and more ecstatic plane” (345). However, in interpreting Emerson’s economic idioms within the context of “Puritanism, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the full emergence of a market economy in antebellum America,” Dolan strips Emerson (and his contemporary transcendentalists) of his more radical politics in order to frame the transcendentalist as a pro-capitalist liberal democrat (345). This version of Emerson is not only unpalatable but also largely incorrect. One must remember that Emerson rubbed elbows with Orestes Brownson, who espoused a brand of socialism in the 1830s that Marx would make famous a decade later. This is not to suggest that Emerson was as radical a socialist as Marx or even Brownson (no need to rush-order your Che Emerson t-shirts), but I would challenge Dolan’s assertion that Emerson was “pro-market” during his “supposedly radical phase” in both action and thought (361). As evidence for this claim, Dolan first points out that Emerson “participated” in market-capitalism to the extent that he marketed himself (the action). He then offers a problematic reading of a passage from “Politics,” in which Emerson makes the outrageous assertion that “while the rights of all as persons are equal…their rights in Property are very unequal” (the thought). If taken at face value, this evidence is indeed damning, but here Dolan fails to recognize Emerson’s posturing as a mechanism for criticizing a political system of which he was often skeptical.

In contrast to Dolan’s interest in property, Jason Frank probes Emerson’s understanding of representation and representativeness in order to demonstrate the democratic importance the “representative man.” For Frank, Emerson’s representative men are not departures from his philosophy of self-reliance because “they elicit the transformative capacities of democratic constituencies forever in the midst of a process” (385). Because there is a distinct relational dynamic between the representative and the represented according to Frank, “this relation stimulates perfectionist transformation” not at odds with Emerson’s theory of self-reliance. The final essay by G. Borden Flannigan likewise reassesses Emerson’s commitment to excellence in the face of liberal democracy in “Representative Men,” but does so by stressing his debt to Plato and Aristotle.

In reading this collection of essays one gets the sense that Emerson was not an explicitly political thinker; nor was he an explicitly apolitical thinker. He might be best represented as an evocative thinker, a philosopher (often a political philosopher), a humanist, and of course a transcendentalist. He thought carefully and “becomingly” (in an Emersonian sense) about the world in which he inhabited. It is therefore difficult to locate his philosophy—political or otherwise—in just one text or at just one moment in his life. When Emerson wrote, “rotation is the law of nature” in Representative Men, he is not dwelling on physical laws of change; his meaning is social and political, suggesting process, progress, and most importantly change over time on a personal level as much as a national level. And since we now readily accept that personal is political, this volume, along with this series, reminds us never to regard any thinker as wholly removed from the political sphere.

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Sarah Blythe is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at UNC Chapel Hill. Tentatively titled “Juicy Effects,” her doctoral dissertation examines the excessive florid and floral rhetoric populating the American short story in the decades straddling the Civil War.
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Notes
1. Davis, Rebecca Harding. Bits of Gossip. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1904. 33.
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2. Ibid. 46.
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3. Emerson, R.W. “Self-Reliance.”
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4. Ibid.
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5. Buell, Laurence. Emerson. Cambridge; Harvard UP, 2004.
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6. Ibid. 158.
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7. Kateb, George. The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture. Ithica: Cornell UP, 1992.
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8. Buell. Op. Cit. 206.
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March 20, 2014

Tag: fugitive slave act

Daniel Greene – Digital Dark Matters

Great American Author Series: A Political Companion to Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Prodigal Political Emerson

Dissonant and melodious, frustrating and engaging, the authors and texts thankfully do not present an explicit or clear picture of Emerson’s politics; but nor should they.