Malcolm K. Read: Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique
Malcolm K. Read: Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique
Malcolm K. Read: Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique
Read
State University of New York, Stony Brook
LATIN AMERICAN
COLONIAL STUDIES:
A MARXIST
CRITIQUE
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 2
LATIN AMERICAN
COLONIAL STUDIES:
A MARXIST CRITIQUE
Malcolm K. Read
2010
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 3
CONTENTS
Preface, 4
Introduction, 6
1. From Organicism to Animism, 15
2. Changing the Subject, 35
3. Reconsidering the Other Ways, 60
4. Reclaiming Reality: Walter Mignolo, 85
5. The Colonial Criticism of José Rabasa, 105
6. Ideologies of Colonial/Colonialist History: Anthony Pagden,
129
7. Benítez Rojo and Las Casas' Plague of Ants, 149
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 4
Preface
The present work gathers together a series of articles published since 2000 in a
variety of journals, together with several inedited pieces that belong to the
same period. While some degree of cross-referencing was possible, this serial
mode of production resulted in a certain amount of repetition, self-imposed
to some extent, as I sought to spell out on each occasion the theoretical
underpinnings of my work, but also dictated in part by editorial fiat. My first
thought, when considering the idea of a collected volume, was that some kind
of rationalization would be required. And such has proved indeed to be the
case: the most obvious redundancies have been surgically removed. However, I
gradually came round to the view that any kind of radical reconstruction
would be not only impractical but also inadvisable. Impractical because it could
never have been a question of simply omitting seemingly otiose passage, given
the structurally destabilizing effects that were bound to ensue; and inadvisable
because there did appear to be definite virtues to the periodic restatement of
my theoretical position, within an unfolding narrative. I have therefore chosen
to leave each contribution more or less as it stands, reworking only those
passages where I felt the argument to be faulty or in need of clarification.
Introduction
I
At its origin the present work took shape, firstly, as an act of resistance, vis-à-
vis the "post-" movements that began to dominate Spanish colonial studies
from the mid 1980s, and secondly, as a project that puts to the test a theoretical
approach refined in the study of 16th- and 17th-century Spain. More
specifically, and simplifying somewhat, it could be said to be the product of a
specific conjuncture, involving three texts: Steven Stern's "Feudalism,
Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and the
Caribbean," Robert Paul Resch's Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social
Theory, and Juan Carlos Rodríguez's, Teoría e historia de la producción ideológica.
Stern set out to review the scholarship on modes of production to come out
of the '70s and '80s, on the occasion of the recent publication of the second
volume of Immanuel Wallerstein's classic The Modern World System. His focus
was upon the latter's relatively unenthusiastic reception in Latin America, to be
explained by Latin America's prior familiarity with Frank's dependency theory,
which, Stern argued, detracted somewhat from the novelty of Wallerstein's
work. The lesson to be learned, with respect to Spanish colonialism, was that
entrepreneurs were driven to experiment with diverse forms of labor relations,
which frequently co-existed on the same site. In Stern's own words:
"Repeatedly in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean, one encounters a
shifting combination of heterogeneous relations of production in a pragmatic
package" (Stern 870). Labor strategies that were exclusive and sequential in
Europe were, the argument ran, typically combined in more variegated patterns
in its colonies, and possibly with greater variation than was to be found in the
"long" early modern period of European history.
In a key footnote to his article, Stern noted the extent to which the
innovations of "our Latin American colleagues" had been largely neglected in
the United States, whose historical profession, he suggested, was strongly anti-
theoretical compared with its Latin American counterpart (836) and whose
intellectuals were rather more reluctant to identify their work as "Marxist"
(842). He does concede, however, that, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, "a
certain disillusionment with the mode of production concept set in among
some intellectuals on the left, including Latin Americans, who had once used
the concept more readily" (872). No reasons are offered for the apparent shift
in "scholarly fashion" (872) – in 1988 the relevant developments were still
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 7
barely discernible – although with the benefit of hindsight the extent of the
change and identities of its protagonists are clear enough. The key theoretical
move was made by Ernesto Laclau, who began by critiquing the dependency
theory of Frank as insufficiently attentive to the relations of production
(Laclau). At this point, the terms of reference remained recognizably Marxist,
and were still contained within the economic sphere, but by the time of his
later work, co-authored with Chantal Mouffe, Laclau had entered a
recognizably post-Marxist phase. The struggle for socialism became not so
much a class struggle as a more diffuse "democratic" campaign, organized
along non-class lines. The focus of attention was displaced onto ideology, now
increasingly identified with the "discursive" and burdened with the task of
bringing about unity where no prior unity existed. From the Marxist
perspective, such a political tactic could only be viewed as deeply suspicious, if
not specifically reformist, and requiring refutation in the strongest possible
terms. Which brings us, by virtue of an intertextual linkage, to the second
book that I have singled out as decisive to the writing of the present text,
namely Paul Resch's interdisciplinary re-assessment of Althusserianism.1
As is well known, Althusserianism falls emphatically within the mode
of production analysis, indeed, defines a social formation as a "totality of
instances articulated on the basis of a determinate mode of production"
(Althusser and Balibar 207n5). The "instances" in question are distinct levels
of social relations, principally economic, political and ideological, each
characterized by a relative degree of autonomy but bound together in a
contradictory ensemble by the matrix effect of the whole. The relevance of
such considerations to instances of "dependency" should be obvious, and
explains Resch's attempt to play down the opposition between global
approaches (whether of the dependency or world-system variety) and his own
version of Althusserianism: "The problematic I am defending here has a place
for both levels of analysis; indeed, despite important and obvious differences
between national, regional, and global structures, this approach insists on the
necessity of analysis of each of them for exactly the same reasons it insists on
different structural levels of analysis within individual social formations"
(Resch 375n12).
