Juan E. de Castro

Division of Liberal Arts and International Studies
Colorado School of Mines
jdecastr@mines.edu

 

Review of: Jerry Hoeg, Science, Technology, and Latin American Narrative in the Twentieth Century and Beyond.Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh UP, 2000.

 

During the electoral process of 1990, Alberto Fujimori, a little-known agricultural engineer and academic, stormed the Peruvian political scene. One of the keys to his mass appeal lay in his often-repeated promise to bring “honradez, tecnología y trabajo” (honesty, technology, and jobs) to Peru. This slogan responded directly to the concerns of a country fed up with the demagogy, corruption, and inefficiency of then-President Alan García’s regime. However, while the slogan implies, at least in part, a moral and political critique of García’s failed populism, Fujimori’s reference to tecnología signifies his campaign’s privileging of technology as the solution to the problems of Peru. Thus one can argue that Fujimori’s propagandistic mantra was also implicitly directed against the presidential candidate then leading the polls, the internationally renowned novelist Mario Vargas Llosa.

 

It is, therefore, possible to see in this election a sign of contemporary Latin American attitudes regarding what C.P. Snow once called “the two cultures” (scientific versus humanistic). Faced with the choice between an engineer and a man of letters, and by implication between technological and humanities-based paradigms for the interpretation of and solution to the country’s problems, the Peruvian population decided in favor of the technocrat.¹ At the dawn of the twentieth century, the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó could, in his classic essay Ariel, argue for the superiority of a supposedly spiritual and artistic Latin America over a more developed, in technological and material terms, United States. But, by the end of the century, the privileging of technology–seen as neutral, apolitical, and necessarily positive–was a tenet held by large sectors of the population of Peru and the region as a whole, as demonstrated in part by the electoral success of Fujimori. While this faith in technological development as the solution to all social problems echoes discourses popular in the “First World” media, it also reflects the desire of Latin America’s population to break the cycle of poverty in which the region has been trapped. However, in one of the great ironies in Peruvian history, Fujimori’s now fortunately defunct regime has left the country mired in corruption, unemployment, poverty, and, of course, technological underdevelopment. Nevertheless, it is doubtful whether Fujimori’s failure has significantly altered Latin American or even Peruvian attitudes toward technology.

 

This centrality of technology in contemporary Latin American political discourse gives special relevance to Jerry Hoeg’s Science, Technology, and Latin American Narrative in the Twentieth Century and Beyond. This book consists of a series of powerful and persuasive interpretations of Latin American texts that emphasize the ideas (both explicit and implicit) regarding technology and science to be found in them. Hoeg’s readings are rooted in a theoretical framework that fuses Martin Heidegger’s and José Ortega y Gasset’s “philosophies of technology,” Cornelius Castoriadis’s notion of the “Social Imaginary,” and concepts originating in communications science, such as “code” and “redundancy.” From Heidegger and Ortega, Hoeg takes the idea that “the essence of our present technological era is nothing technological, but rather the product of a higher level mediation. Heidegger calls this mediation das Ge-stell, while Ortega refers to it as the social construction or definition of bienestar or well-being” (11).

 

Hoeg sees Ge-stell/bienestar as defining the central code of the West, what Hoeg, following Castoriadis, terms its “Social Imaginary” (18).² Using the concepts of Ge-stell/bienestar and that of the Social Imaginary, Hoeg deconstructs the traditional opposition between science and the humanities. Rather than presenting them as dichotomous, he believes that both technology and the humanities, especially literature, express in different, occasionally even contradictory, manners the same societal Ge-stell/bienestar. From the point of view of communications science, technology and literature can, therefore, be interpreted as examples of “the redundancy necessary to protect the message against the perturbations of a ‘noisy’ environment. . . . Without this coding or redundancy, a given society must necessarily succumb to the effects predicted by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that is, it would become more and more entropic over time, until it eventually dissolved into complete disorder” (30). Thus, for Hoeg,

 

Literature, technology, and science are among the societal messages that help constitute a Western society/communications system built upon a Ge-stell/ bienestar (and Social Imaginary) that has ultimately led not only to “controlling nature” and its side-consequences of ecological degradation, but also to “controlling humanity” and the decomposition of any semblance of social equity. (63)

