Book Review-ish: Nicolas Wey Gomez, The Tropics of Empire

Confession time: this can't really count as a book review, as what Old Ken read of Nicolas Wey Gomez's The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (MIT Press, 2008) was on airplanes. Thus, it was not with the most assiduous attention possible. Nonetheless, this a provocative book and I thought y'all might want to hear some yappin' about it, no matter how threadbare my account might be.

Basically, what Nicolas Wey Gomez sets out to do in The Tropics of Empire is to call attention to the mostly forgotten fact that Columbus did not simply sail west to reach his Indies. Instead, he was trying to sail south! However wrong this sense of direction may be according to our maps, so our author observes, understanding what Columbus was trying to do is a powerful means of unveiling his cosmology, his world-picture. And in the late medieval geographical tradition upon which Columbus drew, Wey Gomez claims, latitude was far more conceptually significant than longitude.

"How can that be right?" we might ask. Longitude, as several popular books and movies have emphasized, was an elusive, technological riddle that, when it went unanswered, left sailors floundering aimlessly at sea or dead on the rocks. While latitude could be calculated by a few simple celestial observations, the determination of longitude drove the creation of sophisticated observatories, star charts and precision time keeping instruments - - not to mention the king's ransom offered for a successful means of resolving its mysteries.



The answer, Wey Gomez (see above) claims, is in the cosmological realm. "While longitude may have initially represented for Columbus the nightmare of crossing an unknown ocean," he claims, "it was latitude that would tell Columbus again and again - - when he admired the gold ornaments on indigenous bodies and when he gazed overhead at parrot flocks so dense they obscured the sun - - that he had indeed arrived in the Indies, or at least a place that shared the same nature with the old Ethiopia and India." (p. 49) That is, following Ptolemaic principles, latitude determined the nature of all the plants and animals in a region or zone, thus insuring that all life on a given parallel of latitude would be the same regardless of its east or west location.

Indeed, in this cosmology that Columbus inherited from antique and medieval learning, there were three zones of the world all determined by latitude: temperate, torrid, and frigid. Bounded by the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, the tropical latitudes were believed to be an infernal wasteland, while the frigid zones were equally inhospitable to life. Because this cosmological view was always also a political view, only those from the temperate zone were believed capable of possessing the mental faculties necessary for governing. Therefore, the author argues, it became necessary for critics of the Spanish colonial project in the American New World such as Bartolomeo Las Casas' to show that " 'the Indies' were more universally temperate than even the most temperate places in the Old World." (p. 96) Las Casas, in other words, was trying to beat Columbus at his own game, utilizing his own knowledge of the Americas to contest the legitimacy of Spanish dominion there.

But, how did Columbus reconcile himself to the fact that the Central American lands and people he saw were not the same as those of Africa or India? He had seen African people on the same latitudes as those he traveled in the Caribbean, and he knew the two to be different. How did this perception of difference not undermine his cosmology? According to Wey Gomez, if Columbus did not actually see the peoples in the Caribbean with the dark skin he associated with "Ethiopians" (i.e. any peoples from tropical latitudes), he came to see cannibalism and facial deformation as a kind of substitute for the tropical inferiority he believed his West Indians to suffer. (p. 220)

What is fascinating about this study is how it takes an episode that is so familiar to peoples of the American hemisphere and show how it was conceived and carried out according to logics that seem extremely far from us. However, so the author concludes in a perhaps slightly "j'accuse" conclusion, the belief that the Northern hemisphere is particularly entitled and able to intervene in the governance of tropical regions is perhaps the longue duree legacy of these largely-forgotten conceptions. Compelling stuff!

Haven't learned anything from 1973 recently? HAH!

The work of French philosopher Georges Bataille has always baffled me, if I am to be totally honest. He is supposed to have had immense influence upon the leading figures of French thought in the post-war era—luminaries like Jacques Lacan, Michel de Certeau and others. As interpreted by friends like the eminent Jeremy Biles (see above), I have found his ideas stimulating. However, Bataille's writings themselves mix economic thought, eroticism, aesthetics and anthropological observations in ways that I always find inscrutable, at best. So, when I happened across Denis Hollier's book Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, which promises to bring Bataille's writings to bear upon the problem of architecture, I was duly interested.



