Neil Larsen

Northeastern University

 

My remarks here¹ concern the following topics of critical discussion and debate: 1) the ideological character of postmodernism as both a philosophical standpoint and as a set of political objectives and strategies; 2) the development within a broadly postmodernist theoretical framework of a trend advocating a critique of certain postmodern tenets from the standpoint of anti-imperialism; and 3) the influence of this trend on both the theory and practice of oppositional culture in Latin America. So as to eliminate the need for second-guessing my own standpoint in what follows, let me state clearly at the outset that I will adhere to what I understand to be both a Marxist and a Leninist position as concerns both epistemology and the social and historical primacy of class contradiction. In matters philosophical, then, I will be advancing and defending dialectical materialist arguments. Regarding questions of culture and aesthetics, as well as those of revolutionary strategy under existing conditions–areas in which Marxist and Leninist theory have either remained relatively speculative or have found it necessary to re-think older positions–my own thinking may or may not merit the attribution of ‘orthodoxy,’ depending on how that term is currently to be understood.

 

(1)

 

One typically appeals to the term ‘postmodern’ to characterize a broad and ever-widening range of aesthetic and cultural practices and artifacts. But the concept itself, however diffuse and contested, has also come to designate a very definite current of philosophy as well as a theoretical approach to politics. Postmodern philosophy–or simply postmodern ‘theory,’ if we are to accept Jameson’s somewhat ingenuous observation that it “marks the end of philosophy”²–arguably includes the now standard work of poststructuralist thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault as well as the more recent work by ex-post- Althusserian theorists such a Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, academic philosophical converts such as Richard Rorty and the perennial vanguardist Stanley Aronowitz. The latter elaborate and re-articulate an increasingly withered poststructuralism, re-deploying the grandly dogmatic and quasi-mystical “critique of the metaphysics of presence” as a critical refusal of the “foundationalism” and “essentialism” of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. These two assignations–which now come to replace the baneful Derridean charge of “metaphysics”–refer respectively to the Enlightenment practice of seeking to ground all claims regarding either truth or value in terms of a self-evidencing standard of Reason; and to the ontological fixation upon being as essence, rather than as relationality or ‘difference.’

 

Postmodern philosophy for the most part adopts its “anti-essentialism” directly from Derrida and company, adding little if anything to accepted (or attenuated) post-structuralist doctrine. Where postmodernism contributes more significantly to the honing down and re-tooling of poststructuralism is, I propose, in its indictment of foundationalism–in place of the vaguer abstractions of “presence” or “identity”–as the adversarial doctrine. It is not all “Western” modes of thought and being which must now be discarded, but more precisely their Enlightenment or modern modalities, founded on the concept of reason. Indeed, even the charge of “foundationalism” perhaps functions as a minor subterfuge here. What postmodern philosophy intends is, to cite Aronowitz’s forthright observation, a “rejection of reason as a foundation for human affairs.”³ Postmodernism is thus a form, albeit an unconventional one, of irrationalism.

 

To be sure, important caveats can be raised here. Postmodernist theoreticians often carefully stipulate that a rejection of reason as foundation does not imply or require a rejection of all narrowly ‘reasonable’ procedures. Postmodernity is not to be equated with an anti-modernity. Aronowitz, for example, has written that “postmodern movements” (e.g., ecology and “Solidarity” type labor groups) “borrow freely the terms and programs of modernity but place them in new discursive contexts” (UA 61). Chantal Mouffe insists that “radical democracy”–according to her, the political and social project of postmodernity–aims to “defend the political project [of Enlightenment] while abandoning the notion that it must be based on a specific form of rationality.”⁴ Ernesto Laclau makes an even nicer distinction by suggesting that “it is precisely the ontological status of the central categories of the discourses of modernity and not their content, that is at stake. . . . Postmodernity does not imply a change in the values of Enlightenment modernity but rather a particular weakening of their absolutist character.”⁵ And a similarly conservative gesture within the grander irrationalist impulse can, of course, be followed in Lyotard’s characterization of “paralogy” as those practices legitimating themselves exclusively within their own “small narrative” contexts, rather than within the macro-frames of modernist meta-narratives of Reason, Progress, History, etc.⁶

 

Two counter-objections are necessary here, however. The first is that any thoughtful consideration of claims to locate the attributes of reason within supposedly local or non-totalizable contexts immediately begs the question of what, then, acts to set the limits to any particular instance of “paralogy,” etc.? How does the mere adding of the predicate “local” or “specific” or “weakened” serve to dispense with the logic of an external ground or foundation? Cannot, for example, the ecology movement be shown to be grounded in a social and political context outside and ‘larger’ than it is, whatever the movement may think of itself? If reason is present (or absent) in the fragment, does not this presence/absence necessarily connect with the whole on some level? If, as one might say, postmodernism wants to proclaim a rationality of means entirely removed from a rationality of ends, does it not thereby sacrifice the very “means/ends” logic it wants to invoke, the very logical framework in which one speaks of “contexts”? I suggest it would be more precise to describe the measured, non-foundationalist ‘rationalism’ of postmodernism as simply an evasive maneuver designed to immunize from critique the real object here: that is to preserve “Enlightenment” as merely an outward and superficial guise for irrationalist content, to reduce “Enlightenment,” as an actual set of principles designed to govern consciously thought and action, to merely the specific mythology needed to inform the project of a “new radical imaginary” (Laclau,UA 77).

