Posthegemony in Times of the Pink Tide

In the closing paragraph of a recent essay that asks “What’s Left for Latin American Cultural Studies?,” critic Sophia McClennen addresses the future trajectories of North American academics and their counterpart cultural practitioners in the region. For McClennen, the rise of Latin America’s marea rosada (pink tide) governments compels critics to reconfigure the structures of power and loci of domination that were previously assumed to fall in the hands of the right-wing dictatorships that swept the region from the 1970s onward.
 

As the overt and covert US military influence in the region gave way to “dollar diplomacy,” a number of Latin American nations found themselves led by governments that self-identified as left or socialist. Venezuela, Brazil, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, and Cuba became part of the “pink tide” of the twenty-first century socialism movement. While the actually existing Left politics of these governments has been analyzed and critiqued, and while not all of these governments were able to remain in power, it remains clear that this is an unprecedented moment for Left politics.

(138)

Now no longer in the grips of right-wing tyranny, the state faces a categorically different challenge and, with it, so do North American cultural critics of Latin America. That challenge is to confront the new global configurations of capital under neoliberalism, which were first tested in the very Latin American countries that now resist them, and to strategize equally transnational modes of resistance that break with the now outdated leftist tradition of local armed factions and guerrilla groups. “The institutionalization of the Left that has taken place during these administrations will likely be one of the main areas of focus for future work on Latin American cultural studies,” McClennen predicts:

The currently existing forms of political activism have taken on new modes of organization that no longer track to the idealized ideas of indigenous resistance movements and guerrilla groups, and they no longer take place wholly within the nation-state. These transformations call for new ways to engage the power imbalances that stem from neoliberal free-market practices.

(138)

While the people, leaders, artists, and thinkers of the region have embraced this change, adapting their own methodologies and critiques to the new configurations of power ushered in by this supposed paradigm shift, the part of the North American academy that likes to think of itself as a critical check on Anglo-American ethnocentrism has categorically failed (or undoubtedly will fail) to follow suit. “One thing remains the same,” warns McClennen: “Latin American cultural studies will continue to be guided by polemics, internal debates, fashionable trends, and a permanent desire to create new forms of academic knowledge and new modes of critique capable of advancing an ever-changing, constantly in question Left project” (138).

 
McClennen longs for a politically involved kind of Latin American cultural studies that bridges the divide between the professorial armchair and the revolutionary actor.¹ To a certain extent, her appraisal of the situation is accurate: academics with leftist political interests often find themselves mired in the academy. But this phenomenon is by no means unique to Latin American cultural studies, and indeed one could argue precisely the opposite regarding the relationship between existing political praxis and academics who practice Latin American cultural studies. One might even go so far as to argue that Latin American cultural studies vis-à-vis its institutional counterparts in North American literary and cultural studies enjoys a relatively marked presence in political debates in the region of expertise. From the ’70s and ’80s to the present, Beatriz Sarlo, Ileana Rodríguez, Ángel Rama, Ernesto Laclau, and others have enjoyed prominent roles in Latin American politics as well as in the development of Latin American cultural studies. (Excepting Sarlo, all have held permanent positions in the North American academy and Sarlo herself has lectured widely and held numerous visiting positions in the US.) But McClennen’s critique is sharper and more directed toward what she sees as a general tendency within the discipline in the Anglo-American academic world to overlook political developments in Latin America while professing both a politically Left stance as well as interpretative authority on the region.
 
Against this backdrop of North American humanities scholars who work on Latin America while remaining disconnected from the rise to power of self-proclaimed socialist governments since Chávez in 1998, two recent books attempt to engage these regional political shifts from north of the Mexican border. Jon Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America (2010) traces the history of these shifts within the academic and activist Left, from Peronism in Argentina to Maoism in Peru, and, like McClennen, he highlights moments in this history that suggest a configuration of political struggle different than the one on offer until now. John Beverley’s Latinamericanism After 9/11 (2011) shares many of Beasley-Murray’s concerns, but largely questions the extent to which academics and activists alike must reconfigure the approach to leftist struggle in Latin America, and diagnoses such attempts at reconfiguration as one of the melancholic effects of our post-1989 world, after the end of “really existing socialism.” Yet for all their apparent and important differences, these and many other books being published in today’s North American “Latin American cultural studies” paint a very different picture of the discipline than the one offered by McClennen: polemics and internal debates are increasingly shelved in favor of thinking about existing modes of struggle—from the Zapatistas in Chiapas to the piqueteros in Argentina—that attempt to position themselves with, against, and beyond the confines of the state. In fact, recent publications from critics like Bruno Bosteels, José Rabasa, Ileana Rodríguez, and Gareth Williams, among many others, not to mention the consistent production from preeminent thinkers on the region like John Holloway and Michael Löwy, suggest attempts to reconfigure the North American academy with an eye not only to the 2008 global economic crises but also to the marea rosada governments are fundamental to updating and reinvigorating the academic Left.²
 
Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony is divided into two parts, the first critical, the second positive. The first part mounts a critique of hegemony by way of its current critical avatars in cultural studies and in civil-society theory. The variant of cultural studies that concerns Beasley-Murray is the one commonly referred to as the Birmingham School.³ Largely emanating from the Richard Hoggart-directed Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, this version of cultural studies developed in the early 1960s out of an exchange between British Marxist historians and literary critics that featured the likes of Stuart Hall, E. P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams. Beasley-Murray maintains that this strand of cultural studies reduces politics to hegemony, which he understands, via Antonio Gramsci, as “the notion . . . that the state maintains its dominance (and that of social and economic elites) thanks to the consent of those it dominates. Where it does not win consent, this theory suggests, the state resorts to coercion” (x). Beasley-Murray takes British cultural studies to task for obscuring processes that do not involve consent and coercion. These include habit, affect, and the multitude, concepts borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze, and Antonio Negri, respectively. Habit, affect, and the multitude form the basis for the second part of Beasley-Murray’s book, which constitutes posthegemony positively as a theoretical and political project in contradistinction to current modes of thought like cultural studies.
 
In the first part of the book, Beasley-Murray concludes that cultural studies promotes populism as a stand-in for the state, thereby obscuring and, more devastatingly, becoming complicit with the state-led, antipolitical status quo. He argues that, by paying attention only to representational forms of discourse, cultural studies misses and actively ignores the pre-rational forms of oppression and domination, such as populism, that the state wields through habit and affect. Beasley-Murray’s critique of civil-society theory resembles his attack on cultural studies: civil-society theory also cannot account for pre-rational forms of domination like habit and affect and, in its ignorance of these, not only fails to grasp contemporary politics but, in fact, also actively promotes a political program complicit with the ideology of the state. Whereas cultural studies promotes populism, civil-society theory is complicit with neoliberalism, and populism and neoliberalism furthermore work symbiotically to advance late capitalism’s right-wing agenda and suppression of politics.
 
Beasley-Murray targets three thinkers who exemplify the theoretical heights of cultural studies (Ernesto Laclau) and civil-society theory (Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen). He argues that a defense of populism is not only legible from Laclau’s first book, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977), through his most recent, On Populist Reason (2005), but is also premised on the unsustainable distinction between a Right and a Left populism that Laclau drops in his later texts, thereby “validating populism as a whole.” “Hegemony, cultural studies, populism: these three slippery terms meet at the nexus that is Laclau’s theory of hegemony,” writes Bealsey-Murray, only to sound hegemony theory’s death-knell moments later: “any analysis that relies upon the concept of hegemony inevitably partakes of a populist politics” that remains silent about the role of the state and institutional power, inevitably becoming antipolitical (41). Whereas Laclau’s failure lies in his categorical evasion of questions relating to the state, thereby excluding it from the political picture, Arato and Cohen deal with the state openly by delineating its supposed autonomy. For Beasley-Murray, this attempt to clearly separate civil society from the state is telling. Their
 

insistence on the autonomy of the state and market, allegedly in the name of civil society’s own autonomy, demonstrates the paradoxes of civil society theory: a theory of democracy becomes a discourse of governmentality and control that sets the constituted power of state and market institutions against the democratizing force of social movements.

(88-89)

Arato and Cohen offer a civil-society theory with self-imposed limits to the utopian projects instigated by various social movements. But because they do not think these limit horizons from within the social movements, they cannot make the former work productively for the latter and at the expense of the interests of state or market forces. Instead, these theorists impose upon civil society (and, hence, the social movements that arise from it) various rational controls that police its boundaries, including the very market-friendly, instrumental logic to which they profess opposition.