One important caveat: Hollier's book was written in the early 1970s, and the text is an unmistakable product of that era of high-flying poststructuralist fireworks. However, when read nearly forty years later—and in translation—Hollier's endless indulgences of wordplay, his appeals to the slipperiness of language against meaning and against itself ... well, they feel both turgid and completely unsurprising. So, if you're not in the mood to relive, say, 1974 in Comp Lit at Yale (and I was not), what follows is more or less an account of what the book has to say about architecture and specifically Bataille's antagonism to it.



Hollier begins by noting the anti-architectural trend in French post-war thought, most familiar to us now in the work of Michel Foucault, but also present in that of Bataille. But, where Foucault's privileged instance of panoptic, penal architecture is hidden in the coercive action it inflicts, Bataille's architecture is extroverted—publicly visible as a monument of the ruling order's violent power. Interestingly, Hollier notes that architecture, specifically the thirteenth century Cathedral of Rheims, was the subject of Bataille's earliest publication. Written in the wake of the first world war when the cathedral in this, Bataille's native city, was bombed, the piece is an idealistic vision of how the destroyed building could be recuperated in a kind of spiritual communion.

The main thrust of the book is how Bataille's subsequent thought effectively negates the basic moves of this earliest piece. First, against the idealization proposed in this early essay, Bataille's thinking resonates with his now-famous notion of "informe" (or formless), whereby entities are released from their high-minded trappings and brought back down to earth like a spider crushed on the ground. Secondly, architecture as understood in his Rheims essay was a crystallization of the very orders of stability and systematicity that much of Bataille's work would subsequently combat against. Presumably echoing Bataille, Hollier claims that architectural metaphors in language are hallmarks of ideological programs in societies: "There is [...] no way to describe a system without resorting to the vocabulary of architecture." So Bataille would himself observe, the appearance of architectural forms or motifs in other branches of culture is a sure sign of a prevailing taste for authority.



Yet, what Bataille seems to propose is not an architecture that repudiates this linkage to violence sovereignty. Rather, his opposition (at least as I understood it) was to the concealment of this violence behind architecture. Thus, Bataille contrasts the architecture of the bureaucratic Inca empire wherein sacrifices would be performed secreted away in the bowels of stultifying, deadening buildings with that of the Aztecs. On the tops of specially-constructed pyramids, Bataille claims, subjects would be sacrificed to the sovereign rulers—released from profane, worldliness and liberated into a communal spectacle of sacred violence. Aztec pyramids thus refuse the paralysis of death—the literal stabilization and endless reproduction of social order—performed normally by architecture in its malevolent, bureaucratic forms.

The book then concludes with an extremely long chapter of nearly one hundred pages, entitled "The Caesarean" who major themes are eroticism and the rupturing, spasmodic experiences that Bataille privileges, theorizes and supposedly achieves in his writings. Although architecture is almost entirely absent from this discussion, science very definitely moves into the foreground as the equivalent "bad object." Like architecture, science here is a tool of patriarchal order and what would be called "the rationalization of the world picture." Drawing from Alexandre Koyré, Hollier's account of science is one that negated the grounds of religion and yet put nothing its place. The concluding set of claims returns to the title, making the primal scene of the first "caesarean" as a typological moment where the birth of the ruling order comes at the price of the death of the mother. Because science is the attendant of this imperial power, it is always the instigator of this merciless rationalization.

However, so Hollier argues through a wide-ranging series of discussions, Bataille's work also suggests a second kind of caesarean—one that would decapitate the father, lop off the king's head in a spectacle of solar radiance evoking the shards of light claimed to be represented by pyramids. This kind of blinding solar vision is that which Bataille variously associates with eating feces, staring into anuses, vulvas and so on. Indeed, in a long digression, Hollier takes us through a range of longue duree fantasies of the pineal gland, what Bataille would call the "pineal eye," and the solar anus as a kind of "third eye" that doesn't look at the orders of the world but only at sacred profanity—staring upward through a ruptured skull at the sun. In a word: win!