 

Clearly, there is a complete failure–or refusal– of dialectical reasoning incurred in postmodernism’s attempted retention of an Enlightenment ‘micro’- rationality. And this brings up the second rejoinder: postmodern philosophy’s practiced avoidance on this same score of the Marxist, dialectical materialist critique of Enlightenment. Postmodern theory, virtually without exception, consigns something it calls “Marxism” to the foul Enlightenment brew of “foundationalism.th” Marxism is, in effect, collapsed back into Hegelianism, the materialist dialectic into the idealist dialectic–or, as Aronowitz somewhat puzzlingly puts it, the “form of Marxism is retained while its categories are not” (UA 52). But in no instance that I know of has a postmodern theorist systematically confronted the contention first developed by Marx and Engels that “this realm of reason was nothing more than the idealized realm of the bourgeoisie.”⁷ I think perhaps it needs to be remembered that the Marxist project was not and is not the simple replacement of one “universal reason” with another, but the practical and material transformation of reason to be attained in classless society; and that this attainment would not mean the culmination of reason on earth a la Hegel but a raising of reason to a higher level through its very de-“idealization.” Reason, then, comes to be grasped as a time-bound, relative principle which nevertheless attains an historical universality through the social universality of the proletariat (gendered and multi-ethnic) as they/we who–to quote a famous lyric–“shall be the human race.”

 

But again, postmodern irrationalism systematically evades confrontation with this critique of Enlightenment. It typically manages this through a variety of fundamentally dogmatic maneuvers, epitomized in the work of Laclau and Mouffe–who, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has shown,⁸ consistently and falsely reduce Marxism to a “closed system” of pure economic determinism.

 

Why this evasion? Surely there is more than a casual connection here with the fact that the typical postmodern theorist probably never got any closer to Marxism or Leninism than Althusser’s left-wing structuralism and Lacanianism. One can readily understand how the one time advocate of a self-enclosed “theoretical practice” might elicit postmodern suspicions of closure and ‘scientism.’ Indeed, Althusser’s ‘Marxism’ can fairly be accused of having pre-programmed, in its flight from the class struggles of its time and into methodologism, the subsequent turn-about in which even the residual category of “theoretical practice” is deemed “foundationalist.”

 

But this is secondary. What I would propose is that postmodernism’s hostility towards a “foundationalist” parody of Marxism, combined with the elision of Marxism’s genuinely dialectical and materialist content, flows not from a simple misunderstanding but, objectively, from the consistent need of an ideologically embattled capitalism to seek displacement and pre-emption of Marxism through the formulation of radical-sounding “third paths.” That postmodern philosophy normally refrains from open anti- communism, preferring to pay lip service to “socialism” even while making the necessary obeisances to the demonologies of “Stalin” may make it appear as some sort of a “left” option. But is there really anything “left”? The most crucial problem for Marxism today– how to extend and put into practice a critique from the left of retreating “socialism” at the moment of the old communist movement’s complete transformation into its opposite–remains safely beyond postmodernist conceptual horizons.

 

Postmodernist philosophy’s oblique but hostile relation to Marxism largely duplicates that of Nietzsche. And the classical analysis here belongs to Lukacs’ critique of Nietzschean irrationalism inThe Destruction of Reason, a work largely ignored by contemporary theory since being anathematized by Althusserianism two decades ago. Lukacs identifies in Nietzsche’s radically anti-systemic and counter- cultural thinking a consistent drive to attack and discredit the socialist ideals of his time. But against these Nietzsche proposes nothing with any better claim to social rationality. Any remaining link between reason and the emancipatory is refused. It is, according to Lukacs, this very antagonism towards socialism–a movement of whose most advanced theoretical expression Nietzsche remained fundamentally ignorant–which supplies to Nietzschean philosophy its point of departure and its principal unifying “ground” as such. “It is material from ‘enemy territory,’ problems and questions imposed by the class enemy which ultimately determine the content of his philosophy.”⁹ Unlike his more typical fellow reactionaries, however, Nietzsche perceived the fact of bourgeois decadence and the consequent need to formulate an intellectual creed which could give the appearance of overcoming it. In this he anticipates the later, more explicit “anti- bourgeois” anti-communisms of the coming imperialist epoch–most obviously fascism. This defense of a decadent bourgeois order, based on the partial acknowledgement of its defects and its urgent need for cultural renewal, and pointing to a “third path” “beyond” the domain of reason,¹⁰ Lukacs terms an “indirect apologetic.”

 

Postmodern philosophy receives Nietzsche through the filters of Deleuze, Foucault and Derrida, blending him with similarly mediated versions of Heidegger and William James into a new irrationalist hybrid. But the terms of Lukacs’ Nietzsche-critique on the whole remain no less appropriate. Whereas, on the one hand, postmodernist philosophy’s aversion for orthodox fascism is so far not to be seriously questioned, its basic content continues, I would argue, to be “dictated by the adversary.” And this adversary–revolutionary communism as both a theory and a practice–assumes an even sharper identity today than in Nietzsche’s epoch. Let it be said that Lukacs, writing forty years ago, posits an adversarial Marxism-Leninism more free of the critical tensions and errors than we know it to have been then or to be now. If, from our own present standpoint,The Destruction of Reason has a serious flaw, then it is surely this failure to anticipate or express openly the struggles and uncertainties within communist orthodoxy itself. (Lukacs’ subsequent allegiance to Krushchevite positions–by then, perhaps, inevitable–marks his decisive move to the right on these issues.) But the fact that postmodern philosophy arises in a conjuncture marked by capitalist restoration throughout the “socialist” bloc and the consequent extreme crisis and disarray within the theoretical discourse of Marxism, while it may explain the relative freedom from genuinely contestatory Marxist critique enjoyed by postmodern theorists, in no way alters the essence of this ideological development as a reprise of pseudo-dialectical, Nietzschean “indirect apologetics.”

