POSTMODERNITY AND

TRANSNATIONAL
CAPITALISM IN LATIN
AMERICA

George Yudice

HETEROGENEITY AND POSTMODERNISM

AVANT LA LETTRE?

There is a curious-and thoroughly understandable-argmnent

that Latin America sets the precedent of postmodemity long before the
1. Cf. BRUNNER, Jose notion appears in the Euro-North American context. 1 This argmnent is
Joaquin. Notas sobre la
modemidad y 10 postmo-
analogous to others that attempt to endow heterogeneous formations with
demoenlacuituralatinoa- the cachet of mainstream postmodem rhetoric. Thus, La raison baroque,
rnericana. David y Golia!. according to Christine Buci-Glucksmann, anticipates a postmodemreluc-
17, 52, Sept. 1987; RI-
CHARD, Nelly. Postmo- tance to integrate numerous visual spaces into a coherent representation. 2
demism and Periphery. This idea, in fact, has long had currency in what critics call the Latin
Third Text, 2 Winter
1987/88; WISNIK, Jose American neobaroque. 3 Minority writers and intellectuals in the United
Miguel. The Interpreta- States have also made similar claims for Black and Latino cultures. 4 As
tion of Postmodemism in
the Aesthetics of Brazilian regards Latin America, the argument is as follows: the heterogeneous
Cultural Productions, con- character of Latin American social and cultmal formations made it pos-
ference paper delivered at
The Deabte on Postmo-
sible for discontinuous, alternative, and hybrid forms to emerge that
demism in Latin America: challenged the hegemony of the grand Ticit of modernity. Even history
Brazil, MexiCo and Peru. ftagments into a series of discontinuous formations that undennine the
UniveJSity of Texas, Aus-
tin, April 29-30, 1988; ES- synchronicity of the space of the nation:5 indigenous tribal cultures mix
88 - Rev. Brm;. de Lit. Comparada, n! 1 - 03/91
with traditional peasantry, the descendants of slaves, the hnnpen of the COBAR, Ticio. Posmo-
demismoJprecapitalisrno.
shanties, and a cosmopolitan elite that would be at home in Paris or New Casa de las Americas (... ).
York.
Before we evaluate this contention of Latin America's 2. BUCI-GLUCKS-
MANN, Christine, La
postmodernity avant La Lettre, we should explore the question of raison baroque: de Bau-
heterogeneity. The heterogeneity of Latin American cultural fonna- delaire it Benjamin. Paris:
tions is not the result of some postmodern simulational sleight of Editions Galilee, 1984,
and La Folie du voir: de
hand; rather, it is produced by the uneven implementation of modern- l'esthetique baroque. Pa-
ization, leading, on the one hand, to contestatory projects for political, ris: Editions Galilee,
1986.
economic, and cultural decolonization, and on the other, to strategies
for survival such as informal economies, the legal and illegal act- 3. See, for example', SAR-
ivities that elude government recording and control. Hernando de DUY, Severo. EI barroco
yel neobarroco, In: Ame-
Soto, basing himself on the situation in Peru, argues that it is a rica Latina en su literatu-
top-heavy state-inclined to patronage and other forms of inefficien- ra. Ed. Cesar Ferruindez
Moreno. Mexico: Siglo
cy and corruption - that causes informality.6 Samuel Doria Medina, XXI, 1972, Barraco.
however, attributes the phenomenon to a complex of condictions- Buenos Aires: Sudameri-
cana, 1974, and La simu-
unequal distribution of income, tertiarization of the economy, hyper- /acion. Caracas: Monte
inflation-which are in great measure the result of a state's economic Avila,I982.
vulnerability within a world economy controlled by nation of the
"center... 4. GATES, Henry Louis
Jr. The signifying
monkey. A theory of
The fundamental cause for the formation of an informal African-American
Literary Criticism. New
economy is the deformation of the economic structure once York: Oxford University
economic activity has been directed towards extractive in- Press, 1988; Guillermo
Gomez-Peiia, Docu-
dustry for export. This creates a sector of the economy that mented/Undocumented,
in fact is related to the State, where both are dependent on In: Multi-cultural lite-
eds. Rick Simonson
the center. Consequently, the rest of the economy, which is &racy.Scott Walker. Saint
marginal to the government, develops independently. In Paul, MN: Graywolf
other words, having assigned to the country the production Press, 1988; CORNEL.
West. PostmodeTllism and
of raw materials in order to satisfy the requirements of the black America. Zeta
central economies, it becomes unnecessary to develop all Magazille, 1988.
of society. Since this pattern or structure of accumulation is
S. Cf. CORNEJO-PO-
marginal to society and the rest of the economy, it does not LAR. Antonio. Indigenisl
require internal demand or e~litable income distribution to and heterogeneous litera-
.tures. Their dual sociocul-
generate widespread growth. tural status. Trans. Susan
Casal- Sanchez. Latill
Informality, moreover, has grown to enormous proportions Americall Perspectives.
16,2, Spring 1989, p. 12-
since the mid-seventies due not only to a weak productive sector and 28.
large concentration of unequally distributed income, which capital
flight makes unavailable, but also to extreme vulnerability to the 6.V,eDE SOTO, Hernando,
other path: the invisi-
global economic crisis of 1981-82, the external debt crisis, and the ble revolution in the Third
increasing importance of coca production. 8 Narcotraffic, the largest World. London: Tauris.
1989.
sector of the informal economy, in its current transnational cartel
form (another recent development that owes something to C.I.A. 7. MEDINA, Samuel Da-
ria. La econonlia informal
 Postmodernity and Trasnational Capitalism... - 89
en Bolivia. La Paz: 1986. dealings in the region) is a grotesque (and fitting) parody of capitalist
I quote from the English
translation: Naomi Rob- corporate culture. The narratives constructed to account for infor-
bins, Bolivia's Infonnal mality and narcotraffic might seen hardly consistent with the grand
Economy, M.A. Diss,
CUNY, 1990, p. 28. recit of modernity. And yet they are, in an obverse (if not perverse)
relation that deconstructs modernity's collusion with capitalism. This
8. Ibid, p. 48-72. parodic deconstruction is not, of course, restricted to so-called "third
world" countries: junk bonds and savings and loans fiascos in the
U.S. have had very much the same affect. "Irrationality'" is born of
the guiding (market) "rationality" of modernity.
Recognition of this "irrationality" is important in devising
strategies for overcoming the economic plight of these countries. In
contrast to de Soto, who advocates transforming the pathology of
"informality" into its own solution by liberating the entrepreneurial
spirit of its practitioners from the shackles of state regulation, Doria
Medina analyzes its root causes and cautions against entrenching a
state of affairs founded on (internal and international) inequality. The
institutionalization of informality does nothing to counter the vast
accumulation by elites, who elude a more equitable distribution of
wealth by resorting to contraband and speculation while the under-
and informally - employed barely survive. Contraband is particular-
ly pernicious because it induces loss of economic protection, an
exaggerated degree of tertiary activities, a loss of income for the
National Treasury, and the occupation of active commercial actors in
operations (e.g., speculation) that do not generate significant value
9. Ibid., p. 83-85.
added. 9 This state of affairs relegates "informals" to the recycling of
commodities normally discarded in the "formal" sphere. A "strategy
for survival" is thus transformed into a permanent "strategy of
10. Ibid., p. 29. life." 10
Having lost control of the economy, many Latin American
countries oscillate between hyperinflation and recession, further
strengthening the informal economy and producing a highly stressful
way of life for the under and middle classes. II
11. Ibid., p. 37.
It is important to re-emphasize the role of public expecta-
tion in the inflationary process, and the importance of its
effect on the informal economy. As the public loses confi-
dence in the economic authorities responsible for inflation,
their lack of confidence fans inflationary expectations, con-
verting the latter into an engine that drives inflation up even
further. Under these circumstances, financial transactions
accelerate at a dizzying pace, but they do not involve the
formal sector because of the concomitant accelerated de-
preciation of domestic currency. In short, the national cur-
rency no longer serves as a store of value, but is replaced
90 - Rev. Bras. de Lit. Comparada, n! 1 - 03/91
by a strong currency such as, in the case of Bolivia, the V.S.
12. Ibid., p. 40; emphasis
dollar. 12 added.

