The Ship, the Plantation, and the Polis:

Abstract

Theories of the Caribbean do not just account for a given history—that is the historian's task—but, rather, aim to explain the philosophical stakes of an odd social experiment whose ramifications were and still remain largely unforeseeable. Some of the most productive of these theories have benefited from the iconic power of a particularly successful metaphor. This is no doubt the case with Antonio Benítez Rojo's “the repeating island” and José Luis González's “el país de cuatro pisos”—to name just two metaphors capable of painting in simple strokes concepts that are sophisticated and eye opening. However, while the efficiency of the metaphor sometimes overshadows the complexity of the concept, occasionally, the richness of the theory eclipses part of the suggestive power of the metaphor. In this article I explore two concept metaphors, “the ship” and “the plantation,” which suggest lines of inquiry that either supplement or advance the explicit preoccupations of the theories they illustrate.In The Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy uses the ship—described as “a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion”—to symbolize the slave trade. According to Gilroy, the ship is a chronotope (Bakhtin's term) that not only grounds Caribbean culture in a specific narrative but also provides a figurative framework for the revision of political and moral philosophy. Similarly, Edouard Glissant's Poétique de la relation (1990) explores the metaphorical weight of the plantation, a concept alluding to the formation of purely relational societies on the basis of forced labor. Like Gilroy's ship, Glissant's Plantation stresses a thoroughly Caribbean condition of existence: that of a society built exclusively on an aleatory and largely involuntary coexistence. Both theories start out by exploring how such an anomalous social formation “ait pu contribuer à ce que vous appelez la modernité” (“could have contributed to what you call modernity”).1 The metaphors behind these theories help us visualize a space that encloses a form of social presence characterized not so much by integration as by togetherness; a form of togetherness that, though driven by one-sided economic interests, has had social, cultural, and ethical consequences of foundational proportions.In this article, I see both the plantation and the ship as spatiotemporal matrices of a distinctively Caribbean mode of existence based on relationality. Both Gilroy's and Glissant's theories seem to be animated by a similar question: what ideas of belonging, justice, and responsibility operate in societies in which membership is based on neither filiation nor consent? With this question in mind, I seek to elaborate the meaning of these concept metaphors from the perspective of moral philosophy in order to analyze the complex links between self and community, ethics and politics, that subtend Caribbean societies.In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy uses the image of the ship as “a central organizing symbol” of the history of slavery.2 The ship has intense “descriptive and moral power” because it helps visualize a confined site of aleatory togetherness in extreme circumstances. The ship is both enclosure and vehicle—something like a traveling neighborhood—a kind of entity that fosters relations of continuity and discontinuity with various land-based societies. As a social space, the ship is a world unto itself, with its own legal codes, unspoken rules, and political tensions. As a vehicle, it connects different points of the Atlantic, creating a Deleuzian machine of ships, ports, institutions, laws, and people that Benítez Rojo calls “la Flota” (“the Fleet”).3 So understood, the ship facilitates colonialism but also—and this matters greatly to Gilroy—instances of dissidence. In Gilroy's words, “The image of the ship—a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion—immediately focuses attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs” (4). To be sure, the ship so described speaks of the forced migration of people, but it mostly puts emphasis on the circulation of “dissidents” and of “key cultural and political artefacts” that can be, and often are, subversive. Novels like Alejo Carpentier's El siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral [1962]) and Maryse Condé's La vie scélérate (The Tree of Life [1987]) put in narrative form precisely the constant and at times problematic circulation of ideas, activists, and objects that sought to reconfigure ideological and power relations in the Caribbean. While Carpentier's novel traces the circulation and the evolution of Jacobin ideas and texts into and around the Caribbean, Condé's follows Marcus Garvey's movement and ideas throughout the region.In Gilroy's “black Atlantic,” the ship is viewed as a powerful vehicle for resistance. Accordingly, Gilroy's book explores Caribbean “expressive