 
While Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America critiques political theories that cannot account for pre-social, pre-ideological, or even pre-cognitive modes of social domination like habit and affect, Beverley’s Latinamericanism After 9/11 questions some of the political implications of such a critique. Beverley is less concerned with the civil-society theory of Arato and Cohen than with the avowedly rational concepts of hegemony and ideology that Beasley-Murray considers outdated for understanding contemporary politics. For Beverley, not only do hegemony and ideology still hold theoretical purchase, but, along with other concepts like identity, they also appear most apt for describing the rise of pink tide governments across Latin America. In a moment of self-critique, though, Beverley arrives at the same conclusions as McClennen about Latin American cultural studies today: the current state of politics in Latin America (which is to say, “after 9/11″—neoliberalism and new social movements included) compels us to do away with our old critical paradigms. McClennen thinks that this newly-oriented academic focus on the pink tide governments will result in updated critical work that will no longer recall “images of guerrillas rising up in arms” or resemble “the idealized ideas of indigenous resistance movements and guerrilla groups, and . . . no longer take place wholly within the nation-state” (138). For both McClennen and Beverley, the pink tide suggests a fundamental break from much of Latin America’s right-wing past, especially since the onset of neoliberalism after Chile’s own 9/11.⁴ But Beverley weighs more heavily the continuities between these supposed “indigenous resistance movements” of yesteryear and the current pink tide governments in countries like Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. “The paradigm implicit in subaltern studies (and postmodernist social theory in general) was that of the separation of the state and the subaltern,” he writes, explaining his own intellectual trajectory since the early ’90s: “the intention was to recognize and support both previously existing and newly emergent forms of resistance that did not pass through conventional historical narratives of state formation and statist forms of citizenship and political or social participation” (8-9). But now, these very subaltern movements have themselves propped up socialist governments: “in a situation where, as is the case of several governments of the marea rosada, social movements from the popular-subaltern sectors of society have ‘become the state,’ to borrow a phrase from Ernesto Laclau, or are bidding to do so, a new way of thinking the relationship between the state and society has become necessary” (9). This new paradigm, contrary to McClennen’s implication, entails a rethinking rather than an avoidance of the question of the state in light of its Left-subalternist alterations in Latin America.
 
Rethinking the relationship between the subaltern and the state is the aim of the last chapter of Beverley’s book, and one might even go so far as to say that the entire book is structured around this chapter. Beverley and Beasley-Murray share this concern with the state, and their books could be said to emerge out of a fundamental dissatisfaction with the way current leftist political and cultural theories deal with the question of the state. Beasley-Murray’s dissatisfaction with populism lies in its ability to generate an affectively charged support of the state in the guise of ignoring it altogether, and in its inability to distinguish between its leftist and rightist variations. His critique of civil-society theory similarly foregrounds its relation to the state and its positing of an autonomous civil society that, in turn, implies the autonomy of the state and of the market forces that end up governing it. While Beverley at certain points seems to agree with this assessment, Beasley-Murray presents the relationship between the state and the subaltern classes as always having been intimate: “it is not so much that the subaltern is excluded from power. In fact, the state is parasitic upon the power of the so-called ‘excluded’; it is they who provide it with legitimacy and life, as much as (or even more than) it is the state that denies welfare and recognition to them” (162-63). But the state still functions as an axis of control and subordination with respect to the subaltern. “The state is a reflex, constituted by and in affect, only to expel any affective surplus to the demonized margins of its territorial and symbolic control. The state excludes culture and affect, categorizing and disciplining it, but as a reaction-formation that depends upon an affective culture that is, in fact, primary” (163). This account implies a fleeting or immanent hope of a state that, as Marx says of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto, produces its own gravediggers, but in this case specifically through the emphasis on affect rather than by creating the proletariat. This hope, however, appears much more pronounced in Beverley’s suggestion that the pink tide governments, if not the gravediggers themselves, at least compel us to reconsider the state seriously as a locus of struggle that might expedite this process.
 
If there has always been an intimate (though not reciprocal) relationship between the subaltern and the state, Beverley suggests that it has qualitatively changed “after 9/11,” that is, after the sweeping victories of self-proclaimed socialist governments across Latin America since Chávez. Along with this qualitative shift, many leftist academics must give up their allergy toward the state, he urges, and this includes entertaining the idea that many of today’s leaders in the region came to power with the overwhelming support of groups that have been typically classified as subaltern. Evo Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) government in Bolivia is a case in point. MAS vice-president Álvaro García Linera gives one of the most forceful arguments for bypassing the seeming opposition between the subaltern and the state upheld by critics like Beasley-Murray. Instead of maintaining a kind of ethical relation of unbridled solidarity with the subaltern classes, one which excludes politics altogether,
 

García Linera argues for a new form of politics directed at “becoming” the state that in some sense comes from the subaltern, but also involves the participation of intellectuals and “theory.” He moves away from the simple binary opposition between the state and the subaltern, to presuppose that hegemony not only can be but needs to be constructed from subaltern positions.

(Beverley 120).