Knowledge Exchange and Far-Flung Facts

What is knowledge? Where does it exist? It seems almost inevitable that we who use computers all the time think of knowledge as existing between people—between nodes on a network. Indeed, Old Ken recently had a fascinating conversation with a Greek psychiatrist who outlined the coming of a major paradigm shift in psychoanalysis. By his account, Freud had understood the mind through a series of analogies to flows and exchanges of energy, which were dominant sciences of his time. (Now, for those of us interested in finding apt visualizations of such a nineteenth century mind, check out the decidedly old-school conceit of the gears running this brain in the stock image above.) However, with the explosion of recent research in neuroscience and brain imaging, the dominant models of the presenty suggest that the brain is constantly rewiring and remapping its neural networks. And this poses—or is soon to pose—some major problems for psychoanalysts who want to take Freud's ideas on the functioning of the mind seriously.

With these thoughts on the exchange, prospects for growth and reformation of knowledge in our minds, I want to share with you an enlightening book review transmitted to Old Ken by our Mexico City correspondent, the Famous Anthropologist. Here is his contribution, interspersed with a few illustrations:



"Julie Berger Hochstrasser’s 2007 'Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age' presents a lavishly-illustrated review of secondary-source materials about the global extent of the Dutch economy in the 17th century. The four main chapters of Part 1 each discuss a different zone of this economy: from the Netherlands (butter, cheese, beer), to Europe (wine, oranges, grain) to Asia (spices, porcelain), to the Americas (tobacco, sugar, slaves). The three chapters and conclusion which make up part 2, all 12 pages or less, attempt to add some theoretical discussion to this economic history; they need not detain us here.

"However, Hochstrasser herself says that she wants to write more than an illustrated history of food and drink. What she hopes to do in her book is address, as she puts it, one key 'postmodernist' moral challenge: how to redress the long history of European exploitation of the globe? Now, all of this may seem quite far from the sensitive analysis of images—more on this to come.



"In order to contribute to this 'postmodern' call to conscience, Hochstrasser opens her book with a famous quote from Marx on the commodity as the coagulation of labor. Presumably, then, this will be a book focused on a sensitive analysis the different types of labor that went into the production of the various goods, both foreign and domestic, that appear in still life paintings. Presumably this book will also consider what images—protoethnographic or protoscientific or in any case less sumptuous and skilled in their execution than still life paintings—can be brought to bear on our understanding of these types of labor. But, in fact, Hochstrasser doesn’t really do this. We do have a long discussion, illustrated, of the perils involved in Dutch herring-fishing, it is true. And we do have a long, and illustrated, account of the role of black slaves in sugar production (but given the ubiquitousness of the discussion of this back-breaking production in the secondary literature, we can’t give Hochstrasser too much credit for talking about it). Yet these are but two commodities out of the dozens she mentions whose process of labor, and the role of working people in producing those commodities, are actually talked about. In most cases, Hochstrasser leaves the reader in the dark about working people.