counterculture,” such as music and some forms of literature, “not simply as a succession of literary tropes and genres but as a philosophical discourse that refuses the modern, occidental separation of ethics and aesthetics, culture and politics” (38–39). In his invitation to rethink the Caribbean as a modern philosophical counterdiscourse, Gilroy demonstrates anti-Enlightenment and anti-Aristotelian impulses. He states that the “black Atlantic” speaks against “the traditional idea that a good life for the individual and the problem of the best social and political order for the collectivity could be discerned by rational means” (39) and relies instead on the revisionist power of artistic discourses capable of infiltrating several fields of meaning—discourses that, in their thematic and stylistic specificities, collapse “the modern, occidental separation of ethics and aesthetics, culture and politics” (38–39).Two of Gilroy's arguments are particularly persuasive to me: first, that the Caribbean as a concept often entails a conflation of ethics and politics. Such combination, which lies at the heart of postcolonial studies in general, finds in the Caribbean's violent history a particularly rich area of study. I also agree with Gilroy that the region's artistic production is often the vehicle for such theoretical elaborations. I do find, however, that Gilroy's focus on dissidence fundamentally relies on history-based identities—that is, on constructed social classifications understood as self-explanatory even across time. It is on account of this fact that Gilroy, in my view, falls short of addressing some of the complexities promised by the chronotope of the ship; complexities that generate a deeper understanding of Caribbean conditions of existence.The complex social and philosophical fabric of in the ship is more thoroughly elaborated by Glissant in his treatment of the plantation. Glissant argues that “c'est bien à cette deuxième matrice de la Plantation, après celle du bateau négrier, qu'il faut rapporter la trace de nos sources, difficiles et opaques” (87) (“this second Plantation matrix, after that of the slave ship, is where we must return to track our difficult and opaque sources” [73]).In his Poétique de la relation (1990) as well as his Philosophie de la relation (2009), Glissant offers a densely poetic philosophical discussion about Caribbean literature and culture. Glissant uses several metaphors to advance his theories. The most famous among these is, perhaps, the archipelago (a rhizomatic concept that resembles Benítez Rojo's “repeating island”). Nevertheless, relation, Glissant's guiding concept, seems best illustrated by the plantation, which he defines as a social and linguistic “laboratory” with conceptual ramifications: C'est encore dans la Plantation que la rencontre des cultures c'est manifestée avec le plus d'acuité directement observable, quoique aucun de ceux qui l'habitèrent n'eût le moindre soupçon qu'il s'agissait là véritablement d'un choc de cultures. Le métissage culturel qui nous occupe tous, nous pouvons là en surprendre quelques-unes des lois de formation. C'est dans les prolongements de la Plantation, dans ce que'elle a enfanté au moment même où elle disparaissait comme entité fonctionnelle, que s'est imposée pour nous la recherche d'historicité…. La Plantation est un des ventres du monde, non pas le seul, un parmi tant d'autres, mais que présente l'avantage qu'on peut le scruter avec le plus de précision possible. Ainsi la limite, qui était sa faiblesse structurelle, devient pour nous un avantage. Et pour finir son enfermement a été vaincu. Le lieu était clos, mais la parole qui en est dérivée reste ouverte. (89)(It is also within the Plantation that the meeting of cultures is most clearly and directly observable, though none of the inhabitants had the slightest hint that this was really about a clash of cultures. Here we are able to discover a few of the formational laws of cultural métissage that concerns us all. It is essential that we investigate historicity … in the extensions of the Plantation, [as well as] in the things to which it gave birth at the very instant it vanished as a functional unit…. The Plantation is one of the bellies of the world, not the only one, one among so many others, but it has the advantage of being able to be studied with the utmost precision. Thus, the boundary, its structural weakness, becomes our advantage. And in the end its seclusion has been conquered. The place was closed, but the word derived from it remains open. [74–75]) Glissant makes a distinction between the historical plantation and the plantation as metaphor. The plantation as metaphor, then, is a distinctive micropolitical, microcultural world (to borrow Gilroy's words) that is, like the ship, the spatiotemporal matrix of pure relationality. Glissant's relation conceptualizes the region as a society built on the coexistence of peoples, none of which may claim either