 

This becomes fully apparent when one turns to post-modernism’s more explicit formulations as a politics. I am thinking here mainly of Laclau and Mouffe’sHegemony and Socialist Strategy, a work which, though it remains strongly controversial, has attained in recent years a virtually manifesto-like standing among many intellectuals predisposed to poststructuralist theory.Hegemony and Socialist Strategy proposes to free the Gramscian politics linked to the concept of “hegemony” (the so-called “war of position,” as opposed to “war of maneuver”) from its residual Marxian ‘foundationalism’ in recognition of what is held to be the primary efficacy of discourse itself and its “articulating” agents in forming hegemonic subjects. And it turns out of course that “socialist strategy” means dumping socialism altogether for a “radical democracy” which more adequately conforms to the “indeterminacy” of a “society” whose concept is modeled directly on the poststructuralist critique of the sign.

 

The key arguments ofHegemony and Socialist Strategy–as, in addition, the serious objections they have elicited–have become sufficiently well known to avoid lengthy repetitions here. What Mouffe and Laclau promise to deliver is, in the end, a revolutionary or at least emancipatory political strategy shorn of ‘foundationalist’ ballast. In effect, however, they merely succeed in shifting the locus of political and social agency from “essentialist” categories of class and party to a discursive agency of “articulation.”¹¹ And when it comes time to specify concretely the actual articulating subjects themselves,Hegemony and Socialist Strategy resorts to a battery of argumentative circularities and subterfuges which simply relegate the articulatory agency to “other discourses.”¹²

 

Ellen Meiksins Wood has shown the inevitable collapse ofHegemony and Socialist Strategy into its own illogic as an argument with any pretense to denote political or social realities–a collapse which, because of its very considerable synthetic ambitions and conceptual clarity perhaps marks the conclusive failure of poststructuralism to produce a viable political theory. But the failure of argument has interfered little with the capacity of this theoretical tract to supply potentially anti-capitalist intellectuals with a powerful dose of “indirect apologetics.” The fact that the “third path” calls itself “radical democracy,” draping itself in the “ethics” if not the epistemology of Enlightenment, the fact that it outwardly resists the “fixity” of any one privileged subject, makes it, in a sense, the more perfect “radical” argument for a capitalist politics of pure irrationalist spontaneity. And we know who wins on the battlefield of the spontaneous.¹³ While the oppressed are fed on the myths of their own “hegemony”–and why not, since “on the threshold of postmodernity” humanity is “for the first time the creator and constructor of its own history”? (Laclau, UA 79-80)–those already in a position to “articulate” the myths for us only strengthen their hold on power.

 

(2)

 

In my remarks so far I have emphasized how contemporary postmodern philosophy’s blanket hostility towards the universalisms of Enlightenment thought might merely work to pre-empt Marxism’s carefully directed critique of that particular universal which is present-day capitalist ideology and power. Does not the merely theoretical refusal of the (ideal) ground serve in fact to strengthen the real foundations of real oppression by rendering all putative knowledge of the latter illicit? When Peter Dews criticizes Foucault for his attempt to equate the “plural” with the emancipatory, the remark applies to more recent postmodern theory with equal force: “the deep naivety of this conception lies in the assumption that once the aspiration to universality is abandoned what will be left is a harmonious plurality of unmediated perspectives.”¹⁴ In light of this perverse blindness to particular universals, postmodernism’s seemingly general skepticism towards Marxism as one possible instance of ‘foundationalism’ would be better grasped as a specific and determining antagonism. Is there an extant, living–i.e., practiced–philosophy other than Marxism which any longer purports to ground rational praxis in universal (but in this case also practical-material) categories? We are saying, then, that postmodern philosophy and political theory becomes objectively, albeit perhaps obliquely, a variation of anti-communism.

 

It might, however, be objected at this point that postmodernism encompasses not only this demonstrably right-wing tendency but also a certain ‘left’ which, like Marxism, aims at an actual transcendence of oppressive totalities but which diverges from Marxism in its precise identification of the oppressor and of the social agent charged with its opposition and overthrow. Under this more “practical” aegis, the axis of postmodern antagonism shifts from the universal versus the particular to the more politically charged tension between the “center” and the “margin.” Such a shift has, for example, been adumbrated by Cornel West as representing a particularly American inflection of the postmodern. “For Americans,” says West,

 

are politically always already in a condition of postmodern fragmentation and heterogeneity in a way that Europeans have not been; and the revolt against the center by those constituted as marginals is an oppositional difference in a way that poststructuralist notions of difference are not. These American attacks on universality in the name of difference, these 'postmodern' issues of otherness (Afro-Americans, Native Americans, women, gays) are in fact an implicit critique of certain French postmodern discourses about otherness that really serve to hide and conceal the power of the voices and movements of Others.¹⁵

 

Among instances of a “left” postmodernism we might then include certain of contemporary feminisms and the theoretical opposition to homophobia as well as the cultural nationalisms of ethnic minority groups. The category of the “marginal” scarcely exhausts itself here, however. Arrayed against the “center” even as also “concealed” by its discourses and “disciplines” are, in this conception, also the millions who inhabit the neocolonial societies of the ‘third world.’ Hence there might be a definite logic in describing the contemporary anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the periphery as in their own way also “postmodern.”

