Conclusion
If you are planning to travel to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid to see Picasso’s 1937 masterpiece, Guernica, don’t bother. The famed painting is not visible, nor has it ever been. Though impressive amounts of space have been given over to the display of the monumental mural, commissioned as the Republican government’s submission to the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, there is not a single space in the grand room that houses it where one might gain enough distance, enough composure, to see the work (see figure C.1). Instead, against a backdrop of familiar, if alarmingly disconnected, elements that catch the eye like pieces of landscape viewed from a window seat aboard a speeding train, one encounters a sea of tourists anxiously pressing against boundaries maintained by notices, alarm wires, and irritated guards. They have fought their way to this place, bought tickets, packed bags, bundled themselves into uncomfortable transports, and waited in endless queues for the express purpose of capturing quick photographic memories of their obligatory visits to this most sacred relic of Spanish national culture before they exit for afternoon tapas and sangria. In Sala 206, where Guernica is presumably housed, it is the tourists themselves who are visible. It is their desire to see something, something important and historic, that hits like a wave of Iberian summer heat as one enters the room. Here is the great work of Picasso! Its reference to the April 26, 1937, German bombing of a Basque village might be briefly noted by guides trooping their exhausted charges through impressive exhibitions, but mere facts cannot trump the confusion and splendor of what stands before the Reina Sofía’s visitors. We are stunned by the grand spectacle of seeing and being seen that Picasso’s work has somehow made possible. The vulgar truths of the Spanish Civil War and the profound accomplishment of the maestro’s art are beside the point. We ourselves are what we have come to experience and witness.
What draws me to Guernica, what has fueled my many returns to the site where I am told it is hung, is that I suspect that it represents Picasso’s attempt to image the always already deterritorialized nature of violence and war. Without attempting to deny the lived reality of death and suffering, it is key that we understand that warring is also a representational practice, a concatenation of methods by which to challenge established geopolitical and conceptual boundaries through keen manipulation of those narrative strategies by which individuals and communities name and resist commonsensical articulations of human subjugation. My turn to the work of Picasso at this late point in our journey is designed in part to expand the idea of the war archive by noting again the systematic violence and exploitation that arrange the ideologies of Western humanism. Or to turn to the specific rhetoric of these concluding remarks, the protocols of seeing/not seeing that choreograph our approach to a work like Guernica are articulations of the deeply embedded scholasticism to which so much within the practice of the humanities and human sciences pays obeisance. These protocols represent forms by which the anti-human violence that the work chronicles are rendered innocuous and mute. Thus what I am attempting to encourage in this book is a radically suspicious approach to what I have called the war archive, but which I might as easily have named the archive of Man. I call for a vigorous articulation of the disloyalty and displeasure I noted in the introduction, a recommitment to aesthetics that rejects Man in favor of the human.
I hope that it is clear that much of my fascination with Spain stems from the key role that it has played in the articulation of the concept of Western humanism. There is no way in which the African American on the hunt for the social and ideological bases of the constant rehearsal of his presumed cultural deficiency and biological deformity can avoid engagement with Spain and the Iberian Peninsula. For both Spaniards and African Americans alike, modern understandings of space and human being are mediated through a complex of representational strategies that were themselves dependent upon ideological and aesthetic forms established by and through the systems of exploitation and dehumanization perfected and modernized within the structures of colonization and enslavement. More important still, I have argued that one of the most important tasks of the scholar of arts and aesthetics is to reimagine our critical procedures so as to make it that much more possible to discern the functioning of violence within even and especially the most rarefied precincts of culture.
Located just off the lovely Plaza Merced in Málaga lies the childhood home of Pablo Picasso. Inside the small row house one might find a modest collection of memorabilia from the artist’s youth as well as the offices of the Fundación Pablo Picasso. Prominently displayed on a second-floor wall of the building is a 1936 quote from the artist:
Yo he nacido de un padre blanco y de un pequeño vaso de agua de vida andaluza. Yo he nacido de una madre hija de una hija de quince años nacida en Málaga en los Percheles el hermoso toro que me engendra la frente coronada de jazmines.
