Greg Dawes

North Carolina State University
<gadfll@ncsuvm.bitnet>

 

Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions, by John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman (Austin: U of Texas P, 1990).

 

One of the major contributions to literary studies in recent years has been the recognition that political consciousness is invariably fused with aesthetic practice. In light of literary approaches prior to Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981), which tended to isolate and fetishize the text, such a development in cultural studies can only be seen as salutary. Nonetheless, this re-evaluation of the relation between the political and aesthetic spheres has tended to gravitate towards an interpretation of this dialectic as unconscious. This comes in response, perhaps, to mechanistic formulations of the conjunction of politics and art, but primarily to Georg Lukacs’ reflection theory. Althusserianism and post-Althusserianism (or post-marxism) are certainly among the most significant proponents of unearthing unconscious impulses in cultural investigations. While Althusser’s work has largely remained intact–and in fact could be seen exercizing a hegemonic role within Marxism–in spite of the criticism directed at it, in many ways it has been unable to overcome such structuralist contradictions as the division created between science and ideology.¹ Latin American cultural studies has felt the impact of Althusserianism at least since Marta Harnecker published her monumental study Los conceptos elementales del materialismo historico [The Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism] in 1969; and Marc Zimmerman and John Beverley’s latest book, Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions, comes out of this Althusserian tradition as well as the post-Althusserian and post-Marxist thinking of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. As I will argue below, many of the old problems that plagued Althusser’s concept of ideology continue to afflict a work like Zimmerman and Beverley’s, not only on a theoretical plane, but also in the practical analyses of historico-political events. While we gain many insights into cultural phenomena through such an approach, ultimately a gap is created between the theory, on the one hand, and actual historical events, on the other.

 

In their study, Zimmerman and Beverley make an upfront, forceful, and compelling argument in favor of an Althusserian ideological analysis which propels their study forward and is aided by the adoption of Gramsci’s concept of the ‘National Popular.’ This theory provides the authors with a foundation for elucidating a discussion on aesthetic commitment in the Central American context and for furnishing a reply as to why literature carries so much weight in Latin America. Briefly stated, poetry, for both Zimmerman and Beverley, accrues a significant and unique value in the Central American region because it can function as a symbolic arena which gathers together–from the optic of Althusserianism–an assortment of feelings, images, and myths.² Poetry thus serves as a catalyst in forming national identity in revolutionary circumstances in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua–all of which combine nationalism and socialism in their ideology.

 

Leaving aside the theoretical aspects for the time being, as a historical tract on literary and revolutionary vanguards in Central America, Literature and Politics succeeds in providing the reader with detailed accounts of the intersection of Roque Dalton’s revolutionary commitment and his poetry, the fusion of liberation theology with the Nicarguan revolution, and the role of the testimonio as a transitional, narrational mode. Beverley, of course, has been one of the most astute analysts of the testimonio; and this latest version (Chapter 7) is an expansion of the work he has done in the past.³

 

It is to both Zimmerman and Beverley’s credit that in this most recent analysis, the testimonio (documentary or testimonial literature) is defined as a “transitional literary form” which, as the authors put it, “does not seem particularly well adapted to be the primary narrative form of an elaborated postrevolutionary society, perhaps because its dynamics depend precisely on the conditions of social and cultural inequality and direct oppression that fuel the revolutionary impulse in the first place” (207). While Central American testimonial literature emerges from conscious revolutionary activity, it is completely enmeshed in this praxis. Hence, as Lukacs’ argues in his analysis of Willi Bredel’s novels, while this working class narrative production should be lauded as a great step forward, it strikes me that the testimonio can potentially–as in the case of Bredel’s work–lead to a less complex development of the revolutionary situation.⁴) This is what makes testimonial literature a transitional narrative form. It would be worth exploring the depth of Domitila’s “autobiography” with the less complete–yet still highly important–Fire from the Mountain by Omar Cabezas. In contrast to George Yudice’s view of the testimonial as a struggle for survival,⁵ there is, then, as Beverley and Zimmerman seem to suggest, a problem with testimonials which respond to urgent or spontaneous political matters without having analyzed socio-political matters thoroughly, because they sacrifice to much in their representation of reality.

