Phantasmagoria

Introduction

In 1348 the Black Death reached the European mainland in the form of a bacillus carried by fleas living in the fur of rats. It seems to have originated in China about fifteen years earlier, made its way slowly to Constantinople, from there to Sicily and the Italian peninsula, and from Italy to Spain, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, England, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Poland, and Russia. Wherever the bacillus appeared it unleashed bubonic plague and associated outbreaks of pneumonia. The result was agonizing death, economic devastation, and social hysteria, a level of misery unprecedented even by the sanguinary standards of the Fall of Rome or the ensuing Dark Ages. In Paris, over eight hundred people gave up the ghost every day. Whole villages emptied and farms were abandoned as rural inhabitants fled the advance of the epidemic. Many towns banned all travellers. Doctors as well as close family members refused to visit the beds of the sick, or priests to comfort the dying. In more than one incident frenzied mobs massacred Jews, the perennial scapegoats of medieval Christendom. In the Rhineland entranced bands of Flagellants danced through the streets scourging their flesh while calling on sinners to repent and join them. The feeling of despair must have been overwhelming. In sheer demographic terms the Black Death ended by consuming at least a third, perhaps as much as two fifths, of the total European population. Undoubtedly the epidemic would have been massively destructive under any circumstances, but it was especially devastating in that it struck at a society already in the grip of economic and demographic decline.[1]

The three hundred years spanning 1000 to 1300 were a period of growth for feudal Europe. Such improvements in agricultural technique as the invention of the harness for horse ploughing and the development of the three field system of crop rotation led to the reclamation of huge areas of virgin forest, swamp, and heath as enterprising peasants as well as lords converted the wastelands into farms. Increasing food production in turn permitted a dramatic upswing in the birth rate, the European population roughly doubling in the period concerned. Towns developed where artisans produced goods for exchange against the surplus product from the countryside, and long distance trade in luxury items grew in response to the new wealth of the upper classes. Around 1300 however this expansionary trend reached its limit as the agricultural capacity of the most recently reclaimed lands proved to be quite restricted at current levels of technique. The consequence was widespread famine, demographic erosion, urban stagnation, and curtailment of trade beginning fifty years before the Black Death had even arrived.

It was not long before the suffering and death that were first the result of famine and then of plague as well found an echo in the discord of war. By the mid fourteenth century the decrease in rural population posed a serious threat to the income of the aristocracy. As the enserfed peasantry began to die off in great numbers, the agricultural surplus that they produced and that served as the mainstay of seigneurial wealth also shrank precipitously. In order to recoup their losses, aristocrats turned to the profession in which, after all, they had been specially trained: they launched armed campaigns in pursuit of plunder. The attempt to commandeer a declining surplus sometimes took the form of outright brigandage in which lords and their men preyed on the whole rural population. But it just as frequently led to more focused struggles within the signeurial class. In such bloody and long lived military conflicts as the Hundred Years War and the War of the Roses, nobles turned their weapons against one another in desperate attempts to win control of dwindling resources.

In order to finance their internecine class struggles, the aristocracy imposed heavy taxes on what was left of the peasantry. At the same time they enacted laws to reinforce servile conditions by fixing wages at low levels in both town and country and prohibiting free movement off the manor. In response to their increasingly onerous burdens, peasants, artisans, and laborers engaged in rebellions that shook the authority of state, nobility, and church. These included the victory of an army of artisans over nobles and urban patricians at the battle of Courtrai in 1309, the peasant uprisings in Denmark in 1340 and Majorca in 1351, the Grande Jacquerie in Northern France in 1358, and the Peasant's War in England in 1381. Though most of the rebellions ended in defeat, they constituted a generalized assault against the existing order that resulted in significant gains by the exploited classes, especially since the assault was combined with the strengthened bargaining position that accompanied labor scarcity. The hierarchical edifice of feudal society began to crack as wages rose, cereal prices fell, and labor services were commuted to money rents in a prelude to the abolition of serfdom.

From the time of the Dark Ages, Europe had lived in the anticipation of its demise. The small scale societies that slowly emerged in the aftermath of the Fall of Rome lived at the mercy of the forces of natural and human predation. The radical insecurities of the period were interpreted in accordance with the teachings of the New Testament and Church Fathers as the mark of a world that was growing old, that existed in fact at the end of time. The eschatological expectations of many were focused on the year 1000, the conclusion of the first millennium after the birth of Christ. Yet ironically that moment proved to be not an end but a new beginning. The intricate relations of dependency and superiority that characterized a now mature feudal society were dynamic enough to spur economic growth and demographic expansion. When this process came to an end in the fourteenth century eschatological expectations unsurprisingly returned. However it was not the whole world that was consumed in the flames of the ensuing crisis. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse indeed appeared. Their names were famine, plague, war, and social rebellion. But what they brought to an end was only European feudalism.