By way of contrast, Resch rejected emphatically Laclau and Mouffe's
view of political and ideological discourses as free-floating, autonomous
systems, detached from the class struggle and unrelated to economic
determination. Such an irrationalist view of discourse, he argued, was not only
unable to explain the absence of democratic control over the means of
production and the distribution of the social surplus but was also "unable to
1
Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory (1992). Resch refers to Stern's text
in his discussion of "Feudalism and the Transition to Capitalism" (131 ff).
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 8
II
Ideology was conspicuous by its absence from the article of Stern, in which it
was relegated to a footnote reference to García Márquez's humor (Stern 845-
46n43), as from mode-of-production analysis in general. The same is true of
dependency theory as practiced by Gunder Frank, not to mention Wallerstein
and the World System theorists, who had insisted explicitly and, one is bound
to say, somewhat astoundingly, that the early world system had operated
without the support of an ideology (see Shannon 205-07). This was doubtless
a state of affairs only to be expected from bodies of research indebted for the
most part to historians, as opposed to literary or cultural critics. But it was one
that was to have lamentable consequences, not least of all when, against the
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 9
III
The nature of the present project defines itself in the light of the above. We
set out to critique a body of Spanish colonial criticism that, drawing upon the
post-Marxist tradition, embodied in the work of Laclau and Mouffe (1985),
defines political and ideological discourses as free-floating, autonomous
systems. Such a view, we will be arguing, promotes a species of political
voluntarism that, by collapsing the base into the superstructure, regresses to
the liberal view of history as the "story of liberty," in which "indigenous
peoples" find themselves pitted against their European cultural masters. The
tactic in effect is to invert the process of "othering" characteristic of the
masters, so as to homogenize a European society that, its internal differences
notwithstanding, finds itself circumscribed by a common cultural horizon. In
place of this vertical, geographical split, which opposes the colonizer to the
colonized, we have theorized, from an Althusserian standpoint, the reality of
horizontal, social divisions, in a way that complicates the European legacy. The
latter, we insist, should be understood as consisting of social formations
structured on the basis of conflict, which manifests itself at the ideological
level in the struggle between dominant and emergent ideologies.
The first task, then, in chapter one, is to retrieve the thread of mode-
of-production analysis where it was prematurely curtailed, in the 1970s and
'80s, and to do so through an engagement with the work of the Spanish
Althusserian, Juan Carlos Rodríguez. Spanish history, the latter argues, is to be
understood not in terms of some Hegelian spirit, pervasive of each and every
phenomenon within the social totality, but as the product of contradiction,
between (at least) two modes of production, namely feudalism and mercantilist
capitalism. This contradiction is generative in turn of an opposition between
the public and private spheres, conducive in the long term to the dynamics of
capitalism but, in the short term, through the nobility's control over the public
sector, to a resurgence of the forces of feudalism. The latter, we insist
(following Rodríguez), privileges not the ideological category of the subject but
that of the servant of the lord, in which respect the mechanisms of
substantialism, the dominant ideology of feudalism, largely escape the
comprehension of recent colonial theory, which may be described as subject-
centered. The importance attributed to the subject needs to be understood
historically. In point of fact, it first manifests itself in the emergent ideology
with which substantialism must compete, namely animism, in which subjectivity
assumes the embryonic form of an individualized "beautiful soul." The
defining characteristic of the latter is its capacity to view reality in literal terms,
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 12
2
The same applies to the work of other scholars to be discussed in the
pages that follow. Texts are valued to the extent that, through the sheer rigor
of their argument, they concentrate and bring into focus contradictions that
are more broadly based. Further to which, we take seriously the principle
that history is a process without a subject, which makes a nonsense of any
attempt to personalize our narrative.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 13
IV
3
See Read 2005.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 14
4
"Postmodernism," unlike "post-structuralism," is not addressed as such by Seed,
although standard postmodernist works are listed in her footnotes. Among her
commentators, Hernán Vidal is critical of the uninhibited application of the term
"postmodernism" to Latin America, whereas Rolena Adorno is skeptical of its value as
applied to Bernal Díaz. See Vidal (113); Adorno (1993: 142). For a particularly
insightful discussion of the relationship between postmodernism and post-structuralism,
see Huyssen (1988). Huyssen argues convincingly that European post-structuralists are
best seen as the theoreticians of high modernism, on the grounds that few of them have
shown much interest in postmodern art. He believes that, in contrast, there are definite
links between the ethos of postmodernism and the North American appropriation of
post-structuralism (Huyssen 178-221 and passim).
