Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America

Anibal Quijano

Perhaps for many, to take up the modern/postmodern debate in re-

lation to Latin America is not something whose importance is immediately
evident. For others, the topic is more of a fashion than a serious way of
thinking about the problems of our modernity. Nevertheless, it seems to me
that this question is not so simple or banal. It is not only a European-North
American discussion or a snobbish, vulgar imposition of a topic foreign to
Latin America. On the contrary, the question of modernity involves power
on its most extensive, global scale. Therefore, even if modernity were an
exclusively European-North American phenomenon, it would not be incon-
sequential for us.
In the European concern with the "end of modernity" or in North
American "antimodernity," it is impossible not to detect the peculiar odor
of certain areas of the European zeitgeist that preceded (or directed?) the
Second World War, areas that incubated the ideological germs that sought
to destroy the seeds of liberty, equality, solidarity, and democracy produced
as part of the original, liberating promises of rationality and modernity. Per-
haps the horizon facing Johannes Huizinga was no less dark when, at the

boundary 2 20:3, 1993. Copyright ? 1993 by Duke University Press. CCC 0190-3659/93/$1.50.

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 Quijano / Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America 141

beginning of the 1930s, he decided to publish his worried reflections with the
cautionary title In the Shadow of Tomorrow. Our present horizon does not
necessarily have to darken with new fascisms, nazisms, Stalinisms, wars,
ovens, famines, and trials. All of this is not necessary, but it is implicated in
the debate.

None of this is foreign to Latin America. Not only because the en-
tire world is involved, but also because, for us, the debate about modernity
implies seeing ourselves from a new point of view whose perspective can
reconstitute our ambiguous relationship to our own history in a new way. A
way of ceasing to be what we have never been.

Latin America and the Production of Modernity

We still have not liberated ourselves from a failed or deficient "mod-

ernization," in operation especially since the Second World War. That ex-
perience blocked, in many people, any other concept of modernization; it
made us see ourselves as little more than belated and passive recipients
of modernization and could not prevent a skepticism about its promises,
because of which many of us now find ourselves ahead of the present de-
bate. Nevertheless, although Latin America may have been, in fact, a
latecomer to, and almost passive victim of, "modernization," it was, on the
other hand, an active participant in the production of modernity.
The history of modernity itself began with the violent encounter be-
tween Europe and America at the end of the fifteenth century. From then
on, there followed, in both worlds, a radical reconstitution of the image of
the universe. It is not necessary to insist here on the implications of the
Conquest for the Ptolemaic image of the universe. What was important at
the time was the recognition of the imperative to study, explain, doubt, dis-
cuss, and investigate all that exists and happens in the universe, and to
modify ideas, images, and experiences correspondingly-that is, to recon-
stitute on a new, experimental basis the relations between human beings
and the universe, and their relations with themselves.
The secularization of authority in the production and communication
of experience and knowledge was legitimized and consolidated with the
encounter between Europe and America. Henceforth, all knowledge would
owe its production and legitimacy to the employment of the characteristic
human aptitudes for making experiences common property, announcing
discoveries, translating, and developing cognitive frameworks. This new
cultural imperative, and the resources and procedures destined for its sat-