Hyperinflation is, thus, not only an economic phenomenon; it also

cuts deeply into the individual and collective psyche, producing
uncertainty, skeptici~1n, criminality, and psychological discorders.
Whether economic or social, "national currency" loses its value;
under such circunstances there can be no self-determination. At best,
narcotraffic replaces prior national currencies.
It is precisely in the attempt to modernize by "developing"
extractive industries for export, under the aegis of "central
e-conomies," that modernity takes such ghoulish forms in countries
like Bolivia. The grand redt of modernity, of course, attributes this
ghoulishness to other factors, such as the "backwardness" of
peripheral societies, the corruption of their governments, the im-
maturity of their elites, and so on. Its "rational" self-construal blinds
it to its own role as source of pathology. The critique of modernity-
as-development-and-progress put forth by Latin American social
scientists, theologians, writers and artists, and grass roots organiza-
tions should be considered an important ingredient of postmodernity,
understood as the set of challenges to modernity's self-under-
standing. These challenges stem from the different ways in which
local fonnations engage the colonizing tentacles of transnational 13. Hugo Achugar has
capitalism,13 which should not be confused with one mode produc- wrillen an excellent study
of Uruguayan IIIodemis-
tion. It is, rather, a series of conditions under which various modes ilia precisely by taking in-
of production and symbolization hold in differing localities. to account the "aestheti-
My argument as regards Latin America is not that infonnal co-ideological responses
and propositions" by dif-
economies or narcotraffic are postmodern phenomena but, rather, ferent classes and class
that they are alternative responses/propositions to the grand recit of sectors to late nineteenth
and early twentieth cen-
postmodernity as it has been constructed by Lyotard, Jameson, and tury modernization.
their predecessors. These conditions require alternative narratives Achugar explains that his
usage of "response/pro-
with different configurations of features constitutive of modernity Position" bears a .. distant
and different trajectories and denouements. Functional state ap- relation to the notion of
'semantic gesture' put
paratuses, viable political structures, effective democrative civil forth by the Prague
societies must be conceived in relation to the specific circumstances School.... It attempts to
of given Latin American countries and not patterned after the reigning capture the intemction of
Iitemry product and so-
paradigm of western modernity. For example, to understand why ciety, how the latter con-
these desiderata are curtailed in narcotrafficking countries, we must dictions signic structure.
Thus, a book of poems, a
look at the intersection of several modes of production, various novel or a painting [is)
cultures, different administrative apparatuses, the struggle for sur- considered in its historical
concreteness, both ideo-
vival and for hegemony on the part of diverse social strata (peasants, logically and as the dou-
workers, narcotraffickers, military, national bourgeoisie, middle blemovenlent ofresponse
to a given historical situa-
classes, national and international organized crime networks, V.S. tion and proposition of a
military-industrial complex, etc.). Whatever the possibilities for (utopian) future. All of
this, of course, is realized
 Postmodemity and Trasnational Capitalism ... - 91
or conveyed aestheti- democratization they must be studied as particular respon-
cally."
ACHUGAR, Hugo, Poe- ses/propositions to this set of conditions that comprises the
sia y sociedad (Uruguay heterogeneous formation.
1980-1911) Montevideo:
Area, 1985. p. 22, note 2. Octavio Paz is, perhaps, the first artist/intellectual to claim that
finally Latin America had become contemporaneous with the
postmodem west-even before the term had been coined. As early as
The labyrinth of solitude (1950), he argues that the contradictory
logic of modernity-which he labels a tradicion de rltptltra-came
14. Cf. also PAZ, Octavio. to a grinding haltl~ when the leading nations of imperialist capitalism
EI ronmnticismo y la poe-
sia contemponinea, Vuel-
found themselves dec entered and as "marginal" as the periphery:
ta. 11,127 (June 1987. In,
the same issue of Vuelta. ... we have lived on the periphery of history. Today the
Paz introduces a special
section cntitled Postmo- center, the nucleus of world society has come apart and we
demidad? which includes have all become peripheral beings, even the Europeans and
essays by Jean Clair and
Cornclius CaSloriadis. the North Americans. We are all on the margin because there
is no longer any center. 15
IS. PAZ, Octavio. 17,e
labyrillth of solitude. Me-
xico: Fondo de Cullum Third World revolts and ethnic and national rebellions in in-
Economica, 1959, p. 152. dustrialized societies are the insurrection of particularisms opressed
by another ~articularism that wears the mask of universality: western
16. PAZ, Octavio. EI cea-
so de las vanguardias, In:
capitalism. 6
Los hijos de/limo. Bar~'C­ It should be made clear, however, that Paz homogenizes all
lona: Seix Bmral, 1974, p. those "particularisms" in a generalized marginality, whose aesthetic
201.
he claims to be rooted in the immediacy of a timeless present. Paz's
sense of heterogeneity, however, casts these particularisms only as
symptoms of a more unfathomable otherness, which like Heidegger's
notion of Being, has nothing to do with specific others. For Heideg-
ger, it is to be unconcealed, rather, in the "invisible shadow" or
17. HEIDEGGER, Mar- "space withdrawn from representation. ,,17 Taking his cue from
tin. The age of the world Heidegger, who identifies the poetic as the dwelling place of Being, 18
picture, In: 17,e questioll
cOllcemillg tee/urology Paz reconciles ,the aporia<.; of modernity-particularism vs. univer-
alld other essays. trans. salism, experience vs. history, existence vs. -representation-in the
William Lovitt Ncw York:
Garland Publishing, 1977, "transhi5.10rical virtuality "of poetry.
p. £35-154. Latin America, sa~agely torn by the contradictions of
capitalism, provides for Paz's thought and poetcis a paradigmatic
18. HEIDEGGER, Mar- source for a secular "fundamentalist" reconciliation. And Paz is its
tin. . .. Poetically man
dwells .... In; Poelry: lall- high priest. As such, it is open to Habermas's critique of neoconser-
guage, thought, Ilans. Al- vative responses to rationality.19 It is, essentially, an aesthetic
bert Hofstadtcr. New
York: Haper and Row, moralism, not unlike religious fundamentalism, which seeks to
1975, p. 222. counteract the excesses and "moral decadence" of historical life.
19. Sec HABERMAS,
lurgen. 171ephilosoplrical I think a new star is rising-it is not yet on the horizon but
discourse of modernity. it is announced in many indirect ways; it is the poeticis of
Cambridge: MIT, 1987.
the now. Soon men will have to erect a Morals, a Politicis,
92 - Rev. Bras. de Lit. Comparada, n! 1 - 03/91
an Erotics and a Poetics of the present. The road to the
present passes through the body but it should not be confu-
sed with the mechanical and promiscuous hedonism of
modem western societies. The present is the fruit issued
forth by the fusion of life and death.20 20. PAZ, Octavio. El TO-
maT/lismoy Iopoeslocon-
lempordnea. p. 27.
Paz's apocalyptic, messianic proposition not only purges the
political dimension from the practices of the new social movements
(women, gays and lesbians, ecology, ethnic and racial minorities) by
assimilating their projects to a transhistorical aesthetic; it also aims
to transcend the conditions set by modernity in one fell swoop, as if
those conditions were nothing but the expression of a single logic.
Furthermore, as Nelly Richard observes about "postmodernism in
the periphery, "the sublation of center and margin that is celebrated
in the aesthetic practices of certain elites, Paz among them, actually
abolishes the value and significance, the difference, of the practices
of subaltern and colonized peoples. 21 21. Elsewhere Ihaveoffe-
red a critique of the adop-
tion by elites of a rhetoric
ofmarginality. Cf. Margi-
...just as it appears that for once the Latin American periph- nality and the ethics of
ery might have achieved the distinction of being postmo- survival. In: Universal
Abandon? The politics of
dernist avant La Lettre, no sooner does it attain a postmodernism. ed. An-
synchronicity of forms with the international cultural dis- drew Ross. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota
courses, than that very same postmodernism abolishes any Press, 1988.
privilege which such a position might offer. Postmodernism
dismantles the distinction between centre and periphery,
and in so doing nullifies its significance. There are many
instances in postmodernist discourse aimed at convincing
one of the obsolence of the opposition centre/periphery, and
of the inappropriateness of continuing to see ourselves as
the victims of colonisation. 22 22. RICHARD, Nelly, p.
10.

