Posthegemony John Beasley Murray
Posthegemony John Beasley Murray
Posthegemony John Beasley Murray
Posthegemony
Political Theory and
Latin America
JON BEASLEY-MURRAY
Posthegemony / FULL TEXT FOR PRESS / November 22, 2010 / Page iv / COPYRIGHT
Excerpt from Canto General by Pablo Neruda copyright 2010 Fundacin Pablo
Neruda. From Pablo Neruda, Canto General, translated by Jack Schmitt (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991); reprinted with permission.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Posthegemony / FULL TEXT FOR PRESS / November 22, 2010 / Page vii / Contents
Contents
ix
Part I
CRITIQUE
1. Argentina 1972: Cultural Studies and Populism
15
68
Part II
CONSTITUTION
3. Escaln 1989: Deleuze and Affect
125
174
226
284
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
297
301
325
353
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Introduction
A Users Guide
In this book there are two texts which simply
alternate; you might almost believe they had
nothing in common, but they are in fact inextricably bound up with each other, as though neither
could exist on its own, as though it was only their
coming together, the distant light they cast on one
another, that could make apparent what is never
quite said in one, never quite said in the other,
but said only in their fragile overlapping.
Georges Perec, W
One beginning and one ending for a book was a
thing I did not agree with.
Flann OBrien, At Swim-Two-Birds
Definitions
There is no hegemony and never has been. We live in cynical, posthegemonic times: nobody is very much persuaded by ideologies
that once seemed fundamental to securing social order. Everybody
knows, for instance, that work is exploitation and that politics is
deceit. But we have always lived in posthegemonic times: social
order was never in fact secured through ideology. No amount of
belief in the dignity of labor or the selflessness of elected representatives could ever have been enough to hold things together. The
fact that people no longer give up their consent in the ways in which
they may once have done, and yet everything carries on much the
same, shows that consent was never really at issue. Social order is
secured through habit and affect: through folding the constituent
power of the multitude back on itself to produce the illusion of
transcendence and sovereignty. It follows also that social change is
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diffuse ubiquity of politics is what, following the French philosopher Michel Foucault, I term biopolitics. It is not the expansion of
hegemony but its evacuation. More clearly than ever, power works
directly on bodies, in the everyday life that once appeared to be a
refuge from politics. Yet for Larsen and Ydice, posthegemony is
ironically hegemonys triumph: hegemony is everything and everywhere. I argue that it is this misconception that lies at the root
of cultural studies, encouraging a populism that equates the states
dissolution in the everyday with its disappearance altogether.
Discussion of posthegemony within Latin American studies took
a new turn following an engagement with subaltern studies. Despite
adopting the Gramscian concept of the subaltern with alacrity,
refashioning it to refer to nonelite members of colonial and postcolonial societies, the South Asian historians who formed the
subaltern studies group in the 1980s took issue with what for Gramsci was the related notion of hegemony. For the groups founder
Ranajit Guha, for instance, the subaltern is inconstant and unpredictable and refuses to admit the existence of any single sphere
(secular, religious, or nationalistic) within which hegemony could
be sought or won. Hence the swift transformation of class struggle
into communal strife and vice versa for which the best-intentioned
narrative of solidarity can offer only some well-contrived apology
or a simple gesture of embarrassment.9 Guha suggests that the
subaltern inevitably turns its back on or betrays any putative hegemonic project: it refuses to give consent to consent. If hegemony is
the struggle to gain consent, it requires the prior, implicit agreement
that it is consent that is at issue in political struggles. Hegemony
itself has to become dominant. As Guha argues in Dominance without Hegemony, this implies an equation between civil society, the
nation, and the state: an echo chamber within which the terms of
struggle are more or less predetermined.10 But the subaltern always
disrupts the boundaries of any such delimited space. Subalternity
deconstructs hegemony: as postcolonial critic Gayatri Spivak consistently argues, the subaltern is the mute and impossible remainder
that always undoes hegemonys claims.11
In books published in 2002 and 2001 respectively, Latin Americanist cultural critics Gareth Williams and Alberto Moreiras redescribe subaltern remainder in terms of posthegemony. In Williamss
words, posthegemony permits us to give a name to hegemonys subaltern residues, negative languages, fragmentary responses, cultural
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Structure
Before constitution, critique. This book has two parts. The first is a
critique of cultural studies on the one hand, and the social scientific
discourse of civil society on the other. I suggest that cultural studies reductive definition of politics in terms of hegemony, with its
insistence on culture as discursive articulation, substitutes culture
for the state and therefore also confuses culture and state. This is
true even of a more idiosyncratic definition of hegemony, such as
that of anthropologist William Roseberry, who rejects hegemony as
consensus but still stresses that hegemonic projects aim to construct
a common discursive framework.15 At its limit, the logic of hegemony simply identifies with the state by taking it for granted. My
argument proceeds by way of a history of cultural studies, to show
how and why hegemony theory became its distinguishing feature,
as well as through a close reading of Laclau, the foremost theorist
of hegemony. I then examine the way in which a focus on civil