While contradictions and tensions that, to a certain extent, dilute or slow the process of change will necessarily exist, the initial step of reaching state power is more important than maintaining a critique from within the left (a kind of “left opposition” in solidarity). And for Beverley, as for García Linera, this project of reaching state power must entail certain utopian ideals both to keep it honest and to keep it moving.⁵

 
In addition to rethinking the question of the state, which has been completely left off the table as an object of inquiry for Left critique since the fall of “really existing socialism” in 1989 (or even before then, dating back to Nicos Poulantzas and the experiment of Eurocommunism),⁶ Beverley asks us to rethink the question of armed struggle in Latin America. By this provocation he does not mean to rethink the viability of armed struggle today, but rather to consider how contemporary reflections on the armed struggles of the past indicate the political positions of Latin American intellectuals today vis-à-vis the pink tide governments. Beverley classifies most retrospectives of the armed struggle in Latin America, beginning roughly with the 1959 Cuban Revolution and ending with the 1990 defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua due to the US-backed Contra War, as part of the “paradigm of disillusion” (see Ch. 5). He argues that most intellectuals who participated in or were ideologically close to these guerrilla movements in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s cast a revisionist light on them today in an attempt to distance themselves from them. These intellectuals thus produce a body of narratives that call into question the armed struggle, presenting a heavily one-sided account of the events. But much more important for Beverley is the fact that many of the pink tide’s leaders, including Álvaro García Linera and Dilma Rousseff (the current president of Brazil), themselves participated in the armed struggle.
 
For Beverley, this disavowal of yesterday’s armed struggle politically cashes out today in critiques of the pink tide governments, complacency with neoliberalism, and fodder for the Left’s right-wing challengers.
 

My underlying assumption is that, while there are many good reasons to be critical of or skeptical about the armed struggle, a vision of it as an ‘equivocación,’ or error, as in [Argentine critic Beatriz] Sarlo, even when it is produced from what is nominally a leftist position, sustains neoliberal hegemony in Latin America, in the same way that an antisixties narrative underlies the neo-conservative turn in the United States.

(98)

Many of the retrospective narratives of the armed struggle come from intellectuals who have since markedly veered to the right,⁷ and Beverley worries that this almost exclusive focus on the failures of the armed struggle, even when written from a leftist perspective like Sarlo’s, leaves future generations only one option: that of accepting the neoliberal status quo. He notes moreover that the paradigm of disillusion has not prepared us adequately for appraising the new pink tide governments. It has instead imposed upon us a “residual guilt that shades into an acceptance of, or identification with, the powers that be” (109). We must thoroughly work through our own disillusion, our own melancholia of defeat, without resorting to undifferentiated, one-sided, and developmentist narratives that uncritically identify “forward movement in time with progress” (100).⁸ We must remember, in short, that the armed struggles of the past were waged at a time when the future of Latin America was, like today, up for grabs.

 
Reflections on those armed struggles of the past, many now categorized as new social movements, make up the second part of Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony. This second part, theoretically structured around the concepts of affect, habit, and the multitude, builds a theory of posthegemony that not only breaks with Laclau’s populism and Arato and Cohen’s civil-society theory, but also challenges other prevailing analytical tools like ideology critique for understanding human interaction in merely rational terms. Theorists on the Left—Slavoj Žižek in particular—have attempted to revamp ideology critique in an attempt to move beyond the age-old Marxist impasse of understanding ideology as a mere question of false-consciousness. Žižek instead calls for an analysis of how ideology structures the very social reality in which we live, beyond our immediate symbolic register. But Beasley-Murray contends that “if ideology is no longer a matter of (mis)representation, then it should be reconceived as immanent and affective” (177). The social order and the state, in other words, exert their control through habitual customs and affective charges that make people inured to the struggles of everyday life and momentarily bracket the question of the state altogether. Habits, Beasley-Murray explains, are commonsensical and undertaken without ever having fully come to consciousness. They can reproduce themselves time and again. The social atmosphere in which they are formed furthermore sets the limits of this supposed common sense. Most importantly, habits and affects happen in the body below the symbolic registers of discourse and representation at which ideology remains trapped.
 
Beasley-Murray is not content, however, with simply offering up affect and habit as tools for critique. His project is much more ambitious: “Affect threatens social order. . . . Resistance is no longer a matter of contradiction, but rather of the dissonance between would-be hegemonic projects and the immanent processes that they always fail fully to represent” (136). As suggested earlier, perhaps it is because the state has tapped into affective energies in order to control its citizenry that affect also becomes the new site and weapon of Left struggle. The importance of affect for Beasley-Murray’s “posthegemonic analysis” cannot be overstated. Elsewhere he makes the primacy of affect clear: it structures habit (affect at a standstill) as well as the multitude (affect becoming subject). Beasley-Murray aligns himself here with the affect theory developed by political theorist Brian Massumi, though he seems aware of some of affect theory’s pitfalls: “the Deleuzian conception of affect is insufficient, indeed . . . it falls prey to traps similar to those that befall hegemony theory, in that on its own it cannot distinguish between insurgency and order, ultimately between revolution and fascism” (127).
 