historical precedence in connection to the land or transcendental claims vis-à-vis the creation of the world. The plantation thus appears as a concept metaphor for a society suspended in a space devoid of legal or transcendental meaning other than that which is continuously being generated out of what I provisionally call “an aleatory togetherness.” As a metaphor for unharmonious cohabitation, the plantation, anchored in an illegitimate notion of membership, stresses the fundamental need of civility.Historically, the plantation for Glissant is “une organisation socialement pyramidale, confinée dans un lieu clos, fonctionnant apparemment an autarcie mais réellement en dépendance, et dont le mode technique de production est non évolutif parce qu'il est basé sur une structure esclavagiste” (78) (“an organization formed in a social pyramid, confined within an enclosure, functioning apparently as an autarky but actually dependent, and with a technical mode of production that cannot evolve because it is based on a slave structure” [64]). As Glissant notes, it is in this obsolete place that one can locate the basis of the Caribbean's defective modernity: the tradition of making payment in kind, “ce qui ne mène à aucune accumulation, d'expérience ni de capital” (81) (“which led to accumulation of neither experience nor of capital” [67]) and to the formation of an economic and political system that was “dépendante[s] de l'ailleurs” (81) (“dependent on someplace elsewhere” [67]), based on the practice of importing and exporting, and run by a form of politics that “n'est pas décidée en leur sein” (81) (“is not decided from within” [67]). The historical plantation is also the site of the conflation of a social hierarchy with a racial hierarchy, and the production, which is effected through both biological reproduction as well as by sheer physical proximity, of racial and cultural hybridity. At the same time, Glissant insists on the metaphorical density of the place when he states that “la Plantation n'est pas socialement le produit d'une politique mais l'émanation d'un fantasme” (82) (“socially, the Plantation is not the product of a politics but the emanation of a fantasy” [67]). While “fantasy” here refers to the traces of the delusional impulse of conquest, the phrase “the emanation of a fantasy” as a whole points to the lack of political consent, the absence of a social contract, that lies at the very heart of colonialism and without which, in principle, there can be no polis.Glissant's poetics of relation does not by any means neglect the injustice on which Caribbean societies have been built; yet it has a utopian feel to it. In a vacuum of legitimacy (I understand legitimacy here as membership based on undisputed intelligibility), the plantation offers a distinctive setting where individual and collective stories converge in violent yet creative ways. Among relation's accomplishments is that of acknowledging the human texture of a historical phenomenon by invoking the affective dimension at play in plantation societies—including the role that emotions such as anger, desire, shame, and pride may have had in gluing together a complex new society. The concept is open enough to contain past, present, and future, as well as a potential balance between the singular, the collective, and the specific. Admittedly, Glissant offers little indication as to what kind of relations he has in mind. In fact, he circumvents real practical issues by stating “nous n'avons pas besoin, quand nous évoquons une poétique de la Relation, d'ajouter: relation entre quoi et quoi? C'est pourquoi le mot français “Relation”, qui fonctionne un peu à la manière d'un verbe intransitif” (39–40) (“when we speak of relation we no longer need to add: relation between what and what?”); on the contrary, he writes, the French word “relation” “functions somewhat like an intransitive verb” [27]). By means of an analogy or a grammatical impossibility, that of an intransitive noun, Glissant's relation is a virtual entity, a pure concept that, though rooted in a specific history, must apply to real human beings capable of accountability and yet with room for solidarity. This is what I understand to be “the plantation as metaphor,” which I tend to see as analogous, in this respect, to Gilroy's conceptual ship. In relation, the plantation stands as the violent enclave of multicultural togetherness, an enclave that provided the original model for present-day modes of relation. So understood, the plantation functions as the promise of a certain kind of ethics.Critics such as Abdenneby Ben Beya, Mary Gallagher, and Bernadette Cailler have addressed the ethical dimension of the concept of relation mostly as a theory of the other (inspired no doubt by Glissant's “The Other of Thought”). These critics read Glissant alongside Levinas to find in relation a conceptual model for understanding a diverse global world. They see relation as analogous to a face-to-face