society excludes culture from the political in the name of rational
discourse. At its limit, however, civil society theory is overwhelmed
by the affects it sets out to exclude. Here my argument works
through an account of the discourse of new social movements and
democratization to explain how and why the venerable concept of
civil society has been revived over the past twenty-five years, as well
as by way of a close reading of Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato,
the most thorough theorists of civil society. What cultural studies
and civil society theory share is an emphasis on discourse and on
transcendence. They fail to confront immanent processes: either the
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2002. This history might also encompass indigenous revolts during the colonial period, the wars of independence in the 1820s,
or late nineteenth-century immigration and urbanization. Among
more recent movements, one might consider the Zapatista uprising
in Mexico or the piqueteros in contemporary Argentina. This would
be an underground, alternative history of Latin America that would
tell of insurgencies but also the stratagems by which hegemonic
projects have attempted to turn those insurgencies to the advantage
of the state: from the New Laws of the Indies, the Bourbon reforms,
or the postindependence settlement, to the twentieth-century history
that is more fully outlined here. It is precisely such mechanisms
of reactionary conversion of culture into state, affect into emotion, habit into opinion, multitude into people, constituent into
constituted power that are the ultimate interest of this book.
This is a book about political theory and Latin America, not
political theory in Latin America or Latin American political theory.
Its juxtaposition of the two terms is not quite contingent, not quite
necessary. In one sense, its analyses of Latin American history and
politics are interchangeable, almost disposable. In another sense,
they anchor the theoretical argument. In still another, they contaminate and decenter it. The theory of posthegemony draws from
but is also tested by Latin American history. Deleuze, Bourdieu,
and Negri are European theorists, but European theorys passage
through Latin America relocates and dislocates that theory. Passing such theory (and the theory of posthegemony) through other
contexts would dislocate it in other ways, forcing revision and reappraisal. At the same time, at least one of my examples is not strictly
Latin American at all: for all Columbuss bluster in front of his crew
on October 10, 1492, he had not yet discovered the continent
that would become the Americas. Indeed, the term Latin America would not be coined for another 350 years, and even now one
would be hard-pressed to define its limits. Part geographical, part
political, part cultural, Latin America overspills its bounds: is Belize
Latin America? Qubec? Miami? Lavapis, Madrid? The Gaucho
Grill, Manchester? Elsewhere I argue that Latin America becomes
viral, diffusely global, in contemporary postmodernity.17 But the
history of the conquest, of the colony and its immense transatlantic
trade, of populism and neoliberalism, shows that Latin America has
always been global, has always directly affected and decentered the
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Prologue
Prologue
Prologue
the documents author realized it was farcical.6 Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernndez de Oviedo is said to have commented to
his compatriot Pedrarias Dvila that these Indians have no wish
to listen to the theology of this Requirement, nor do you have
any obligation to make them try and understand it.7 Contrary to
claims that the Requerimiento was an instance of Spanish rulers
requir[ing] subject peoples to reiterate and reaffirm Spanish hegemony on a regular basis,8 in fact here hegemony is not at issue.
The indigenous never had the option to consent; they were in no
position to reaffirm anything.
Prologue
Prologue
The text appears to seek consent and so to expand the community of believers, but those to whom it offers that possibility remain
out of earshot, while those who are already within the circle are
there regardless of any beliefs they might hold. The Requerimiento
is comparable to the Bible proffered before the Inca Atahualpa in
Cajamarca as the conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro advanced in his
conquest of what is now Peru. The indigenous emperor threw the
book to the ground because it did not speak to him; this sacrilege toward the holy word was taken by the Europeans to be
proof of his barbarism and justification for bloodshed. Yet, as cultural critic Antonio Cornejo Polar observes, the Bible would have
been equally illegible to most Spaniards, including Pizarro himself,
not least because it was written in Latin.12 The book was more
fetish than text, a shibboleth whose signification was purely incidental. Neither the Bible nor the Requerimiento were documents that
demanded interpretation; they were instead touchpapers for the violent explosion of imperial expansion, code words in the protocol
for conquest enacted by the Spaniards in the dark.13
Las Casas had no illusions about the Spaniards motivations:
they were driven by the search for gold. This was no civilizing
mission. Indeed, the Dominicans complaint was that the Requerimiento bore no relationship to the reality of Spanish practice. Las
Casas was hardly an anti-imperialist. If anything, his campaign was
for the Spanish state to give substance to the fiction of hegemony.14
For Las Casas, the scandal was the unbridled desire that reduced
the conquistadors to savages more dangerous than the indigenous
peoples themselves; their blind and obsessive greed made them
more inhumane and more vicious than savage tigers, more ferocious than lions or than ravening wolves.15 But he failed to see that
the Requerimiento channeled that affect. It placed the lust for gold
under the sign of a narrative of progress, and more importantly it
unified the conquistadors, huddled together in an alien landscape.