Capitalism was born in the sixteenth century from the crisis of European feudalism, with its epidemic diseases, population decline, and flagging agricultural production. That is to say, it was a response to the death throes of a society that occupied a relatively small area of the planet. Yet from its beginnings, capitalism has also been a global reality. Its origins involved the commencement of four processes that were in some ways causally related, but that nonetheless took place on different continents: the dispossession of the European, especially English, peasantry of its land through enclosure of the commons and other forms of economic ruin; the penetration and looting of India, Southeast Asia, and the Islands of the Pacific; the conquest of the Americas, including the destruction of much of their indigenous population; and the removal of Africans from their homelands for the trans-Atlantic trade in slaves. These developments allowed gold and silver bullion to be amassed, agricultural production to be increased, and labor power to be intensively exploited in its free and unfree forms, in other words, as both wage and chattel slavery. They constituted what Marx called the “primitive accumulation of capital” that enabled a new mode of production to arise and consolidate as a self-perpetuating system. Over time, such consolidation took the spatial form of a further expansion of capitalism from the place of its birth to other regions of the globe. In that expansion, the birthplace maintained an advantage over outlying areas with respect to advanced technologies and their application to the organization of labor, including the effort involved in military campaigns. The geographic generalization of the capitalist mode of production was thereby expressed as the hegemony of the ruling classes of Europe (including such settler outposts as the United States) over the non-European world. Whether in the shape of the conquest of the Americas and their importation of slave labor during the phase of primitive accumulation, or that of the creation of colonial empires in Africa, Asia, and Oceania during the age of classical imperialism, or that of the neo-colonialism of Third World debt, austerity programs, and military interventions of the current period, world capitalism has always been marked by the distinction between a dominant European core and a subordinate and overwhelmingly non-European periphery.[2]

Europeans, of course, were familiar with non-European societies even before the rise of global capitalism, especially the Islamic empires with which they traded and often warred. But the Age of Exploration that was part and parcel of the era of primitive accumulation of capital introduced them to societies even more exotic than those of the Islamic world (which included India at the time). In particular, none of the indigenous peoples of Africa, America, or Oceania had technological capacities as advanced as those of Europe or the Near East. More surprisingly, many had no kings or any distinction between nobles and commoners. Even those who lived in politically centralized, class-divided societies possessed family structures and sexual practices that bewildered and often offended European sensibilities. And most importantly, perhaps, none of what were somewhat anachronistically called the “savage nations” shared the scriptural tradition that at least connected the religious beliefs of Islam with those of Christianity. It is therefore not surprising that the early explorers, merchants, and colonialists were fascinated by the strange peoples with whom they made contact, nor that they grappled with the problem of understanding the material creations of those radically alien societies.

Around the time of first contact, Europeans approached this problem in the only way possible. They brought native artifacts or artworks (the two were not distinguished by the indigenous peoples concerned) within familiar frameworks of interpretation. They saw them in the light of their own religious conceptions, craft traditions, aesthetic proclivities, and notions of material wealth. During this early period, nearly all European judgments and actions concerning objects of indigenous art remained securely within the compass of Western cultural presuppositions. It was only with the passage of time that some Europeans were able to register what was unique about the indigenous objects by noting how they deviated from traditional Western expectations. Studies in hermeneutics and related investigations in the aesthetics of reception have demonstrated that all interpretation of texts, art objects, anything imbued with a foreign or obscure significance, proceeds by way of the gradual modification of prejudices.[3] There is no presuppositionless starting-point when it comes to our encounter with the Other. The first European experiences of native art are not unique in that regard. Yet, in this case, it is important to resist regarding the process in which the alien is illuminated by both its similarity to and difference from the familiar as a simple exercise in the interpretation of meaning. The Europeans who participated in the Age of Exploration and its near aftermath certainly tried to bring the art of indigenous peoples within their own horizon of understanding. But, for the most part, they did so in the pursuit of a more fundamental project of material plunder and cultural and political subjugation.

Of course, the Europeans involved in that project ─ that is, the ruling classes, those who aspired to their status, and those who acted as their functionaries ─ were not the first people to impose their will on alien societies or to use military and other forms of domination to extract wealth from subject populations. The history of the non-European world prior to the sixteenth century does not want for examples of conquest, mass destruction, slavery, colonization, or the extortion of tribute from defeated peoples. What is unique about those who have triumphed during the past five hundred years is neither their cruelty, nor their greed, nor their willingness to exclude alien cultures from the realm of genuine humanity. It is rather the fact that these all too human failings have been driven to new intensities of expression and effect by the inherently limitless imperative to accumulate capital. The workings of that systemic imperative have resulted, for the first time, in the creation of a bi-polar world, with affluence concentrated at one pole of the global system and misery at the other, along with the ideologies and other symbolic instruments necessary to justify such bi-polarity. If we are to make sense of the European encounter with indigenous art, then we must locate it within this unprecedented and still unfolding history.