 

It is this “marginal” and “anti-imperialist” claim to postmodernity which I now wish to assess in some depth. In particular I propose to challenge the idea that such a “left” movement within postmodernism really succeeds in freeing itself from the right-wing apologetic strain within the postmodern philosophy of the “center.”

 

The basic outlines of this “left” position are as follows: both post-structuralism and postmodernism, as discourses emergent in the “center,” have failed to give adequate theoretical consideration to the international division of labor and to what is in fact the uneven and oppressive relation of metropolitan knowledge and its institutions to the “life-world” of the periphery. Both metropolitan knowledge as well as metropolitan systems of ethics constitute themselves upon a prior exclusion of peripheral reality. They therefore become themselves falsely ‘universal’ and as such ideological rather than genuinely critical. The remedy to such false consciousness is not to be sought in the mere abstract insistence on “difference” (or “unfixity,” the “heterogeneous,” etc.), but in the direct practical intervention of those who are different, those flesh and blood “others” whom, as West observes, the very conceptual appeal to alterity has ironically excluded. As a corollary, it is then implied that a definite epistemological priority, together with a kind of ethical exemplariness, adheres to those subjects and practices marginalized by imperialist institutions of knowledge and culture.

 

Among ‘first world’ theorists who have put forward this kind of criticism perhaps the best known is Fredric Jameson. In his essay “Third World Literature in the Era of Multi-national Capitalism” Jameson argues that “third world texts necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society.”¹⁶ Third world texts, then–and by extension those who produce them and their primary public–retain what the culture of postmodernism in the ‘first world’ is unable to provide, according to another of Jameson’s well-known arguments: a “cognitive map”¹⁷ equipped to project the private onto the public sphere. As such, these peripheral practices of signification consciously represent a political bedrock reality which for the contemporary postmodern metropole remains on the level of the political unconscious. (It should be pointed out of course that Jameson’s schema is largely indifferent in this respect to the modernism/postmodernism divide.) What enables this is the fact that the third world subject, like Hegel’s slave, exhibits a “situational consciousness” (Jameson’s preferred substitute term for materialism). As “master,” however, the metropolitan consciousness becomes enthralled to the fetishes which symbolize its dominance.

 

An analogous but weaker theory of the marginal as epistemologically privileged is to be found in the writings of Edward Said. InThe World, the Text and the Critic, for example, Said chastises contemporary critical theory, especially poststructuralism, for its lack of “worldliness”–by which he evidently means much the same thing designated by Jameson’s “situational consciousness.” What is needed, according to Said, is “a sort of spatial sense, a sort of measuring faculty for locating or situating theory”¹⁸ which Said denotes simply as “critical consciousness.”The World, the Text and the Critic ultimately disappoints in its own failure to historically or “spatially” situate such “critical consciousness,” but given Said’s public commitment to Palestinian nationalism it wouldn’t seem unreasonable to identify in his call for “worldliness” a prescription for “third-worldliness.”

 

Both Jameson and Said–the former far more openly and forthrightly than the latter–violate central tenets of postmodernism, of course, insofar as they posit the existence of a marginal consciousness imbued with “presence” and “self-identity.” That is, they appear to justify an orthodox postmodernist counter-accusation of “essentialism.” Lest this should be thought to constitute a final incompatibility of postmodernism for an anti-imperialist, post-colonial standpoint, however, it is imperative to mention here the work of Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak. Foreseeing this difficulty, Spivak has (in her critical reading of the work of a radical collective of Indian historians known as the “subaltern studies group”) sought to justify such “essentialism” as a strategic necessity, despite its supposed epistemological falsity. The radical, third world historian, writes Spivak, “must remain committed to the subaltern as the subject of his history. As they choose this strategy, they reveal the limits of the critique of humanism as produced in the west.”¹⁹ Spivak, that is to say, poses the necessity for an exceptionalism: a conceptual reliance on the “subject of history,” which as a poststructuralist she would condemn as reactionary and “humanist,” is allowed on “strategical” grounds within the terrain of the “subaltern.” It begins to sound ironically like the old pro-colonialist condescension to the “native’s” need for myths that the educated metropolitan city- dweller has now dispensed with–but more on this below.

