Bonds of Citizenship. Hoang Gia Phan
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as the absent presence of the Constitution.19 That slavery was the absent presence of the Constitution was clear to Douglass and his contemporaries: the slave was not named in any of the so-called “slave clauses,” and instead referenced only indirectly through the “equivocal” and “ambiguous” term “person held to service or labour.” Yet as we have seen, Douglass pushed further on this point regarding the slave’s ambiguous legal form of appearance, to apprehend that very form of appearance as a trace which codifies and masks another form of labor bondage: indentured servitude. This servitude is the other half of that labor bondage which is the absent presence of the “slave clauses”; and the intertwined history of slavery and servitude is marked in the Constitution by the figure of the bondsman as legal form of appearance.
The reading of Douglass’s “man from another country” reveals how this form of appearance works in the Constitution to make invisible those other laboring subjects, indentured servants. In indentured servitude, individuals “voluntarily” contracted to serve for a term in exchange for compensation, such as transportation expenses and freedom dues. What type of labor exploitation did this practice constitute? As Barbara Fields’s well-known argument indicates, the modern answer seems to be that it constitutes a form of slavery.20 As Robert Steinfeld reminds us, however, this answer “depends upon a particular scheme of understandings that ignores the characteristics indentured servitude shares with free labor—contractual freedom, limited term, compensation—and that classifies it with slavery because of the legal compulsion both involve.”21
At the time of the constitutional founding, indentured labor was a widespread form of labor bondage; and the recapture of escaped indentured servants was in fact one of the “originally intended” meanings of the fugitive labor rendition clause. William Wiecek notes that the interstate rendition of fugitive slaves among the American states “originated in intercolonial efforts to prohibit the absconding of white servants, and never lost its association with the problem of controlling elopement by those in limited-term servitude.”22 As Douglass and his contemporaries learned from reading James Madison’s record of The Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 (first published in 1840), the original draft of this clause referred explicitly to both “fugitive slaves and servants,” and provided for the return of both these types of laborers. Madison noted that this fugitive-from-labor clause was introduced initially as a supplement to the clause requiring the rendition of fugitive criminals to the “State having jurisdiction over the Crime”: “Mr. Butler and Mr. Pinckney moved to ‘require fugitive slaves and servants to be delivered up like criminals.’”23 After several objections to this proposal—objections to its explicit inscription of slavery into the Constitution; and to its logical implication that nonslaveholding states would be required to pay for the labor practices of the slaveholding states—the proposition was withdrawn, “in order that some particular provision might be made apart from this article.” What modern historians now call the “fugitive slave clause” was reintroduced the next day as a separate provision. Both “slave” and “servant” disappeared in the new formulation of the provision, replaced by the terms “person held to service or labour.”24 These twinned subjects of labor bondage are thus inscribed into the referential structure of the Constitution only indirectly, as the “person held to service or labor,” their names erased from the letter of the law. Slave and servant are collapsed into the singular figure of the bondsman, “the person held to service or labor.” The bondsman’s legal form of appearance conceals the history of these other subjects of labor bondage implicated in the Constitution’s fugitive rendition clause. As I elaborate in the next two sections of this introduction, a hermeneutic attuned to this absent presence and the ambiguities of law’s forms can illuminate as well the other key term of that founding moment and of the present study, the citizen.
The Bondsman as Vanishing Mediator
Etienne Balibar has argued that the national revolutions of the late eighteenth century constituted a “break” in “the history of ‘the problem of Man,’ as ‘citizen’ and as subject,’” the crossing of an “irreversible threshold.” This historical threshold was “crossed when secular and would-be democratic societies were constituted…namely during the ‘revolutions’ at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries in North America, France, Latin America, Greece, and elsewhere.”25In contrast to the medieval figure of subjection to (religious and political) sovereign authority, with this second historical break man now “ceases to be a subjectus, a subject, and therefore his relationship to the Law (and the idea of law) is radically inverted: he is no longer the man called before the Law, or to whom an inner voice dictates the Law…he is rather the man who, at least virtually, ‘makes the law,’ i.e. constitutes it, or declares it to be valid.”26 This modern citizen-subject is now responsible or accountable because he is a legislator: “These men…were able to begin thinking of themselves as free subjects, and thus to identify liberty and subjectivity, because they had abolished the principle of their subjection…while conquering and constituting their political citizenship.”27 If the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 reconstituted citizenship such that modern “citizenship is not one among other attributes of subjectivity, on the contrary: it is subjectivity, that form of subjectivity that would no longer be identical with subjection for anyone,” how do we understand the histories of slavery and servitude that inhered in these moments?28 Supplementing Balibar’s argument with the perspective of Douglass’s “man from another country,” we can see that during the historical moment of the constitutional founding, the bondsman mediates the two opposing poles of subjection and subjectivity codified in the letter of the law: that is, the complete subjection of chattel slavery on the one side and the “freedom” of self-constituted political subjectivity on the other.
As I argued in the previous section, the pairing of slavery and indentured servitude in the fugitive labor rendition clause also underscores their shared condition of legal compulsion. Such a provision for legal compulsion—this was a clause providing for the recapture and delivering up of fugitive labor, after all—would be mobilized later to consolidate the modern definition of “free labor” as that performed in “the absence of legal compulsion.”29 As the figure for criminal fugitive labor—criminal for having fled with the embodied labor purchased by another—whose recapture was a condition of the Constitution’s ratification and thus of the founding of the nation, this bondsman (the “person held to service or labor”) thus also serves as the vanishing mediator, between a pre-Revolutionary form of subjection to sovereignty and the imagined self-constituted subjectivity of U.S. citizenship.30
In Fredric Jameson’s formulation, a vanishing mediator is “a catalytic agent that permits an exchange of [historical] energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms”; it is a dialectical figure whose form mediates the transition between two opposed concepts and thereafter disappears.31 Jameson develops the concept of the vanishing mediator in his narrative analysis of Weber’s famous account of Protestantism’s role in the transition from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist mode of production; he proposes also that as a dialectical figure of historical transition, the vanishing mediator is likewise perceptible in Marx’s analyses of political events (for example, his analyses of the revolutions of 1789 and 1848). Its origins in narrative analysis remind us of the dual function of the vanishing mediator, which is to “combine the twin requirements of narrative irreversibility, and of figuration into agents or characters.”32 In Weber’s story of secularization, the movement called “Protestantism” is a historical character, a narrative agent that serves as a “mediation between the traditional medieval world from which it emerged and the modern secularized one that it in its turn prepared.”33 And it is a vanishing mediator in the sense that in “the final transition to the situation of modern capitalism…what happens here is essentially that once Protestantism has accomplished the task of allowing a rationalization of innerworldly life to take place, it has no further reasons for being and disappears from the historical scene.”34
As a narrative figure, the vanishing mediator need not be a historical movement, such as Protestantism; it can also be a singular character type, such as the figure of the prophet