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142 boundary 2 / Fall 1993

isfaction in the Europe of that time, was reason, or rationality. And the new
social intersubjectivity it brought in its wake was what we are accustomed
to calling modernity.
The primordial moment of this vast mutation of intersubjectivity, with-
out which it would have no meaning, occurs in the social image of time:
The past is replaced by the future as the privileged seat of the hopes of
humanity. Until then, all previous images of the universe lay in the past,
because they came from it. All explanations, indeed all legitimacy, were
associated with this past. Hope was an insistence on a return to a golden
age. More accurately, it was nostalgia.
What characterizes the European labyrinth of the fourteenth and fif-
teenth centuries was not only the erosion of the central institutions of society
and culture and the exacerbated violence of their conflicts but also, or per-
haps even more decisively, the loss of control or confusion about historical
alternatives. Absent a historical sense of the future, no perspective was
able to give meaning to events nor to the constitution of a social project
that envisioned a time yet to come, as opposed to the mere prolongation of
the past.
The production of the European utopias at the beginning of the six-
teenth century gives testimony that this labyrinth begins to be left behind
and that history begins to be projected toward, or charged with, the future,
with meaning. Those first forms of a new historical consciousness, in which
the beginnings of European reason and modernity were situated, were not
only a new elaboration of their own past. Their most powerful images, those
that gave the utopias their immense motivating force and their longevity,
were dependent above all on the seminal contribution of Andean rationality
to the new European imaginary that was being constituted. Andean social
institutions and forms of thought, established around reciprocity, solidarity,
the control of chance, and the joyous intersubjectivity of collective work and
communion with the world (or, in European terms, by the unity of the tree of
life) provided models for the utopias. None of this came from the European
past, and all hope of it had to be located in the future.
This copresence of Latin America in the production of modernity
not only continued but became more conscious throughout the period of
the crystallization of modernity, especially during the eighteenth and the
beginning of the nineteenth centuries. If one considers the characteristic
traits of the Enlightenment-the interest in the scientific investigation of the
universe and the resulting discoveries; the acceptance of the often radi-
cal intellectual risks implied in this behavior; the critique of existing social

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 Quijano / Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America 143

reality and the complete acceptance of the idea of change; the disposition to
work for reforms, against social prejudices, arbitrary power, despotism, and
obscurantism-if these are the initial features of the movement of moder-
nity, they are as documentable in colonial America as in Europe during the
eighteenth century.
On both sides of the Atlantic, groups such as the Societies of Friends
of the Nation, were organized to pursue these goals. These intellectual and
political circles formulated the same questions, worked on similar projects,
and published and discussed common matters. That is precisely what
Humboldt would find, without being able to conceal his surprise, in the
course of his journey through America. The fruits of Enlightenment were
tasted at the same time in Europe and America.
Nor was the movement of ideas simply from Europe to America. A
Peruvian, Pablo de Olavide, forced to emigrate from Peru by the colonial
authorities, befriended Voltaire, joined the group of French encyclopedists,
and played an active part in the political experiences of the Spanish reform-
ers of that period. Persecuted by the Inquisition, Olavide was defended by
all of the European circles of the Enlightenment, and it was Diderot him-
self, also Olavide's personal friend, who published the first bibliography of
his works.

The intellectual and political movement of the Enlightenment, in other

words, was produced and practiced simultaneously in Europe and America.
In both worlds, a battle had been mounted against the religious obscur-
antism that blocked the development of knowledge and personal freedom
of choice; against the arbitrariness and inequality of the relations of social
power in a context in which the crisis of feudal society was still not over-
come; against the despotism incorporated by the monarchic state; against
anything that might be an obstacle to the reorganization of society on the
basis of reason.

All of this was even more profoundly felt in America than in Europe
during the eighteenth century, because its colonial situation reinforced des-
potism, arbitrariness, inequality, and obscurantism. It is not surprising, then,
that the Societies of Friends not only spread throughout all of Latin America
but also frequently enjoyed a more intense activity there than in Europe.
Contrary to the usual model of cultural transmission in the narrative of
modernity, it is useful to remember, for example, that intellectual and politi-
cal nationalism, one of the clearest consequences of the reformism of the
Enlightenment, developed earlier and in more politically concrete forms in
America than in Europe, where it did not enter the arena of political debate

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144 boundary 2 / Fall 1993

and conflict until almost a century later, toward the end of the nineteenth
century.