(From a white father and from a small glass of water of Andalusian life was I born. Born from a mother, daughter of a daughter of fifteen years old born in Málaga in “Los Percheles,” the beautiful bull that engenders my forehead crowned with jasmines.)
Half statement of primogeniture, half impressionist prose poem, this spiritedly performative statement operates for the administrators of the foundation as evidence of the artist’s abiding relationship to a city that he left as a child and only very infrequently visited after that. The point is to place Picasso not so much within the history of Málaga as above it. He has been formed from the very water of the city and the bull of a neighborhood that gave birth to his grandmother. But what of that white father? Why such an awkward detail in an otherwise whimsically evocative statement of Picasso’s origins?
The word “white” (blanco/a) at once obscures and reiterates the history of colonialism and mercenary violence that gave rise to the complex visual vocabularies of Picasso. It names a long history of aesthetic development in which the more brutish arrangements of capitalism and white supremacy were integrated into aesthetic practice and then obscured, turned into inert modes that might be approached through self-consciously formal critical practices in which the black might be treated as at best an awkward, ill-placed (non)subject. Thus working against the sedimented logics that surround the artist, I will read him not as a master but instead a student. The potent representation of disarticulation that we find in Guernica would not be possible without the brooding expression of masculine anxiety in José de Ribera’s 1631 composition Maddalena Ventura, con su marido, or Miguel Cabrera’s lushly decorative and self-consciously white supremacist eighteenth-century celebrations of the racialist protocols underwriting Spanish colonization. “White” is the name that we give to that complex of procedures designed to break tradition, to murder, plunder, rape, and exploit, but also to rehabilitate, recuperate, and repurpose. “White” is the sign of not simply cannibalism, parasitism, destruction, and waste, but also reproduction, innovation, rehabilitation, and conservation.
This catabolistic dynamism is the very thing evoked by Picasso’s impolitic quote. It is the power evoked by images of enslaved Africans trapped in cells, cages, and holds. It is that dis-ease that we see tepidly confronted in the on-again, off-again liberal fretting about black incarceration and police violence. It is the grand problem that plagues and severely delimits the practice of cultural studies, the obscuring of the Man/human/anthropophorous animal ideological nexus that underwrites the whole of the Western humanist project. The result is not only the reiteration of a grotesquely segregated set of disciplinary apparatuses, but also the proliferation of practices and procedures in the humanities and human sciences that work less to illuminate the aesthetic structures of the various works that we examine than to obscure the conditions of their production and consumption.
Throughout Archives of Flesh I have used Orlando Patterson’s masterful work, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, as a touchstone. Concerning himself with the macroeconomic, macro-social concept of enslavement, Patterson reveals the binding common sense of the institution. Alienated from the rituals and etiquettes of its birth and rendered “socially dead,” the slave became an addition to the master’s identity, a prosthetic. “In his powerlessness the slave became an extension of his master’s power. He was a human surrogate, recreated by his master with god-like power in his behalf.”1 Where I have departed from Patterson is in my concern with the everyday procedures and practices that might allow such a strange pairing of master and slave to occur; that is to say, where Patterson privileges social death, I focus on social (re)birth. I recognize that the ties that bound the enslaved to the logics of slavery were never so tight or secure as the masters assumed. Thus my call for a post-humanist archive, an archive of flesh, is an attempt to access those many moments of slippage and uncertainty in the master/slave dynamic in order to make plain the dominant logics of humanism and hopefully to corrode further the Man/anthropophorous animal binary. This is why I return again and again to the fact that enslaved persons had by necessity to work actively to calibrate the stitching that Patterson describes. The notion of the slave as “human surrogate” is maintained through the deployment of often impossibly complicated ideological/aesthetic conventions, the very conventions that support the efforts of all modern intellectuals, even an artist with the talents of Picasso.
I would like to look toward a set of works in Picasso’s oeuvre that vividly demonstrate the aesthetic procedures that I have been at pains to name. Located at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona, Las meninas is a suite of fifty-eight paintings produced by the master in 1957, forty-five of which reiterate and reinterpret Diego Velázquez’s famed 1656 painting of the same name (see figure C.2).