 

While the Latin American “cult of technology” is generally linked to the embrace of economic neoliberalism and the celebration of the United States (understood as the Mecca of consumerism and unbridled free markets) as the privileged societal model, Hoeg presents his analysis as oppositional to the current economic, political, and social order.³ In fact, he claims “the ultimate aim of this inquiry is to shed light on the possibility of constructing alternative codes or mediations which will produce sociotechnical messages of empowerment rather than domination” (10). And this desire for a radical change in the current Social Imaginary leads him to speculate on the possibility of a Heideggerian “Turning” from the Ge-stell that has led to our current ecological and social impasses and that would thus bring “a new coding of the relationship between nature, society, and technics [uses of technology]” (22-23). Moreover, based on his vision of society as a communications system, as well as on Ortega’s notion of bienestar as socially constructed, he believes one can assign to literature and literary criticism a central role in this possible “Turning”: “The fact that a given society’s ‘system of necessities’ is constrained and mediated by the Social Imaginary raises the question of the possible influence of literature in reshaping that Social Imaginary” (38). Hoeg not only breaks down the opposition between science/technology and the humanities/literature, he identifies the latter as a possible source of change of the Ge-stell/bienestar and the Social Imaginary.

 

From this brief and, of necessity, incomplete summary of Hoeg’s complex theoretical framework, it should be clear that Science, Technology, and Latin American Narrative is built on a contrary philosophical base that, while not invalidating the study’s importance, is symptomatic of certain characteristic problems faced by criticism in the present political and theoretical conjuncture. But, as we will see, Hoeg’s selection of texts and his interpretation of Latin American reality camouflage the theoretical disjunctions present in this study.

 

These contradictions are directly linked to Hoeg’s simultaneous reliance on Heidegger and Ortega. Hoeg himself notes that:

 

A key distinction between the view postulated by Ortega and that adumbrated by Heidegger concerns the role of technics in human socio-cultural activity. For Heidegger, the imposition of a certain metaphysical enframing or Ge-stell–the Social Imaginary–is an essential feature of the Western human condition which leads inevitably to our current technological society. For Ortega, on the other hand, the technics used to realize the creative projects of humanity can also lead to symbolic rather that [sic] imaginary constructions, that is, to cultural messages, such as art or literature, which can produce a society whose relations with the real are not predominantly rationalist or metaphysical. (20)

 

In other words, the appropriation of Heidegger’s concept of das Ge-stell necessarily leads to a deterministic vision of the development of Western culture. Western civilization–which now includes the whole world–is thus a system that can only develop in the direction pre-programmed by the Ge-stell. True change is precluded. It is, therefore, not surprising that Heidegger sees the “Turning” in mystical, even messianic terms:

 

But the surmounting of a destining of Being–here and now the surmounting of Enframing–each time comes to pass out of the arrival of another destining that does not allow itself to be either logically or historically predicted or to be metaphysically construed as a sequence belonging to a process of history. (qtd. in Hoeg 22)

 

Unpredictable and nearly inconceivable, the “Turning” implies the irruption into the closed system of Western civilization of an unknown and unknowable external element capable of making visible the until-then “concealed truth” of the prevailing Ge-stell and, therefore, of presenting an alternative road that can lead to the “surmounting” of the path trodden, according to Heidegger, by our culture since Socrates. But Ortega’s bienestar, at least in Hoeg’s interpretation, includes social change in its definition. As society changes, and as the discourses society produces change, bienestar can change. Bienestar thus not only determines history, but is also historically determined. Beneath the obvious similarities, Ge-stell and bienestar are, therefore, irreconcilable concepts.