The "Metamorphosis" of Modernity in Latin America

if modernity, as a movement of social intersubjectivity, could occur

at the same time in Europe and Latin America, this was due not only to the
communication existing between both worlds, but also to the fact that they
were going through the same sociohistorical process: the apogee of the
mercantilism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The problem with
Latin America, however, was that just when its modernity seemed to enter
the phase of the demarcation of its specificity and maturity with respect to
Europe, when it began to define itself as a new social and cultural possibility,
it fell victim to its colonial relationship to Europe and was subjected to a liter-
ally Kafkaesque "metamorphosis." While in Europe, mercantilism started to
transform itself into industrial capitalism, in Latin America, especially from
the last third of the eighteenth century on, the parallel transformation was
halted, and the economy began to stagnate due to the double effect of
the continued restrictions imposed by the political economy of the Iberian
metropolis and the displacement of economic power in favor of England.
So, while in Europe modernity was part of a radical mutation of society,
feeding off the changes prepared by the emergence of capitalism, in Latin
America, from the end of the eighteenth century on, modernity was linked
to an adverse social context, in which the decline of the economy and the
breakdown of the mercantilist system permitted the social sectors most
antagonistic to it to occupy the leading positions in the elaboration of Latin
America's independence from Europe.
In this way, the same modernity that remade in Europe not only the
sphere of intersubjective relations but also, increasingly, the material, social
relations themselves, becoming, as a result, the mode of everyday life in
society, in Latin America remained confined to the intersubjective sphere,
blocked from its possibilities of entering the materiality of society, and even
there it was repressed, persecuted, forced to seek refuge in the practice of
enlightened minorities.
This was, without a doubt, an authentic "metamorphosis." For a long
time, modernity would exist for us as pure intelligence, self-enclosed, in-
communicado, and almost incommunicable. The intellectuals could think
with the tools of modernity while their society became less and less mod-

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 Quijano / Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America 145

ern, less rational. This helps to explain why the liberal intelligentsia, once
colonial subjugation was ended, could not manage to liberate itself from the
chimera of a modernization of society without a revolution, and why many
intellectuals, often the most brilliant, ended up simply submitting themselves
to the servitude of the new models of power and society that were being
exported from Europe and later the United States. Modernity ceased to be
produced and coproduced from Latin American cultural soil.

The Internal Conflict of Modernity in Europe

This "metamorphosis" of modernity in Latin America is not a phe-

nomenon disconnected from the European history of that movement. It
resulted, to a decisive degree, from Latin America's colonial relationship
to Europe, and its consolidation and prolonged duration (which has still not
completely ended) were, in turn, associated with the fact that in Europe,
domination could impose, in its own service, the almost complete instru-
mentalization of reason against liberation.
From its very beginnings, the European Enlightenment contained an
unbridgeable split between tendencies that saw reason as the historical
promise of the liberation of humanity from its own ghosts, from social injus-
tice and the prisons of power, and, on the other hand, tendencies that saw
rationality in instrumental terms, as a mechanism of power, of domination.
The first tendencies were particularly disseminated in Mediterranean and
Latin Europe; the second in Nordic Europe and especially in what today
is Great Britain. The split between the two became clearer and sharper in
the course of the eighteenth century; it was involved in the conflict between
England and Spain and, later, between England and France over the course
of the French Revolution and control of the Americas, and became definitive
with the imposition of English hegemony over Europe and, subsequently,
over most of the rest of the world in the nineteenth century.
The imposition of English hegemony, linked as it was to the spectacu-
lar expansion of British industrial capitalism, consolidated the hegemony
of the tendencies in the movement of the Enlightenment that conceived
of reason primarily in instrumental terms. The association between reason
and liberation was occluded. Henceforth, modernity would be seen almost
exclusively through the crooked mirror of domination. The age of "modern-
ization," instead of modernity, had begun: that is, the transformation of the
world, of society, according to the requirements of domination and control,

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146 boundary 2 / Fall 1993

specifically, of the domination of capital, stripped of any purpose other than

accumulation. The ax that had cut off the Moor's head could be turned in a

different direction and allowed to prolong its pale efficiency.