 

Another chapter which is unique to Literature and Politics–in the material it deals with–is Zimmmerman and Beverley’s interpretation of cultural practices during the Nicaraguan revolution. To a great extent, our versions of the aesthetic and political events that took place, from as early as 1985 to the election, corroborate each other. However, since the book was published shortly after the February debacle, it appears that the authors did not have time to evaluate the political and aesthetic effects that the collapse of the Ministry of Culture and the rise of Rosario Murillo and the professionalists could have on cultural production. In their study there is–understandably–a hesitancy to critique the model which they have seen as exemplary of a type of resistance to postmodernism in this hemisphere. I would contend that this apparent weakness is due to the theoretical framework itself, to which I would like to turn now.

 

One of the main weaknesses in Althusserian theory is the concept of ideology itself. As long as ideology in general is specified in terms which have no reference to or place for the struggle between labor and capital, then it will only be, what Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez has called “theoretical ideology” and will cease to operate dialectically with material reality. Ideology will always appear as secondary; superimposed in fundamental, timeless struggles between sexes and generations, or strictly divorced from actual, material struggles. Althusser, as Terry Lovell has perceptively noted:

 

produces . . . a theory of knowledge which eliminates experience altogether from the practice of knowledge construction, relegating it to the inferior realm of ideology. Experience becomes the product of ideological practice, rather than of social reality. It cannot therefore provide any guide to social reality.⁶

 

What we observe in Althusser, then, is a break with the Lukacsian notion of “reflection” in favor of the production of “ideological effects” within a given text. In the process, the French thinker could be seen as resorting to formalist methods because the very material forces that generate such “ideological effects” are put aside. Following Althusser’s mapping of ideology, history itself interacts mechanically and not dialectically with it (ideology) because the latter is ostensibly “pre-scientific”. When this gap between ideology and history takes place, then the Althusserian model relinquishes its materialist grounding in exchange for an “autonomous,” free-floating ideological apparatus that is, according to Althusser, “ahistorical” and related directly to Freud’s notion that the “unconscious is eternal.”⁷

 

The danger inherent in this departure from dialectical materialism is borne out in subsequent analyses of a historical, political, economic and aesthetic nature. Following Althusser, Beverley and Zimmerman in their work allege that ideologies have

 

multiple power functions (of distinction, domination, subordination) that are not reducible to or intelligible in terms of class or group interests alone, although they are the sites in which class or group struggle occurs. Similarly, they are not always circumscribed by modes of production or concrete social formations; they can cut across modes of production and social formations, as in the case of religious ideologies. In particular, ideologies are not reducible to politics or political programs or isms, because their nature is unconscious rather than explicit; their effect is to produce in the subject a sense of things as natural, self-evident, a matter of common sense. (2)

 

In keeping with Althusserianism, this notion of ideology is rooted in the unconscious, that is, specifically in the “mirror stage” of development as elaborated by Jacques Lacan.⁸ Althusser draws upon this Lacanian study in order to formulate his theory of ideology, which returns to this stage when the individual cannot distinguish him or herself from the social. This domain, then, is located outside of rational apprehension. Lacan writes that it:

 

situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being (le devenir) of the subject asymptomatically. (2)

 

It is this “method of symbolic reduction” that will serve as the basis for Althusser’s theory of ideologies. The problem with such a philosophical position is that it is not anchored in actual, real-life processes, but rather, is a theoretical model constructed–so to speak–“above” this material life. Consequently, in this method of analyzing ideological forces one loses all grasp of the conflictive nature of ideology (and, hence, of material life) because, following Althusser, ideology is somehow beyond such a realm since it is actually in the isolated “mirror stage.”