 

This tension between the Heideggerian and Ortegan poles is present throughout Science, Technology, and Latin American Narrative. Hoeg’s simultaneous reliance on bienestar and Ge-stell leads him to a contradictory search for possible agents of the “Turning” and a simultaneous dismissal of these same agents. Building on Ortega and communications science, Hoeg proposes literature as a possible source for the “Turning.” In fact, he ends his study by suggesting this possibility: “I would argue that if it [Latin American society] can change its social coding, a precondition of such a change is an awareness of the present coding, and that one source of this awareness can be found in Latin American narrative, if only we would look” (122). While Hoeg identifies what could be categorized as the kernels of a truly emancipating discourse in, for instance, the implicit criticism of the “techno-military-political structure” to be found in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (33), or in the implied acknowledgment that “technology can be usefully contested only at the level of the code” discernable in Jorge Amado’s Gabriela (38), among other examples, his general evaluation of Latin American narrative and criticism is pessimistic. Hoeg finds that Latin American narrative and criticism, despite their often progressive tinge, are, as one would expect from Heidegger’s analysis, “mediated by the metaphysics of Modernity,” “mediated by a now global Social Imaginary,” and, furthermore, that “what these narratives do is perpetuate that enframing which is the essence of technology” (122). The same texts that are somehow a source for emancipation also help perpetuate the “metaphysics” of Modernity. (Indeed, both evaluations of Latin American literature are made on the same page of Science, Technology and Latin American Narrative.)

 

Another facet of the aporia present throughout Hoeg’s study can be found in his analysis of cybernetic technology and the concomitant new media as possible “sources” for the “Turning.” Thus, Hoeg entertains the possibility that “the radical differences of electronically mediated communication” could lead to a “new social narrative” (25). Here Hoeg joins hands with other celebrants of the postmodern and even posthuman condition, such as N. Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway. For instance, Hoeg quotes approvingly Haraway’s vision of the posthuman as overcoming “the tradition of racist male-dominated capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of the reproduction of the self from the reflection of the other” (24). What is ironic is that Hoeg’s (as well as Hayles’s and Haraway’s) celebration of cybernetics and current digital innovations is nothing but the mirror image of the blind faith in technology commonplace in contemporary Latin America. If Fujimori and Latin American neo-liberals propose technology as the solution to the problems raised by the region’s lack of a “modern condition,” Hoeg, like the prophets of the posthuman, finds in current digital technologies the antidote to the “metaphysics of Modernity.”

 

Needless to say, this belief in technology as leading not only to social change but also to a kind of utopia where all the dichotomies that haunt modernity are sutured into what could be called a “heterogeneous plenitude” contradicts the Heideggerean pole of Hoeg’s arguments. From a Heideggerean perspective, cybernetics and digital technology are nothing but the latest and until now fullest stage in the development of the Ge-stell. Hoeg, however, stops short of the full identification of technological development with the agent for the “Turning.” Despite his celebration of “postmodernity” and the “posthuman,” he remains aware of the fact that “new technologies are routinely heralded as the solution to all problems, only to be coopted shortly thereafter by the ‘system'” and of “the present impossibility of reconciling cyberscience with Third World realities” (26).

 

It is possible, however, to argue that the contradiction between the Heideggerean Ge-stell and the Ortegan bienestar is not as clear in the case of Latin America as it would be in that of the “First World.” Despite Hoeg’s belief in the need to create a discourse of empowerment that would help generate the conditions necessary for the “Turning,” his analysis implies the impossibility of a willful change in the Ge-stell or the bienestar. After all, according to Hoeg’s version of Ortega’s bienestar, change at this level is rooted in technics. Thus Hoeg’s (as well as Hayles’s and Haraway’s) celebration of the possibilities for social change created by technological change and the new discourses derived from it is fully congruent with the version of Ortega presented in Science, Technology, and Latin American Narrative. For Hoeg, change in the Social Imaginary originates in the possibilities created by the new digital and cybernetic technologies and media and not in any type of political or social resistance (although new technologies may give rise to the latter). While bienestar is grounded in history, it is doubtful whether Ortega’s concept can be seen as directly justifying any type of individual or group action. Moreover, since Latin American literature and criticism are described as trapped by the “global Social Imaginary” and without access to the apparently liberating possibilities generated by cybernetic technology and its concomitant media, the region can only depend on a deus ex-machina for its liberation.

 

Hoeg somewhat unwillingly acknowledges the true consequences of his analysis when he asks, “Can Latin American society change its system of necessities without a wholesale change in the global Social Imaginary, or must it await the arrival of a new global destining in order to surmount its current enframing?” (122). It is this question, rather than the somewhat forced attempt at presenting Latin American literature as leading to “an awareness of the present coding” (122), that comes closest to being the logical conclusion of his study. When it comes to Latin America, both the Ortegan and Heideggerean poles of Science, Technology, and Latin American Narrative are reconciled.