Ticio Escobar, moreover, cautions us to distinguish between

the surface effects of a "postmodem"style-fragmentation, recy-
cling, pastiche, etc.-and the significance of conditioning cir-
cumstances. 23 Consequently, a theory ofpostmodern culture cannot 23. ESCOBAR, p. IS.

rely on the formal techniques and properties of particular works. That

is why the myriad primers that attempt to register the features of
postmodern phenomena, though they provide easily identifiable
markers of style, are so unsatisfying. Linda Hutcheon, for example,
under the pretext of identifying postmodernism with a
"denaturalizing"politics of representation, lumps together Salman
Rushdie, Angela Carter and Manuel Puig as practitioners of a subver- 24. HUTCHEON, Linda.
sive "postmodern parody. ,,24 It is not, of course, as if this kind of The politics of PoSlmO-
 Pmtmodemity and Trasnational Capitalism. .. - 93
dernism. New York: ROUl- parody had not existed previously; doesn't Cervantes's intertex-
ledge. 1989.p. 3-8. Seeal-
so A Poetics of Postma- tuality have a similar effect? It is easy enough to identify stylistic
dernism: histoty. theory. markers; it is more difficult to pay close attention to how conjectural
fiction. New York: Rout-
ledge. 1988. circumstances condition how those markers are to be interpreted.
Hutcheon shows indifference or ignorance in this latter respect.
Rather than speak of a postmodernism, then, which runs the
risk of identifying the style of one group as emblematic of a condition
2S.IdonotagreewithFre- (Lyotard) or a "cultural dominant" (Jameson),2S it is preferable to
dric Jameson's charac-
terimtion of postmodem
theorize postmodernity as series of conditions variously holding in
culture as those local tac- different social formations that elicit diverse responses/propositions
tics and practices of "fttst
world" elites that. he con-
to the multiple ways in which modernization has been attempted in
tends. come to embody them. It is not a matter, then, of a different order of things following
symbolically the global or replacing modernity, as it has been suggested from Weber to
logic ofthe system. Accor-
ding to Jameson, thecultu- Habermas. If postmodernity has any specificity, it is in the rethinking
ral production ofa particu- of how modernity has been represented, how altemati ve sciences,
lar class fraction (call it
"new petty bourgeoisie." morals and aesthetics, as well as diferent sociocultural formations,
"professional-manageri- have all contributed to constitute modem life.
al" "baby boon" or
"yuppy") of"frrst world"
How we (re)think modernity and postmodemity has conse-
elites "articulate[s] the quences for how we construe the ethico-political go.als of theory.
world in the most useful
way functionally. or in
Paz's poetics of reconciling opposites in the transhistory of the
ways that can be functio- present leads to an antimodern irrationality with little room for ac-
nally reappropriated. " commodating the democratic demands of diverse social movements.'
Jameson seems to be ma-
king a category error here. Rethinking democracy outside of the terms set by the grand recit of
Transnational capital may modernity is an enterprise which many Latin American social move-
or may not have a global
logic but it does not trans- ments see as necessary. Up to now the formal apparatuses of repre-
late tout court into the cul- sentati ve democracy have failed miserably. This is not to say that they
tural practices of a gtoup
the chosen people of the
have succeeded in Europe and the U.S.; their "dysfunctionality" in
transcendent Being the Latin American context only makes more patent what is wrong
(whether God or Capital).
If. on the other hand, di-
with th~m in the "democratic west" where their pathologies are
verse social formations. partly screened by "viable" consumer economies.
and the gtoups that com- According to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, new ways
prise them. manage - by
responsefproposition - the of constructing democracy have been made possible by the new social
fonns that the conditions movements, whose practices have "weakened" the rationality that
of postmodemity take in
their localities, then there undergirds modernity:
are as many different cul-
tures of postmodemity as
there are social formations
and particular struggles The discourse ofradical democracy is no longer the discour-
for hegemony within
them.
se of the universal; the epistemological niche from which
Cf. JAMESON. Fredric. "universal" classes and subjects spoke has been erradica-
Marxism and postmoder- ted and replaced by a poliphony of voices, each of which
nism. New Left Review.
176. July-August 1989. p. constructs its own irreducible discursive identity. The con-
41. clusion is decisive: there can be no radical, plural demo-
cracy without renouncing the discourse of the universal and
the implied premise that it provides a privileged access to
94 - Rev. Bras. de Lit. Comparada, n2 1 - 03/91
the "truth," attainable only by a limited number of sub-
• 26 26. LACLAU, Ernesto
Jects. and MOUFFE, Chantal.
Hegemony and socialist
strategy. Towards a radi-
Laclau and Mouffe's diagnostic also conceives of politics as a crea- cal democratic politics.
tive articulation process. With the pluralization and legitimation of London: Verso. 1985. p.
191-92. See also Ernesto
manifold social projects, it is increasingly difficult to establish com- Laclau, The politics and
mon meanings across the entire social terrain. How to strike a balance limits of Modernity.
Trans. George Yudice, in
"between a logic of complete identity and another of pure difference" Universal Abandon? n,e
is the goal of "radical democracy. " It consists of the Politics of Postllloder-
nism. ed. Andrew Ross.
Minneapolis: University
recognition of the multiplicity of social logics and of the of Minnesota Press, 1988.
necessity to articulate them. This articulation, however,
must constantly be recreated and renegotiated, for there is
no final point where a definitive balance will be reached. 27 27. Ibid., p. 188. Lac1au
and MoulTe have been cri-
ticized for their endorse-
According to Bernardo Subercaseaux, this creative articulation ment of an "infmif' de-
construction, such as that
is the means by which "one's own," always provisional identity is suggested in this quote.
achieved. 28 He seesthis a process of appropriation quite different Recognition of ongoing
struggles for hegemony
from the mimetism decried by ningltneistas who berate their cultures need not, however, resort
for being a pale reflection of metropolitan society. The flavor of these to such a relativist posi-
self-negating breast-beatings, so typical of elite Latin American in- tion.