 

One of the main difficulties with the internal logic of Zimmerman and Beverley’s post-Althusserianism is that the symbolic and the political are almost seen as two separate entities. By alleging that literature in the Latin American context–it is different, they maintain, in so-called First World countries–is the symbolic site where ideological production and revolutionary consciousness take place, Beverley and Zimmerman endeavor to make the link between the ideological and the political more visible. Real historical events must somehow find a place in Althusserian ideological criticism or–as both Beverley and Zimmerman surely would admit–the approach will lose its sense of grounding. While this connection is made at certain moments in Literature and Politics, seen as a whole, their work fails to convincingly break with this dualism. An immediate case in point is apparent in the beginning of the first chapter when they declare that:

 

The "work" of ideology consists in constituting (Althusser: interpellating) human subjects as such, with coherent gender, ethnic, class, or national identities appropriate to their place in a given social order or, in the case of counterhegemonic ideologies, their place in a possible social order. Ideologies provide human beings with a structure of experience that enables them to recognize themselves in the world, to see the world as in some way created *for* them, to feel they have a place and identity in it. (2)

 

In this post-Marxist definition of ideology–in contrast to Marx’s rendering of it as inversion–it acts as a social catalyst which allows one to grasp one’s life in the social order in a more reasonable way. But at the same time, ideology seems to operate independently of human beings: Beverley and Zimmerman state that ideology enables human beings “to see the world as in some way created for them.” This gulf between human beings and the production of ideology is also clear when the authors argue against the Marxist notion of “false consciousness”:

 

The traditional problematic of ideology in the social sciences, founded in both its positivist and Marxist variants on the epistemological question of distinguishing "true" from "false" forms of consciousness, had been displaced in contemporary cultural studies by the recognition suggested in psychoanalytic theory that truth for the subject is something distinct from the truth of the subject, given that it entails an act of identification between the self and something external to it. (4)

 

But why focus only on the distinction between the self and what is external to it? Why not concentrate on the dialectic between subject and history? Furthermore, why should we believe that what rules in aesthetic experience is this marginalized, individual jouissance in contrast to “external reality”? Doesn’t this theory capitulate to the same limitations as Freudian psychoanalysis in its privileging of subjective sensations over reality?⁹ For these authors, it would seem, ideology is asked to bridge the gap between the individual and the society because the integration of the two does not come about in their analysis.

 

In order to overcome the division that they have created between ideology and politics, Beverley and Zimmerman then turn to an Althusserian solution to this dilemma, “We rejoin here the point that revolutionary political consciousness does not derive directly or spontaneously from exploitative economic relations, that it must be in some sense produced” (8). Thus, as I suggested above, literature serves as that desperately needed link between ideology and politics that aids in the “development of subject identity.” In essence, then, literature (and specifically poetry in this study) is a semi-autonomous territory for the production of political consciousness in Central America, but it is somehow divorced from the actual social relations of production themselves. According to this logic, it is the production of a certain type of literature–“political” poetry, for instance–which enables subjects to reflect upon “private experiences of authenticity and alienation to the awareness of collective situations of social exploitation, injustice, and national underdevelopment” (9). But the weakness in a such an argument–in addition to the separation set up between individual and social experience–resides more fundamentally on the privileging of the unconscious in aesthetics. For if we agree that the motor force of ideology is the unconscious, then what power do revolutionaries have to change it, much less interpret it? If there are no conscious, scientific methods to follow, then how do we prove that this or that thesis is actually valid?

 

All this theoretical footwork pushes Beverley and Zimmerman’s study into a corner on more than one occasion. One such moment is in their analysis of literary production in revolutionary Nicaragua. Before turning to this section, I would note that another problem with this discussion of Central American literature and revolutions is that Beverley and Zimmerman fervently adhere to postmodernist interpretations of the “unfixity” of social class (i.e.–pluralism) and of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s notion of “radical democracy.” The idealism exhibited in the writings of both Althusser and Laclau and Mouffe will come back to haunt Literature and Politics when the analysis extends beyond the theoretical to the practical realm. For example, in their study of Nicaraguan poetry during the revolutionary period, Beverley and Zimmerman give a very accurate account of the aesthetic and political debate that ensued after 1985, yet the authors overlook the fact that the deficiency in the Nicaraguan political, economic and cultural system was the vulnerability of pluralism. Thus, they assess the situation as follows:

 