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 16
5
For what any such attempt would betray is, firstly, a remarkable degree of historical
amnesia vis-à-vis the long tradition of Marxist critiques of Stalinism, which include, for
example, L. Trotsky (1937); secondly, a lamentable ignorance of the diverse Marxist
analyses of the collapse of Stalinism, such as, for example, Callinicos (1991), which
demonstrates Marxism's capacity for comprehending the very political and ideological
processes that Seed believes to be beyond its methodological scope; and thirdly, a
politically motivated refusal of the class-riven nature of capitalism's continued global
depredations, which include the "occasional" (!) occupation of, and intervention in,
parts of Central and South America by the USA.
6
The exception that proves the rule is George Mariscal's Contradictory Subjects (1990).
Although Mariscal was heavily influenced by Rodríguez, he was significantly unable to
take on board the Spaniard's notion of an ideology that is not subject-centered.
7
Consider, for example, the collection of essays entitled Depositions: Althusser, Balibar,
Macherey, and the Labor of Reading (1995).
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 17
Spain in Transition
It is not my intention here to enter into the complexities of Rodríguez's
program, sustained through a series of major works, but simply to sketch in its
general parameters and to isolate those aspects of it that are germane to the
current colonial debate among Hispanists. In typically Althusserian fashion,
Rodríguez conceptualizes a social formation as a hierarchy of heterogeneous,
unequal, yet interrelated instances or levels, on the basis of a mode of
production. In the case of 16th- and 17th-century Spain, there is one dominant
structure: a public/private dialectic operative at the political level but impacting
upon social relations at other levels. The economic function exerts an ultimate
determination, not directly, in reflexionist terms, but indirectly, through the
"matrix" effect of the structured whole on its elements, whose distinct and
unequal effectivities are simultaneously at work. The single public/private
dialectic is complicated in the case of the transitional social formation that
existed in Spain by the presence of two ideological optics, that of the
bourgeoisie and that of the nobility. Even as it controls the state aparatus, the
nobility is unable to neutralize the impact of the bourgeoisie, whose
incontrovertible presence not only explains the formation of the Absolutist
State but the existence of the public/private dichotomy, to which the nobility
must adapt. The result is a body of literature, that of the Golden Age, which
consists, fundamentally, of at least two literatures, corresponding to the
existence of two optics:
Sólo en las formaciones de transición se da el fenómeno que venimos
analizando porque en ellas no hay propiamente hablando una sola
matriz ideológica (esto es, una contradicción fundamental localizada en
el nivel de las relaciones sociales), sino una lucha de modos de
producción, que sólo logra su configuración en las relaciones sociales
gracias a la cohesión que impone el especial funcionamiento del nivel
político. (56-57)
While the transitional formation is tendentially favorable to the
bourgeoisie – the public/private dichotomy is particularly amenable to the
latter's mode of operating – the nobility is able to delay and block
development ("con la amenaza incluso de retroceso al viejo sistema" (57)). In
fact, the political defeat of the bourgeoisie opens the way in post-Tridentine
Spain to a resurgence of feudal values to the extent that, while the nobility
lacks the power to liquidate the public/private split, it is sufficiently hegemonic
to fill existing forms – the theater, for example – with its own ideology of
"blood," "honor," etc.: "El verdadero problema de las relaciones sociales
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 20
Subject to Change
Before proceeding to unpack these notions of literature as ideological
production, with respect to certain colonial texts, we might pause to consider
the contrasting direction taken by post-structuralists. The exchange within
Hispanic colonial scholarship, to which we referred earlier, begins with Seed's
celebration of Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Rorty, loosely grouped under the
rubric of post-structuralism, in the context of a review of a number of books,
including Beatriz Pastor's The Armature of Conquest. The demise of narratives
of resistance and accommodation, Seed argues, has taken place as writers have
become more alert, under the impact of the above-mentioned scholars, to the
"polysemic character of language." She emphasizes (a) the extent to which the
new emphasis upon discursivity "has enabled natives of colonized territories to
appropriate and transform the colonizers' discourses" (Seed 1991: 183); and (b)
the way post-structuralism has dislodged the author's "intention" or "original
meaning" from a central role, "allowing literary critics and others to consider
ways in which the text is appropriated by different textual communities" (184).