It is the over-the-top theatricality of Velázquez’s masterwork that Picasso worries in his own series. He stretches the figure of the Infanta, producing not so much a caricature as a deft commentary on the fact that her image came ready-made as an infinitely reproducible product. To approach one of the portraits in Picasso’s Las meninas is to seek instruction in the mechanics and protocols of the Velázquez cottage industry. The conceit of a young royal attended by her servants and looked on admiringly by her parents has been stripped away. What is left is pure light, color, line, and perspective (see figure C.3). In the process, Picasso reiterates Federico García Lorca’s fear that images of artists are useful only to the extent that they are deadened and made available for (re)production.
Facsimiles of Las meninas were produced by both Botero and Dalí, who famously dispensed with any semblance of human imagery altogether and instead substituted numbers for the painting’s characters. In addition, artists as disparate as Robert Llimos, Isabel León, Carmen Aguado, Franca Pacetti, José Terrero, Francisco Crespo, Alvaro Paz, Luis Blanco, Francisco Marín, Eve Sussman, Alexandru Racu, Federico Navarra, Ying Feng, Cristóbal Toral, and Manolo Valdéz all produced successively more abstract, mischievous, and iconoclastic images of the Infanta and her attendants.
Figure C.3. Pablo Picasso, Las Meninas (Infanta Margarita María), Museu Picasso, Barcelona. Photograph, Gasull Fotografia.
Foucault famously understood the great value of Velázquez’s masterwork to be that the painting epitomized a key moment in the history of representation, the place at which classical ideas of human subjectivity were confronted by the aggressive claims of modern Man. “Representation undertakes to represent itself here in all its elements,” he writes of Las meninas.
But there, in the midst of this dispersion which it is simultaneously grouping together and spreading out before us, indicated compellingly from every side, is an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation—of the person it resembles and the person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance. This very subject—which is the same—has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form.2
Where this precious insight is justly critiqued is in the way that Foucault’s elegant prose points away from the practical means by which representation “freed itself” from its impeding foundational relations in favor of pure form. The maestro’s attempt to historicize the conceptualization of Man and humanism devolves into metaphysics to the extent that it cannot contain radical disruptions in the history of philosophy alongside radical disruptions in the political and economic structures of seventeenth-century Spain. Infanta Margarita Teresa was in the midst of a war room. Her fulsome presence was attended by effectively defeated persons. The fawning gazes of her maids are perfect replicas of the overdrawn masks taken up by slaves. And if the rigid protocols of (theatrical) domination should fail, one might always hail that bodyguard standing badly lit and nonchalantly menacing behind the bright tableau of women and children.
Our ability to announce, without giggling, something as ethereal as “pure form” is itself the continuation of a set of discursive practices developed in the contexts of slavery and colonization, structures in which the obvious violence represented in Las meninas becomes invisible to contemporary audiences. If the original subjects of the Spanish throne were Isabella and Ferdinand, architects of capitalism and the modern nation-state, then this cartoonish image of the Infanta represents their “necessary disappearance.” The young royal’s puckering redundancy is given all our attention. The focus is not so much on sovereignty as splendor. Even so, one senses something akin to a parlor trick, a momentary dispersal of the viewer’s attention away from the range of structures that made the painting possible.
My ability to read the processes of Las meninas’ iconographic dispersal is much improved when I consider the complexities of African American playwright Lynn Nottage’s distressingly underappreciated play Las Meninas. The work repeats the widely believed rumor of an illicit affair between the Spanish-born wife of Louis XIV, Queen Marie-Thérèse, and her African servant, Nabo, a dwarf from Dahomey. The couple is said to have produced an illegitimate, never acknowledged child, Louise Marie-Thérèse, the so-called Mauresse de Moret or Black Nun of Moret, a handsome portrait of whom hangs in the Bibliothèque Saint-Geneviève in Paris (see figure C.4). Born on November 16, 1664, the child was presumably removed from the Louvre palace soon after her birth and placed in an abbey of Benedictine sisters in the nearby town of Moret-sur-Loing.