For Latin America, this inflection of the history of modernity was more
than decisive-it was catastrophic. The victory of the instrumentalization
of reason in the service of domination was also a profound defeat for Latin
America, which, because of its colonial situation, had associated modern
rationality more than anything else with liberation. Latin America would not
again encounter modernity except under the guise of "modernization."
The subsequent predominance of the United States in capitalist im-
perialism and the imposition of "Pax Americana" after World War II not
only consolidated and globalized the hegemony of instrumental reason (the
association of reason and domination) over "historical reason" (the associa-
tion between reason and liberation); it also exacerbated its consequences
immeasurably. For it has been under this empire that all instances of society
and each of its elements have ended up subjugated to the demands of capi-
tal. And it has been precisely during the period of its rise that Latin America,
in particular, came to be one of the victims of "modernization."
The victory of instrumental reason was even more profound and
tragic because it also involved ideas and social movements that emerged as
the bearers of the original liberatory promises of modernity, only to succumb
themselves to the force of instrumental reason. What is worse, these ideas
and movements attempted, not without success for a long time, to present
instrumental reason as nothing less than liberating rationality itself. In this
way, they contributed to the further occlusion of the association between
reason and liberation. Everyone knows what I am referring to: Socialism did
not manage to be anything other than "actually existing socialism"--that
is, Stalinism in any of its local variants.
Why, then, all things considered, should we be surprised that the
term modernity now appears to designate only "actually existing moder-
nity"-that is, the reign of instrumental reason?

Whose Modernity Is in Crisis?

It is a historical irony, then, that the present attack on modernity

should come precisely from the bastions of instrumental reason. I say this
because the postmodernism of a sector of the French intelligentsia (some
of whose members came from, or had to define themselves against, a Stal-
inist Left, others who did not discover in time that the mask and the face of

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 Quijano / Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America 147

"actually existing modernity" were the same thing) and the antimodernism
of a sector of the North American intelligentsia (not a few of whom are also
former leftists) are precisely dedicated to destroying what little remains of
the original association between reason and social liberation.
The postmodernists contend that after nazism and Stalinism, no one
can still believe in the "master narratives" of modernity or its promise of
liberation. The North American antimodernists, for their part, sustain that
these promises were never more than chimeras, and that order and au-
thority are the only expressions of modernity. Both of them propose that the
technology of power is the only aspect of modernity that is worth defending
anymore.
If all efforts for the liberation of men and women from domination,
servitude, social inequality, arbitrary authority, despotism, obscurantism,
and the like, are in vain, if all hopes of achieving the complete realization of
individual faculties and collective joy are chimerical, if they are only some-
thing that history reduced to "master narratives" of impossible aspirations,
then it should be admitted that the promises of modernity are not only not
rational, they are decidedly irrational. The only thing that really remains,
then, is power. The rational thing would be to surrender oneself to it. In this
way, the seduction of power offers itself to us as an alternative to modernity.
The effect of historical reason, that is, of rationality as a project for the
liberation of society, is subjugated to a new and more insidious siege. Social
and political forces equivalent to those that, like nazism and Stalinism, pro-
duced the weakening-in truth, almost the eclipse of historical reason-
emerge again in search of the definitive destruction of all projects to liberate
society from the present holders of power.
This, in essence, is the nature of the present crisis of modernity.
Nevertheless, it would be pointless and, worse, dangerous not to see that it
is not only a matter of the struggle between instrumental reason and histori-
cal reason. If the liberating promises of modern rationality were able to be
marginalized and subordinated to the necessities of power, first under the
hegemony of British and then later North American imperialism, and if the
alternative movements, the heirs and bearers of the promises of modernity,
ended up converting these promises into "actually existing socialism," it is
improbable that all of this should happen only because historical reason
is defended only by the weakest sectors of society. It is more likely that
in the constitution of modern rationality itself in Europe, elements that not
only weakened the liberating force of rationality but also made it possible to
disguise and to substitute this force, have been present from the beginning.

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148 boundary 2 / Fall 1993

It turns out that liberating rationality was not itself constitutionally

immune to the seduction of power. This is because, as I noted, modern
rationality is connected from its Enlightenment origin on to the relations of
power between Europe and the rest of the world. But if European reason
could wither so quickly into instrumental reason, perhaps this is also be-
cause it had to nourish itself, from the start, from a tree of knowledge broken
off from the tree of life precisely as the price of the association between
reason and domination.

