Theses_on_AntagonismHybridityand_the_Subaltern.pdf

Dispositio/n 52, voLXXV 147-158 2005 Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan

THESES ON ANTAGONISM, HYBRIDITY, AND THE SUBALTERN IN LATIN AMERICA*

Bruno Bosteels Cornell University

1

atin American subaltern studies emerge out of two related but apparently heterogeneous sources. The first source, which is pri- 4 marily of a historico-political nature, comes in response to the

last successful revolutionary experience on the continent, with the rise to

power and the subsequent electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. More generally, the strand of subaltern thinking that corresponds to this first source is forced to register the loss of referentiality of most, if not all, political projects that were directly or indirectly related to the rational core of Marxism.

* This paper was first presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the Modern Lan- guages Association, which was held in New Orleans. I had hoped to expand each thesis so as to incorporate a much more painstaking reply to the texts that serve as the constant interlocutors for this debate: John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), Alberto Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), Gareth Williams, The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalter- nity in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), and the two editions prepared and introduced by Ileana Rodrguez, The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001) and Conver- gencia de tiempos: Estudios subalternos/contextos latinoamericanos estado, cultura, subalternidad (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001). May this first and only footnote be a token, however insufficient, of my tremendous indebtedness to this collective work, as well as an earnest for future repayment.

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As an intervening doctrine, which remains irreducible to its endlessly rewritten version as an academic body of knowledge, Marxism indeed

gathered its historical force from an indissociable tie to three basic referents: first, the workers' movement starting in the latter half of the nineteenth century in Western Europe; second, the creation of communist and/or socialist nation-states, from the Soviet Union all the way to Cuba; and, finally, the anticolonial liberationist struggles, with their concomitant search for national-popular sovereignty, starting in the mid-twentieth cen-

tury in the so-called Third World. In Latin America, the electoral defeat of the Sandinista ruling party in 1990 might well signal an event similar to the one that Solidarity in Poland represented for the European Left, namely, the

joint collapse of all three of these referents which, while following a grad- ual and relatively autonomous path in Europe, had often been fused into a

nonsynchronous synchronicity in the case of various revolutionary movements throughout Latin America.

If this global and immanent crisis of the Marxist intervening doctrine embodies the first, historical and political, source of subaltern studies, then its second source, which is more of a theoretical and philosophical nature, comes in response to the so-called closure of metaphysics and the deconstruction of modern foundational thinking. This strand of subaltern studies

attempts to think through the limits of culture and politics by expanding the radical critique not just of essentialism but also, or even more so, of the

very kinds of particularism, liberal multiculturalism, and social constructiv- ism that often take up the place vacated by essentialist thinking without

really offering a different logic of the social, the political, or the cultural. For this second source of subaltern studies, the deconstruction of

metaphysics-the active unworking and degrounding not only of the meta-

physics of presence but also of the new metaphysics of difference as yet another presence, as the presence of "the other"-is precisely the strongest intellectual weapon against the persistent "othering" of the subaltern, including by intellectuals who otherwise would want to be loyal to the latter's very own cause.

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These two sources are of unequal weight for the various groups and

subgroups that give shape to the field of subaltern studies in and about Latin America. Thus, John Beverley and Ileana Rodriguez can easily be


THESES ON ANTAGONISM, HYBRIDITY,... 149

seen as having led the way for the first orientation, while Alberto Moreiras and Gareth Williams shoulder much of the burden of the second one. Aside from the circumstantial but perhaps not wholly indifferent issue of genera- tional distinctions, however, what seems absolutely crucial to me is the

question of how we ought to understand the encounter between these two strands of thought and, thus, how we should understand the peculiar articulation of the theoretico-philosophical and the historico-political in Latin American subaltern studies. That is something, of course, that in earlier

days - who knows if they can still be called the "good old" days - might

have been compared to the fusion of theory and practice. From both sides, however, the possibility of such a fusion nowadays appears to be compro- mised, not in the least because the typical forms of political organization that were thought to bring about this fusion-above all, the party-form, but also the vanguard minority or the guerrilla group-seem to have completely exhausted their historical potential.