Set in 1695 on the eve of thirty-one-year-old Louise’s final vows, Las Meninas operates as a gossipy articulation of the facts of her birth. The truths that she holds have barely enough time to slip through the quickly closing cracks of possibility still available to a novitiate not yet securely sealed into the disciplinary structures of the Church. The young nun’s alleged mother, Marie-Thérèse of Spain, the daughter of King Philip IV and his wife, Elisabeth of France, was six years old when her own mother died in 1644. Marie-Thérèse’s half-sister, Margarita Teresa, was born seven years later, in 1651, to King Philip and his second wife, Mariana of Austria. Margarita Teresa was just short of five years old when Velázquez finished her portrait in Las meninas and about nine when Marie-Thérèse (née Maria Teresa) left Spain to marry King Louis of France.
Every detail of these women’s histories is an emblem of the self-conscious ways early modern elites worked to create seamless aesthetic/discursive ties between the micro-level biopolitics of their families and the articulation of (modern) sovereignty. Marie-Thérèse arrived in France to disrupt martial competition between Spain and France and to invigorate the extra-national colonialist structures that would allow for the production of the modern European nation-state. Margarita eventually departed Spain for Austria, marrying her uncle and cousin Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor. The newly enthroned empress would eventually give birth to four children, only one of whom survived. In both instances the trick is to read these women’s implication within the geopolitics of early modern Spain in relation to the extremely complex iconographic codes embedded within the representational history of the nobility. Bending my comments once again toward this book’s dominant rhetorics, I would argue that Margarita Teresa and Maria Teresa (Marie-Thérèse) were at once architects and products of a set of discursive structures designed to control and manipulate the profundity of the flesh. Their reproductive abilities were met by a set of aesthetic conceits designed to effect the complex transmogrification from animal to Man. In both cases, however, their physical bodies proved less than fully useful to the project at hand.
Figure C.4. Pierre Gobert, La Mauresse (The Black Nun of Moret) (early 18th century). © Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris. Used by permission.
The mischievousness of Nottage’s play is built on the fact that she so successfully weaves questions of doubt, dissimulation, desire, and violence into that history. The work is stuffed with visual and aural cues designed to encourage consideration of the human corporeality that supported the statecraft of eighteenth-century Europe. Her reputation for great piety notwithstanding, Marie-Thérèse is played as a lusty woman eager for entertainment, the attentions of her husband, and chocolate, a reality revealed most poignantly by the state of Her Majesty’s teeth. The queen’s suspect heritage is demonstrated by the pidgin language she uses to translate herself into French. “Ay Dios mío. Es un African. A little one at that. Look Luis, es fantastic.”3 Moreover, she is fully aware of the parallels between her status and that of her fool, Nabo. “You were shipped in a box, I, a carriage,” she confides to the black dwarf. “When you first peered over the edge of that little box I recognized you” (Nottage, Las Meninas, 311).
What plagues and burdens the young monarch are the gratingly complex techniques that she must develop in order to maintain her own thickly embodied desires alongside the disciplinary protocols of royal iconography. “I am the vessel of empires to come,” she reminds Nabo with equal measures of joy and lamentation (311). She knows that this particular gambit, this willingness to sacrifice one’s animal self to the exigencies of representation, must always culminate in tragedy. The queen’s inability to reproduce with Louis is met by the readiness with which she and Nabo create a child. Where with her husband Marie-Thérèse set about to open the gates to possibility, with Nabo she was willing, however briefly, to celebrate “presence.” It was this openness to interstitiality and experimentation that created the cloistered unspeakable entity known as Louise Marie-Thérèse. But a dark-skinned child appearing incongruously in the queen’s bedchambers at the Louvre could never be properly explained within the colonialist and white supremacist conventions that dictated the behavior of Louis’s court.
Nottage insists that within the complex of techniques available to the actors in Las Meninas, there were few that might grant safe harbor to any form of human subjectivity that had not already been sacrificed to the exigencies of representation and replication. “I was explaining to Her Majesty that when I first arrived in France, I’d never seen white powdered makeup or a wig,” Nabo tells a half-amused Louis in a joking conversation about his former patron.