tellectuals, is captured in El arte de la pa la bra, Enrique Lihn's

28. SUBERCASEAUX,
self-deconstructive pastiche of poststructuralist erasures of the sub- Bernardo. La apropria-
ject: ciOn cultural en e1 pensa-
miento latinoamericano,
Mundo. I, 3, Summer
we are nothing: imitations, copies, phantoms; repeaters of 1987.
what we understand badly, that is, hardly at all; deaf organ
grinders; the animated fossils of a prehistory that we have
lived neither here nor, consequently, anywhere, for we are
aboriginal foreigners, transplanted from birth in our respec-
tive countries of origin?9 29. LINCH, Enrique, El
arte de la palabra. Barce-
lona: Pornaire, 1980. p.
For Subercaseaux, as for Richard, Escobar, and Wisnik, the formation 82. I translated into En-
of a national identity is not a matter of authenticity versus mimetism glishandpublishedanex-
but rater of articulation: celpl of this novel in Re-
vie\l: 29, May/August
198I,p.55-61. WISNIK,
The model of appropriation contrasts with a dual vision op. cir.• also alludes to the
self-erasure of Latin
[i.e., native vs alien, G.Y.] of Latin American culture. By Atjlerican postmodemists
definition; a theory of appropriation rejects the existence of who "consume impol1ed
stereotypes," especially
an uncontaminated, endogenous cultural core. It also rejects current stereotypes con-
the myth of cultural pluralism and any essentialism what- cerning simulation. cr. al-
so RICHARD, p. 7.
soever, for Latin America identity is not something already
constituted and fixed but something always in the process
of becoming. Consequently, it cannot be understood by
 Postmodenuty and Trasnational Capitalism ... - 95
recourse to pre conceptual or precategorical approaches ....
The theory of appropriation offers a model of an ecumenical
culture, always open and never endogamous. 30
30. SUBERCASEAUX,
op. cit., p. 34-35.
Roberto Schwarz has also rejected the Manichean dichotomy
between imitation and original "because it does not permit detecting
the alien within the proper, the mimetic component within the
31. SCHWARZ, Roberto. original, and also the original component within the imitation. ,,31
Nacional por substrac- Schwarz rethinks this aporia in terms of articulation, with the proviso
ciOn. Plllltode I'ista. 9,28,
November 1986, p. 22. that subaltern groups should have the apportunity to "refashion
This essay was published [prevalent forms] in accordance with their own interests, which ... is
in English translation in
New Left Rel'iell: ( .. ).
a way of defining democracy. " This statement is very important for
my own argument since, as I noted above, the debates on postmoder-
nity are often about the possibilities for establishing a democratic
culture.
In what follows, I give a precis of what Euro-North American
theorists understand by postmodernity, not with the intention of
applying their terms to Latin American phenomena. On the contrary,
it seems to me that such theories need to be deconstructed and
reconstructed in relation to Latin American contexts.

REDEMPTION THROUGH CULTURE?

One criterion which holds for advocates of modernity (Haber-

mas) and postmodernity (Jameson) alike is the emancipatory poten-
tial of cultural works. In Latin America, few are the artists who are
not judged in terms of the social effectivity of their work. The 60s
and 70s were rife with recriminations shot back and forth between
writers who advocated art in the service of social justice and those
who held that formal innovations were in and of themselves revolu-
tionary.
The debates around the effectivity of Jose Maria Arguedas's
work, in fact, hinged on this criterion. One influential study, El mito
de la salvacioll por La cuLtura. critiques the idea that the pathologies
wrought by a savage capitalism can be healed by recourse to the
32. MUNOZ, Silverio, EI moninstrumental cultural practices of indigenous Andean peoples. 32
milo de la salvacion por la How to tap this source of personal and collective integration in the
cultura.
face of imminent cultural destruction by modernization was the
aporia thematized in Arguedas's fiction and anthropological re-
search. In his last novel, El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo
Arguedas's attempts to work out this aporia reaches its most poignant
test. In it he portrays both the ravages wrought by capitalism in a
Peruvian factory town as well as the attempts to overcome them by
 96 - Rev. Bras. de Lit. Comparada, n
2 1 - 03/91

recourse to a rapidly vanishing highland indigenous culture but

whose values continue to be disseminated '.'transculturally" by mes-
tizos settled in the coastal region. 33 Arguedas alternates this fictional 33. Angel Rama elabora·
tes on the phenomenon of
text with diary entries in which he criticizes the professionalization .. transculturation". In:
of writers and vents his despair at ever recuperating the kind of Transculturaci6n narrati-
vaenAmiricaLatina. Me-
unalienated life he experienced as a child among the Andean Indians. xico: SigloXXI.1982.
The very existence of a Peruvian national culture as well as his own
life are in the balance. Culture seems to be the only hope, modern
politics and leftist revolution having failed. Ultimately, however,
culture does not rise to the task and Arguedas commits suicide, the
epilogue to the novel serving as his suicide note.
Arguedas's suicide, his second and successful attempt, may
have been the result of a particularly dark moment in his life, a life
in which, on the contrary, he held the highest hopes for a cultural
working through of the contradictions of modernity in Peru. Given
.his circumstances-economy, politics, and a very reduced public
sphere controlled by oligarchic elites -, such possibilities remained
symbolic. Angel Rama explains that the social redentption to which
he aspired was effected by proxy in his literature:

.. .literature was for him a reduced model oftransculturation

which made it possible to portray it and test it out. If it was
possible in literature it should also be possible in the culture
at large. However, not in charge of a government or a
revolution, that is, without power, Arguedas was not free to
take the bestroute to that larger transculturation. Neverthel-
les, he did what he could with all his resources: portray
transculturation by means of literary narrative, make it 34. Ibid.. p. 202-203.
come to Ihe 'e ••
artlstlca 11y. 34

Such a notion of culture, in the Latin American context, shares

with modern bourgeois aesthetics the will to (re)construct hegemony.
The greater reliance on indigenous and other popular (as opposed to
mass mediated) cultures is, perhaps, a notable distinction between the
two traditions. The greatest difference, however, is the ever-present
lament over the difficulty of establishing an unalienated modern
culture in Latin America. There have been many different projects
for cultural hegemony in the twenty-odd Latin American nations, but
they all have on feature in common: its yet-unattained status. In the
sixties, the writers of the so-called "Boom" thought they could
achieve not only national cultures but, more importantly, a global
continental culture on a par with that of Europe or the United States.
However, rather than taking indigenous and popular traditions as its
 Pcmmodemity and Trasnational Capitalism .. - 97
base, "Boom" writers sought to forge a new aesthetic language and,
consequently, a new hegemonic consciousness. As in Arguedas's
case, however, culture was a proxy for revolution or political power.
According to Carlos Fuentes:

.. .if we Hispano-Americans are capable of creating our own

model of progress [as compared to western technocratic
models], then our language is the only vehicle that can give
form, propose goals, establish priorities, elaborate critiques
of a given way of life: of saying everything that cannot be
said in any other way. I believe that in Spanish America
there are novels being written and to be written which, when
such a consciousness is attained, will provide the necessary
instruments to drink the water and the fruits of our true
35. FUENTES, Carlos. La identity.35
nueva novela hispanoa-
mericana. Mexico: Joa-
quinMortiz, 1969, p. 98. Fuentes is, of course, on the right track in seeking alternative
models of progress but by adopting an autotelic aesthetic he is ul-
timately endorsing the option of elites in their bid for hegemony. The
autotelic here is a symbolic expression of the self-determination that
such writers sought vis-a-vis the international cultural market. Not-
withstanding their protestations to the contrary, Fuentes and his col-
leagues (Cortlizar, Vargas Llosa, etc.) ironically espoused
technological development in the realm of the aesthetic-not only in
terms of narrative technique but also as regards the growth of an
international and promotion industry -, falling in step, then, with
the global reach of capitalist rationality into all spheres of life. It
seems that the aesthetic fulfills the same function in this context as it
had in its inception in England an Germany: it serves as a a proxy for
power enabling a particular group to seek consensus on cultural
terrain in order to maintain hegemony. Not only did professionalized,
superstar novelists like Fuentes sideline "vocational" writers like
Arguedas, they also sought to integrate with the growing consumer
culture among elites (the beautiful people of "La onda") that made
popular and indigenous cultures irrelevant unless they too integrated
or "transculturated" into consumer society. 36
36 Cf. FRANCO, Jean.
Nanator, author, supers- Today, with poor prospects for military-revolutionary triumph,
tar: Latin American narra- with the popular appeal of revolutionary heroism partly displaced
tive in the age ofmasscul-
lute. RevistIJ lberoameri-
. toward narcotraffickers, and with the transformation of politics into
cana, 47, p. 114-115, struggles for interpretive power, the cultural sphere has opened up to
1981. all kinds of challenges. Its function as a "proxy for power" -it seems
preferable to speak of a mediation of power relations-is openly
recognized by groups throughout the political spectrum. At stake is
an idea that the cultural or the aesthetic can provide a terrain for
98 - Rev. Bras. de Lit. Comparada, n~ 1 - 03/91
establishing consensus; everyone recognizes that consensus work.., in
the interest of the hegemony of some groups. The premise that the
aesthetic realm is intrinsically free and disinterested has become
difficult to accept.
Is there still, then, an emancipatory potential in the aesthetic
or cultural realm? In a different context, although directly addressing
postmodern challenges to aesthetic disinterest, Terry Eagleton
afirms that "there are meanings and values embedded in the tradition
goal of achieving equal rights for self-determination. 37 The critical 37. EAGLETON, Terry,
17le ideology of the aes-
consensus is, however, that the aesthetic lost its emancipatory poten- thetic. Oxford: Basil
tial when the historical (i.e., European) avant-gardes were extin- Blackwell, 1990. p. 415.
guished, on the one hand, by the double whammy of Nazism and
Stalinism, and on the other, by the cooptation of consumer capitalism,
which transformed "epater Ie bourgeois" into a marketing strategy.
The second and subsequent avatars of the avant-garde, variously
named neoavant-garde and transavant-garde, have only confirmed
the exhaustion of the dri ve to innovate and shock humanity back from
instrumental rationality into aestheticized life practices. With this
exhaustion, or "twilight of the avant-gardes," we enter an era of
38. Cf. Los hijos de/limo
skepticism, which Paz equates with postmodernity.38 and El romalltismo y la
What many call postmodernity, Habermas argues, is really a poesia cOlltemporallea.
political and cultural impasse awaiting resolution in the transforma-
tion of the emancipatory projetc of modernity such that a democratiz-
ing communicative rationality rather than instrumental reason
becomes its driving force. Following Weber and Durkheim, Haber-
mas sees European modernity emerging out of two interrelated
diremptions: on the one hand, the separation of "system" (economy
and state apparatus) and "lifeworld" (the concept of "Lebenswelt, "
taken from Husserl, refers to culture that serve as the medium of
intersubjective relations), and, on the other, the emergence of moder-
nity through the rationalization of the lifeworld into three
autonomous value spheres: the cognitive, the moral and the aes- 17,e 39. HABERMAS, Hirgen.
theory of comllllicati-
thetic. 39 These diremptions lead to the splitting off of modern from I'eactioll. Vol. 2 Lifeworld
system: a critique of
traditional society as rationalization provides rules of validation in alld
functionalist reason. Bos-
each sphere, thus displacing the traditional autority of myth, religion ton: Beacon Press, 1987.
or the absolute right of monarchy. The reproduction of society Cf. The uncoupling of
system and lifeworld. p.
depends more on human actions than on the dictates of traditional 153-97. The classic ac-
authority. From its very beginning, then, modernity is at odds with count of the rationaliza-
tion of Western culture is
tradition as a nonsecular fonn of belief and transcendence. Max Weber, The Protes-
Modernity, however, is driven by an inherent contradiction tallt Ethic alld the Spirit of
(New York:
resulting from the increased autonomy and reflexivity of a rational- Capitalism
Scribner's, 1958). It
ized society. Automatic behavioral systems driven by instrumental should be pointed out that
reason override processes of mutual understanding that operate ac- Weber grounds this ratio-
nalization solely in the
cording to communicative rationality. The economy and the state West. He concedes that
other cultures evince dif-
 Postmodemity and Trasnational Capitalism... - 99
ferent modes ofrationali- apparatus thus come to colonize the lifeworld. At his point the aes-
zation. but they do notpro-
duce the kind of rational thetic sphere emerges as the principal source of resistances to
moral conduct (conditio- colonization (although practically ignored by the social sciences) by
ned by the Protestant et-
hic) which leads to the de- projecting nonalienated modes of cognition. But according to Peter
velopment of capitalism Biirger, as the bourgeoisie expands its domain even resistances to
(p. 25-26). Cf. also
SCHLUCHTER, Wolf- instrumental reason are increasingly institutionalized, cutting off the
gang. 17le rise of westem aesthetic from other spheres of social life. Nineteenth century Par-
rationalism. Marx We-
ber's developmental his-
nassianism, Symbolism, Pre-Raphaelism and Art for Art's Sake
tol)'. Berkeley: University exemplify the specialization of the aesthetic. Modernity generates its
of California Press, 1981. own antimodernity but subjets it to the same rules of specialization,
p.19.
thus constituting its internal contradiction. Eagleton further
elucidates this contradiction noting that the putati ve unalienated and
disinterested cognition provided by the aesthetic is, in fact, a proxy
for power, a "kind of prosthesis to reason, extending a reified En-
lightenment rationality into vital regions which are otherwise beyond
40. EAGLETON, p. 16.
its reach .• ,40
An ever increasing colonization of the lifeworld resulted in a
Europe disenchanted with its own elite culture, driving its artists and
intellectuals to seek ever new regions of experience to tap. The era
that saw the rise of nihilism, the avant-gardes and Spengler's Twilight
ofthe West, also saw a new way of appropriating the cultural products
of nonwestern societies. Primitivism is not just a matter of collecting
exotic objets from the outer reaches of the Empire, it is a source of
"still unalienated" cultural capital that wil enable aesthetics, as
"prosthesis to reason, .. to open up heretofore untapped regions of the
psyche and facilitate their colonization in the process. This era also
saw Latin American literature, as the major expression of (elite)
cultural life, "catch up to" or get "up to date with" metroplitan
culture. In effect, (elite) aesthetics in Latin America finally went
beyond a mere costltmbrism0, tapping local indigenous cultural
forms in search of its own unalienated cultural capital. Examples are
Andean and Mesoamerican indigenismo (Icaza, Alegria, Asturias,
and the Nicaraguan Vangltardia), Caribbean negrismo (Pales Matos
and Guillen), Brazilian Modernismo (Tarsila do Amaral, Mario and
Oswald de Andrade).
All of the above are expressions of the avant-garde will to
abolish the institutionalized separation between autonomous art and
bourgeois everyday life, seeking to establish a new pratice of
everyday life patterned after art.

The avant-gardistes proposed the sublation of art-subla-

tion in the Hegelian sense of the term: art was not to be
simply destroyed, but transferred to the praxis of life where
it would be preserved, albeit in changed form. The avant-
100 - Rev. BrmI. de Ut. Comparada, n! 1 - 03/91
gardistes thus adopted an essential element of Aestheticism
[that] had made the -distance from the praxis of life the
conterit of works. 1be praxis of life to which Aestheticism
refers and which it negates is the means-ends rationality of
the bourgeois everyday. Now, it is not the aim of the avant-
gardistes to integrate art into this praxis. On the contrary,
they assent to the aestheticists· rejection of the word and its
means-ends rationality. What distinguished them from the
latter is the attempt to organize a new life praxis from a basis
in art. 41 41. BORGER. Peter.
Theoryoftheavant-ganJe.
Minneapolis: University
It may be argued that the difference between metropolitan of Minnesota. 1984. p. 49.
European and Latin American/peripheral avant-gardes revolves
around how the aesthetic practice which serves as model for a new
everyday practice is construed. In Latin America, many of the avant-
gardes sought to reactualize indigenous traditions, thus projecting
new imaginaries with strong ethical contents. If we rethink peripheral
avant-gardes as the endeavor to create new life praxes by rearticulat-
42. I have attempted such
ing local traditions,42 as in testimonial literature, it may prove too a rethinking in: Repensan-
hasty to have declared the death of the avant-garde. Evidently, avant- do a VIIIlgUII1da desde a pc-
forthcoming in the
garde would mean something else if thus construed. It would not, for riferia.
working papers series
example, be the sole domain of elites but would require, as in tes- (Ptipeis avulsos) of the
Centro Intenlisciplinar de
timonial literature, the collaboration of elites and subalterns rather Estudos Contempord-
than the self-serving representation, incorporation or cooptation of neos. Rio de Janeiro:
the latter by the former. UFRJ.I990.
From the perspective of elite metropolitan culture, and its
enclaves in peripheral societies, the avant-gardes petered out:

Today we witness the twilight of the aesthetics of rupture;

the art and literature of our tum of the century have gra-
dually lost their powers of negation. For a long time now
their negations have been ritualistic repetitions. their rebel-
lions formulas, their transgressions ceremonies .... 43 43. PAZ, EI romanticimoy
/a poes/a contemporanea.
p.26.
But this is because they did not really change the framework of their
aesthetic rationality. For thinkers like Paz, autonomous aesthetics
continues to set the tenor of cultural practice; any collaboration with
the subaltern is considered populist demagoguery, and any experi-
mentation involving elite, popular and mass culture a commodifica-
tion. Consequently the entire problem of the avant-garde is left
behind as the world enters a new episteme, according to paz:

Critics, somewhat belatedly. have noticed that for the past

quarter century we have been entered a new historical pe-
 Postmodemity and Trasnational Capitalism... - 101
riod and another fonn of art. Talk of the avant-garde has
become popular as a new label has emerged for our time:
the "postmodern era," a term just as dubious and contra-
dictory as the idea of modernity. What comes after the
modem cannot but be ultramodern: a modernity even more
44. Ibid. modem than yesterday·s.44

Paz, it seems to me, has got it wrong. His account is a willful

misrecognition that the postmodern does not necessarily seek to
innovate, as does the modern, but rather to rearticulate alternative
traditions in order to disalienate contemporary life. Even a
mainstream account, like Lyotard's, situates postmodernity "not
after nor in opposition to the modern which includes it, however much
45. LYOTARD, Jean- it may remain concealed within it. .. 45 Before considering in what
Fran~is. La postmoder-
nidad (explicada a los ni-
ways postmodernity can be construed as continuous with modernity,
iios) Ban:elona: Gedisa, I should like to review briefly Lyotard's checklist of postmodem
1987, back cover. features, which Jameson extends to the entire field of culture.
What defines postmodernity for Lyotard is the loss of
credibility in the grand recits that legitimize knowledge in the name
of any mode of unification, whether christianity, revolution, the
46. Ibid., P. 31.
Hegelian Absolute S&irit, Marxism, or even the idea that "the people
reign over history. .. There is no longer faith in global or totalizing
explanations. Jameson, in tum, sees postmodernity as a "cultural
dominant" disseminated globally by the third or "late"stage of
capitalism. Its cultural landscape is no longer the mechanical
reproduction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but rather
the semiotic reproduction (a mode of symbolization of articulation
of signs and not a mode of reproduction proper) that becomes
47. JAMESON, Fredric. dominant after World War 11.47
Postmodernism, or the lo- Jameson's keenest insight is his explanation of why there has
gic of Late Capitalism.
New Left Review, 146. been a loss of faith in totalizing explanations. He derives his account
July-August 1984. p. 79. from those works infused by the aesthetic of simulation, "whose
power Of authenticity is documented by [their] success (. .. ) in evoking
a whole new postmodem space in emergence around us. " This evoca-
tion is powerful, according to Jameson, because it makes palpable
what we can no longer understand without the prosthesis of simula-
tion:

...our faulty representations of some immense communica-

tional and computer network are themselves but a distorted
figuration of something even deeper, namely the whole
world system of present..cJay multinational capitalism. The
technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmeri-
zing and fascinating, not so much in its own right, but
because it seems to offer some privileged representational
102 - Rev. Bras. de Lit. Comparada, n2 1 - 03/91
sho rthand for grasping a networ k of power and control even
more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp-
namely the whole new decentred global network of the third
stage of capital itself. 48 48. Ibid., p. 79-80; empha-
sis added.

Jameson's argument relies on an allegolical reading of the

works he refers to, inasmuch as he treats them as simulacra of an
unrepresentable, sublime referent. Such works no longer refer to the
problem of power, "the physical incommensurability of the human
organism with Nature, but also [to] the limits of figuration and the
49. Ibid., p. 77.
incapacity of the human mind to give representation to such enor-
mous forces. ,,49 Consequently, for Jameson, the postmodern sublime
can only be adequately theorized "in tenns of that enonnous and
threatening, yet on~ dimly percevaible, other reality of economic and SO. Ibid., p. 88.
social institutions. 0
Contrary to theorists of the avant-garde, Jameson does not
propose how these works resist the colonization of the lifeworld. For
Jameson, our everyday life is totally colonized, so much so that it is
impossible to achieve any direct cognition of the world. Hence the
sublime experience of failing to represent the reality to which the
simulacra and the fragments might allude. 51 Rather than resistance, 51. Among the simulacra
and fragments of the post-
Jameson, following Kevin Lynch in The image of the city, advocates modem, Jameson lists the
an "aesthetics of cognitive mapping" so as to compensate for that following: 1) the rise of
aesthetic populism, tole-
unrepresentability that impedes the subject from recognizing its rant of mass culture and
"Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence. ,,52 kitsch; 2) the destruction
of the expression of Being
One of these conditions is the obsolescence of a "semi- (represented by Van
autonomous" cultural or aesthetic sphere with a corresponding criti- Gogh's "Peasant
Shoes"), replaced by si-
cal distance. But it isn't that culture has disappeared; it has, rather, mulations (as in Warhol's
exploded and expanded "Diamond Dust Shoes");
3) the waning of affect,
with its corresponding
throughout the social realm, to the point at which evything reference to human depth
in our social life-from economic value and state power to (e.g., Freud's drives), and
the emergence of jouis-
practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself-can sallce. the euphoric expe-
be said to have become "cultural" in some original and yet rience of the death of the
. d sense. 53
unt heonze subject (Lacan); 4) the
substitution of parody
(transgression) by pasti-
che (confOlmity); 5) the
All of this entails that the "Left" must redefine its strategies replacement of History by
for offense and resistance. The writing on the wall suggests that such historicism, the mise ell
time-honored notions as negativity, position, subversion, critical dis- spectacle of all past styles;
6) the mode retro minus
tance, and so on have been made irrelevant in the new postmodern any feeling of nostalgia
landscape. (e.g., V,e Big Chill); 7) the
loss of a radical past; 8,
social narcissism and schi-
The short-hand language of 'cooptation' C.. ) offers a most zophrenia resulting from
deoedipalization (Lasch,;
inadequate theoretical basis for understanding a situation in 9) the transfomtation of
 Postrnodenuty and Trasnational Capitalism ... - 103
work and subject into tex- which we all, in one way or another, dimly feel that not only
tualit), constituted by dif-
ferences; 10) hysterical or punctual and local countercultural forms of cultural resis-
camp sublinle, no longer tance and guerrilla warfare, but also even overtly political
resulting from the incapa-
city to figure or represent interventions like those of the Clash, are all somehow se-
incommensurability but cretly disarmed by a system of which they themselves might
from the terror of simula-
ted existence; 11) the apo-
well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance
thoosis of the machinisrn from it. 54
of the third. or cybernetic,
industrial revolution; 12)
the abolition of critical I have quoted Jameson at length not only because his essays
distance; 13) the loss of provide the most detailed descriptions of the kinds of works that can
coordinates in urban spa-
ce. be considered to constitute mainstream postmodernism but also to
serve as a backdrop against which we can gauge other, non-
52. Ibid., p. 90. Jameson is
quoting Althusser here. mainstream contemporary expressions. On the basis of the latter, it
seems to me that Jameson's conclusions are unacceptable. He has
53. Ibid., p. 87.
argued that every "third world" text is necessarily a national allegory
54. Ibid. which is easily discerned. 55 How does this statement reflect on cul-
55. Cf. Third World Lite-
tural texts from peripheral societies? Are they less interesting because
rature in the era of multi- their subtexts are not as unfathomable as those of "postmodern"
national capitalism, Social texts? Is it true that the allegorized referent is more complex in "first
Text, 15, Fall 1986, n. 69,
p. 79-80. See also the elo- world" contexts? If we accept Jameson's premise that late capitalism
quent critique by AH- is the transcendental referent that infuses postmodern textuality and
MAD, Aijaz, Jameson's
rhetoric of otherness and eludes cognition, and if peripheral societies are also part of the global
the national allegory. So- network of transnational capital, why then are their texts not as
cial Texr. 17, Fall 1987, p.
3-25.
complex? Or does he mean to imply that "third world"readers are
more astute in cognitive mapping? That is hardly the case since
Jameson has already argued that it is the cultural landscape of "first
world" societies that makes the referent elusive. We can only infer,
then, that Jameson looks either nostalgically or condescendingly at
those writers and readers who go on about their interpretations as if
the "Real" of late capitalism were a simple matter of national con-
flicts figured according to long outdated cognitive maps from a
postmodern perspective.
These objections to Jameson's diagnostic can be extended to
almost all the theorists of modernity and postmodernity who pri vilege
a Euro-North American model of cultural evolution: at some point
bourgeois society attains an autonomous aesthetic sphere harboring
unalienated experience which is eventually reified through institu-
tionalized specialization; the avant-gardes recuperate the critical
potential of the aesthetic but either capitulate under fascist and
authoritarian regimes or are commodified in consumer societies;
finall y, rather than the collapse of the aesthetic, postmodernity is the
implosion of the social and the political such that the aesthetic per-
meates all experience. The lifeword has become simulation.
104 - Rev. Bras. de Lit. Comparada, n! 1 - 03/91
This evolutionary model relegates nonwestern societies to a
perennial lag, even in those cases, as in Latin American ningllneismo,
in which subjets see themselves as copies. But they are copies-
dissimulations and not simulations-of referents that have ceased to
exist; much like the supernovas whose light we continue to see
millions of years after they collapsed. Lihn, whose parody of the
death of the subject I referred to above, sardonically casts Latin
America as the mirror image of a black hole, mainstream theories of
postmodernity leave little room for an alternative.
If we dispense with this evolutionary model, however, and seek
other premises, it is possible to construe a positive account of Latin
American cultural practices that does not lapse into knee jerk affir-
mations of authenticity of despairing laments over an ersatz ontology.
A new generation of culttural critics has put forth such concepts as 56. Cf. KAMA, 7ranscuJ-
turaciOl1 narrativa en
"transculturation, .. 56 "cultural rearticulation, .. 57 and .. cultural America Latina.
reconversion, ,,58 to account for the ways in which the diverse groups
that constitute Latin America negotiate their cultural capital. 57. BRUNNER, Jose Joa-
quin. Notos sobre Ia ma-
detnidad y 10 postmoder-
no en Ia cultura latinoa-
mericana.
THE REARTICULATION OF TRADITION
58. GARCIA CANCUNI
In contrast to Paz, who understood modernity in relation to the Nestor. La reconversiOn
"tradici6n de rllptllra y rllptura de la tradici6n." the new Latin cuhuraJ: estmtegias para
enttar y sa1ir de 1a moder-
American cultural critics emphasize how groups recycle their tradi- nidad (forthcoming).
tions in national and international markets. Theirs is no longer a
nostalgic aspiration for a return to unalienated modes of life. By
focusing on consumption and other means of cultural mediation, they
are in a better position-vis-a-vis nationalist ideologues-to gauge
how and to that extent the diverse groups of Latin America's cultural
heterogeneity interact with one another and what the prospects are
for subaltern groups to gain a greater participation in the distribution
of goods. Increased restructuring of economy and state administra-
tion by neoconservatives (facilitated by international capital's im-
position of austerity programs) has certainly made it more difficult
to achieve an egalitarian distribution of wealth. Neverthel~ restruc-
turing has created new possibilities for interaction and maneuver, as
traditional cultures are faced with "segmented and differentiated
participation in the global market (... ) according to local codes of
reception... 59 . 59. BRUNNER, Notos sa-
bre Ia modernidad y ID
The result of restructuring and the responses/propositions in postmoderno en Ia cultum
relation to it is latinoamericana. p. 33.