moment with the other that demands an unconditional ethical response to the other's humanity. Ben Beya analyzes relation vis-à-vis a number of ethical figures (such as Foucault's “barbarian” and Levinas's “naked face”) to propose relation as “a counter-myth ‘in which no one person has control of the whole story,’ in which no one person is reducible to the status of invisibility. Such achievement is nothing but an ethical call for unconditional recognition and solidarity.”4 In contrast, Gallagher opposes Glissant's opaqueness to Levinas's notion of nudity (defined as pure humanity, that is, as an abstract singularity detached from culture).5 Similarly, Cailler's essay attends to the responsibility for the other, summarized in Derrida's words (apropos of Levinas) as “the messianic politics of hospitality” (“‘hospitality’ for the stranger, the marginal, the naked migrant,” adds Cailler).6 While these critics present nuanced philosophical readings of Glissant's relation, they share my view that relation must be seen not only as a poetics but also as an ethics, and they seek to treat it as such by unpacking Glissant's ambiguous language with the help of more rigorous philosophical discourse. Nonetheless, they seem to remain within a philosophical predicament that could be described, paraphrasing Peter Hallward, as a singular-to-singular ethics.Hallward's Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific reinterprets relation (and postcolonial theory in general) as precluding the possibility of ethics. Hallward complains that postcolonial theory is vague, opaque, and unsystematic. But Hallward goes a step further—or, in my view, a step too far—when he points out that, while anticolonial studies refer to specificities, postcolonial studies, with its interest in a multiplicity of interstitial and improvised identities, speak only of singularities. Hallward asserts that “postcolonial discourse, despite certain thematic first impressions, is best interpreted as an essentially singular or aspecific enterprise.”7 Given that one of Hallward's four chapters on emblematic authors is dedicated to the elusive works of Severo Sarduy, it is not surprising that he views postcolonialism as aspecific.Clearly, Hallward's argument relies on two mutually exclusive modes of individuation, the singular and the specific. The singular “is constituent of itself, expressive of itself, immediate to itself” and, therefore, he adds, it “comes to be in the absence of others, deprived of an ethical or political environment as such.”8 We could say, returning to Gallagher's interpretation of Levinas, that what Hallward calls “the singular” refers to humanity detached from culture. By contrast, Hallward defines “the specific” in part by way of reference to Marx: A specific rather than singular mode of individuation yields elements whose individuality can only be discerned through the relations they maintain with themselves, with their environment, and with other individuals. The condition of identity for such an individual is that it be constituted through and persist in relations with others…. The specific … implies a situation, a past, an intelligibility constrained by inherited conditions. The specific is the space of interests in relation to other interests, the space of the historical as such, forever ongoing, forever incomplete, the space where “we make our own history but not in circumstances of our choosing. Within the world, the specific relates subject to subject and subject to other [while] the singular dissolves both in one beyond-subject.”9 Based on Hallward's understanding of the singular as pure individuality, on the one hand, and the specific as the individual immersed in complex social, historical and moral conditions, on the other, I would not hesitate to suggest that Glissant's relation addresses “the specific.” However, Hallward expressly understands it to be concerned with singularities. In fact, he goes as far as to explicitly claim that Glissant's relation is nonrelational.Hallward attributes Glissant's “rise to eminence” to a paradox: Glissant's “project is both ‘post-identitarian’ and context-specific,” and he criticizes Glissant's apparent commitment to “the affirmation of specific relations” while in fact abandoning “the nation in favour of a kind of self-asserting, self-constituting immediacy,” which he defines in terms of the singular; that is, as something gained at the expense of the specific.10 Hallward seems to be challenging Levinasian readings of Glissant when he states, quoting Alain Badiou, that one of the express guiding principles of his book is that “we need to find the courage to accept that the whole ethico-culturalist ‘predication based upon recognition of the other must be purely and simply abandoned.’”11 These points suggest that Hallward is advancing three very troublesome positions in Absolutely Postcolonial: that postcolonial theory is a false ethical enterprise, that