I'm currently working (very slowly, pardon me) on completing my masters in Film Studies. I have a lot of reading to do...one of the books I'm currently reading (and blowing my fucking mind) is Ian Baucom's Specters of the Atlantic. It basically posits the Atlantic Slave Trade is the catalyst or foundation (seems slaves have been the foundation for allll TYPES of institutions!) for our contemporary finance market systems of capital, credit and most importantly insurance. Betcha never thought about insurance that hard, have ya? Me either. You should. We all should, for it drives almost all the things we do and take for granted in a free market, capitalist society.
Baucom is a prolific cultural writer dealing mostly with colonialism, Afro-diaspora studies and media. I know I've read him before, but what it was I can not remember.
I'm just going to copy/paste what I have in my google doc. It won't make sense or maybe it will! More to come either way :)
p. 37 - Baucom makes a distinct point to localize this moment of commerce/capitalism
Why? Is it because of the Atlantic Slave Trade?
I made a note after reading p. 40’s description of insurance as form of storytelling (this is my far reaching simplification of how insurance and historicism and the novel convene at this moment in time)
I finally understood what historiography is. Wow.
And all it took was the concept of insurance for me to fully grasp what we were LOOKING AT when we say or think about historiography
p.45 - “Historicism to put it most briefly, thus entails not only the two-way production of situations but the two-way generation of types”
This quote helps me see how history must define itself at the same time OF itself.
Meaning that history must find those typical qualities to make distinctions from other typical qualities usually marked by time, thus making genres or categories or types...
Baucom using some of James Chandler’s ideology of a history “that repeats itself not as a sequence of recurrent events but through the reanimation of antecedent intellectual methods and genres of knowing” p.41
Insurance and the concept of typicality underwrites the Zong incident
Typicality frames the time in which the Zong incident occurs, how and why we arrive at its outcome
Baucom, in his distinctions of these genres of knowing, or distinguishing types of ways to approach an understanding of history (or how we got here…) he uses the terms actuarial and romantic
Actuarial being those types of things “as the measurable, abstract, aggregate representations of what are taken to be contemporaneous, extant phenomena” (p. 45) like commodities
Romantic “conversely functions as the representative of something that no longer exists, something that once existed but, by the moment it enters historicist awareness, is not lost…amaterial, nongraspable entity, a substitute” (p. 46)
Baucom situates the Zong slave to the actuarial type, as they were accountable, accumulating things which could be insured/represented numerically
Baucom also chooses the terms “theoretical realism” (which I have figured is rooted in the actuarial type of historicism and “melancholy realism” (by process of elimination and, I guess, with the ghostly qualities that romantic historicism possesses would be under that form of historicism)
p. 47 - Baucom helps us understand that for the Zong (and slave owners of Liverpool et.al) the value of a slave had to survive their death
This sentiment helps usher the next section which speaks candidly about the actual numbers of slaves captured and lost in voyages
I won’t go into all the details, as they are figures, and I did take the time to read them, as Baucom implored his reader to do with the ship’s logs
The framework, I’ve come to realize, is working backward. Baucom wants to look at the typical nature of this event and situate it in a very specific moment in time and commerce (thus answering my question from above)
The pride Liverpool took in their part in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade is baffling only to my contemporary eyes but the African heads on the exchange building? The colloquial use of the word “Guinea” meaning money? Just wow.
I see some similarities to Caligari to Hitler in tracing the abstract philosophy that toppled the monarchy with the creation of speculative finances
On p. 55 Baucom employs both Zizek and Hegel to distinguish the new subject, on that possesses a freedom which in part aids in creating a fellowship that feeds into a new capital culture
Capital culture makes money (therefore status, i.e. no more claims to money due to born status [The French Revolution]) egalitarian
This also is ripe territory for the conceptualization of paper monies (p.59)
Pages 60-1 help me come to a conclusion about what’s being said about the money lending and the value-objects of slaves: the systems of finance that allowed the Atlantic Slave Trade be so profitable--this exchange of ever present/endless supply of “goods”--paper money (a speculative ‘thing’ that denotes value) had more value than a human life AND helped usher us into the finance market we know today. The Trans-Atlantic slave trade birthed modernity
The note I made after coming to this realization is I need to finish the Wilderson book
Baucom goes on to describe the characters of the persons in the circle of finance
Later in the chapters (and others) Baucom notes that one of the many factors propelling this new world order is the Character of Men, social capital
Novelization!