The act of reading helped bind the affect mobilized in their hunt for
gold, counteracting that affects centrifugal tendencies by organizing
it as part of an ecclesiastical, imperial, and monarchical hierarchy
before the men were let loose as a war machine irrupt[ing] into
the town.
The Requerimiento consolidates relations between the Spanish
conquistadors after the fact of domination; it embodies them as
agents of the state, as subjects of constituted power. Everybody
Prologue
Prologue
of the social contract. Empire stretched the state to its limit: the
Crowns gravest problem was always its inability . . . to control
events from a distance.17 The multitude, a motley crew that resisted
authority, representation, or leadership, constituted Empire but also
undermined the very power that it brought into being.
Christopher Columbus was a Genoese adventurer who believed
he had visionary inspiration. For over a decade, he hawked his idea
for an expedition over the Atlantic to a variety of private and public
interests. In the end, he won the backing of the Spanish monarchy,
but his enterprise was essentially a private one. Spain itself barely
existed as a modern nation-state: the crowns of Castile and Aragon
had come together with the wedding of Ferdinand and Isabella
in 1469, but it was only with the reconquest of Andalusia and
the expulsion of Jews and Moors from the Iberian peninsula two
decades later that the state could even aspire to the fantasy of territorial integrity and ethnic and cultural homogeneity. Columbus
gained royal approval for his voyage just days after the king and
queen rode into Granada in triumph in January 1492. This year of
settling boundaries was also a year of great movements of peoples,
swarms of refugees. Jews who were camped around the ports and
on seagoing vessels were given the order to leave port on August 2,
1492, the day before Columbus set sail.18 In the early morning
of August 3, as Spain consolidated its territorial and ethnic limits,
Columbuss small fleet the Nia, Pinta, and Santa Mara constituted a seemingly insignificant line of flight westward. Something
always escapes.
Columbuss crew had reason to flee. Tradition portrays them as
convicts motivated by the royal pardon they received for signing
up.19 Historian and sailor Samuel Eliot Morison plays down this
account of a crew composed of desperate characters, criminals,
and jailbirds, but he does confirm that at least four of the men
had indeed been reprieved from death row by enlisting.20 Even the
full-time seafarers among them operated at the margins of the law.
Columbuss main associate, Martn Alonso Pinzn, who captained
the Pinta while his brother Vicente took charge of the Nia, had
like many other mariners . . . occasionally engaged in piracy as well
as legitimate trade.21 This was an expedition packed with potentially unruly subordinates, exacerbated by an imbalance between
crew and officers in that each ships crew was exceptionally large,
perhaps double the normal complement.22 In any case, Columbus
Prologue
had trouble with his men from the start. Even before they set sail,
several of the crew on the Pinta had been grumbling and making difficulties, and were suspected of sabotaging the ship at the
Canaries.23 Once underway, the admiral was increasingly worried
about a possible mutiny, and with good cause: Las Casas reports
that as early as September 24, when they were almost exactly in midAtlantic, some of his crew argued that the best thing of all would
be to throw [Columbus] overboard one night and put it about that
he had fallen while trying to take a reading of the Pole Star with his
quadrant or astrolabe.24
The voyage is longer and farther than any of the men had
expected. From early on, Columbus is aware that the sheer extent
to which they are collectively venturing into the unknown is a
likely cause for dissent. From September 9 (just three days after
leaving the Canaries) he maintains a double log, with two reckonings, one false and the other true, of the distance traveled each
day, because he is worried that his crew might take fright or lose
courage if the voyage were long.25 Only landfall will resolve the
mens concerns, yet land is frustratingly elusive. Expectation runs
high, however. From September 14 Columbus reports that there are
many sure signs of land, provoking a veritable interpretosis: there
are no innocent objects in the Atlantic traversed by this convoy.