Though the debate had repercussions inside the Frente, the Sandinista leadership was reluctant to take a firm stand one way or another on cultural policy, for fear of making the mistake of the Cubans in the late 1960s of favoring one cultural "line" over others. But this commendable commitment to pluralism also meant that cultural policy was made ad hoc, without any real budgetary priorities or control. (103)

 

Since their post-Althusserian approach automatically excludes a more organic and materialist understanding of the consequences of the economic and political situation–because ideology is supposed to be relatively independent from these spheres–Beverley and Zimmerman do not interpret this aesthetic crisis on a more global scale as the crisis of this type of “third path” to socialism. Since representation, for Althusser, does not transcend the aesthetic realm, they fail to acknowledge that the crisis in aesthetic agency is also a crisis in economic and political agency, i.e.–they fail to note that pluralist economic, political and aesthetic institutions are affected by their internal limitations and by the overwhelming force of capital.

 

This weakness in their analysis is due, in large part, to the fact that they do not truly take a critical distance with respect to this “third path.” Their own study advocates an aesthetic and political pluralism which doesn’t effectively distinguish itself from liberal pluralism. Even late in Chapter 4, Beverley and Zimmerman continue to hold this position vis-a-vis political and artistic representation, “We are far from thinking that cultural forms have an essential class location or connotation, as our discussion in the previous chapter of the ideological mutations of vanguardism suggests” (110). Here the fateful error of post-Althusserianism or post-Marxism is fleshed out. When aesthetic agencies are separated from the social relations of production, then history itself will have a way of turning any such idealist study on its head. In the postscript to this chapter, Beverley and Zimmerman run into precisely this dilemma:

 

[T]he perspective we adopted in our presentation of this chapter--that the revolutionary process was irreversible, despite problems and setbacks--clearly has been problematized. It may be that the revolution will go forward; on the other hand, we may well be witnessing the first stage of a more long-lasting restoration. We had hypothesized in chapters 1 and 2 that one of the key roles of literature in the revolutionary process in Central America generally was to constitute a discursive space in which the possibilities of alliance between popular sectors and a basically middle- and upper-class revolutionary vanguard could be pragmatically negotiated around a shared sense of the national-popular. (111)

 

Here their populist or postmodernist theory meets the limits of its interpretative abilities because history itself has proven that this multi-class alliance, the concept of the nationalism, and the experimental nature of a mixed economic system were not able to sustain themselves. As Carlos Vilas has demonstrated, it was the Sandinista’s transformation from a vanguard predominantly supported by the working class and the campesinos to a party which catered to the interests of entrepreneurs in the last years of the revolution, which lost the elections of 1990.¹⁰ Similarly, in the cultural realm, the Frente abandoned its cultural democratization project not only because of financial problems, but also because there was a shift in ideological positions within party cadres themselves who now suggested that culture follow more professional guidelines. As a result, the professionalists–or, those who favored professionally-developed artists–clashed with those who defended the democratization program. Thus, the content of this debate boiled down to differences in political, economic, and aesthetic form–a regular “revolution with the revolution” to paraphrase Regis Debray–among the revolutionary forces.

 

Given this historical context in Nicaragua, the question we must then ask, to my mind, is: If it is appropriate to cite the Nicaraguan revolutionary experience as postmodernism lived out in the flesh, so to speak, and if it did not survive a historical testing, then what other socialist alternatives do we have in Latin America? What type of revolutionary politics and theory would steer us away from the errors of “real socialism” (i.e.–the Eastern Bloc countries and the Soviet Union) and the faults of the so-called “third path”? In searching for answers, it is interesting to turn to a classical revolutionary pamphlet that was written eighty-nine years ago, but which sounds so very contemporary when read in these years of postmodernism: I am referring to Lenin’s What is to be Done?. In what follows I would like to limit my remarks to the general milieu in 1902 and to Lenin’s elaboration of the role of the vanguard.