In this sense, in the present crisis of modernity, it is European iden-

tity itself, the European constitution of modern rationality, that is in question.
This is not only a matter, consequently, of a confrontation between instru-
mental and historical reason in the abstract. It involves, more profoundly,
the European model of the constitution of liberating rationality. It is Euro-
pean, and now European-North American, hegemony over the history of
modernity and rationality that is now in crisis.

"Metamorphosis" and the Tension of Subjectivity

in Latin America

During the sixties, we discussed more than anything else in Latin

America the problems of our society and how to change it. Now we are
more anxious to establish our identity. This is not surprising. What is behind
our search for identity every time Latin America is in crisis is that the forma-
tive elements of our reality have not lost their tension among themselves,
thus slowing down and impeding the process of historical sedimentation
that could make the ground of our social existence more dense and firm,
and our need to always be in search of our identity less urgent or recurrent.
The connection of these questions with the trajectory of modernity
in Latin America opens a very extensive problematic that it would not be
pertinent to discuss here at great length. Let me take up a few elements
that seem central and exemplary to me. I suggested before that the "meta-
morphosis" of modernity in Latin America, as one of the consequences
of colonial domination, served to excessively prolong a system of power
whose beneficiaries were social groups that embodied the most perverse
results of colonial domination, that were the least touched by modern ratio-
nality, and that today, with "modernization," have managed to maintain their
hegemonic positions.
The problem of Latin American culture, however, is not only due to
the traumatic "metamorphosis" its modernity was subjected to at the end

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 Quijano / Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America 149

of the eighteenth century but also to the uninterrupted reproduction of its

dependence with respect to European-North American domination. One of
the most insistent expressions of the tensile character of Latin American
subjectivity is a permanent note of dualism in our intellectual manner, our
sensibility, our imaginary. This dualism cannot be simplistically explained by
the opposition between the modern and the nonmodern, as the apologists
of "modernization" continue to attempt to do. Rather, it derives from the rich,
varied, and dense condition of the elements that nourish this subjectivity,
whose open contradictions also continue to fuse together in new meanings
and consistencies that articulate themselves in a new and different struc-

ture of intersubjective relations. The slowness and perhaps precariousness

of this process of production of a new and autonomous cultural universe
is not disconnected from the very same factors that reproduced colonial
domination and then the hegemony of instrumental reason, and that have
been reinforced under the pressures of "modernization."
Perhaps the best example of the presence of this note of dualism in
the Latin American intelligentsia is Mariategui. A Marxist, considered today
perhaps the greatest Latin American Marxist, Mariategui was at the same
time not a Marxist. He openly believed in God. He proclaimed that it was
not possible to live without a metaphysical conception of existence; and
he never ceased to feel close to Nietzsche. His discoveries concerning the
specific character of Latin American social reality could not be understood
outside of this tension in his thought and personal attitude, perhaps be-
cause outside of it he probably would not have made them. (In any case,
those who were looking at the same reality at more or less the same time
with a methodology tied to European rationalism managed to do little more
than find the reproduction of Europe in Latin America.)
A similar tension runs through everything and almost everybody in
Latin America. It is not just that we read European books and live in a com-
pletely different world. If it were only this, we would be little more than "exiled
Europeans in these savage plains," as some have defined us, or we would
have as our main aspiration to be accepted as Europeans, or even better,
as Yankees, which is undoubtedly the dream of many others. We could not,
therefore, stop being what we never were and never will be.
One of the many meanings that is beginning to form Latin American
identity is that here, because of the "metamorphosis" of our modernity, the
relation between history and time is completely different than in Europe or
the United States. In Latin America, what is a sequence in other countries
is a simultaneity. It is also a sequence. But in the first place, it is a simul-