It has been the tendency of imperial critics, Seed continues, to privilege the
authorial intentions behind texts, at the expense of the reception of texts by
colonized cultures.
The problems regarding "intention," it has to be said, are complex (see
Hawthorn 74). Provisionally, it does not seem wholly eccentric, except perhaps
to a few stray post-structuralists, to claim that part of our humanity, as
individual agents, consists not only in having intentions but also in acting upon
them. Indeed, intentional behavior is traditionally held to distinguish the social
from the natural sciences. The task is not to ignore it, as post-structuralism
wishes to do, but to theorize its status, vis-à-vis the intransitive effects of
structural causality, operative through the matrix effect of the social formation.
From such a standpoint, the significance and range of the recent skirmishes
that so excite Seed seem rather less impressive. Consider, to begin with, the
frequency with which post-structuralists relinquish the subject and its
intentions in one move, only to reintroduce them with their next (see
Hawthorn 68), not to mention the fact that, as Rolena Adorno rightly argues,
the current demise of the subject seems to be of greater relevance to the
ideological complexities of modern society than to colonial texts.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 22
chamber to be lowered some twenty cubits into a pit. It is at this point that a
sudden semantic switch occurs, by which we are asked to understand the text
allegorically:
A esta donzella muda, hermosa, podemos comparar el mundo en que
bivimos, que pareçiéndonos hermoso, sin boca, sin lengua
halagándonos, lisonjándonos, nos combida con muchos deleites y
plazeres, con los cuales sin recelo alguno siguiéndole, nos abraçamos; y
perdiendo de nuestras memorias las angustias y tribulaciones que por
alvergue dellos se nos aparejan después de los haver seguido y tratado,
echámanos a dormir con muy reposado sueño; y cuando despertamos,
seyendo ya passados de la vida a la muerte, aunque con más razón se
devría dezir de la muerte a la vida, por ser perdurable, hallámonos en
tan gran fondura que ya apartada de nos aquella gran piedad del muy
alto Señor, no nos queda redención alguna; y si estos cavalleros la
ovieron, fue por ser ahún en esta vida, donde ninguno por malo, por
pecador que sea, deve perder la sperança del perdón, tanto que,
dexando las malas obras, sigua las que son conformes al servicio de
aquel Señor que jelo dar puede. (Rodríguez de Montalvo 637)
Amadís de Gaula might seem a pretty obvious point of departure for
any consideration of Bernal Díaz's Historia verdadera. The latter's debt to the
chivalric romance, legitimated by intertextual reference, has become, on
Adorno's own reckoning, a "commonplace" of colonial criticism. However, it
is significant that this same criticism has shown itself remarkably reluctant to
engage the Spanish text directly, doubtless for reasons of obscure professional
etiquette and specialization that prevail in the North-American academy.8 In
contrast, the Althusserian model quickly moves from the hermeneutic to a
symptomatic reading, aimed at explaining the structural principles that
constitute the text's objective reality as a socio-historical production. Such a
reading is governed by a problematic grounded not in the experiential world of
the subject – the intentions of its author are not primarily at issue – but in the
explanatory world of science.
Viewed on this basis, Amadís exhibits a number of interesting, highly
significant features. Specifically, we have in mind the manner in which the
narrative's literal level of meaning is surrendered, more or less hurriedly, to its
symbolic counterpart, in accordance with a more generalized practice, in
evidence in feudal epics, that sees the physical confrontation between knights
raised from the level of their material ambiguity to that of symbolic clarity (cf.
8
Adorno emphasizes the extent to which chivalric romance functioned as a negative
reference in writing about the New World. Her concern throughout is with authorial
intention and reader response: European attitudes are collapsed into a "dominant
ideology" (see Adorno 1985: 17-19). The basic text regarding the impact of chivalric
romance in the New World is Ida Rodríguez de Prampoloni (1948).