Latin American subaltern studies thus bring together a deep sense of

crisis, if not of outright defeat, in the wake of past revolutionary uprisings and an acute sense of failure, or at the very least the closure of a longstanding tradition of metaphysical thinking, still operative in the dialectic and in the accompanying philosophy of consciousness in general. Both of these

developments merge at the precise point where the problematic of subaltern studies comes to coincide with the impasses of modern forms of political theory and practice. Indeed, as the name for a relatively new field of experience and thought, the subaltern emerges when the deconstruction of meta-

physical thinking and the critique of the philosophy of the subject as consciousness clash with persistent habits of dialectical thinking, while at the same time having to come to terms with all the traditional presupposi- tions regarding history and subjectivity that still underpin even, or espe- cially, the intervening doctrine of Marxism.

In sum, even while continuing to be distinguishable both individually and generationally, the two strands that together provide the ground for Latin American subaltern studies are, on the one hand, Marxist and his-

torico-political, and on the other, deconstructive and philosophico-theoretical. Thus, when Florencia Mallon, in a now famous reference, compared the major theorists who influenced the emergence of subaltern studies in Latin America to the four knights of the Apocalypse, she could have added- as was already implicit in her critique-that these imposing figures came

riding in by pairs on two high horses, with Gramsci and Foucault sitting on


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one, and Derrida and Spivak on the other. However, I do not think that it is a matter of choosing, say, in favor of "good" historical work over and against too much "evil" deconstruction. Rather, the whole point of subaltern studies lies in the combination, no matter how uneven in its development, of both strands. In other words, and to return to the knightly metaphor: instead of checking with a hammer which horse's armor is better equipped against the onslaught of criticisms, including self-criticisms, the task is to put both under one and the same yoke.

The proper articulation of these two sources of subaltern thought, then, allows the critic in new and unheard-of ways not only to theorize the demise of revolutionary politics, but also to politicize the theory of difference and the deconstruction of metaphysics. The most thorough-going pas- sage through this double movement is in my eyes not only useful but absolutely indispensable for anyone who is critically engaged today with questions of literature, culture, and politics-in Latin America as much as elsewhere.

3

What I would call the subaltern predicament derives from the paradoxical tensions and incompatibilities that, despite their attempted fusion into a unique historical and theoretical conjuncture, beset the two sources of subaltern studies in Latin America.

These two strands of subaltern thinking time and again split off and become discernible precisely at the point where one either puts forth the wager of a decision or remains faithful to the aporias of a deconstruction of all such wagers and decisions, by pushing them to the limit of their inherent impossibility in the name of what they necessarily have to exclude, or leave behind, as a stubborn remainder. Subjectively or affectively speaking, this forced choice makes itself heard in different ways, whether by a pessimistic or nostalgic judgment regarding the possibility and durability of new counter-hegemonic social agents, or by a more radical, even messianic expectation, outside of all established horizons, for an end to all traditional forms of agency and hegemony in general, including above all the promise of reconstituting a populist counter-hegemony.



4

Despite this predicament, in the realm of cultural practices with which they are most commonly associated, the two strands of subaltern thinking share a common opponent in the recent proposals for, and hopeful descriptions of, phenomena of cultural hybridity.

Instead of interpreting the exchanges between high and low, between elite and mass culture, between the modern and the native or indigenous, whereby the latter always tend to be considered more primitive but also more genuine, proponents of "hybrid cultures" such as Nstor Garca Can- clini privilege the inventive negotiations that take place, in both directions, between these binaries. From the standpoint of the subaltern, however, such precarious exchanges, no matter how flexible and creative they may well appear to be, nevertheless remain inscribed and contained in a longstanding and dominant reconciliatory tradition of dealing with social, economical, political, and cultural contradictions in Latin America.