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150 boundary 2 / Fall 1993

taneity. What in Europe were stages of the history of capital, for example,
here constitute both historical stages of and the present structural grounds
for capital: Forms of the "primitive accumulation," competitive capitalism,
monopoly capitalism before the Second World War, still tied to national im-
perialisms, and transnational capitalism today are all active, manifested in a
pyramid structure of levels of domination rather than stages in a sequence.
But neither could one completely deny their disposition as stages. Time in
this history is simultaneity and sequence at the same time.
It is a question of a different history of time, and of a time differ-
ent from history. This is what a lineal perspective and, worse, a unilineal
perspective of time, or a unidirectional perspective of history (such as the
"master narrative" of the dominant version of European-North American
rationalism), cannot manage to incorporate into its own ways of produc-
ing or giving "reason" meaning within its cognitive matrix. Although we are
always made anxious by the signs of its presence, we have not been able to
completely define or assume our own historical identity as a cognitive matrix
because we have not successfully liberated ourselves from the control of
this rationalism.

For many of us, this was the most genuine meaning of our searches
and confusion during the period of the agitated debates over dependency
theory. It is also true, however, that we were able to get at the question
of our identity only intermittently. It was no accident that it was not a soci-
ologist but a novelist, Gabriel Garcia M&rquez, who, by good fortune or
coincidence, found the road to this revelation, for which he won the Nobel
Prize. For by what mode, if not the aesthetic-mythic, can an account be
given of this simultaneity of all historical times in the same time? And what
but mythic time can be this time of all times? Paradoxically, this strange way
of revealing the untransferable identity of a history proves to be a kind of
rationality, which makes the specificity of that universe intelligible. That is,
in my opinion, what Garcia Marquez basically does in One Hundred Years
of Solitude. And that, without a doubt, is worth a Nobel Prize.
In Latin America, the past runs through the present in a different way
than is pictured in the premodern European imaginary: not, that is, as the
nostalgia for a golden age that is, or was, the continent of innocence. Among
ourselves, the past is, or can be, a personal experience of the present, not
its nostalgic recovery. Our past is not lost innocence but integrated wis-
dom, the unity of the tree of knowledge with the tree of life, that which the
past defends in us as the basis for an alternative rationality against the in-
strumental rationalism that dominates our present. Here, rationality is not a

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 Quijano / Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America 151

disenchantment with the world, but rather the intelligibility of its totality. The
real is rational only inasmuch as rationality does not exclude its magic. Juan
Rulfo and Jose Maria Arguedas, in the privileged seats of the heritage of
the original rationality of Latin America, narrated this fact. But the formula
that names this alternative rationality for international consumption, "magi-
cal realism," a contradiction in terms for European rationalism, comes, not
by chance, from Alejo Carpentier, the most intellectual, or if you prefer the
most European, of the Latin American narrators who had the audacity and
the fortune to make (recalling one of his titles) "the trip to the seed," in the
course of which his European intellectual formation was taken to the limit of
all of its tensions and reconstituted from the recognition of what he called a
"marvelous real."

This tensile relation between past and present, simultaneity and se-
quence of historical time, and the note of duality in our sensibility, could
not be explained apart from the history of domination of Latin America
by Europe, the copresence of Latin America in the initial production of
modernity, the split between liberatory and instrumental rationality, and the
eventual hegemony of instrumental rationality.
Because of the uninterrupted reproduction of our dependence in
this history, every time there is a crisis in European rationality and, con-
sequently, in the intersubjective relations between the European and the
Latin American, the process of the sedimentation of our own identity also
enters into crisis, and we once again leave in search of our absent identity.
Today, this problem is more pressing than at other times: While the Creole-
oligarchical culture that appeared after the "metamorphosis" of modernity
has irrevocably lost the social bases of its reproduction and is in advanced
decay, it is not clearly evident yet who will have the subsequent hegemony.