From Baucom’s reading of Catherine Gallagher’s Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Woman Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 she points to the novel as “help[ing] secure the imaginary of the new ‘credit economy and polity’ by endorsing the validity and expanding the circulation networks of fictional truths” (p.68)
The novel gave birth to the ‘typical’ or the ‘blank’ canvas that insurances base their calculations from (p.70)
I like how he makes note of he parties the Liverpool elite throw, aping the culturally lavish parties in London
Gives these players in the Zong some ‘character’, shows their typicality, places them in a certain point in history
On p. 81 Baucom finally explicitly says what I’ve been waiting for: [The] Atlantic finance capital staked its claim to the modernization of the globe
p. 83 - I made a note here, basically saying “y'all tellin me that the British markets soared because the advent of the modern novel helped financiers see speculatively??”
The Caligari to Hitler similarities keep coming!
Then there is B.Cruikshank and his faith and belief in credit (Lady Credit as Baucom begins to call her)
Credit for all drives up the markets (goes beyond people’s needs and desires) just plain goes for the people’s lives or “habits” (p.87)
p.89 - “credit produced slaves” - literally for the slaves of the Zong and millions of others; figuratively for us now in 2019
What’s more is slaves were considered money! Cash money, or at least interchangeable as so! “Slaves,” Cruikshank reveals, “for some time as being the staple of commerce, held the most conspicuous place as a test of computation, and an article was ordinarily reckoned at the value of one, two or more slaves” (p.90)
WILD.
Then on page 91 again my mind was blown seeing that cowrie shells, that symbol of fertility and womanhood was actually money first? Used (in conjunction with trust) to show how much “credit” one had
These shells that fed off the cadavers and dismembered slave bodies -- “slaves certainly did in an economic sense ‘feed’ the shell trade” (p.92)
He uses this allegory to transition to the idea of insurance and the “existence of imaginary values” (p.94)
A few quotes from p. 95 sum up Baucom’s introduction to insurance and its creation and appeal:
To paraphrase, insurance is the the product of “imagination and agreement” in practice
“The genius of insurance, the secret of its contribution to finance capitalism, is its insistence that the real test of something’s value comes not at the moment it is made or exchanged but at the moment it is lost or destroyed”
This is a Marxist crisis if I’ve ever heard of one
Thinking about insurance in the manner is fun! I’ve never given much thought to the thing, I just knew it was something I had to purchase to drive a car and to visit the doctor/dentist...It’s a living THING. It flourishes off live and destruction equally! It gives a whole new meaning to structuralism/post-structuralism
p. 98 - I like how Baucom points out how the white hegemony that ‘ruled’ Liverpool politics had their own traditions, not unlike the Africans that did not want sacred rocks being used for the white’s holding structures for new slaves
Baucom makes sure to illuminate the similarities in forming traditions and customs whites have/had to blacks, it just that one is based in ‘history and ancestry” and the other is ‘savage and ridiculously superstitious’
He goes on to compare the loss of the stones to the loss of the Liverpool’s Corporations liberties (basically the hegemony over the entire city of Liverpool populated by about 40 men from a few highly regarded families) as an allegory for (and I love the way it’s worded) “the war on thingliness which characterizes the speculative culture of finance capital, and which, I have further argued, finds its ultimate expression in the practice of insurance” (p. 99)
Baucom goes on to inform us that the whole system of everything was behind establishing insurance, namely the government
Everyone was invested in this system of oppression
There are three major parties that had to be present at the time of drawing an insurance contract
“A ship’s owner or one or more of its investors; a broker...and an insurance underwriter” (p. 101)
These figures, of course, were present for the biggest form of insurance of the day (marine) to be contracted
Baucom again mentions the patina of the character that drove these transactions, the trust and, because insurance, a type to underwrite
Underwriters were the value makers of the society and not only of men but of THINGS. It’s almost as if these underwriters were also cultural theorist (p. 103)
And here on pages 104-5, Baucom drives home this notion of the “rise of novelistic discourse” and “theory of insurance” arose around the same time.
The way in which insurance is predicated on the concept of loss and speculation
On p. 106 it becomes clear that marine insurance is the basis from which I understand how insurance functions today in 2019
It’s almost like the Zong massacre was encouraged with the way insurance rewards loss
It’s all about maintaining an average. Assessing the typical risk of a thing like marine travel and making decisions for ‘the greater good’
The Zong massacre actually helped establish a baseline of the typical! “...it defined the type of situation from which that general normative scheme could deduce itself” (p.109)
It’s as if the insurance case that paid out the owners of the Zong for the loss of their ‘property’ justified the fact or gave after-the-fact reasoning to do what they did! MURDER!
The very end of the chapter truly and really drives home the thingliness of slaves. Just one, in a list of real inanimate objects, as if a dark-skinned human means nothing. They are all things, insurable, accumulating things.