Hybridity, in other words, not only when seen as normative or pro- grammatic but perhaps even from a purely, if disingenuously, descriptive or phenomenological point of view, remains suspiciously close to the much older modernizing ideological projects that were aimed at forging an all- inclusive national or even continental identity, based on the overcoming of differences. In sharp contrast, the notion of the subaltern, following its historico-political inflection, is inseparable from the basic fact of antagonistic social relations and the unequal division of labor and power, while, following its more strictly deconstructive orientation, the subaltern is in fact precisely that which always already resists sublation in any process of hybridism, whether cultural or otherwise.

5

The polemic over hybridity and the subaltern is perhaps nothing more than an updated revision, in the context of rampant neoliberalism, of a major earlier debate, the one regarding the notions of transculturation and heterogeneity.

Here, too, the former category pretended to account for the renewal of mostly dominant cultures by the incorporation of elements from the margins or from popular social strata. A canonical example, often discussed by ngel Rama and confirmed by Josefina Ludmer in her own analysis, would


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be the integration and, ultimately, the complete absorption of various oral traditions of gaucho songwriting into high so-called gauchesque literature for the purposes of nation-building and its cultural or ideological legitima- tion of a modern centralized state apparatus. Such processes of transculturation, as the example can barely begin to illustrate, were of course never far removed from state-sponsored projects to produce a similar unity, this time in terms of ethnic and racial identity-projects which in reality meant a sys- tematic whitening of the population and the spreading of nation-wide poli- cies of assimilation and miscegenation. The category of heterogeneity, in contrast to that of transculturation, is presented by way of acknowledging the insuperable plurality and diversity of social, cultural, ethnic, and racial components in the contradictory totality of all societies of Latin America- even if the principal site of emergence for such attempts at recognizing the fact of heterogeneity is found in the Andes, as in the work of Antonio Cornejo Polar, rather than, say, in Argentina or Mexico.

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If we compare both debates, we can state that heterogeneity was to transculturation what the subaltern is to hybridity, that is to say, a radical proposal to resist the erasure and/or reinscription of antagonisms-whether on behalf of the state or (even) through the ideological support of civil society. In fact, in yet another turn of the screw, unlikely to be the last, Alberto Moreiras has poignantly redirected the notion of the subaltern against the very category of heterogeneity devised by older critical traditions.

All hitherto existing forms or models of cultural politics, whether in terms of transculturation, hybridism, or heterogeneity, would thus in the final instance give up on the radical desire of somehow coming to terms with the recalcitrance of the subaltern in Latin America. Today, all proposals for the negotiation, or even the bare affirmation, of difference, in principle yet most often also in spite of themselves, remain uncannily close to, if not complicitous with, the otherwise uniform trend towards the globalization of capital. Difference, to be more precise, risks always already being nothing more than the intrinsic counterpart, or necessary underside, of the homogeneous tendency toward the ravaging identity of the world market and its attendant ideology of wall-to-wall consumerism. Difference is today perhaps only the barely disguised form of apparition of the law of general- ized equivalence.



Latin American cultural studies would still have to learn to forego the humanist and profoundly liberal heritage - a heritage at work even in the revolutionary movements in Cuba and Nicaragua - which puts a conciliatory understanding of culture at the service of the modern state or civil society, all the while ignoring or continuing to exclude the subaltern - lliterate, indigenous, peasant, and urban poor-whether in the name of progress and development, or by way of pastiche and nomadic play. Thus, whereas transculturation, hybridism, and even the proposal of heterogeneity all risk to have become ideologies of failed modern nation-building, followed by the reign of postmodern transnational capital, only the sustained recognition of the subaltern and of the antagonistic structuring of any given social instance holds the promise of a radical-democratic society.

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Behind the interplay of difference and identity, then, what is actually at stake turns out to revolve around an unspoken, or insufficiently theorized logic of contradiction - including the logic of how a given contradiction historically becomes antagonistic to begin with. Even more broadly speaking, the possible renewal of such a theory of antagonistic contradictions as an unfinished task is bound up with the still relatively obscure fate of dialectical reason after the crisis and historical demise of Marxism.