Affect theory’s solution to this important political conundrum finds its fullest expression in its response to terrorism. Beasley-Murray argues for understanding El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a guerrilla group that waged a continuous war against the state from roughly 1980 to 1992, through Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic “war machine.” The “war machine” offers an alternative form of political organization to the state. It constitutes an outside to the state and is constituted by a radical exteriority that is absolutely open to plurality, multiplicity, and difference. Politically, it implies a democratic organization that must be constantly open to experimentation and renewal. And in the face of terror, it “obliterates individuality” and makes us “realize that we are part of a collective” (154). Habit, like affect, also has a positive means of presenting a political challenge. In the epilogue to his book, Beasley-Murray considers the case of the 1989 Caracazo in Venezuela:
 

The trigger for the Caracazo was no more (and no less) than habit. Commuters were accustomed to paying one price for public transport; they protested when they were suddenly forced to pay another. In response to the shock doctrine of neoliberal reform, sprung on the nation without warning after President [Carlos Andrés] Pérez had run for office on a broadly populist platform, the Venezuelan population took violent umbrage.

(288)

Beasley-Murray notes that this response from the Venezuelan multitude was conservative in many respects, thereby offering a dose of skepticism to his stress in the previous chapter on the multitude’s revolutionary power. The Venezuelan multitude made itself known again in 2002 when a short-lived coup d’état against Chávez was paralyzed by sweeping protests calling for the deposed president’s return. Beasley-Murray reads this moment in which Chávez was briefly deposed as a quintessential expression of the multitude’s power: chavismo or the Bolivarian revolution, largely understood as a populism centered around the ideology of one person, could not exist without a multitude that resisted calls for representation.

 
In the few years since its publication, Beasley-Murray’s book has already attracted a significant amount of attention in the forms of both praise and criticism. Posthegemony was awarded Honorable Mention for the Modern Language Association’s annual Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for best book on Latin American or Spanish literature and culture.⁹ Beyond numerous positive reviews, it has been the subject of several essays and numerous conference papers.¹⁰ But the book and its overall project have also faced an increasing amount of criticism from Latin American literary, anthropology, and political science circles.¹¹ Beverley’s Latinamericanism has enjoyed some of the same results.¹² But apart from a handful of positive reviews, his arguments have largely been called into question by some of the same critics who support Beasley-Murray’s analysis of posthegemony. Indeed, his book is exclusively targeted by a dossier of the journal Política Común titled “On John Beverley’s Latinamericanism after 9/11” that is edited by Sam Steinberg and includes an article by Beasley-Murray himself.
 
These varied responses to each book in part have to do with their respective projects: while Beasley-Murray’s book attempts to develop its own positive theory of posthegemony, Beverley’s book interrogates already available theories. But they also have to do with the dialectic between their perceived positions with respect to Latin America’s pink tide governments and their theoretical commitments. Beverly, for example, is not bashful about his support for the governments in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela. And his theoretical commitments remain tied to the more traditional Marxist concepts of hegemony, ideology, and subalternity. Whereas against those who, like Beverley, praise the pink tide governments, Beasley-Murray contends that “these electoral victories are at best a symptom, at worst a reaction” (285). They are a symptom, he suggests, of the multitude’s need for constituted power at the same time that its constituent power exceeds the political representation they offer. They are a reaction to the displays of constituent power insofar as they can create a political vacuum that primes far-right alliances between the military and neoliberal capitalist forces to take control the moment they falter. This kind of response obligates Beasley-Murray to frame the political problem differently: given that the pink tide governments do not offer a new political opportunity insofar as they occupy the role of the state, we must develop new forms of critique that make us attentive to the contours of state power. The tools used by the state to quell resistance, like affect and habit, then also become sites of resistance, places where the pressure of the multitude can unravel the power of the state.
 
Beverley’s critique of these attempts to wither away the state without ever becoming part of it stage this dialectic between posthegemony theory’s support or opposition to the pink tide governments and its theoretical commitments. Following Lenin’s famous tract “Left Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1921), Beverley sees Beasley-Murray and other politically-informed “second wave” deconstructionist critics like Moreiras as “ultraleftists.”¹³ He characterizes this form of deconstruction as an attempt to intervene in Leftist politics (and critics like Moreiras would certainly agree): their goals are not merely to deconstruct texts, but also to renew the Left in order to lay the theoretical groundwork for a political transformation in Latin America. Beverley sees this last goal as the one this politicized form of deconstruction cannot live up to without supporting the pink-tide governments:
 

It seems, then, that both of these distinct (albeit related) outcomes to the unexpected impasse deconstruction encounters in its pretended relation with Latinamericanism—that is, Moreiras’s critique of the “onto-theological” character of politics and the apocalyptic ultraleftism of the “multitude” and “posthegemony” involve in fact a renunciation of actual politics, which means that despite their claim to be “transformative,” they remain complicit with the existing order of things.