Rationality and Utopia in Latin America

The "unfinished" character of our culture is a product of the way in

which the elements that originate from this relationship of domination and
conflict are reorganized and redirected when the bases and institutions of
power have been corroded and partially dismantled by the eruption of the
dominated in the foreground of the historical stage-in other words, when
the basic elements of our universe of subjectivity become original again.
The anxious demand for identity is stronger in the countries and among
the groups where the pressures of the transnationals to form a new version
of Creole-oligarchical culture (which was, it should be remembered, a neo-

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152 boundary 2 / Fall 1993

colonial culture) have not managed to displace cultural identities produced

by Indian and African cultures. With this resistance, a new utopia is begin-
ning to be formed, a new historical meaning, a proposal of an alternative
rationality.
It should not be surprising that this process is most notable in areas
that have inherited sources of original culture that still survive and flow
anew, as in Mexico-Mesoamerica and the Andean world. Is not the writ-
ing of Jose Maria Arguedas an expression, an instance, of this utopia? He
had to choose between Spanish, the dominant language, and Quechua,
the dominated language, to express the needs of the dominated population
to communicate. He chose to write in the dominant language, contriving in
the process, however, to achieve the transmission of some of the expres-
sive possibilities of the dominated language. His was a program of linguistic
subversion, really something like the creation of a new literary language.
This method led Arguedas to another discovery. What sort of narra-
tive structure would be the most effective for representing, as he wanted
to, the magmatic constitution of a new society, a new culture on the sandy,
coastal deserts where the masses of immigrants from the sierra gathered
in a world agitated by the tense dialogue between the dominant and domi-
nated cultures? El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo, his posthumous
novel, contains his answer. Once again he had to opt for a narrative struc-
ture derived from the dominators, the novel, but with the condition that the
world of the subaltern caught up in this somber conflict would be the real
content of the product. This is a program of narrative subversion, a sub-
version of paradigms of historical becoming and agency: the end point of a
project of cultural subversion initiated by a linguistic subversion.
In this moment of our history, we must admit to ourselves irrevo-
cably that we have never been, and will never be, just like European-North
Americans, in the mode of the self-image sought after by the old Creole-
oligarchical culture or the new version of it that some would like to simulate.
The dominant culture was not imposed, nor will it be imposed, by the ex-
tinction of the dominated cultures. Nor, on the other hand, will the liberation
of the dominated cultures be the equivalent of some kind of resurrection.
In this sense, Arguedas's proposal, implicit in all of his work, should be
recognized, as Angel Rama already suggested, as the model of a historical
project that it is necessary to realize consciously-that is, as nothing more
nor less than the cultural utopia of Latin America.
Arguedas's utopia could not have been articulated as such were it
not for the prefiguration of other and greater subversions. Any utopia is,

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 Quijano / Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America 153

after all, a project for the reconstitution of the historical meaning of society.
The fact that such a project was first lodged in the aesthetic or symbolic-
expressive sphere does nothing other than indicate, as always, that it is
within that sphere that the possible transformations of the historic totality
are prefigured. Is this not what was at issue in the debates of our European
counterparts Lukacs, Adorno, Benjamin, and Brecht before the Second
World War? Was not aesthetic liberation seen as, in effect, the antechamber
of a possible social liberation?
The Latin American utopia as the proposal of an alternative ratio-
nality acquires all of its specificity when it is confronted by what has been
perhaps the crucial question in the present debate about modernity, and
not only in Latin America: the question of the private versus the state (or, as
the current slogan has it, of society versus the state). This question is, in my
opinion, the result of a double process: on the one hand, the clustering of
postmodernists and antimodernists around a kind of neoconservatism that
sings paeans to the seductions of power; on the other hand, the discovery
that the mask and the face, the dream and the reality, were the same in
"actually existing socialism." The result is an offensive based on the en-
chantments of the power of private capital and an unexpected confusion in
the other camp that gradually gives in to these enchantments.
The private versus state question has emerged as the axis around
which not only the problems of the economic crisis are debated but also
those which concern every other instance of social reality. The private is
seen, from a political and cultural point of view, as supportive of liberty and
democracy because nationalization accompanied the despotic organization
of bureaucracy under Stalinism; from the point of view of economic ratio-
nality, the private is celebrated because the bureaucratic sclerosis caused
by nationalization ended up retarding the growth of the economy.
Despotism really exists under Stalinism, but it finds its match in the
operations of the transnational corporations, which are also despotic. It is
true that private capital is the source of the dynamic power and success
of these corporations. Capitalism, as a system capable of producing a
free and prosperous existence for the vast majority of the world's peoples,
and certainly for most of us in Latin America, however, continues to be a
chimera. For the exploited and dominated of the world, this confrontation
between unrestricted capitalist property and absolute state property can-
not be recognized as the only alternative. In truth, it is a trap that ends in
an impasse. Both are faces of the same instrumental reason and lead to
the same frustrations of "modernization" and "populism" in our countries.