Dialectical thinking, according to a first critical reformulation, no longer proceeds by way of the objective alienation and subsequent reappropriation of histoiy by a unitary subject but by way of the internal scission, or division, of any subjective force by its structural determinations, as well as by the possible torsion of the former back upon the latter - a torsion or forced twisting that is symptomatic at the outset and destructive in the end.

In a second and more openly deconstructive reformulation, all thinking ceases to be dialectical, or continues to be dialectical only in a negative sense, when it no longer proceeds by the final sublation of difference into a higher spiritual unity that is ultimately embodied in the figure of the nation- state or the sovereign, but by the interminable acknowledgement of what this very process of overcoming always necessarily leaves behind as a stubborn remnant or supplement - namely, that which by definition has no proper name but only a generic one, and which might as well be called the indivis- ible subaltern remainder.


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8

If the two strands of subaltern thinking mentioned earlier find a common target in the contemporary propositions of transculturation and hybridity, then I should add that they also share a common ally in the doctrine of overdetermination, or structural causality, which in one of the latest avatars of dialectical materialism - at the very point of its imminent collapse - was borrowed from the theory of the subject in psychoanalysis. According to this doctrine, any given social formation is overdetermined by a cause whose effects vanish completely into the very structure of which it is the absent cause. What gives coherence to a social order is thus a paradoxical term or class, in a fairly strict technical sense of the word as used in set the-

ory, which has no properties whatsoever other than those that can be read off symptomatically out of the structure from which it is inherently excluded.

Following the doctrine of absent or structural causality, which in my eyes still marks one of the most productive points of transition not only between structuralism and poststructuralism but also, and more impor- tantly, between the deconstruction of metaphysics and the psychoanalytical critique of the humanist subject, the subaltern can then be defined as that which stands in a relation of internal exclusion to the hegemonic.

In this sense, the fundamental outcome of the various projects of subaltern studies comes down to the recognition of precisely such inevitable

antagonisms and relations of internal exclusion that define the social field from within. Even the Maoist line, so often quoted by John Beverley, about "contradictions in the midst of the people" is aimed historically at the per- sistence of antagonism within the national-popular bloc - including, or espe- cially, under socialist rule. Finally, the logic of internal exclusion can also be phrased in terms of a constitutive outside. The subaltern is then that which paradoxically lies both inside and outside the sphere of the hegemonic social regime - being the wild embodiment of all that has to be included out in order for there to be a social order and the possibility of a

political decision to begin with.

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Any attempt to articulate the subaltern as the constitutive outside of the hegemonic into a viable political or artistic project runs in my eyes the



risk of falling back into the melodrama of consciousness and the predica- ments of the beautiful soul.

Of course, in principle, there can be no such thing as subaltern consciousness, let alone a subaltern class consciousness, insofar as the dialectic of consciousness has since its very inception been wound up in its own inherent limit, and in the relation of internal exclusion between the cogito and the unconscious. In this sense, the subaltern is that which should radi- cally break with all melodramatic temptations. However, there remains a tangible risk that the increasing self-reflexivity about the inevitable presence of a subaltern remainder would become in turn the irrefutable guaran- tee of radicalism in the purest sense. This would explain the trend to continue upping the ante in the debate regarding all hitherto existing forms of cultural politics in Latin America.

Every social order is ultimately overdetermined by that which it simultaneously excludes and includes as its constitutive outside. Any project to bring this remainder into the political arena, though, runs the risk of always already being nothing more than a reaction formation that as such remains inscribed within the bounds of the existing state of affairs. What is more, insofar as all hegemonic regimes are inherently built upon the con- trolled production and reproduction of marginal counter-hegemonic projects, insofar as power and the moral law too are inherently built and fortified by their infraction and transgression, any straightforward affirma- tive project must accept the possibility of already being part of the cycle of what a social order needs for the sake of its sustained existence. What remains problematic about this otherwise acute insight is that any specific change will inevitably become liable to the criticism that it misrecognizes its own conditions of possibility, insofar as these are also at the same time conditions of impossibility. In many quarters, in fact, a radical philosophy has indeed already come into existence that derives its irrefutable strength from precisely such arguments. A heightened metacritical awareness of this liability, nevertheless, should neither serve as an alibi for radical quietism nor allow the critical thinker to hide behind the mask of the beautiful soul, free of all worldly guilt.