(59)

Put another way, deconstruction’s ethical fraternity with the subaltern (he uses the example of Gayatri Spivak) keeps the latter politically in their place as the idealized subaltern. It takes away from them any power they might have had to change their subaltern status. “To make the claim that deconstruction is on the side of the subaltern, whereas ‘hegemony’ is on the side of domination,” writes Beverley, “is precisely not to deconstruct the binary that grounds that claim in the first place” (114). Instead of allowing for the possibility of the subaltern classes to change their status qualitatively and become part of, say, the proletariat or the ruling political class, deconstructionists reify the subaltern to the point of fixing people to their marginal political status.

 
While Beasley-Murray’s and Beverley’s respective projects seem at first glance to be antithetical to one another, at several moments this opposition dissolves and they appear much closer. For example, the most polemical chapter of Beverley’s book, titled “The Neoconservative Turn,” attacks a group of Latin Americanist critics that he claims have turned to the right from within the Left. He identifies this trend with three scholars in particular: the Guatemalan critic Mario Roberto Morales, the Uruguayan scholar Mabel Moraña, and Beatriz Sarlo. Beverley is afraid that something like what happened in France after the ’68 student protests will happen to these Latin American critics: in France, student members of a revolutionary Maoist group—among them André Glucksmann and Bernard Henry-Lévy—quickly turned to the Right after the protests, calling themselves the nouveaux philosophes, and made their careers through intellectual posturing on TV. Beverley’s argument is purposely polemical and overstated, and Morales has rightly taken him to task in an exchange published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (where Beverley’s chapter first appeared as an article) for a kind of multiculturalist essentialism that reifies Latin America’s indigenous identifications and unconditionally celebrates certain identities (“mestizo,” “the Mayas,” “the subaltern,” etc.) to understand a multi-ethnic reality.¹⁴ Beverley all too easily equates a cultural anti-essentialism with anti-leftism. As Morales explains, “Beverley, being a culturalist (that is, someone who privileges culture over the economy when theorizing about the rights of the subaltern) also adopts the moralism of a ‘people’s commissar,’ pointing out who is on the right and who on the left” (87). In other words, by leaving economics out of the picture entirely, Beverley cannot distinguish mestizo elites from, say, the subjugated mestizo peasants. The dictates of multiculturalism would only be able to identify both as mestizos, understood as an undifferentiated subaltern in whose name we must unconditionally submit. Beverley falls into the same inability to distinguish right from left that he spends his entire book attempting to address. In many ways, Latinamericanism is fraught with Beverley’s postmodernist past that comes into contradiction with a Marxist present.
 
Beverley comes closest to Beasley-Murray in his critique of Sarlo (whose book, Scenes from a Postmodern Life, the latter translated). Beverley takes Sarlo to task for defending literature in a modernist way against other forms of cultural articulation. In his Against Literature (1993), Beverley famously denounced literature as a bourgeois construct that cannot adequately represent an essentialized subaltern subject. He continues this line of criticism in Latinamericanism after 9/11. In the case of Sarlo, who criticizes “a testimonial Left that seeks refuge in the moral-formal reaffirmation of its values,” Beverley counters in a way that surprisingly allies himself with Beasley-Murray’s focus on affect as a political category. “To be on the Left today is to intervene in the public sphere and in politics by refuting the mimetic pacts that are pacts of complicity or resignation,” Sarlo writes (qtd. 87), to which Beverley responds:
 

The giro subjetivo [subjective turn] of testimonio with its emphasis on affect over critical theory, empathy over analysis, is in that sense the corollary of something like Kirchner’s neo-Peronism for her. A bad cultural practice—the giro subjetivo—leads to bad politics (because for Sarlo, Kirchner, and now his wife too are bad politics).

(87)

