WORKING MASTERS, PORTABLE ISLANDS
In a little Time I began to speak to him and teach him to speak to me; and first, I made him know his Name should be Friday, which was the Day I sav'd his Life; I called him so for the Memory of the Time; I likewise taught him to say Master, and then let him know, that was to be my Name.
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719
Defoe's castaway defines a lonely individual, and yet he acquires an important shadow, the man he rescues from cannibalism and renames after a day of the week. Friday proves a perfect servant; unshakably loyal in his devotion, he provides his master with the subservient companionship of which he had dreamed. Despite the fact that Friday is native to the region, Crusoe reforms him to fit his improved island, teaching him to abhor cannibal feasts and labor productively. In our colonial myth, then, the displaced hero crosses a middle plane between exile and home, as he transforms from piteous castaway into governor. In that middle plane he
Long before our present story but somewhat after Defoe, a German scholar gave a famous analysis of servitude amid a grand account of the emergence of consciousness. At a crucial point in Georg Hegel's Phenomenology, a recognition of strength and weakness gives birth to the overpowering lord and overpowered bondsman. Hegel's dense description of the aftermath of conquest provides a complex fable of social change. Forced to work by the master, the slave comes to know the world and control it, achieving independent consciousness. At the same time, by forcing the slave to work the master becomes dependent on the service performed and hence is weakened. Servitude is thus inherently unstable, for craft and control of nature provide a remedy for the threat of death. Labor, in this tradition, describes a key to power and eventual freedom.[4]
This moment of the master and slave resonates through much subsequent writing about domination and world history, surfacing memorably in Marxist visions of struggling classes and postcolonial accounts of mutually constituting colonizer and colonized. It is the latter echo that concerns us here, for in it we encounter less perfect masters and slaves.[5] Hegel's power figures live symmetrically in abstraction, unmarked by location or heritage, beyond a vaguely classical agrarian past. The darker shadows of empirical record around Defoe's novel tell less certain stories. More is at stake than violent rule and labor when the Atlantic slave trade leaves a painful vocabulary of color and when the end of European empire witnesses new systems of inequality. As the Martiniquan psychiatrist Franz Fanon notes, the master and slave in a colonial system defined by race are not the same as those in Hegel's dialectic:
For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work. In the same way the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation …. In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns towards the object. Here the slave turns towards the master and abandons the object.[6]
The dynamic of liberation promised in Hegel is thus lost in the colonies; race distorts the opposition of domination, eliminating its symmetry and deferring the reversal of power. The colonial slave works, but without mastering nature or learning craft. In this setting, labor does not produce independent consciousness, but only a complex of dependency.
Fanon leaves us here, but Robinson Crusoe contains a second, related clue, one that will take us deeper into a consideration of the technical fault lines in colonial space. Crusoe, the displaced man, is a ruler who knows nature for himself and refashions the world around him. He has already labored as his own slave and mastered mechanical arts. Despite his gun, he is not simply a warrior; despite his merchant past, he is not simply bourgeois. He is a working, well-equipped master, corrupted by experience and bolstered by far-flung ties. Thus the opposition between lord and bondsman on this tropical island is not between pure command and service but between different, unequal identities within a common project of practice. The field of power between independence and labor is offset not only by race but also by a technical landscape.
How might the work of a master and the work of a slave characterize themselves? Further provocation comes from another citizen of the German language, this one writing not long after Sputnik. In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt distinguishes between three forms of activity: labor (that which is necessary for life), work (that which leaves an imprint on the world), and action (that which changes political conditions). Arendt's larger aim is to chronicle a perceived decline of action and the eventual glorification of labor in modern existence, and as with Hegel, her narrative world contains but a single history, and her terms remain abstract. Here I am not seeking to adopt Arendt's firm and idiosyncratic definitions as given. But her etymologically based distinction between labor and work touches on relevant lines between toil and skill, expended energy and design. Thus Arendt's vocabulary has its uses for this argument, demarcating processes that further living and reproduction (at a minimum, “getting by”) from those that produce objects and transform the world (at a maximum, “technology”). In Crusoe we find both labor, his struggle to adapt to an alien land, and work, his eventual domination of an “improved” island. Only after he has domesticated nature does Defoe's protagonist become a master in the world of human affairs, rescuing other men in violent acts of mercy. This point is crucial: he is not a passive owner of his island but an active governor, the lord of an extended household, manipulator of a modified environment.[7]
It would be a mistake to think of the place that Crusoe washes ashore and the place where Friday lands as the same ground. Between these two narrative points, Defoe's hero has reworked the fabric of the landscape around him, recovering fragments of the ship, fashioning
Our fictional guidebook can only take us so far. Amid the range of imperial experience, few islands were so uninhabited, few landings so uncontested, few servants so willing, and few masters so industrious. But set against Hegel and Arendt, Robinson Crusoe suggests an important principle: in the tropical expanse of empire, universal theory is forced to confront an exposed space of imperfection. Because the colonial lord and bondsman emerge on a frontier between different alignments of nature and technology, their relation is defined in spatial terms. The rule of the latter by the former rests on an imposed order of life, one referenced to elsewhere. The division between them returns to a distinction between work and labor, with expertise reserved for a mastery of the horizon rather than local toil and improvisation. The colonial bondsman thus cannot master nature and play off the lord's dependence, for nature has been reworked in the master's conquest, a conquest born of a voyage as well as violence, of dislocation as well as production. In the colonial drama, action extends ever offstage. So too do plans, techniques, and criteria of improvement. The reasonable story of theory, so clear within a single dimension, becomes an uncertain line across a larger domain of history, ever shifting, flawed, and incomplete. Within this domain, some islands are not only larger than others but also more portable.