 

Even if the “marginal” cannot be proved to enjoy an epistemological advantage, however, its very reality as a ‘situation’ requiring direct action against oppression can be appealed to as politically and ethically exemplary. Thus, in her very poignant essay entitled “Feminism: the Political Conscience of Postmodernism?” (UA 149-166) the critic and video artist Laura Kipnis proposes that feminism, seemingly entrapped between the “textualist” (i.e., modernist) aestheticism of French poststructuralist critics on the order of Cixous, Irigaray, etc., and North American liberal reformism (another case of “essentialism”), adopt “a theory of women not as class or caste but as colony” (UA 161). The efforts of a Rorty or a Laclau to salvage “Enlightenment” by ridding it of foundationalism and leaving only its “pragmatic” procedures would, in this view, be too little too late. For Kipnis, as for Craig Owens,²⁰ postmodernism denotes what is really the definitive decline of the “West” and its colonial systems of power. If those marginalized within the center itself, e.g., women, are to rescue themselves from this sinking ship they must model their opposition on the practice of non-Western anti-colonial rebels. Referring to the 1986 bombing of Libya, Kipnis writes: “When retaliation is taken, as has been announced, for ‘American arrogance,’ this is the postmodern critique of Enlightenment; it is, in fact, a decentering, it is the margin, the absence, the periphery rewriting the rules from its own interest” (UA 163).

 

An analogous proposal for third world revolt within the conceptual terrain of postmodernism has been issued by George Yudice. Against the postmodern ‘ethics’ formulated by Foucault as an “aesthetics of existence”–manifesting itself, e.g., in the liberal comforts of pluralism–Yudice suggests finding an ethical standard “among the dominated and oppressed peoples of the ‘peripheral’ or underdeveloped countries.”²¹ As a mere “aesthetic” the postmodern “explores the marginal, yet is incapable of any solidarity with it” (UA 224). Yudice terms this marginal ethic an “ethic of survival” and points to the example set by Rigoberta Menchu, a Guatemalan Mayan woman who has recorded her experiences as an organizer for the Christian base community movement against genocidal repression.²² “Menchu, in fact, has turned her very identity into a ‘poetics of defense.’ Her oppression and that of her people have opened them to an unfixity delimited by the unboundedness of struggle” (UA 229). In Menchu’s ethical example we thus have, so to speak, the subversive promise of “unfixity” a la Mouffe-Laclau made flesh.

 

Yudice is not the first to attempt this particular inflection with specific reference to Latin America. The “liberation theology” which guides Menchu’s practice as a militant might itself lay some claim to represent an indigenously Latin American postmodernism–“avant la lettre” insofar as Foucault and his followers are concerned. The philosophical implications of liberation theology have been worked out by the so-called “Philosophy of Liberation,” a intellectual current which developed in Argentina in the early 1970s. As recounted recently by Horacio Cerutti-Guldberg,²³ “Philosophy of Liberation” set out explicitly to formulate a uniquely Latin American doctrine of liberation which would be “neither a liberal individualism nor a Marxist collectivism” (LAP 47). Rather, it would set itself the goal of “philosophizing out of the social demands of the most needy, the marginalized and despised sectors of the population” (LAP 44). This in turn requires, according to exponent Enrique Dussel, a new philosophical method–known as “analectics”–based on the logical priority or “anteriority” of the exterior (i.e., the marginal, the Other) over totality.²⁴ “Analectics” are to supplant the “Eurocentric” method of dialectics. As Cerutti-Guldberg observes:

 

Dialectics (it doesn't matter whether Hegelian or Marxist, since analectical philosophy identifies them) could never exceed "intra-systematicity." It would be incapable of capturing the requirements of "alterity" expressed in the "face" of the "poor" that demands justice. In this sense, it would appear necessary to postulate a method that would go beyond (ana-) and not merely through (dia-) the totality. This is the "analectical" method which works with the central notion of analogy. In this way, analectical philosophy would develop the "essential" thinking longed for by Heidegger. Such thinking would be made possible when it emerges out of the cultural, anthropological "alterative" Latin American space. This space is postulated as "preliminary in the order of Being" and "posterior in the order of knowledge" with respect to the "ontological totality." It is constituted by the poor of the "third world." (LAP 50)

 

In Dussel’sPhilosophy of Liberation the logic of going “beyond” the totality ultimately leads to explicit theology and mysticism. “What reason can never embrace–the mystery of the other as other–only faith can penetrate” (Dussel 93). But the “analectical” method has received other, non- theological formulations in Latin America, most notably in the case of the Cuban critic Roberto Fernandez Retamar, whose theoretical writings of the early 1970s²⁵ were aimed at refuting the possibility that a “universal” theory of literature could truthfully reflect the radical alterity of “Nuestra America.” This is argued to be so not only as a result of the unequal, exploitative relation of imperial metropolis to periphery–a relation which is historically evolved and determined and thus subject to transformation–but because all notions of universality (e.g., Goethe’s, and Marx and Engels’ idea of aWeltliteratur) are fictions masking the reality of radical diversity and alterity.

 

One should point out here that Retamar’s philosophical authority is Jose Marti and certainly not Derrida, Deleuze or Foucault, whom, had he been aware of them at the time, Retamar would almost surely have regarded with skeptical hostility. Dussel and the various Latin American philosophers associated with “Philosophy of Liberation” have obvious debts to European phenomenology and existentialism, especially Heidegger and Levinas. But here, too, a philosophical trend in which we can now recognize the idea of postmodernity as a radical break with Enlightenment develops out of what is perceived at least as a direct social and political demand for theory to adequately reflect the life-world of those who are, as it were, both “marginal” and the “subject of history” at once. One can sympathize with the general impatience of Latin American critics and theorists who see in the category of the “postmodern” what appears to be yet another neo- colonial attempt to impose alien cultural models. (Such would probably be Retamar’s conscious sentiments.) But the example of the “analectical” critiques of Dussel and Retamar shows, in fact, that the intellectual and cultural gulf is overdrawn and that all roads to postmodernism do not lead through French poststructuralism.