 

From the very beginning when Lenin addresses the incipient “dogmatism and ‘freedom of criticism'” of the Economists to his manual for the organization of revolutionaries, the political climate sketched out in What is to be Done? cannot help but sound very familiar to our contemporary period. Lenin’s attack on Bernsteinism begins with a series of cardinal points that seem to represent the revisionism of the day:

 

Denied is the possibility of putting socialism on a scientific basis and of demonstrating its necessity and inevitability from the point of view of the materialist conception of history. Denied is the fact of growing impoverishment, of proletarianization and of the sharpening of capitalist contradictions. The very concept of 'the ultimate aim' has been declared unsound, and the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat unconditionally rejected. Denied is the antithesis in principle between liberalism and socialism. Denied is the theory of the class struggle, on the grounds of its alleged inapplicability to a strictly democratic society governed according to the will of the majority, etc..¹¹

 

I cite this passage because it encapsulates the main strains of political thought at the beginning of the twentieth century and is representative of the types of leftism that Lenin attempted to refute in What is to be Done?. This fragment also is important because it is indicative of the type of postmodernist “radical democracy” that we find in the works of Laclau and Mouffe. This is not the place to do a more exhaustive analysis of their work, let it suffice for now to quote a segment from Hegemony and Socialist Strategyin order to establish the correlation between the economism of Lenin’s day and the economism of our times:

 

It is no longer possible to maintain the conception of subjectivity and classes elaborated by Marxism, nor its vision of the historical course of capitalist development, nor, of course, the conception of communism as a transparent society from which antagonisms have disappeared.¹²

 

In place of this Marxist analysis and prognosis we are expected to struggle for “radical, libertarian and plural democracy” which, Mouffe and Laclau inform us, will consist of the dispersed identity of social agents and the ensemble of social movements. However, we might reflect on whether it is even possible to carry out this project at this historical moment. In examining the Nicaraguan revolutionary experience elsewhere and briefly in this paper, I have noted how this pluralist political and economic agenda doesn’t present a viable, historically- tested alternative.¹³ Similarly, Richard Stahler-Sholk has persuasively argued that the Nicaraguan case “reveals that the Sandinista model of a mixed economy (presupposing at least simple reproduction of the capitalist, small producer, and state sectors) with multiclass ‘national unity’ created a series of demands that were increasingly difficult to reconcile with defense priorities and longer-term goals for socioeconomic transformation.”¹⁴

 

If this form of political (and aesthetic) representation has failed, what other means are open to us? In short, a consciously organized self-representation. At certain moments in the Nicaraguan revolution workers’ and peasants’ control over the actual means of production and the aesthetic “means of production” became a viable option. However, as I commented above, for both external and internal reasons, the FSLN did not follow through with these political and economic steps. As a thorough reading of What is to be Done? adduces to it is not the spontaneous terrain of libertarianism, found in the works of Mouffe and Laclau, that is able to survive historically, but rather some new formulation of the notion of a politically- conscious vanguard which is both of and for the working class. This path is new at least in practice. Until the “Cultural Revolution,” perhaps the Chinese revolution carried out this political, economic and aesthetic alternative most effectively and Cuba, in varying degrees, has also been successful in instituting political and economic democracy.

 

What is certain is that this revolutionary direction can overcome the dualism exhibited in the writings of post-Althusserianism between ideology and political practice. Rather than driving a wedge between ideology and politics and anchoring both in the realm of the spontaneous (the unconscious), a Marxist reading of ideology suggests that there is always a dialectical relation between material life and ideology. To become conscious of this dialectic, according to Marx and Engles, is to supersede the distortions that accompany ideology.¹⁵ In Bolivia, Domitila is and has been keenly aware of the need for a conscious revolutionary proletariat and harbors no illusions about “radical democracy” or the “pluralism” of class and economic interests:

 