something similar to what certain representatives of post-

modernism claim: the decentering and deconstruction of
 Postmodemity and Trasnatiooal Capitalism ... - 105
western culture as it is depicted in primers; of its rationality,
key institutions and cognitive habits and styles, which we
are led to believe are imposed uniformly. [Cultural hetero-
geneity resembles] the implosion of consumed, produced
and reproduced meanings and the concomitant destructu-
ring of collective representations, the problems in and de-
sire for identify, a confusion of temporal demarcations,
paralysis of the creative imagination, the loss of utopias, the
atomization of local memory, the obsolescence of tradi-
60. Ibid., p. 34. tions. 60

It resembles these ··ftrst world" cultural phenomena but only super-

ficially. Not only, as explained above, are the causes different, the
ways in which different localities respond to the conditions imposed
by transnational capitalism are also different: e.g., the hyperinflatio-
nary situation in Latin American countries is not the same as the
hyperinflationary circulation of signs- the ·obscene obesity of in-
formation" -which Baudrillard sees as the culture of to the United
61. BAUDRILLARD,
States. 61
Jean. Fatal strategies. Hyperinflation in Latin America, on the contrary, is not the
Trans. Philip Beitclunan. result of consumerism but of external debt, speculation, narcotraffic
New York: Semio-
text(e)JPluto, 1990. and, most importantly for the point being made, the struggle for
consumption that informal economies represent. Jameson is, there-
fore, wrong to attribute ··postmodern cognitive mapping" only to
"first world" cultural production. It is just that in Latin America the
mappings are different; they correlate to different sets of conditions
imposed by transnational capitalism.
According to Garcia Canclini, comsumption, understood as an
•• appropriation of products," should not be reduced to consumerism,
passive reception, useless waste and depoliticization or to habits
targeted by market research. It is, rather, the terrain of struggle
between cla,Sses and other group formations over the distribution of
goods, and as such it also serves as the medium in which needs amt
other cultural categories such as identity are constituted: Consump-
tion is a particularly apt space of cultural mediation in which
hegemony can be challenged:

We know that struggle by means of cultural mediations

offers neither immediate nor spectacular results. But it is
the only guarantee that we are not passing from the simula-
crum of hegemony to the simulacrum of democracy-a way
of avoiding the resurgence of a defeated in our ways of
thinking and interacting. The political uncertainties of the
106 - Rev. Bras. de Lit. Comparada, n! 1 - 03/91
cultural struggle seemtBreferable to a revolutionary epic
that repudiates culture. 62. GARCiA CANCLI-
NI. Nestor. CultlU'e and
power: the state of Ie-
Garcia Canclini 's research on the rearticulation within transna- seach, Media, culture and
society. 10, 1988, P. 495.
tional capital of popular or folk traditions as a means to expand
possibilities of consumption in its narrow and wider senses,
demonstrates that modernization does not require the elimination of
economic and cultural forces that do not directly serve the growth of
capitalism so long as these forces "cohere into a significant sector,
which satisfies its needs or those of a balanced reproduction of the
system. 63 Consequently, modernity does not have to be theorized in 63. Ibid., p. 485.

the traditional avant-gardist terms of a "tradicion de ruptura."