So you can imagine my surprise one evening when I went into his sleeping chamber to say good night and found an old balding man tucked in my patron’s bed. “Who are you?” I demanded. For what was this shriveled old man doing there? I tried to pull him out of my patron’s bed. But he refused to budge, insisting that he was my patron. “Oh no,” I said, “my patron is a beautiful man with a full head of hair, a man who is still in his golden years.” He slapped my face, I slapped his. “Fool!” he said. “Indeed!” I said. So I found my patron’s sword and drove this man triumphantly from the house. That evening as I was searching for signs of my patron’s disappearance I came upon his wig placed lovingly in a cradle as if a child. Next, I found my patron’s face in a jar of rouge and a compact of powder. O dear. I could still hear the old man yelling from the cold. I thought, Should I let him in to give me a thorough beating or should I let him freeze to death and claim he went mad? (277)
The complexity of the aesthetic/ideological work that Nabo does is remarkable. He must be careful never to insult his patrons. (The old man whose pretensions he unveils is an absent former employer and not the king himself.) At the same time, he announces the very representational instability that Louis and Marie-Thérèse so awkwardly and ostentatiously negotiate. Both the nobleman whom Nabo unmasks and the king himself must submit their own human bodies to the protocols of Manhood. Formally mirroring their slaves and servants, they operate as a species of the anthropophorous. Their own “selves” are old, shriveled, easily driven from their homes, and prone to early deaths. Thus they quickly resort to violence when the fiction of a clear distinction between human and Man is unveiled. That slapping to which Nabo’s employer turns is a necessary part of the apparatus that maintains Man’s centrality in the dominant discursive and ideological structures of Western humanism. The presence of the black dwarf demonstrates not only his presumably comic nature, but also a history of kidnapping, theft, and coercion that is reiterated each time the little man makes his unlikely entrance.
As with Picasso’s efforts in Guernica, we see violence represented not as solemn but instead farcical. The everyday visual protocols to which one might refer when attempting to unpack the works of either the great painter or the great playwright are so overdetermined, so weakened and deracinated, that it becomes nearly impossible to see an image of a kidnapped and abused dwarf or a representation of a human body mutilated by falling bombs as anything other than pure representation, a graph, a set of signs that exist separately from the complexities of history.
As I have said, you are unlikely to encounter Guernica in Sala 206. The complex codes necessary to decipher the work have been too severely obfuscated to allow the many spectators who visit the Reina Sofía to experience anything other than a pleasantly displayed carcass. Picasso’s obsessive reiterations within the Las meninas suite ought to be read, then, as a form of self-defense, the efforts of the artist to resist the deadening of meaning and affect that accompanies the disciplining protocols of humanism. Like Lynn Nottage, he returns to the iconographic structures embedded within Velázquez’s painting in order to jolt his audiences out of their complacency, to remind them that art is at its best less concerned with decoration than destabilization. The repetition imaged by Velázquez, Picasso, and Nottage is an essential practice within the aesthetic/ideological matrices that support the deadly fiction of Manhood. Drawing attention to this fact, continually repeating the logic of repetition, forces our cultural studies back toward the historical and the social. We become, like Nabo and the pregnant Marie-Thérèse, nothing more than simple, always changing, and inevitably damaged individuals struggling to shape our histories with only the most improbable of tools at our disposal.
Coda
On the day that I decided to undertake the project that has become Archives of Flesh, I left the small apartment I had rented close by the “mixed” madrileño neighborhood of Lavapiés and set myself walking toward the riotously elegant Parque del Buen Retiro in Madrid’s city center. I had just announced to myself that I preferred African Madrid to European Barcelona, that I valued the crush of immigrants from Colombia, Ecuador, Morocco, Senegal, and Nigeria gathered around the cafés and flower stalls in the Plaza de Tirso de Molina more than the warm, if smug and casually racist, bourgeois nationalists whom I had befriended in Catalonia. I came to Spain years before in search of something larger and more open than the provincialism of the United States. I found relief in the Spanish language from the everyday stupidity and mediocrity that are perhaps the most crushing aspects of American-style white supremacy. The Spanish saying El cuerpo no tiene la culpa de na’ seemed an apt summation of my haphazardly developing sense of the proper relation between politics, intellectualism, and aesthetics. In Madrid, free in the forgiving brightness of mid-morning, I was released. Dressed sparsely in tee-shirt, shorts, and running shoes, I left each morning before my lessons in grammar and vocabulary to make a thick-thighed hop through the Retiro’s sand trails, feasting on the grand visages of statues and manicured gardens that are among the city’s most generous gifts.