 

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Do we then find a Latin American culture of postmodernism linked to these particular conceptual trends? I would argue–and have argued elsewhere²⁶— that the recent proliferation in Latin America of so- called “testimonial” narratives like that of Rigoberta Menchu, as well as the fictional and quasi-fictional texts which adopt the perspective of the marginalized (see,inter alia, the works of Elena Poniatowska, Eduardo Galeano and Manlio Argueta), give some evidence of postmodernity insofar as they look for ways of “giving voice” to alterity. Significant here is their implicit opposition to the more traditional (and modernist) approach of “magical realism” in which the marginal becomes a kind of aesthetic mode of access to the ground of national or regional unity and identity. One could include here as well the general wave of interest in Latin American popular and “barrio” culture as an embodiment of ‘resistance.’

 

But our direct concern here is with the ideological character of the conceptual trend as such. Does the move to, as it were, found post-modernism’s anti-foundationalism in the rebellious consciousness of those marginalized by modernity alter orthodox postmodernism’s reactionary character?

 

I submit that it does not. Basing themselves on what is, to be sure, the decisive historical and political reality of unequal development and the undeniably imperialist and neo-colonialist bias of much metropolitan-based theory, the “left” postmodernists we have surveyed here all, to one degree or another, proceed to distort this reality into a new irrationalist and spontaneist myth. Marginality is postulated as a condition which, purely by virtue of its objective situation, spontaneously gives rise to the subversive particularity upon which postmodern politics pins its hopes. But where has this been shown actually to occur? Where has imperialism, and its attendant “scientific” and cultural institutions, actually given way and not simply adapted to the “new social movements” founded on ideals of alterity?

 

Jameson, whose argument for a third-world cognitive advantage points openly to an anti- imperialist nationalism as the road to both political and cultural redemption from postmodern psychic and social pathologies, speaks to us of Ousmane Sembene and Lu Hsun, but leaves out the larger question of where strategies of all-class national liberation have ultimately led Africa and China–of whether, in fact, nationalism, even the radical nationalism of cultural alterity, can be said to have succeeded as a strategy of anti-imperialism. As Aijaz Ahmad remarked in his well-taken critique of Jameson’s essay, Jameson’s retention of a “three worlds” theoretical framework imposes a view of neo-colonial society as free of class contradictions.²⁷

 

Spivak’s move to characterize the “subaltern” as what might be termed “deconstruction with a human face” only leads us further into a spontaneist thicket– although the logic here is more consistent than in Jameson and Said, since the transition from colonial to independent status itself is reduced to a “displacement of function between sign systems” (Spivak, 198).

 

Kipnis, whose attempt to implicate both textualist and reformist feminisms in a politics of elitism and quietism has real merits, can in the end offer up as models for an “anti-colonial” feminism little more than the vague threat of anti-Western counter-terror from radical third-world nationalists such as Muammar Khadafy. We recall here Lenin’s dialectical insight inWhat is to be Done? regarding the internal link between spontaneism and an advocacy of terrorism. Yudice’s counter-posing of a third world “ethic of survival” to a postmodern ethic of “self- formation” possesses real force as itself an ethical judgement and one can only concur in arguing the superior moral example of a Rigoberta Menchu. But where does this lead us politically? Those super- exploited and oppressed at the periphery thus become pegged with a sort of sub-political consciousness, as if they couldn’t or needn’t see beyond the sheer fact of “survival.”

 

Are these lapses into the most threadbare sorts of political myths and fetishes simply the result of ignorance or bad faith on the part of sympathetic first world theorists? Not at all, I would suggest. Regarding current political reality in Latin America, at least, such retreats into spontaneism and the overall sub-estimation of the conscious element in the waging of political struggle merely reflect in a general way the continuing and indeed increasing reliance of much of the autochthonous anti-imperialist left on a similar mix of romantic faith in exemplary violence and in the eventual spontaneous uprising of the “people,” whether with bullets or with ballots. Although bothfoquismo and the strategy of a “peaceful road to socialism” based on populist alliances are recognized on one level to have failed, the conclusions drawn from this by the mainstream left have on the whole only led to an even more thorough- going abandonment of Marxist and Leninist political strategies in favor of a “democratic” politics of consensus. The strategic watchword seems to be “hegemony”–as derived, so far, from Gramsci, although who can say whether Laclau and Mouffe might not stage a rapid conquest of the Latin American left intelligentsia the way Althusser did two decades ago? If the left is to reverse the disastrous consequences of praetorian fascism in the Southern Cone and Brazil, for example–a reversal now basically limited to the regaining of a “lost” bourgeois “democracy”–this will supposedly require a less “sectarian” approach in which such slogans as “democracy” and “national sovereignty” are given a “popular” rather than an “elite” content. The matter of ideology–the question of whether, for example, “democracy,” “national sovereignty,” etc., are the political ideas through which the masses of exploited Latin Americans are to attain true emancipation–is now generally dropped. (Another case of “essentialism.”) What is needed is to wage a “war of position” fought by a left-hegemonized “popular bloc” and not by a movement of workers and class-allies organized in a revolutionary party.

