Abstract
This paper is concerned with how a particular logic informed the articulation of ‘Liberia’ from its conception as an idea of liberty at the beginning of the nineteenth century to its consolidation as a nation-state in the twentieth. The paper begins with an examination of the logic itself, through a reading of John Austin’s lecture on ‘things’. This reveals a logic operating through a legal framework that can render an object entirely fungible. The logic, I argue, is the logic of capital. The paper then turns to the making of Liberia to show how this logic was super-imposed over lands and peoples in west Africa through a process of colonisation, which, since the Roman colōnia, has involved both the introduction of civilisation and the cultivation of new land. The argument running through this history is that, at each point, the legal-representational framework that was supposed to liberate its object—human and land—was informed by the logic of capital. On this logic, liberation would come with the super-imposition of a general value: rendering humans productive citizens, and rendering land productive territory, through the investment of rights. However, the result was that, what began at the start of the nineteenth century as an idea of liberty that was supposed to make free all of Africa, culminated at the end of the twentieth century in a state of civil death, and eventually revolution and war.
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Notes
This finding would not have been surprising to Austin’s contemporary, Karl Marx. In his analysis of commodities, Marx shows how they are ‘two-fold, both objects of utility, and, at the same time, depositories of value. They manifest themselves therefore as commodities, or have the form of commodities, only in so far as they have two forms, a physical or natural form, and a value form’ (1887, p. 33). Thus, as in Austin’s analysis of a thing, Marx shows how a commodity is both ‘singular’ in its physical form, which gives it its particular utility, and ‘general’ in its value form, as an exchangeable object. Importantly, this value is not intrinsic to the object but reflected onto it, as a ‘mode of expression’, specifically a mode of expressing equivalence (1887, p. 27).
Again, in Marxian terms, what is being dealt with is no longer the bodily form of the object but an abstracted exchange value that is ‘totally independent’ of the object’s particular qualities and yet exists as the object’s mode of expression (see Marx 1887, p. 28).
Or in Marxian terms, an object acquires its value, as a commodity, through the framework of exchange (see generally Marx 1887, chapter 1); thus the round piece of metal in my pocket acquires its legitimate presence, as money, by being stamped with the markings proper to this framework (which is itself constituted through the network of social relations).
The result is a kind of Marxian ‘inversion through which what is sensible and concrete counts only as a phenomenal form of what is abstract and universal’ (Marx cited in Žižek 2008, p. 29). Rather than the ‘thing’ deriving its properties from the particular object that it circumscribes, the object now derives its properties from the thing (see further Žižek 2008, p. 29). Thus, to paraphrase Marx, at this point, could things themselves speak, they would say: ‘In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange values’ (Marx 1887, pp. 52–53).
Incidentally, this is also what it means ‘to invest’. Although no longer usually understood in this way, an ‘investment’ is literally an outer covering; in the words of the OED, it is ‘refractory material which can be used to embed or surround an object and then is allowed to harden’ (OED 2015b). Thus it is by encasing an object within a hard layer that refracts light, an investment creates a new reality by simultaneously blocking the light and therefore one’s sight from penetrating to the actual object. Now when one looks at the thing invested, one sees a simulacra—a general value in the place of a singular object.
As suggested by the references I have made to Marx, there are obvious parallels between Austin’s analysis of ‘things’ and Marx’s analysis of ‘commodities’. I have indicated some of these parallels in passing, although unfortunately the scope of this paper does not allow for deeper exploration. However, one way of understanding the parallels might be that, as Marx observes, the economic relation between commodities is reflected in the juridical relation that facilitates their exchange (see Marx 1887, p. 60). In other words, the legal representational framework through which objects become things, analysed by Austin, ‘is but the reflex of the real economic relation’ analysed by Marx (p. 60). If so, then what I am concerned with here is not the underlying or ‘originary’ relation but the medium through which this relation becomes operative through its reflection on the world. Pushing this further, one might also pursue Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s argument that the logic of exchange is itself informed by a ‘real abstraction’ (ie, it arises from ‘the spatio-temporal sphere of human relations’ and not from the mind); and while Marx was concerned with how this real abstraction informs the field of political economy, its effect is not limited to this field but extends to the very ‘conceptual mode of thinking peculiar to societies based on commodity production’, not least in the juridical sphere (Sohn-Rethel 1978, pp. 19–23). This was also the driving concern of Adorno, and many of his other ‘Frankfurt School’ colleagues, who restlessly pursued the totalitarian effect of the exchange abstraction. On Adorno’s concept of ‘exchange society’, see, eg, Adorno 1969–1970; for a sustained examination of how the exchange abstraction informs the smallest details of life, see Adorno (2005); and for a brief consideration of this in relation to the juridical sphere, see Adorno (2001, pp. 303–306). For an overview of Adorno’s ‘late Marxism’, see also Jameson (1990); and for an overview of Adorno’s ‘sociology of exchange society’, see Benzer (2011).
On the importance of the flag as a sign of the Republic’s dominion, see also GoL (1903, pp. 9–10, 13–14, 18, 20–21).
In Hegelian terms, this would be the negation of the negation. If the first negation involves negating an object’s immediate mode of existence by seeing its potential (reflected here in the transformation from self-possessed west African into potential-citizen or not-yet-citizen), then the second negation involves overcoming the abstraction by realising the potential (reflected in the transformation from potential-citizen into citizen).
And it is clear that many did recognise the already existing qualities of their west African neighbours; see, eg, Fairhead et al (2003).
On what would constitute ‘effective occupation’, see also General Act of the Brussels Conference Relative to the African Slave Trade, 2 July 1890.
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Acknowledgement
I thank my friends and colleagues at The Australian National University for engaging with this paper at various points in its development: Jeremy Farrall, Kate Henne, Desmond Manderson, and Veronica Taylor. I also thank warmly Shaun McVeigh, Alain Pottage, Peter Rush, Valeria Vázquez Guevara, and Jonathan Yovel for reviewing early drafts, and Chris Gevers and Branwen Gruffydd Jones for their helpful comments on a version presented at The Legacies of the Tricontinental Conference. The paper benefited especially from review at the Institute for Global Law and Policy Workshop in Madrid, with special thanks to all the participants. Finally, thanks to the anonymous reviewers and editors of Law and Critique. Part of the research was carried out while a visitor at the Law and Anthropology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and I was able to finish the paper with the generous support of an Australian Endeavour Research Fellowship while hosted by the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law.
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Chalmers, S. Civil Death in the Dominion of Freedom: Liberia and the Logic of Capital . Law Critique 28, 145–165 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-017-9201-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-017-9201-z