Beverley reads Sarlo here as equating the “giro subjetivo” with the Kirchners’ brand of Peronism, which he seems to support however reluctantly. After all, Beverley’s boundless support for the testimonio as a literary form that escapes the confines of modernist narrative places him firmly, contra Sarlo, on the side of the “giro subjetivo.” If for Sarlo the “giro subjetivo” means an emphasis on testimonio at the expense of the chronicle, the novel, or the poem, then for Beverley it seems that the benefit of this subjective turn is precisely “its emphasis on affect over critical theory”—its emphasis, in other words, on a post-ideological critique that escapes the confines of rational thought by becoming attentive to the naturalized, pre-cognitive response to an event. This move seems at least questionable if not highly contradictory: does Sarlo’s critique of the Kirchners not offer a way out of the affectively charged and politically ambiguous method behind Peronism’s “two hands” doctrine, in which populism has the dexterity of bringing together those on the Left with those on the Right? Critical theory, for Sarlo, does not lead to a political ambiguity that, under the pretense of Left governance, would allow the Right or right-wing policies into the government through the back door. Beverley takes this side against Sarlo because his hand seems forced from the beginning: his failure to differentiate the different governments of the pink tide (similar to Roberto Morales’s charge vis-à-vis mestizaje) forces him to defend all of them at all costs. Sarlo, conversely, clearly has her reasons for calling the Kirchner government to task from the Left: their neo-Peronist populism has occluded the fact that many government officials formerly served under Carlos Menem’s neoliberal, right-wing regime (1989-1999). How, then, can Kirchner’s government claim to be of the left when her government is filled with people who a decade ago were on the right and who have never spoken openly about their supposed “transformation,” let alone disavowed it or engaged in any kind of self-critique?

 
Like Beasley-Murray, Beverley envisions posthegemony as a desirable goal for the Latin American (and, arguably, the international) Left. “But to get to that point, a more conventional politics of some sort is necessary,” he reminds us before drawing a parallel to the South African apartheid regime: “after apartheid, ‘forgiveness,’ multilateralism, Derrida’s ‘politics of friendship’ are possible in South Africa, even necessary to ground a new form of national-popular hegemony; but to end apartheid required a struggle, both political and military” (59). For Beverley, Beasley-Murray’s theory of posthegemony leaves out the intermediary step of acquiring the state apparatus that would even allow for arranging constituent power along the lines of the multitude, habit, or affect. In fact, it’s unclear why Beverley thinks that posthegemony might be used to understand South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC). Scholarship on the TRC has suggested quite the opposite and few believe that one can develop the kind of systemic change necessary in South Africa from a Derridean politics of forgiveness.¹⁵
 
While Beverley’s critique of Beasley-Murray’s project is certainly valid, it evades more fundamental questions that underpin the latter’s use of affect. These questions have political consequences that in Posthegemony go unanswered and largely unacknowledged. Affective theorists like Massumi (with whom Beasley-Murray explicitly aligns posthegemony) and the political theorist William Connolly have recently faced strong critiques that, among other things, highlight the theory’s political vacuity.¹⁶ The strongest critique so far, posed by Ruth Leys, questions the overwhelming importance affect theorists place on the primacy of affect. By primacy, Leys means the pre-social, pre-ideological, and ultimately pre-cognitive privilege affect is said to have over supposedly rational responses to stimuli like emotion. Beasley-Murray, in Posthegemony, doubles down on the primacy of affect:
 

It is only as affect is delimited and captured that bodies are fixed and so subjectivity (or at least, individual subjectivity) and transcendence emerge, but as this happens, affect itself changes: the order that establishes both subjectivity and transcendence also (and reciprocally) converts affect into emotion.

(128)

Beasley-Murray envisions affect as the primary, collective response to stimuli in contradistinction to emotion, which appears as the individual, subjective one. Leys has critiqued Massumi for his incorrect reading of neuroscientific experiments in his famous essay, “The Autonomy of Affect.”¹⁷ But I’d like to question the political results one can derive from affect theory.

 
Assuming that affect does occupy some sort of pre-cognitive domain, a positive political project like posthegemony that is built upon a theory of affect necessarily grounds itself on a form of determinism. We are affected by various stimuli every day, but only in the emotional (that is, cognitive) register can we make political decisions. This is because, in the affective (pre-cognitive) register, these political decisions are made for us. Massumi’s theory, derived as much from Deleuze and Guattari as from neurological experiments, casts affect as independent of signification and meaning. Massumi’s example of Ronald Reagan as the political example par excellence of affect is cited by
 

Beasley-Murray: Ronald Reagan, for instance, put affect to work in the service of state power, conjuring up sovereignty by projecting confidence, “the apotheosis of affective capture.” … Rather than seeking consent, Reagan achieved the semblance of control by transmitting “vitality, virtuality, tendency.”

(Posthegemony 129)

The presumed “autonomy of affect” (its pre-cognitive nature) works together with politics in a strictly deterministic fashion. Reagan enthralled so many people, even people who were presumably politically opposed to him (i.e., the so-called “Reagan democrats”), because he was able to tap into their affective predisposition. They were at the mercy of Reagan’s affective conceit, in other words, above and beyond their ability to think. This interpretation of events tells a tragic and politically impotent story about why so many people decided to vote for Reagan: presumably, there is nothing anyone on the left could have done to thwart the affective responses of so many people. They were predisposed to vote for Reagan’s grandfather-like because their affective disposition, over which they had no control given its autonomy, guided them in this way.