At the park’s edge, tripping up the small bank of steps of an elegant side entrance, I encountered a policeman, dressed from head to toe in tight-fitting green, hiding himself beside a clump of bushes. A strange image, but the type of thing that a tourist out for a morning jog is best advised to leave unremarked. Turning into the park and puffing a ways down the path, I encountered an African immigrant, his back heavily loaded with a sheet filled with counterfeit belts and handbags. We looked tense and uncomprehending at one another, the complexities of diaspora palpable in the terrible silence attending the strangeness we saw reflected in each other’s eyes. I spoke first.
“Que hay policía.”
“Where?” he answered in English, quickly coming to recognize that I might not be as useless as my behavior and clothing seemed to suggest. I turned my head in the direction of the entrance. He immediately trotted off through the bushes. Two, three, four beats later, a crash of perhaps ten blue-skinned men broke through the woods that bordered the path, all burdened with sacks of imitation Coach, Gucci, and Hermes purses, each larger than the next. They scattered around me as I stood stock-still, my face turned toward my recently escaped interlocutor, acting like an unlikely brown-skinned beacon of retreat. Two Spanish policemen followed immediately upon their heels, huffing and very clearly irritated that a clumsy, inexplicably (non)African tourist had helped to spring their trap.
The thought came to me without warning. Humans were herding humans. In a burlesque of the sorry history that binds Europe, America, and Africa, the exigencies of petty commerce drove Wolof, Fula, Hausa, and Fulani scattering like panicked gazelles into mid-morning traffic. The war was here. Our ancestors had succeeded in modulating the etiquette of conflict, produced for many of us zones of (relatively) safe withdrawal. But the terms of armistice have yet to be ratified. Especially within this most precious site of Spanish civilization, this monument to the legacies of Isabella and Ferdinand, situated close by the Museo Nacional del Prado, the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid, the Reina Sofía, the Plaza del Sol, and the Biblioteca Nacional, one might easily encounter the most commonplace violence against Africans and their descendants while oblivious tourists clutch cheap treasures and poorly examined fantasies of European exceptionalism to their chests. It was not lost on me that a little more than a century earlier, crowds of madrileños had gathered in this same park to ogle collections of Ashanti, Filipinos, and Inuits in specially designed exhibition spaces, many of which continue to service the needs of the park’s many pleasantly distracted visitors.4 It is this willingness not only to assault and abuse but also to ignore and obfuscate that supports the most rarefied, most obscene cultural projects of Western humanism. It is what makes so much of the work in the humanities and human sciences so shockingly hermetic and disconnected. What I have attempted to demonstrate in Archives of Flesh is not simply that as a matter of both ideology and aesthetics Africans must be scattered from about the environs of the white kings, but instead that these theatrical dispersions, these nonsensical images of police chasing human men through well-manicured woods, are absolutely necessary devices in the articulation of the vague and reedy concepts of nobility and Euro-American “civilization” with which so much in the practice of contemporary literary and cultural studies is so unapologetically concerned. My response has been to follow the only half-discernible paths prepared for me by a generation of intellectuals who have asked not only that we radically expand the foci of our inquiries, but also that we resist the manufactured tone deafness that stands at the heart of the increasingly irrelevant practices of our cultural studies. My face, narrowed by distress, is turned in the direction of the African’s retreat. I resist those commonsense ideological structures that privilege the nativity—and nobility—of “white” Europeans and their American look-alikes. I openly question the proprietary claims to culture and cultivation that are choked down the throats of successive generations of not always willing supplicants at the altar of civilization. I have lost all proper respect for the essentially segregationist disciplinary structures to which many in my profession desperately cling. With each improbable stoke of this indelicate pen, I announce the inevitability of a coming revolt of ideas, politics, and culture in which the fictions of Europe and Africa will finally be dismantled. With each clumsy step, I attempt as best I can to reject Man’s allure in favor of humanity’s promise.