Glissant's relation is nonrelational, and that the Caribbean is a collection of endless particularities.Absolutely Postcolonial constitutes a serious misreading of Glissant. Hallward states, for instance, that “like Deleuze, Glissant arrives at a theory of la Relation defined primarily by its transcendence of relations with or between specific individuals.”12 This is a surprising assertion given that Glissant sees “colonized peoples identity as primarily ‘opposed to,’” that is, as peoples whose means of self-representation—whose intelligibility—results exclusively from relations produced by conquest. This is a precondition that Glissant believes to be “au principe une limitation” (29) (“a limitation from the beginning” [17]), and he concludes that “le vrai travail de la décolonisation aura été d'outrepasser cette limite” (29) (“decolonization will have done its real work when it goes beyond this limit” [17]).For Glissant, relation is an imaginary construct representing “la possibilité pour chacun de s'y trouver, à tout moment, solidaire et solitaire” (145, emphasis in original) (“the possibility for each one at every moment to be both solidary and solitary” [132]). It follows that Glissant is claiming the right for Caribbean subjects/citizens/protagonists to be both specific (specific in more ways than those dictated by colonial power relations) and singular. The question is, of course, how?What I intend to do in the rest of this article constitutes an ethical turn in itself, a turn that supplements Levinasian readings of Glissant and that may help reconcile the (false) paradoxes pointed out by Hallward. I contend that what is overdue in any ethical interpretation of relation is not just a conversation about the other but one that treats the self as self. I aim to show how a Caribbean subject/citizen/protagonist can come to terms with her own place in such a violent historical context (that is, to be both singular and specific, solidary and solitary) and also feel free to ponder what present and future relations are available to her. I would like to suggest that what is ultimately at stake in relation, borrowing moral philosopher Michael Sandel's words, is the question of “how we can see ourselves as situated and yet free.”13 It may be relevant to note that Sandel is not talking about Caribbean subjects but about human beings in general. However, I find his question to be particularly germane to Caribbean conditions of existence. In order to answer Sandel's question, I put relation in dialogue with communitarian philosophers Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre. Based on their theories, I suggest that Glissant leaves behind a “history-based” notion of identity in favor of “narrative-based” identities—a notion that is already contained in the double meaning of relation, namely, to relate and to narrate. I argue that relation, which is both a poetics and an ethics, can be redefined as an ongoing balancing act between interconnected profane narratives.Before discussing how the communitarian concept of narrative-based identities can help illuminate an “ethics of relation,” I explain what I mean by the word “profane” in the phrase “interconnected profane narratives.” Glissant condemns three sacred elements of cultures—mostly European but also African and Asian cultures—that, while at the heart of much historical violence in world history, are fundamentally absent in the modern Caribbean. It is largely by virtue of opposing the validity of these cultural foundations that relation constitutes a powerful ethical stance. The first is intolerance of the root. In the absence of a myth of uninterrupted filiation (Glissant's term for genealogical claims to territorial ownership), relation provides its own mechanism of shared meaning; hence, Glissant's famous borrowing of Deleuze and Guattari's figure of the rhizome to describe Caribbean identity in opposition to the intolerance of the root. The second concerns atavistic conceptions of identity. Contemporary Caribbean peoples cannot situate themselves in relation to a narrative “liée, non pas à une création du monde, mais au vécu conscient et contradictoire des contacts de culture” (158) (“about the creation of the world but [only in relation] to the conscious and contradictory experience of contacts among cultures” [144]). The third relates to the conflation of language and truth. For those peoples that have enjoyed a long unchallenged historical continuity in a given land, monolingualism seems to be directly related to the production of totalizing knowledge, to the equation of self and truth. Relation, however, stands against monolinguistic intransigence. In sum, for Glissant, neither land occupation based on filiation, nor atavistic myth of origin, nor the conflation of truth and language can fulfill the expectation of self-intelligibility in a world completely constructed on an aleatory togetherness in the absence of sacred meaning. In the