 
This narrative categorically ignores the actual political calculation and propaganda that right-wing activists and Republican strategists poured into Reagan’s marketing campaign. It also ignores the decades of ideological purging of left-wing activists and intellectuals as a result of McCarthyism and the Cold War that so significantly debilitated the Left in the US. How can one possibly construct a political program that is based upon categories over which we have no control? Others—elites, namely—may have affective control over us, but we seem to have no affective control over ourselves. With these assumptions, we might as well consider ascribing to a Heideggerian politics of Stimmung (mood) in which we give ourselves up to the moods that shape us.¹⁸ The pre-symbolic category of affect, for Beasley-Murray, ends up reaffirming everything posthegemony is against: in his chapter combining Deleuze, affect, and the FMLN, Beasley-Murray resorts to the symbolic language of testimonio and literary collage in order to challenge subjectivity. “The guerrilla both forms a war machine as ‘an alternative mode of social organization’ and reorders affect through visceral means, yet precisely effects this (exemplarily) and is shown to do so through a ‘combination of testimonio and literary collage,'” writes Philip Derbyshire about this chapter in Posthegemony, before concluding that “a signifying practice does the work of counter-subjectivation. So local hegemonic practices but no hegemonic work at a national level: this seems an arbitrary and self-amputating restriction” (53). Furthermore, it seems like a restriction that undoes the project of posthegemony altogether.
 
In the end, these two books elucidate two political-theoretical positions on the current state of affairs in Latin America and in Latin Americanism (cultural studies, literary criticism, etc.). A position not articulated by either side of this debate might better frame the difference between Beasley-Murray and Beverley. Recall Althusser’s position vis-à-vis Stalinism.¹⁹ Many orthodox Marxists and communist party lines around the world dogmatically aligned themselves with Stalinism through the 1960s. Conversely, communist party members fled the party to the right and used right-wing critiques of Stalinism to justify their decision. Althusser dialectically rejected the either/or dichotomy Stalinists and right-wing critics presented. He instead embarked on what he called the “first left-wing critique of Stalinism.” What Althusser meant by this left-wing critique was that he would, unlike other critics of Soviet orthodoxy, critique the theoretical premises of Stalinism from within, that is, from within the radius of Stalinism otherwise known as Marxism-Leninism, but without allying himself in any way with the Stalinist orthodoxy.
 
Beasley-Murray and Beverley, on both the theoretical and political levels, seem to present an unbridgeable opposition. Beasley-Murray’s views on the marea rosada have become more complex and ambivalent since he penned a first draft of Posthegemony over a decade ago (the ambivalence of the Prologue when compared to the rest of the book displays this change along both theoretical and political lines). But it is clear that, on the whole, the book presents an anti-statist critique as well as a program for theoretical intervention. Beverley, by contrast, presents the opposite: a pro-statist position that unyieldingly, though at times hesitantly, commits itself to the vision and governments encompassed by the “pink tide.” This political position leads to theoretical mishaps, as with respect to Sarlo, that reveals its theoretical inability to distinguish the many valences of the Left that the pink-tide governments represent. Let us make no mistake: both Beasley-Murray and Beverley make these critiques from a position within the Left. (They are in no way succumbing to right-wing propaganda.) But they present accounts that all too quickly support or reject the present pink tide governments almost wholesale without being able to differentiate among them. The present moment calls for a much more nuanced differentiation of these governments than the ones offered by right-wing shills like Jorge Castañeda, Mexico’s former Secretary of Foreign Affairs under Vicente Fox, or Michael Reid, the Americas editor for The Economist.²⁰ Popularly labeled the doctrine of the “two Lefts,” this right-wing differentiation cuts the Left along lines of economic friendliness to the United States: depending on who you read, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador might appear on the bad side, while Brazil, Argentina, and Chile (under Bachelet) might appear on the good side.
 
For those left dissatisfied with the seeming dichotomy Beasley-Murray and Beverley represent, perhaps a “left-wing critique” of the many pink-tide governments in Latin America still remains an option. Can we critique these governments from within the realm of their theoretical enterprise precisely in order to make them more egalitarian, democratic, multicultural, multiethnic, and the like? How can we express solidarity, however futile it may seem from the ivory tower or North American armchair, with these self-described socialist governments in Latin America while at the same time critiquing them for not being socialist enough? How are we to moderate our utopian impulse of wanting to see the state practice a more egalitarian politics while remaining fully aware of capitalism’s universalization and the impossibility of seeing an ideal state develop over night? Marx gave one of his most famous definitions of communism in The German Ideology: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence” (56-57). In short, how might we re-interpret this dictum for our present moment in the times of the pink tide?