Soluciones momentaneas ya no nos interesan. Nosotros ya hemos tenido gobiernos de todo corte, "nacionalista", "revolucionario","cristiano", asi de toda etiqueta. Desde el 52, cuando el gobierno del MNR empezo a traicionar la revolucion por el pueblo . . . tantos gobiernos han pasado y ninguno ha llegado a colmar las aspiraciones del pueblo. Ninguno ha hecho lo que realmente quiere el pueblo. El gobierno actual, por ejemplo, no esta haciendo obras para nosotros, sino que los beneficiados son, en primer lugar, los extranjeros que continuan llevandose nuestras riquezas y despues los empresarios privados, las empresas estatales, los militares y no asi la clase obrera ni el campesino que seguimos cada dia mas pobres. Y eso va a continuar igual mientras estemos en el sistema capitalista. Yo veo, por todo lo que he vivido y leido, que nosotros nos identificamos con el socialismo. Porque solamente en un sistema socialista ha de haber mas justicia y todos aprovecharan de los beneficios que hoy dia estan en manos de unos pocos.¹⁶ [Momentary solutions no longer interest us. We have already had governments of every stripe, "nationalists", "revolutionaries", "Christian", every label imaginable. Since 1952, when the MNR [the National Revolutionary Movement] government began to betray the people's revolution . . . so many governments have gone and none has been able to fulfill the people's aspirations. None has done what the people really want done. The current government, for example, is not working for us, but rather the beneficiaries are, in the first place, the foreigners, who continue to take away our wealth; and in the second place, the private entrepreneurs, the state businesses, the military and not the worker nor the peasant: each day we get poorer. And this will continue as it is as long as we are in the capitalist system. I see, from all that I have experienced and read, that we identify with socialism. Because only in a socialist system is it possible for there to be justice and for the benefits to be enjoyed by all and not be in the hands of a few [individuals]."]

 

Notes

 

1. See Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez’s Ciencia y revolucion: El marxismo de Althusser (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1978).

 

2. Beverley articulated this theoretical stance in his seminal article, “Ideologia/deseo/literatura,” Revista de critica literaria latinoamericana (1er semestre 1988), 7-24.

 

3. See especially, “Anatomia del testimonio” Revista de critica literaria latinoamericana (1er semestre 1987), 7-16.

 

4. Georg Lukacs, Essays in Realism, Rodney Livingstone, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 23-32.

 

5. George Yudice, “Marginality and the Ethics of Survival,” in Andrew Ross ed., Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

 

6. Terry Lovell, “The Social Relations of Cultural Production: Absent Centre of a New Discourse,” in Simon Clarke, et. al., One-Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and the Politics of Culture (London and New York: Allison and Busby, 1980), 245. Hereafter cited in text. To verify Althusser’s position on this matter consult Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 170-71.

 

7. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 160-61.

 

8. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 1-7.

 

9. The question here is: How far does Beverley and Zimmerman’s Althusserian theory take us from the type of dualism that Volosinov describes so precisely in his critique of Freudianism?: Inner experience [for Freud], extracted by means of introspection, cannot in fact be directly linked with the data of objective, external apprehension. To maintain a thorough consistency only the one or the other point of view can be pursued. Freud has ultimately favored the consistent pursuit of the inner, subjective point of view; all external reality is for him, in the final analysis, merely the “reality principle,” a principle that he places on the same level with the “pleasure principle” [emphasis in the original]. V.N. Volosinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique (New York: Academic Press, 1976), 72.

 

10. Carlos Vilas, “What Went Wrong” NACLA (June 1990), 10-18.

 

11. V.I. Lenin, What is to be Done? (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 75.

 

12. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 4.

 

13. A succinct version of my argument was presented at the 1990 Modern Language Association meeting and was entitled, “Contemporary Nicaraguan Politics and Aesthetics: The Fate of Postmodernist Idealism.” I have just finished a more comprehensive development of this thesis in a manuscript I have prepared for publication, Aesthetics and Revolution: A Historical Materialist Analysis of Nicaraguan Poetry 1979-1990.

 

14. Richard Stahler-Sholk, “Stabilization, Destabilization, and the Popular Classes in Nicaragua, 1979-1988,” Latin American Research Review vol. xxv, number 3 (1990), 55-88.

 

15. Here the key text is, of course, The German Ideology. (New York: International Publishers, 1977).

 

16. Moema Viezzer, ‘Si me permiten hablar…’Testimonio de Domitila: Una mujer de las minas de Bolivia (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1985).