Rather than a still unfinished project, as Habermas understands it,
modernity in Latin Ameica is a series of necessarily unfinished
projects. In the case of Brazil, for example, Renato Ortiz finds no
break,

the ruptura never occurred as it did in European countries

because the idea that dominated our imaginary was always
connected to the need to construct a modem Brazilian na-
tion. 64 64. ORTIZ. Renato. Arno-
dema tradi~o brasileira.
CuiUtra brasileira e in-
In Latin America, in effect, the kind of institutionalization that dUstria cultural Sio Pau-
lo: BrasiUense, 1988, p.
guaranteed the autonomy of the three value spheres did not take place 209.
in any rigorous fashion. Knowlegde, politics, and aesthetics above
all, continually cross-fertilize each other. Thus, Brazilian avant-gar-
des-in contrast to the European avant-gardes which, according to
Peter Biirger, sought to reintegrate art and the "praxis of life" by
dismantling institutionalization-were not so much a break with the
(indigenous, Afro-Brazilian and Luso-colonial) past as a rearticula-
tion of it is their attempts to establish a national culture. Mario de
Andrade, one of the leaders of Modernismo in the 1920s, confessed
that this movement "anticipated and prepared the way for the creation
pf a new state of national being," alluding to Getlilio Vargas's Estado
Novo, which centralized the economy and all state apparatuses under
one directorate. 65 65 ANDRADE. MBrlode.
Paradoxically, modernity in Latin America is more a question o Movimento Modemis-
ta.ln:-. Aspectosda Lite-
of establishing new relationships with tradition than of surpassing it. ralura Brasileira. Sio
Among the many ways in which this can be done, cultural critics have Paulo: n. d.
emphasized the role of pastiche, that appropriative form of styliza-
tion which neither rejects nor celebrates the past but, in the words of
66. SANTIAGO, Silvia-
Silviano Santiago, "assumes it. .. 66 In a very insightful essay, San- no. peIJIJIUlCncia do dis-
tiago not only explains how the Brazilian avant-garde can be CIU'SO da tradi~o no mo-
rethought in relation to tradition, he even suggests that the avant- demismo. In: BORN-
HElM, Gerdet atiL Cultu-
 Postmodernity and Trasoational Capitalism ... - 107
ra Brasileira: Tradi- garde may itself be rearticulated for present cultural circumstances,
raojConlradirtio. Rio de
Janeiro: Jmge ZaharJFu-
although it will be necessary to de-emphasize the transgressive
narte, 1987. p. 136. poetics of ruptura that does not hold in many Latin American cases.
Santiago illustrates his premise with the Modernistas' interest in
recuperating Brazil's baroque colonial heritage.

The most interesting case... of the relationship of Moder-

nismo to tradition, which also permits us to disengage Mo-
demismo from any neoconservative appropriations, is the
trip taken by Mario and Oswald de Andrade and Blaise
Cendrars to Minas Gerais in 1924. Those poets were totally
steeped in futurist principles, they had an absolute belief in
the civilization of machines and progress. But suddenly
they decided to travel in search of colonial Brasil. There
they encountered our national history and-more important
to the point we're making-the primitivism of Minas's
67. Ibid., p. 124.
eighteenth century baroque. 67

Santiago goes on to explain that this rearticulation and

recuperation of tradition is achieved by means of suplementation, the
process by which the excluded is reincorporated into the status quo.
Santiago, however, uses Derrida's notion-as laid out in O/Gram-
matology-somewhat against the grain. Derrida invokes the tenn
according to the rhetoric of marginality such that whatever is ex-
cluded is a threat to the status 2suo. Metaphors of violence and danger
68. DERRIDA, Iacques. abound in his exposition of it. It is because modernity continued to
Of Grammatology. Intro. privilege tradition-as it did Nature -, that innovation could be
and trans. Gayatty Chak-
tavorty Spivak Baltimo- construed as supplement. The radical avant-gardes exposed
re: Johns Hopkins, 1976. modernity's ideological strategies of "naturalization" and inverted
the paradigm, transfonning innovation-ruptura-into a continually
self-supplemen~g process. By doing this, however, they obviated
any role for tradition. Subsequently, poststructuralists fetishized the
inversion as ecriture (Derrida),le semiotique (Kristeva), andjouis-
sance (Barthes); they attempted to exorcise the straw man of moder-
nity-and its demon, Cartesian subjectivity- and mine the
foundational lack left in its place. By doing so, however, they lapsed
into a negative theology that revered the signifier hovering over the
abyss of absence.
Many Latin American writers and critics-especially Paz, Sar-
duy, Rodriguez Monegal, Haroldo and Augusto de Campos-were
seduced into thinking they could more easily occupy this privileged
place, since Latin American culture had always been dermed as a
fonn of lack (by elite intellectuals). This is the point of Lihn's parody
of ninguneismo quoted above. But this rhetoric of marginality can
108 - Rev. Hm. de Lit. Comparada, n! 1 - 03/91
also be quite hubristic; Latin America intellectuals declare themsel-
ves superior because from their marginal place they cannibalize
everything, suck all values into the black hole. In an essay in which
he puts his own literary movement-concretismo-at the pinnacle of
this •• anthropophagic rationality," Haroldo de Campos proclams that

writers of a supposedly peripheral literature suddenly ap-

propriated the entirety of the code, claming it as their own
patrimony, like a hollow prize awaiting a new historical
subject. They thus restored a more universal and radical
function to poetics. The Brazilian [concrete poetry ~ove­
ment).was its condition ofpossibility.69 69. CAMPOS, Haroldo
de. Da razao antropofagi-
ca: a Europa sob osigno da
A rethinking of the avant-garde, however, makes it possible to dev~iio. CoIOquio Le-
tras. 62, June 1981, p. 19.
rearticulate tradition as a supplement that does not subordinate the
other elements of the articulation. According to Santiago:

Pastiche does not reject the past in a gesture of mockery,

contempt or irony. Pastiche accepts the past as it is and the
work of art is nothing but a supplement. (. .. ) The supplement
is something which you add to something already complete.
I would not say that pastiche is reverence towards the past,
but I would say that it assumes [endossa) the past, contrary
to parody which always ridicules it. 70 70. Ibid., p. 136.

Santiago, in fact, envisions cultural articulations that can include

avant-garde practices that can take their place next to elements from
other traditions.
Universalizing modes of democratization have not been the
most successful in Latin America. This is due not only to their
encounter with economic underdevelopment or authoritarian and
charismatic forms of state power. It is also due to in great part to the
tendency to understand ,democratization in terms of modernization,
that is, the eradication of traditions whose "enchanted" or "auratic"
modes of life may prove inimical to coexistence with others or to the
projects of elites and their allies. The problem is, of course, that
modernization has severely handicapped many groups who hold to
these traditions. And the problems have only gotten worse with the
tum to the right under the aegis of neoconservatism. Facile proclama-
tions of Latin America's cannibalizing subersi veness at best mask the
problem. Marginality is not willy nilly transformed into a share of the
common wealth. Habbermas is certainly correct when he contends
that neoconservative and •• anarchistic" postmoderns are not at odds
but, rather, serve the same purpose. To celebrate "parasitism" (whose
 Postmodemity and Trasnational Capitalism... - 109

Latin American correlate is the problem of informal economies) or

the hyperreal (which in Latin America is wrought by the hyperinfla-
tionary effects of the external debt and narcotraffic) is like cheerlead-
ing on the sidelines as neoconservatives sell out the citizenry.
The rearticulation of the traditions of Latin America's cultural
heterogeneity, on the other hand, provides one of the most significant
ways for furthering democratization. Liberation theology and the
Christian Base Communities, with their emphasis on concientizacion
achieved through rewriting the gospels in light of everyday experien-
ces, have paved the way for other social movements to seek recogni-
tion and enfrachisement. In the past, the representation of the interests
of the array of groups that make up this cultural heterogeneity was
either absent from the public sphere or projected by elites who sought
to maintain their own hegemony. Pastiche, as Santiago defines it, is
the literary counterpart of those rearticulatory practices that seek to
assume alternative traditions within modernity. These involve the
struggles for interpretive power on the part of peasants, women,
ethnic, racial, and religious groups. For interpretive power enables
them to justify their needs and on that basis demand satisfaction. The
criteria, forms, and terms of these rearticulatory practices are both
old and new. Old because they draw from their traditions~ new be-
cause they no longer operate solely within the framework of class or
nation. Jameson could not be more wrong with respect to the sig-
nificance of Latin American cultural practices. They are not "natio-
nal allegories." They are not allegories at all. They are, on the
contrary, practices for or against democratization, for or agaist the
recognition, representation, and enfrachisement of all as citizens.