On September 16, seeing many patches of very green seaweed,
which appeared only recently to have been uprooted[, a]ll considered therefore that they were near some island. Likewise, a
live crab on September 17 can be taken to be a certain sign of
land. On September 25, both Columbus and the crew are convinced that land has been sighted. They fall on their knees to give
thanks to God, but what they had taken for land was no land but
cloud. A week or so later, these many signs of land, previously
heralded by Columbus with enthusiasm, have to be discounted
as the crew lobbies for the expedition to return to investigate.26
Columbus rejects their proposal, and insists that they continue
on westward. Historians William and Carla Phillips argue that he
must have wanted to maintain his authority over the captains
and their crews. . . . Allowing side excursions in search of islands
would diminish the aura of certainty that he had been at pains to
protect.27 Previous voyagers (notably Bartholomew Dias rounding
the Cape of Good Hope in 1487) had been forced by their crews
Prologue
10
Prologue
arguments were now wearing thin. Even the ships captains were
turning against their admiral. The mutinous crewmen began to
rattle their weapons.35 The admiral had to forestall panic among
his crew, on whom he was totally dependent. There was no one
more vulnerable than Columbus, as he himself would later lament
loudly and persistently.
Columbus makes a pact with his men. The compromise he suggests is that they would continue on their westward course for two
more days (or three or four; accounts vary). If they had not found
land at the end of that period, they would turn back.36 The precise
details of the agreement are sketchy: it is omitted from the admirals
log and will become a bone of contention in a long-running court
case years later in which the Crown will try to argue for the Pinzn
brothers share of the voyages success.37 Some accounts claim that
it is Columbus who has to be encouraged to continue, and others
that the Pinzn brothers are fully part of the mutiny. What is clear
is that only this last-ditch attempt at compromise keeps the voyage going on October 10, 1492, and that there are good reasons
why even Columbus might be losing heart. But an indication of
the type of pact he might have made comes from the admirals second voyage, in 1494. Then, he and his men are reconnoitering the
coast of Cuba until, fed by frustration and fantasy, Columbus
gives up when he begins to suspect that it is not in fact part of
the Asian mainland. This realization would threaten his cherished
belief that he had indeed found a new route to the East Indies. So
he again attempts a contract with his crew. He called upon the
ships scrivener, Fernndez-Armesto reports, to record the oath
of almost every man in the fleet that Cuba was a mainland and that
no island of such magnitude had ever been known. . . . They further
swore that had they navigated farther they would have encountered
the Chinese. If the men break their oath, they face dire consequences: a fine of ten thousand maravedis and the loss by excision
of their tongues.38 If they refuse to abide by Columbuss fantasy,
the crew lose their place within this newly constituted imperial order
and are cast into mute subalternity.
On October 10 of the first voyage, the fictions validating Columbuss control are breaking down: he has given his men a false
account of the distance traveled and has argued that they have
already reached land, but the crew are no longer so prepared to
Prologue
11
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Notes
Introduction
1. See Keohane, After Hegemony.
2. Spinoza, Ethics, 71.
3. Lash, Power after Hegemony, 55.
4. Thoburn, Patterns of Production.
5. Arditi, Post-Hegemony, 215, 209.
6. Larsen, Modernism and Hegemony, 97.
7. Ydice, Civil Society, 4.
8. See Hardt, The Withering of Civil Society.
9. Guha, The Prose of Counter-Insurgency, 83.
10. Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, xi.
11. See Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?
12. Williams, The Other Side of the Popular, 327 n. 7.
13. Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference, 263.
14. Negri, El exilio, 38.
15. Roseberry, Hegemony and the Language of Contention, 364.
Roseberrys version of hegemony is rather similar to Bourdieus conception
of a divide between discourse and doxa: between the universe of the
thinkable and the universe of the unthinkable . . . what cannot be said
for lack of an available discourse (Outline of a Theory of Practice, 170).
But Bourdieu would be the first to note that power works also through the
unthinkable and the unsayable (in other words, through habit), not simply
through establishing a framework for what can be said.
16. Perec, W, [vii].
17. Beasley-Murray, Latin America and the Global System.
18. See again Beasley-Murray, Latin America and the Global System.
19. See, for instance, Holloway, Change the World without Taking
Power, and Mentinis, Zapatistas.
Prologue
1. Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, 12.
2. Quoted in Hanke, History of Latin American Civilization, 1:125.
3. Kamen, Empire, 97.
4. Quoted in Williams, The American Indian in Western Legal
Thought, 92.
301
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1. Argentina 1972
1.
2.
3.
4.