 

This is not to say that the Gramscian political strategy associated with “hegemony” is necessarily tied to spontaneism; for Gramsci, at least, the “hegemony” required could only be the result of conscious political organizing and guidance by a working-class party itself led by its own “organic intellectuals.” (To what extent this accords or diverges from the Leninist strategy of democratic centralism is a matter we cannot go into here.) In its currently general acceptation in Latin America, however–linked as it is to purely reformist ends–“hegemony” implies a need to substitute a form of organization based on spontaneously arising social and cultural ideologies and practices for the “older” one of party-based, consciousness-raising agitation and recruitment. The almost unanimous move of the mainstream left to embrace liberation theology and the Catholic Church-led Christian base-community movement (or at least to refrain from open polemics with it) is the most significant example of a politics of “hegemony” over one of ideology.

 

I think this entire political trend within Latin America can be correctly grasped only as a consequence of the failure of Marxists, in particular the established Communist Parties and allied organizations, to carry out a self-criticism from the left, and of the resulting shift rightward into political positions which merely compound the errors of the past. The response of traditional Latin American Marxism to the evident failure of populism (with or without afoco component) as a variation on the orthodox “two-stage” model (democratic capitalism first, then socialism) has typically been to jettison the second stage entirely. One could argue with a certain justice that this collapse was inevitable, given the political mistakes already embedded in the older line. As Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez has recently pointed out,²⁸ Latin Americans inherited the Marxism of the Second International, the Marxism which regarded revolution in the Western centers of capitalism as the necessary precondition for even national liberation, much less socialism or communism on the periphery. The Marx who, after studying British colonialism in Ireland, concluded that the liberation of Irish workers from imperialism was key to the political advance of an increasingly reformist and conservative British working class; the Marx who speculated that peasant communes in Russia might make feasible a direct transition to socialism: this Marx was largely unknown in Latin America. Thus when the Communism of the Third International adopted the “two stage” model for neocolonial countries, Latin American revolutionaries had scarcely any theoretical basis upon which to dissent. (This, according to Sanchez Vasquez, held true even for so original a Marxist thinker as Mariategui, who, perhaps because he had to go outside Marxism for theories sensitive to factors of unequal development, was ultimately led in the direction of the irrationalism of Bergson and Sorel.) Latin America is in no way unique in this, needless to say. Everywhere the dominant trend is to compound past errors with even greater ones, thus reaching the point of renouncing the very core of Marxism as such in preference for liberal anachronisms and worse.

 

I dwell on this because I think a truly critical assessment of an “anti-imperialist” postmodernism, as of orthodox postmodernism, requires a prior recognition of the essentially parasitical dependence of such thinking on Marxism and particularly on the crisis within Marxism–a dependence which, as we have repeatedly observed, postmodernism must systematically seek to erase. The very insistence on a politics of spontaneism and myth, on the tacit abandonment of conscious and scientific revolutionary strategy and organization, is, I am suggesting, the derivative effect of developments within Marxism itself, of what amounts to the conscious political decision to give up the principle of revolution as a scientifically grounded activity, as a praxis with a rational foundation. The contemporary emphasis on “cultural politics” which one finds throughout intellectual and radical discourse in Latin America as well as in the metropolis, while useful and positive to the degree that it opens up new areas for genuinely political analysis and critique, is symptomatic, in my view, of this theoretical surrender, and more often than not simply ratifies the non-strategy of spontaneism. One might almost speak these days of a “culturalism” occupying the ideological space once held by the “economism” of the Second International revisionists. To adopt the “postmodern” sensibility means, in this sense, to regard the “culturalization” of the political as somehow simply in accordance with the current nature of things–to so minimize the role of political determination as to eliminate it altogether. And yet, this sensibility itself is politically determined.

 

Spontaneism, however it may drape itself in populist slogans and admiration for the people’s day to day struggle for survival, etc., rests on an intellectual distrust of the masses, a view of the mass as beyond the reach of reason and hence to be guided by myth. The Latin American masses have a long history of being stigmatized in this way by both imperial and creole elites. This elitism begins to lose its hold on the intelligentsia in the writings of genuine “radical democrats” such as Marti and is still further overcome in the discourses of revolutionary intellectuals such as Mariategui and Guevara, although even here vestiges of the old viewpoint remain. (Mariategui, who saw the Quechua-speaking indigenous peasants of Peru as beings with full historical and political subjecthood, maintained ridiculously archaic and racist views regarding Peru’s blacks.) And, of course, sexism has been and remains a serious and deadly obstacle.

 

But in the era of ‘postmodernity’ we are being urged, in exchange for a cult of alterity, to relinquish this conception of the masses as the rational agents of social and historical change, as the bearers of progress. Given the increasing prevalence of such aristocratism, however it may devise radical credentials for itself, it becomes possible to fall short of this truly democratic vision, to be seduced by the false Nietzschean regard for the masses as capable only of an unconscious, instinctual political agency.

 

Ultimately, it may be only revolutionary practice, the activity of strategy and organization, that can successfully trouble the political reveries of postmodernism. But just the sheer history of such practice, particularly in Latin America, makes risible any theory which considers politics (in the Leninist sense) to be either too abstract to matter, or–in what finally amounts to the same thing–to be “self- produced,” as Aronowitz has phrased it.

