Notes on Liberalism at its Limits: Crime and Terror in the Latin American Cultural Text (2009) by Ileana Rodríguez

“Thus, for liberalism to ever be universal, it must achieve the impossible: obtain global consensus on the meaning of civil society, the public sphere, and the state. To do so, it must engage with concrete communities and mediate the relations they establish among themselves socially. If liberal ideology can do this, it will become truly liberal politics” (5). This is how Ileana Rodríguez’ Liberalism at its Limits. Crime and Terror in The Latin American Cultural Text (2009) closes its introduction. These statements illustrate what comes after one of the main tasks of the book. That is, once the limits of liberalism have been pointed out, then there must be a reform, so that liberalism would finally “obtain consensus” on the meaning of the civil society, the public sphere, and the state. The problem for Rodríguez is not that liberalism has, as it does, disrupted the way politics are played around the world, especially considering the North American liberalism and its never-ending pas de deux with the Latin American liberal states, but that liberalism has never fully been able to produce meaning, consensus. This means, of course, that liberalism has been mistranslated. That is why in the “prose of globalization” (3) liberalism has never fully produced global civil societies, public spheres and states in Latin America. Hence, for critical thought, the task is only to respectfully correct the cultural text by intervening the three key semantical and syntactical components that have been mistranslated, wrongly used. 

Guatemala, Colombia and Mexico, each country provides for Rodríguez an example of a “historization of liberalism that will allow us to understand why so-called cultural minorities do not fare as well as so-called cultural majorities” (31). Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonial, La nieta de los mayas, shows how civil society can negotiate opening its porous walls. This text, and Menchú herself, did in the sphere of civil society “either push the borders and seams of liberalism and make it more inclusive or to demonstrate the aporetical nature of the model [liberalism]” (160). Nevertheless, the Colombian and Mexican examples —testimonials from two of the periods of violence in XXth century Colombia (“La Violencia” and “el sicariato”) and from the “feminicidios” in the border town Cd. Juárez, Mexico— do not achieve any inclusion or reform into the liberal arena. We face directly failures, not of liberalism, but failures of state(s) and of a labor system(s) that both produce bodies for a delirious devouring capitalist machine. 

If the grammar of liberalism does not make sense in the context of Colombia and Mexico (and arguably neither in Guatemala), why stick to it for reading Latin American cultural texts? Rodríguez acknowledges that the limits of liberalism are a burden. Rodríguez’ burden and of any liberalist hermeneutic, “is to make sense of a critical analysis that simultaneously invokes and rejects the intervention of these categories [civil society, the state, public sphere] in positing the Mexican state” (155), the Colombian and the Guatemalan state accountable for their failures. The state, itself, is the one to blame, for sure. Yet, following Rodríguez idea of Liberalism as a mistranslated politics, what could be wrong when one is trying to learn the grammar of a foreign language? 

Liberalism main purpose is to turn the state neutral (10), to let everyone, but not all, do what they want, to build an immune state to the exterior while also creating a right, fair and free civil society. In a sense, the Latin American liberal states can only play a “skewed and bizarre performance” (9) in the global political theater. This role, paradoxically, shows signs of true liberal states within Latin America, where these states’ neutrality happens to be successful, by allowing violence to be its only rule; where there is no direct intervention of any foreign state except when cheap labor force needs to be negotiated or druglords attempt to poison the youth of the world; and where critical reason can only “respectfully” approach with a disempowered responsibility to the Global South’ cultural texts and try to write with light beautiful thoughts on a bright light sky, merely just style corrections in the prose of the global world we live in.

Notes on The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America (2002) by Gareth Williams

If the “canonical” side of the Latin Americanist critical discourse on popular culture is limited, and does not guarantees any foreseeable exit from Neoliberalism’s managerial drive, the other side, or an-other side, of popular culture might offer an exit, a suspension, or at least a possibility of thinking an escape to Neoliberalism, (but only perhaps). This is one of the main points of Gareth Williams’ The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America (2002). Divided in three parts the book offers first a detailed analysis of three of the main concepts that have shaped Latin Americanist critical gaze (transculturation, subalternity and hybridity). Secondly, it is exposed and opened a space of suspension —an intermezzo— where the “hegemony” and “counter-hegemony”, both narratives that orchestrated the core of Latin Americanism’s intentions of overcoming Capitalism and Neoliberalism, “cease to make sense” (275). Finally the book presents three reverberations of what might be a perhaps, that is a thought that “has displaced the function of hegemonic thought in ‘the name of reading as active transaction between past and future’” (275). Through this perhaps, a posthegemonic thought becomes possible, and both perhaps and posthegemonic thought “challenge and undermine traditional constituted paradigms [and] point toward their finitude and to the possibility of a theoretical (and potentially constitutive) other side” (275-276). 