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Faced with the relation of internal exclusion, with heterogeneity from within, or with the constitutive outside inherent in any given identity, what


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if anything can be the task of radical critical thinking and acting, aside from the so-called politics of recognition? Recognition, that is, of the structural

impossibility of closure and therefore of the necessary failure of all articu-

latory practices, precisely because of the resistance of the subaltern? In their search for productive answers to these questions, the various strands of subaltern studies can also be seen as leading the way in the direction of two distinct alternatives.

A first answer ultimately still involves the search for a viable populist counter-hegemony. Faced with the unlikely duration of any contestatory social movement today, however, this response often involves a turn inward, in a self-reflective move back upon the limits of academic disci- plinary reason. Subaltern studies, from this point of view, signals the need to register the structural inadequacy of the discourses and practices of university knowledge, precisely by teaching and .learning, as much as by unlearning, from the absence, or vanishing presence, of the subaltern in their midst.

A second answer involves an even more radical problematization, not just of the viability of future counter-hegemonic projects, but of the whole horizon of hegemonic thinking as such. Subaltern studies, from this point of view, no longer projects the nostalgia for past dreams onto the future but rather raises the question whether an as yet undreamt-of politics of the post- hegemonic, or infra-hegemonic, can be conceived at all. Is there, in other words, a retreat from the double bind of hegemony and the subaltern - a withdrawal that would not be an escape but rather an exodus, and thus the

promise of a new beginning?

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Latin American cultural studies, in their various subaltern orienta- tions, still have to come to grips with an even deeper problem, namely, with the very relation between art and politics, and by extension, between liter- ary criticism and political theory, which seems to underlie an ill-defined notion of culture as such.

For much of the twentieth century, the most important trends of critical and dialectical reason have tended to suture art onto politics, and to del- egate the capacities for thought to the twin operations of either aestheticizing politics or politicizing art and literature. Subaltern studies are

perhaps no exception in this regard. In fact, the critical insistence on the



subaltern remainder has been instrumental in the unmasking of the ideological complicity between the formation of a vibrant national culture and the reproduction of the entire state apparatus in its properly modern guise. However, the fact that there are past sequences when art and politics were indeed sutured by statist forms of thinking should not make us forget that, in principle and without wanting to ring the formalist bell, art and politics work with different materials and according to a different sequencing of their thought procedures. Politics, for example, deals with the collective or multiple as its material and with the subtraction of inegalitarian statements as its process; but art and literature deal rather with the limits of representation as their end and with formalization as their means, and in this sense they tend to carry out a figurative undoing of the social bond.

Thus, for subaltern studies to continue without an exclusively presen- tisi agenda, the specificity and relative autonomy of the procedures of art and politics must be established historically or genealogically, rather than formally or transcendentally. Otherwise, in the search if not exactly for an illustration than at least for a proper enactment or exposure of the subaltern, art and literature risk to become the site for a purely aesthetic or even arch- aesthetic act, while political thinking as a process, if it does not fall for the temptation of an equally radical or arch-political act, becomes objectified into mere political philosophy, as the quest continues for a regime capable of assuming the fundamental negativity of the subaltern as the constitutive outside of each and every society.

More generally, because of the predicament mentioned earlier, a ten- sion has yet to be solved in subaltern thinking between, on the one hand, a logic that remains structural and transcendental to the point of its extreme limit and imminent exhaustion, and, on the other hand, forms of thought such as art and politics that are sequential and eventmental, and thus are to be thoroughly historicized without giving in an inch on the rigor of deconstructive negativity. Thus far, subaltern studies often seem to have avoided the traps of historicism and aestheticism only by having recourse to radical, arch-political or arch-aesthetic, acts. Art and politics, however, can and perhaps must be captured historically for what they have been, what they are, and what they still could be in the future: forms of thought with their own kernel of truth and of the repressed. Otherwise, the fact that all tends to be political for certain forms of subaltern thinking might lead one to conclude that, paradoxically, the thought that claims to criticize both aestheticism