 

Perhaps the most eloquent refutation of spontaneist faith in “new social movements” is recorded in Roque Dalton’s “testimonial classic”Miguel Marmol, in which the legendary Salvadoran revolutionary named in the title recounts a life as a communist militant in Central America. It is impossible to do justice to the combined practical wisdom and theoretical profundity of this narrative by citing excerpts–but one in particular speaks poignantly to the question at hand: In the third chapter of the text, Marmol discusses his return in 1930, shortly before he participates in founding the Salvadoran Communist Party, to his home town of Ilopango. His task is to organize a union of rural workers. At first, as he tells it, the workers reject him, suspicious of his being anti-Catholic. He is led to recall the failure of previous union organizing efforts carried out by a local teacher and a railroad engineer. “However, we suspected they had always worked outside reality, that they hadn’t based their organizing work on the actual problems of people and, on the contrary, had created an impenetrable barrier between their ‘enlightenment’ and the ‘backwardness’ they ascribed to the people.”²⁹

 

Marmol, however, persists in “finding out what the people thought” (M 119)–that is, he refuses to take their initially backward reaction (defense of the church) to mean that they lack “enlightenment.” Meetings are called, and as the people begin to talk about working conditions, Marmol recalls, “it wasn’t hard to hear, over and over again, concepts that sounded to me just like the ‘class struggle,’ the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ etc.” (M 136-136). Marmol’s task, then, is not that of “enlightening” the “backward” masses, nor is it simply to acknowledge “what the people thought” as sovereign. Rather, it is to collect these isolated concepts, to articulate them, and to draw the logically necessary conclusions.

 

Here, in so many words, Marmol demonstrates his profound, dialectical grasp of the essential, contradictory relation of theory to practice, of concept to reality, of the conscious to the spontaneous, of the “from without” to the “from within.” Postmodernism, meanwhile, even at its most “left,” political and self-critical, remains cut-off from the dialectical truths discovered in the practice of Marmol and of the millions of others in Latin America and across the planet who preceded and will follow him.

 

Notes

 

1. An original version of this paper was presented as a lecture, entitled “Postmodernism and Hegemony: Theory and Politics in Latin America,” at the Humanities Institute at SUNY Stony Brook on March 2, 1989.

 

2. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” inThe Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA:Bay Press, 1983), 112.

 

3. Stanley Aronowitz, “Postmodern and Politics,” inUniversal Abandon?: the Politics of Postmodernism, ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 50.Universal Abandon? cited hereafter in text and notes asUA.

 

4. Chantal Mouffe, “Radical Democracy,”UA 32.

 

5. Ernesto Laclau, “Politics and the Limits of Modernity,”UA 66-67.

 

6. Jean-Francois Lyotard,The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

 

7. Frederick Engels,Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1975),46.

 

8. See Ellen Meiksins Wood,The Retreat from Class: a New ‘True’ Socialism (London: Verso, 1986) chapter 4, “The Autonomization of Ideology and Politics.”

 

9. Georg Lukacs,The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1981), 395.

 

10. “The two moments–that of reason and that of its other–stand not in opposition pointing to a dialecticalAufhebung, but in a relationship of tension characterized by mutual repugnance and exclusion” (Habermas, “The Entry into Postmodernity: Nietzsche as Turning Point” inThe Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 103).

 

11. See the introductory chapter to myModernism and Hegemony: a Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).

 

12. “[T]he exterior is constituted by other discourses.” Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 146.

 

13. See Lenin,What is to Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973):

 

all worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of the "conscious element," of the role of Social- Democracy, means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers. (39) Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement, the only choice is--either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a "third" ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms, there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology). Hence to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology. . . . (40-41)

 

14. Peter Dews,Logics of Disintegration (London: Verso, 1987), 217.

 

15. “Interview with Cornell West,”UA 273.

 

16. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,”Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 69.

 

17. See Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism: the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,”New Left Review 146 (July-August 1984).

 

18. Edward Said,The World, the Text and the Critic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983),241.

 

19. Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak,In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York, London: Methuen, 1987), 209.

 

20. See “The Discourse of Others: Feminism and Postmodernism,” in Foster, 57-82.

 

21. George Yudice, “Marginality and the Ethics of Survival,”UA 220.

 

22. See Rigoberta Menchu,Me llamo Rigoberta Menchu y asi me nacio la conciencia (Mexico: Siglo veintiuno, 1983).

 

23. See “Actual Situation and Perspectives of Latin American Philosophy for Liberation,”The Philosophical Forum 20.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1988-89): 43-61. Cited hereafter in text asLAP.

 

24. See Enrique Dussel,Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985), 158-160.

 

25. Roberto Fernandez Retamar,Para una teoria de la literatura hispano-americana (Habana: Casa de las Americas, 1975).

 

26. Neil Larsen, “Latin America and Postmodernity: a Brief Theoretical Sketch,” unpublished paper; andModernism and Hegemony.

 

27. Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’,”Social Text 17 (Fall 1987): 3-27.

 

28. Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez, “Marxism in Latin America,”The Philosophical Forum 20.1-2 (Fall-Winter 1988-89): 114-128.

 

29. Roque Dalton,Miguel Marmol, trans. Kathleen Ross and Richard Schaaf (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 1982), 119. Cited hereafter in text asM.