 

Hoeg’s pessimism may, however, be reinforced by what I believe is a mistaken description of attitudes toward technology in Latin America. This misrepresentation is reinforced by his selection of texts. While there is no denying the importance of most of the texts chosen by Hoeg, the nearly exclusive selection of “Magic Realist” novels and other anti-rationalist texts such as Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica skews his vision of Latin American narrative and culture.⁴ For instance, based on his analysis of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Hoeg comes to the conclusion that contemporary Latin American fiction and, one can assume, criticism, are characterized by rejecting “technology . . . as imposed foreign domination” and as believing that it “leads inevitably to disastrous consequences” (35). However, as Fujimori’s slogan exemplifies, this is far from being today the only or, I would argue, the hegemonic attitude toward technology. In fact, rather than being possessed by an uncritical technophobia, many Latin Americans have been, to paraphrase the Mexican critic Carlos Monsiváis, “blinded by technology.”⁵ And this societal technophilia has led to the proliferation of writings on technology. For instance, many of Latin America’s most influential newspapers include weekly sections on technology that while frequently being just another cog in the cyber-industry’s advertising machinery also occasionally incorporate significant reflections on the subject.⁶

 

This interest in technology, although clearly boosted by the “digital revolution,” is, moreover, not a new phenomenon. Monsiváis dates it to the post-Second World War and, in particular, to the introduction of television (211-12). Moreover, if, following Hoeg, one looks for literary reflections on technology, one can safely include texts that span much of the twentieth century. Such texts would include Spanish American vanguardista and Brazilian modernista narratives and poems of the 1920s, Roberto Arlt’s El juguete rabioso (1931), Adolfo Bioy Casares’s Morel’s Invention (1940), and, from an indigenista perspective, José María Arguedas’s poem “Oda al jet” (1967).⁷ And the obvious affinity between Borges’s interest in levels of reality in his stories prefigures contemporary concerns regarding virtual realities and simulacra present in such recent science fiction films as The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and Existenz, or the Spanish Open Your Eyes and its American remake Vanilla Sky.⁸

 

Nevertheless, the cultural vein analyzed by Hoeg is still important. The fact is that despite the region’s current obsession with technological development, “Magical Realism” expresses a significant tendency in Latin American culture. It is not accidental that One Hundred Years of Solitude is generally considered to be the most important Latin American novel, or that the works of Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel are frequently best-sellers in the region. Dissatisfaction with a technological progress that never fully arrives, and distrust of a never-ending process of modernization that seems to exacerbate social inequality and environmental degradation, are the underside of the region’s technophilia.

 

Thus, despite the contradictions and omissions analyzed above, Science, Technology, and Latin American Narrative is a groundbreaking work. Hoeg’s profound, though problematic, philosophical framework leads him to read the texts selected from a new and topically relevant perspective. After all, technology is at the center of contemporary existence, whether in the so-called “First” or “Third” World, and any attempt at thinking through social change must necessarily deal with the problematics of technology, technics, and science. And the anti-technological (and anti-rational) tradition identified and studied by Hoeg is an important tendency in Latin American culture, though at the present it is far from hegemonic. Hoeg is not alone in his inability to reconcile his desire for social change with his analyses of society and literature. Rather, this simultaneous dissatisfaction with existing social reality and an incapacity to imagine a way to move beyond it is the quandary faced by much postmodern thought. If earlier generations of critics (especially Latin American and Latin Americanist) could find in revolution the deus ex-machina capable of changing reality, it would seem that today one has to be satisfied with finding in technology, discourse, or literature the seeds of a change nearly impossible to imagine.

 

Notes

 

1. It is necessary to point out that I am referring to the connotations implicit in Vargas Llosa’s and Fujimori’s professions, rather than to the actual political positions held by both then candidates. Vargas Llosa, as a staunch neo-liberal, is far from being a technophobe and believes that “the internationalization of modern life–of markets, of technology, of capital–permits any country . . . to achieve rapid growth” (45). It must be noted, however, that Fujimori’s campaign played up not only his career–frequently contrasting it with his rival’s profession as a novelist–but also his Japanese background. The Japanese in Peru, as in other countries, are associated with technological prowess, among other traits.