absence of both filiation and myth, a poetics of relation provides the contemporary reason for a community's existence, and therefore, relation, that is, self-intelligibility through civil and civic interconnectedness, constitutes “une forme moderne du sacré” (29) (“a modern form of the sacred” [16]).Hallward is partly right when he points out that the fact that “we are relational in no way determines the kinds of (political or ethical) relations we should pursue.”14 However, even though Glissant fails to offer an explicit social or political agenda, he proposes a recognizable ethical stance when he suggests that the lack of legitimacy in “nonatavistic societies” yields an “ecological” relationship to land and to language. Legitimacy in relation derives not from sacred conceptions of identity but from complicity, that is, a commitment to compensatory responsibility. This includes responsibility for conservation as well as a remedial impulse concerning the ills of the past. It also entails reducing the negative impact of one's presence. An ecological stance would mean an ethical position that is based not simply on interdependency but also on impersonal forms of solidarity. Relation suggests noninvasive ways to live with the other, to think of the other, to give meaning to present social connections, to one's own personal history, and to make possible the creation of new alliances and bonds. As an ecological take on social presence, relation can be defined as “profane”—fragile, temporary, inherently renegotiable. It is a social contract that not only recognizes interdependency as the source of legitimacy but, as a commitment to compensatory responsibility, offers a glimpse into the possibility of turning history into civility.Relation so understood brings all Caribbean peoples into the fold of what I would like to call a “squatters' ethics,” that is, an ethics built on a blatant disregard for traditional notions of legitimacy established by birthrights. While there is, in truth, no single notion of what kind of relations relation is meant to yield, I would say that a “squatters' ethics” could potentially advance an understanding of social presence that is legally fragile by definition and therefore relies most heavily on personal commitment and reasonable, inherently negotiable social contracts. In fact, Glissant himself suggests as much when he points out that classical philosophy was the first “d'éssayer de fonder la légitimité, non pas encore—ou non plus—de la communauté dans un territoire, mais de la Cité dans la rationalité de ses lois” (35) (“to attempt to base legitimacy not on community within territory (as it was before and would be later) but on the City in the rationality of its laws” [13]).It is perhaps possible to see relation as merely “a collection of citizens of nowhere” who have been “banded together” by historical incidents and geographical accidents—I am paraphrasing MacIntyre, but we can hear the echoes of Hallward's “collection of endless particularities.”15 This interpretation of relation is somewhat in keeping with that original form of belonging best represented by the idea of the ship, one that, philosophically speaking, can be described as “membership without consent.” This view, however, would thwart the possibility of present forms of relations that are both conditioned by the ship's and the plantation's original social arrangements and still retain a considerable margin of freedom and responsibility. It would be more precise, then, to understand relation as a Caribbean theory distinctly informed by what Michael Sandel calls “membership beyond consent.” Indeed, Glissant's theory allows for a context-specific moral freedom through which to pursue both individual happiness and the overall good via cultural identification, social commitments, and political participation. So defined, relation suggests the possibility of a polis, a polis whose notions of the good and its mechanism for defining and achieving it allows for the theoretical reconciliation of genealogy, accountability, and personal freedom. The plantation then becomes a moral concept metaphor that depends on a hermeneutic shift: that of understanding identity as determined not so much by a given history but instead by what MacIntyre calls “encumbered narrative.”MacIntyre's notion of narrative-based identity is particularly suited to helping us unravel Glissant's theory of relation. While history-based identity separates into distinctive groups that are defined a priori, narrative-based identities speak of the individual as embedded in multiple forms of interconnectedness, an interconnectedness whose unity is ultimately provided by narrative. In After Virtue, MacIntyre asserts that “human beings are storytelling beings,” not unlike characters extracted from a text, for it is only in narrative that we can make sense of our lives. Sandel advances MacIntyre's argument by stating that to live a life is to enact a nar