"Her long discussion of the spice trade, for example, focuses on the, yes, horrific Dutch practices of deportation and slaughter on islands in Indonesia. She also talks about the large number of images from the East Indies which show natives being forced to hold parasols over Dutch merchants (a tradition they inherited from the Portuguese—though the surely important fact that parasols and parasol holders were a tradition first developed by Asian elites should be talked about more than the one-line reference it gets). But she never addresses HOW SPICES WERE GROWN. Plantations? Forest gathering? Who did the gathering? How was this harvest organized? How did local political orders get coopted, if at all, by the Dutch to ensure their access to spices? Not discussed. Nor are these kinds of issues raised in regards to the tea trade, although here at least Hochstrasser includes an image of a tea plantation (which, of course, is left undiscussed). Discussion of Chinese ceramic production does get a brief mention, but it is clear that Hochstrasser is too-quickly summarizing a Dutch account that could have provided the reader with a much better picture of the Chinese people involved in making the clay, making the pots, painting them, and firing them. (She specifically dismisses, in her too-brief rehash of a traveler's account of ceramic production, the details he offers on kilns, by saying something like 'after a detailed discussion of porcelain kilns…'). Turning to the Atlantic salt trade, Hochstrasser has a brief reference to the 'workers' who died on the salt flats of the Cape Verde Islands, which are illustrated above. But who were these workers? Europeans? Africans? A fascinating illustration of this harvest is included—but, again, its imagery is not discussed . Nor is there any discussion of the raising of tobacco in the Americas. Again: did this happen on plantations? Was some sort of tribute extracted from Native American populations? How did this relate to traditions of tobacco-raising that pre-existed the arrival of the Dutch? We are told nothing.

"Hochstrasser’s erasure of the labor of non-Europeans thus does exactly what she accuses still-live paintings of doing: not detailing the 'human costs', as she is fond of saying, involved behind the objects in these images of 'snob appeal' another favorite term. But there is an even more sinister aspect to Hochstrasser’s ultimately condescending lack of interest in non-Europeans. Since she wants to take part in the retrospective 'postmodern' condemnation of Europe’s evils in the past, she can only imagine non-Europeans as poor helpless lumps, abused by the Almighty Might of European Hegemony. Thus even when her secondary sources reveal that, in fact, non-Europeans were not so passive, she passes over such cases with minimal comment. They have no place in her assumptions about the past. Thus an Indonesian epic poem of 1670, Entji
Amin’s 'Rhymed Chronicle of the Macassar War' (which runs several thousand lines and has been given a number of analyses for its scathing critiques of Dutch colonization) is mentioned only in passing (106). Hochstrasser references the end of Dutch presence on the island of Formosa (Taiwan) by saying 'Formosa fell and was lost to the VOC.' What does this mean, 'Formosa fell'? It means that a Chinese warrior came in with his army and kicked the Dutch out. But rather than tell the reader this,
Hochstrasser prefers to use the subjectless 'Formosa fell.' As one final example, turning to the Americas, Hochstrasser discusses the, yes, horrifying aspects of the slave trade and slave plantations in northern Brazil. She mentions that 'so harsh was their lot that slaves risked inconceivable tortures to flee from the plantations to the surrounding jungles, despite routine hunts to recapture them.' (221) But where did they flee to? It is surely important that the northern coast of Brazil saw rise to long-lived independent kingdoms of escaped slaves, organized along the lines of political orders inherited from Africa. These were complex, hierarchically ordered states. These Maroon civilizations have been discussed at length by Richard and Sally Price, so are hardly unknown cases whose histories are unpublished in English. But, again, since Hochstrasser can only see a story of All-Powerful Europeans crushing poor innocent non-Europeans underfoot, this kind of history has no place in her study.



"This is not to say that we should overlook, or underestimate, the power of capitalism or European expansion—as Talal Asad’s introduction to his 1993 'Genealogies of Religion' makes clear. But underestimating the power of capitalism or colonialism is one thing. Totally ignoring the ways these orders have been challenged or critiqued or resisted by people, say, in European colonies is something different. Hochstrasser opens her account by referencing Dipesh Chakrabarty’s idea of 'provincializing
Europe.' That is, given that so much of academic historical production (whether about Europe or about the rest of the world) uses Euro-American history (and Euro-American theories developed to understand that history) as a baseline, how might one 'decenter' Europe? Unfortunately, by telling a story of Powerful Europeans and Passive Non-Europeans, and by only considering European visual culture (with the exception of maybe 5 photos of Chinese porcelains) Hochstrasser keeps European Might—aptly visualized above—at the center of her narrative. Her story makes non-Europeans into passive objects, as passive as the oranges and cheeses that fill the still life paintings so gorgeously printed (in Singapore, no doubt under all sorts of awful labor conditions) in Yale University Press’ book."