It is clear since the beginning of the book that we are reading a “hybrid and inherently incomplete accumulation of distinct processes of approximation toward the contemporary” (3). Then, as much as the limits of transculturation, subalternity and hybridity are sharply pointed out, The Other Side of the Popular does not attempt to have the last word on the conceptual critical arena of Latin Americanism. This happens because the failure of the canonical concepts that ruled most of Latin American thought only prepared the soil for capitalist accumulation to enter and spread. In a way, transculturation, subalternity and hybridity, all “negotiated and imposed from within the state’s naturalization of linguistic and ethnic heterogeneity” (37), and consequently, when imposing negotiation, they excluded precisely that which were they trying to integrate, speak for or reconsider. Hence, The Other Side of the Popular would disavow any attempt of “negotiating” as did the canonical concepts. The task for an-other way of thinking the popular consists, then, not only in pointing the limits of the “most influential” concepts in the field and reading them against the grain, but also of searching for a way of “being asked —silently— not to even try to reproduce the logic of capture that has brought these defenceless eyes to us in the first place” [emphasis added] (301). The other side of the popular is a side without capture, where heterogeneity moves freely in a negative communal landscape.

Posthegemonic thought, one of the key concepts elaborated by Williams, is depicted as a threshold between the ruined and striated space of transculturation, subalternity and hybridity and the smooth space of savage hybridity and the “perhaps”. Posthegemonic thought “thinks and measures hegemony’s force; it resists appropriation by interrupting hegemony’s signifying process; and it does not coincide with hegemony even when it converges with it” (149). This thinking, however, has its ow limits. An intermezzo is a musical composition that bonds two bigger movements, or could be independent itself. Posthegemonic thought could take flight from its own space and role. If this thought stays as a double register that suspends a “certain sense of historicity that belongs to alternative repertoires” while “refusing to reproduce the standardized rationalized, and homogenized narratives and topographies of (post)modern accumulation” (154), posthegemonic thought might become addict to the prosecution of hegemonies, and eventually it would only find its in-betweenness after the ruin of hegemonies, only connecting two big movements. If suspension does not become line of flight, then an-other side of popular hardly could freely move in the exodus, but only if.

Notes on The Ends of Literature. The Latin American “Boom” in The Neoliberal Marketplace (2002) by Bret Levinson

If neoliberalism is, among many things, an off-centre market, where merchandises are exchanged without “easy to identify” buyers and sellers, how does literature introduce itself to this place? This is one, among many, questions that Bret Levinson’s The Ends of Literature (2002) asks and answers. The book is divided in 8 chapters and all of them share a common premise. This is the depiction of a third space, a space where literature could trace its end(s), not only as “conclusion but also, on the one hand, an exposure to an outside, to transition; and on the other hand, a goal” (3). Hence, as much as the end of certain type of literature inaugurates a more democratic artistic participation, this also shows the dangers of literature’s disavowal to participate in any possibility of political or theoretical project. The neoliberal market might have triumphed when showing that there is not an “outside” of it, and vanishing a “conservative” literature too, but this is nothing to celebrate. That is, as much as the market announces a better world to come, the disappearance, or weakening of the state, as institution and concept, just announces how things are moving more to the old spectre of authoritarianism. 

The Latin American political and literary experiences serve to illustrate the market’s regime and realm. Identity and transition politics, democracy, cosmopolitanism, and area studies depict a battleground where culture, art, cinema and specially literature register the place where things are bonded again to sameness but also where this bond recodes a threshold where things might take a flight of fancy. This is why literature —as much as it seems it might disappear or loose some of its terrain in front of other arts— stands still as a tool able to “serve as either the permanent cement that holds together contingent constructions such as class hierarchies, or as a site of subversion that upends these ‘mere’ cultural values” (21). Of course, literature is condemned to affirm over and over again the values of the social class that famously “institutionalized” it, the bourgeoisie. Yet, at the limit, or end, of this literature, where it is openly and excessively exposed, as in the neoliberal market, texts like Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú open a new pathway. Texts alike, or testimonio, would communicate and reveal that “death —literature’s death, literature as the carrier of death itself— is its own condition: the condition not only if the Other’s qua the subaltern’s very existence, but of itself as the narrative of such devastating situations” (168). Thus, Menchu’s narration would illustrate a “posttransition”, a change beyond literature’s own limit, where no amnesty is possible, where exposure would map new figurations for testimonio’s unuttered and secret demand. 

As such, the neoliberal market does not mean a necessarily end of literature nor of writing and différance. The role of literature is very and strongly depicted, analyzed and commented, yet the figure of the state is mostly absent*. If literature and the state used to present together, or at least at the same time, into the capitalist market, how would a “new literariness” present itself in the neoliberal market without the state? In the final chapter, concepts of nation, people and theory are analyzed in the context of the possibility of thinking “Latin Americanism”, as nation, place of thinking and practice. Levinson concludes the book trying to reconcile perspectives withing Latin American Subalternism and Latin Americanism. This reconciliation would offer a corner where departure for further debates might happen (as in fact did happened). It is also stated that Latin Americanism rematerializes a “desire of a perfect nation, resistant to both the brutal law of the state and the callous lawlessness of the market” (191). If that nation is possible, how would “resistance” differentiate between brutality and callousness? When both the state and the market offer a single force divided in a dual process of inflicting an “irrational” and violent affect (brutality) and then enjoying from it (callousness), how would “literariness” could disavow to be part of this theatre of cruelty? 

_{*an exception might be the wonderful and inspiring analysis presented in chapter 3 “Trans(relations):Disaster and ‘Literary Poltics’ (Reading Piglia’s ‘Respiración Artificial’)}