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and historicism, ends up aestheticizing the political by failing to historicize

politics. Concretely, then, let me suggest what I see as some of the tasks ahead

of a larger tradition in the practice of critical theory that would have to be capable of traversing the problematic of the subaltern in Latin America:

1) unsuture art and politics, without simply falling back on their institu- tional autonomy which is itself of course a historical and not a structural condition;

2) reconfigure art and politics, as well as their possible suturing as singu- lar thought procedures, according to their specific sequences, con- cepts, and theories;

3) revisit the problem of the presentation and transmission of these forms of thought, if not by remaining outside, which is of course impossi- ble, then at the very least by adamantly going against the con- straints of purely academic power.

In the future, though, I cannot imagine the continuation of such a

project without the possibility of its collective reappropriation.


Article Contentsp. [147]p. 148p. 149p. 150p. 151p. 152p. 153p. 154p. 155p. 156p. 157p. 158

Issue Table of ContentsDispositio, Vol. 25, No. 52 (2005), pp. 1-404Front MatterLATIN AMERICAN SUBALTERN STUDIES REVISITEDIntroduction: LATIN AMERICAN SUBALTERN STUDIES REVISITED: IS THERE LIFE AFTER THE DEMISE OF THE GROUP? [pp. 5-42]IS THERE A NEED FOR SUBALTERN STUDIES? [pp. 43-62]ADIOS: A NATIONAL ALLEGORY (SOME REFLECTIONS ON LATIN AMERICAN CULTURAL STUDIES) [pp. 63-79]COLONIAL/POSTCOLONIAL [pp. 81-93]THE RECOGNITION OF CONVERGENCE: SUBALTERN STUDIES IN PERSPECTIVE [pp. 95-105]HOW RANAJIT GUHA CAME TO LATIN AMERICAN SUBALTERN STUDIES [pp. 107-111]ON NEGATION: REFLECTIONS FROM ANDEAN PEASANT MOVEMENTS [pp. 113-126]"UN PARADIGMA OTRO": COLONIALIDAD GLOBAL, PENSAMIENTO FRONTERIZO Y COSMOPOLITANISMO CRITICO [pp. 127-146]THESES ON ANTAGONISM, HYBRIDITY, AND THE SUBALTERN IN LATIN AMERICA [pp. 147-158]SUBALTERNS AND THE NATION [pp. 159-178]RE-MAPPING LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES: POSTCOLONIALISM, SUBALTERN STUDIES, POSTOCCIDENTALISM AND GLOBALIZATION THEORY [pp. 179-202]THE PREDICAMENT OF CULTURAL STUDIES: SUBALTERNITY AND THE DIALECTICS OF THE IMAGE [pp. 203-226]ON BEARDED MEN, DEVILS AND SOLDIERS (POST) COLONIAL DRAMAS IN PERU AND BOLIVIA [pp. 227-247]AT THE MARGINS OF HISTORY, THE NATION-STATE AND LITERATURE: THE DISCOURSE OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND LATIN AMERICAN SUBALTERN STUDIES [pp. 249-264]IN SEARCH OF THE POLITICAL WITHIN AND WITHOUT THE POLITICS OF THEORY [pp. 265-284]INTELECTUALES, COMUNIDADES INDGENAS Y LA ACADEMIA NORTEAMERICANA [pp. 285-334]POST-OBITUARY: WE ARE DEAD. LONG LIVE SUBALTERN STUDIES IN THE AMERICAS! [pp. 337-341]

INTERVIEWABOUT THE SUBALTERN AND OTHER THINGS. A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN BEVERLEY [pp. 343-372]

REVIEWSReview: untitled [pp. 373-383]Review: untitled [pp. 383-389]Review: untitled [pp. 389-392]Review: untitled [pp. 393-396]Review: untitled [pp. 396-401]Review: untitled [pp. 401-404]

Back Matter

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