Plantation Energy: From Slave Labor to Machine Discipline

[Slavery] reduces man to a mere machine.

—Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

Figure 1.

Kevin Beasley, A view of a landscape: A cotton gin motor, 2012–2018 (detail), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, December 15, 2018–March 10, 2019, © Kevin Beasley. Photo: Ron Amstutz, image courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York.

World-weary and reanimated, a cotton gin motor could be seen spinning inside a glass vitrine, its expected industrial roar absorbed by anechoic foam lining the base of its enclosure. The machine was the centerpiece of Kevin Beasley's A view of a landscape: A cotton gin motor, 2012–18 (fig. 1) on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in spring 2019. Inside the case, Beasley placed a dozen microphones relaying the noise of the massive machine to an adjacent room. There, the sensorial experience was inverted: the walls were dark, lined with sound-absorbing pads, and illuminated during performances in various colors; wires ran to synthesizers staged along the rear wall; hi-fi speakers filled the room with the motor's amplified live-feed; and, on benches or the floor, viewers sank into a machinic soundscape. With sound and sight separated, the motor's absence could be read as consent to enjoy its noise as music. In this way, A view spurred critical reflection on the exploitation of black musical expression conditioned on the social marginalization of black people.¹ However, Beasley refused to appropriate the motor's sound for the musical sublime; he hardly modulated its industrial roar. Instead, the motor's ready-made time and space—it powered an Alabama cotton gin from 1940 to 1973—was allowed to enter the white walls of the museum. More than an instrument, the motor was situated as a storage device whose inhuman rhythm recalled the accumulated history of the plantation and whose dislocation suggested that it was standing in for the plantation's first technologies: black slaves worked like machines under the threat of the overseer's whip.

A view called attention to the traffic between racial slavery and industrialization, a relay largely disavowed in the scientific and engineering efforts that aided racial capitalism's technological transition in the nineteenth century. In this essay, I aim to reconnect this history by proceeding through the temporal displacement of the plantation offered by Beasley's work. This approach grapples with how, in Ian Baucom's words, the time of transatlantic slavery "accumulates … in the cargo holds of the present."² By framing the plantation landscape's temporality this way, it is possible to see how the industrial age inherits slavery's technological use of humans in an unbroken chain. The steam engine, the electric motor, and the black slave are linked through the parameters of their use—as devices, as the planter's prosthetic implements for improving the land, as power sources that transformed energy into mechanical motion, and motion into profit. Bodies and machines were connected by the force they provided to do work and power plantation operations, a force that nineteenth-century physics would quantify as an abstract and transformable notion of energy. It is through this conceptualization of energy that I track the displacement of the "new-world" plantation into industrial capitalism and explore the proximity between blackness and the machinic.

Early on in the plantation zone, black slaves were used for their metabolic energy alongside mules and horses, but by the turn of the nineteenth century, plantations were fashioned as industrial operations and steam engines began to replace pack animals. In the process, slaves were reimagined as industrial resources that were part of the mechanical processes of production like milling or ginning.³ The shift from the artisanal to the industrial plantation entailed a shift in the energetic enframing of black labor that refined the extraction of energy and accelerated the accumulation of wealth. The whitening of American and British factories and the rising tide of abolition troubled the consubstantiality of black bodies and industrial machines, but the accumulation of energy...