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154 boundary 2 / Fall 1993

Neither proposes anything other than a power always hanging over the vast
multitude of the dominated.

In Latin America, the state sphere has ended up being efficient for
the controllers of the state, the private sphere for the controllers of capi-
tal. Nevertheless, in our experience, there is not only one kind of private
sphere. There is a private sphere that effectively functioned, and functions
today, for the direct producers involved in it, not because it is capitalist but
precisely because it is not. I am thinking, of course, of what Mariategui
pointed to: The experience of the Andean communities before their adapta-
tion to mercantilism shows the possibility of a communal form of the private,
of "civil society," or institutions outside the state. This was what enabled
Arguedas to learn to love in them the joy of collective work, the freedom of
enterprises decided by all, and the effectiveness of reciprocity.
No one should think that I am proposing the return to Andean com-
munalism or to the systems of reciprocity of the ancient agrarian societies
of our continent. Neither will they return, nor would they be able to satisfy
the complex needs of contemporary society if they did. Nor do I mean to
suggest the immediate dissolution of all forms of social power except the un-
coerced association of free citizens that appears in some of the formidable
utopias of the anarchist movement. Instead, what I propose is what Argue-
das shows: that in the very center of Latin American cities, the masses of
the dominated are building new social practices founded on reciprocity, on
an assumption of equality, on collective solidarity, and at the same time on
the freedom of individual choice and on a democracy of collectively made
decisions, against all external impositions.
What is involved in this is a way of rearticulating two cultural heri-
tages: from the original Andean rationality, a sense of reciprocity and soli-
darity; from the original modern rationality, when rationality was still asso-
ciated with social liberation, a sense of individual liberty and of democracy
as a collective decision-making process founded on the free choice of its
constituent individuals. We do not have to remain prisoners of the alter-
native between the private or state forms of capitalism, nor of any of the
faces of instrumental reason. Latin America, because of its peculiar his-
tory, because of its place in the trajectory of modernity, is the most apt
historical territory to produce the articulation of elements that up to now
have been separated: the happiness of collective solidarity; the adventure
of complete individual self-fulfillment. We do not have to renounce either of
these elements because both are part of our heritage.
If one looks at the United States, one finds that the ideology of social

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 Quijano / Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America 155

egalitarianism was more profoundly established there than in any other

known society. In general, all the others were hierarchical societies, not
just in socioeconomic terms (the United States has no particular advantage
over them in that area) but also in intersubjective relations. It does not seem
an accident, however, that this ideology of social egalitarianism was the
other face of the most exacerbated individualism, because the latter is not
possible without the former. The North American utopia that is expressed
in contemporary science fiction reveals that the only idea systematically
absent in it is precisely the idea of social solidarity. I believe that this is
also an expression of the exacerbated power of instrumental reason in that
culture.

Latin America, by contrast, is beginning to constitute itself through

new social practices of reciprocity, solidarity, equity, and democracy, in in-
stitutions that are formed outside or against the state and private capital
and their respective bureaucracies. Latin American identity, which cannot
be defined in ontological terms, is a complex history of production of new
historical meanings that depart from legitimate and multiple heritages of
rationality. It is the utopia of a new association between reason and libera-
tion.

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