 

2. Heidegger defines the Ge-stell or “Enframing” as “the gathering together that belongs to that setting-upon man and puts him in position to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering as a standing-reserve,” and notes that “Enframing, as the challenging-forth into ordering, sends into a way of revealing” (24). Ortega y Gasset argues that the concept of bienestar incorporates not only physical necessities but also “the objectively superfluous” considered by a group of people as necessary (294). Thus bienestar determines technology: “technology is a system of actions called forth and directed by these necessities, it likewise is of a Protean nature and ever changing” (294). Castoriadis defines the Social Imaginary as the element “which gives a specific orientation to every institutional system, which overdetermines the choice and the connections of symbolic networks, which is the creation of each historical period, its singular manner of living, of seeing and of conducting its own existence, its world, and its relations with this world” (145). Despite the fact that one can establish differences between the three concepts (Ge-stell and bienestar are presented as defining technology, while the Social Imaginary determines society as a whole; and unlike Ge-stell, bienestar and the Social Imaginary are explicitly presented as historically determined), they all imply the existence of higher-level mediations for technology and/or society. In Hoeg’s study the exact relationship between Ge-stell, bienestar, and the Social Imaginary is, however, not fully theorized. Although Hoeg frequently uses the concepts of Ge-stell and bienestar as synonymous with that of the Social Imaginary–see the quotation in paragraph 7–it is not clear whether they only determine the fields of Western science, modern technology, and “creative production” (18). In other words, Hoeg doesn’t make explicit whether he believes that the code that “overdetermines” science and technology actually determines society as a whole, or that it is simply one of the “ensemble of societal codes that constitute . . . [the] Social Imaginary,” even if the most important (30).

 

3. Carlos Monsiváis, the astute Mexican cultural critic, describes this attitude in the following terms: “Technology blinds and there is no doubt about the correct strategy: imitate [everything] North American” (212). The translation is mine.

 

4. The novels studied by Hoeg include such “Magical Realist” texts as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits, and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. He also analyzes the Brazilian film O Boto that, in its use of regional myths, shows a certain affinity with the Magical Realism of these novels.

 

5. See note 3.

 

6. Among the major newspapers that include weekly sections on technology are the Argentinean La Nación and El Clarín, the Mexican La Jornada, the Brazilian O Estado de São Paulo, and the Peruvian El Comercio. Nahif Yehva’s articles on the Internet, software, and hardware for La Jornada can serve as an example of the critical discourse presented in the Latin American mass media.

 

7. Vicky Unruh, in her account of Spanish American vanguardia and Brazilian modernista poetic movements of the 1920s, Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters, writes about this interest in technology: “Vanguardist expression reinforced this self-defining image of artists as workers by portraying artistic work with technological or athletic motifs, a poetics of airplanes, automobiles, elevators, bicycles, and trampolines” (80). Flora Süssekind describes the relation of pre-modernista and modernista literature, with technology as “flirtation, friction, or appropriation” (4). In both the cases of Brazil and Spanish America, the attitude of writers toward technology during the first decades of the century cannot be characterized as being exclusively, or even mainly, one of rejection.

 

8. This interest in simulacra, virtual realities, and technology is precisely the topic of Bioy’s Morel’s Invention, which, as is well known, is based on an idea by Borges.

 

Works Cited

 

• Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1987.
• Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology.” The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Garland, 1977. 3-35.
• Monsiváis, Carlos. Aires de familia: Cultura y sociedad en América Latina. Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2000.
• Ortega y Gasset, José. “Thoughts on Technology.” Trans. Helene Weyl. Philosophy and Technology: Readings in the Philosophical Problems of Technology. Ed. Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey. New York: Free, 1972. 290-313.
• Süssekind, Flora. Cinematograph of Words: Literature, Technique, and Modernization in Brazil. Trans. Paulo Henriques Britto. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997.
• Unruh, Vicky. Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1994.
• Vargas Llosa, Mario. A Fish in the Water: A Memoir. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Farrar, 1994.