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 27
Read 1983: 8-9). The effect is to confirm the possession, on the part of the
knight, of certain innate qualities, the existence of which we, unlike the knight
himself, have been aware all along. To be sure, this strong essentialist bias is
not unalloyed – the notion of courtly "virtue," "courtesy" and the "gentle
heart" that pervades Amadís gives evidence of a medieval animism that will
subsequently blossom, within the context of a different problematic, into
radically different forms (see Rodríguez 1990: 78-80). However, the pressure
of concern for feudal etiquette is so overwhelming in the above text that its
allegorical turn, far from departing from the semantics of the physical
encounter between knights, can be said to unfold the latter's inner logic. At all
points, the problem that Amadís will finally raise is one of reading, of deciphering
signs, confirming thereby that what we have before us is a quintessentially
substantialist text.
Rodríguez, whose ideas I am following closely at this point, believes
that such texts exhibit a semantics that is "unitariamente dual." What he means
by this is that they see this world as a symbolic reflection of another world.
There is only one book, the book of God (otherwise the World as a Book), of
which other writers are condemned to produce glosses. This way of thinking
lends to the world of chivalry its curiously abstract quality. Amadís knows no
chronology, as an ideological category, and has little sense of specific
geographic space or place. In other words, it is characterized by an absence of
true literalness. In feudalism, there is no "eye" and no "thing." As Rodríguez
succinctly and enigmatically asks: "¿Cómo un no-yo con una no-escritura podía
usar un no-ojo para construir una no-cosa?" (Rodríguez 2001b: 122). Nor, by
the same token, can such texts possibly relate to "private lives," for the simple
reason, as Rodríguez continues to explain, that the logic of privatization does
not exist for them. The idea is never posed of intimate "action" bound to
private relations. Amadís' main objective is to promote the cause of "honor,"
not on the public stage but in the World, a fact that will emphatically make the
work not a "novel," a distinctively bourgeois genre, but a "book" of chivalry,
distinguished by trenchantly seigneurial, organicist values.
individual experience – "con muy cierta verdad, como testigo de vista" (Díaz
del Castillo 14) – and upon Díaz's ever-present willingness to record his own
personal impressions: "Acuérdome que aquellas reñidas guerras que nos dieron
de aquella vez firieron a catorce soldados, y a mí me dieron un flechazo en el
muslo, mas poca herida y quedaron tendidos y muertos diez e ocho indios en el
agua adonde desembarcamos; y allí dormimos aquella noche con grandes velas
y escuchas. Y dejallo he por contar lo que pasamos" (68).
"Y dejallo he por contar lo que pasamos." The material analysis of the
kind we are advocating needs to attend closely to this and other such formulae:
"Quiero volver a mi materia"; "Volvamos a nuestro cuento"; "no tocaré más
esta tecla, y volveré a decir," etc. A device so persistently bared, to the extent
of becoming the text's dominant, to borrow a term from Russian Formalism,
must perform some crucial function. Our suspicions are confirmed by
Althusserian discourse analysis, as deployed by Michel Pêcheux, which suggests
that syntactic mechanisms of this kind serve to create the relationship of the
subject to other subjects and to the Subject.9 For Pêcheux they are instances of
intradiscourse, a "thread of discourse," an intricate network of co-reference
through which the process without a subject constitutes the subject (Pêcheux,
116). As such, they are to be considered alongside the mise-en-scène, exemplified
by the use of the present for the past tense ("se vienen […] cargan"), the
power of which "depends on the implicit condition of a displacement (décalage)
of origins (of the "zero points" of subjectivities), a displacement from the
present to the past, coupled with the displacement from one subject to other
subjects, which constitutes identification" (119).
One further effect of the discursive mechanisms under review is to
promote the emergent autonomy of the individual and, thereby, to mask the
proto-subject's subordination to the Subject or Lord. The radical limitations
upon Díaz's own freedom to say what he wants become more evident if we
contrast his own situation with that of Cervantes el Loco. I am referring to an
incident related early in the Historia verdadera, at a point before the Cortés
expedition is fully underway. Cervantes el Loco, it will be recalled, confronts
Diego Veláquez, the Governor, with the prophecy regarding Cortés' future acts
of betrayal. Indications are that Cervantes was in the service of relatives of
Velázquez out to embarrass Cortés. But, as Díaz himself observes, the irony
was that the fool touches upon a truth, albeit in a degraded manner: "Dicen
que los locos algunas veces aciertan en lo que dicen" (47). Such low-life
characters indicate the limitations placed on the servant within the confines of
organicism. A certain license or authenticity is granted to a fool or "gracioso"
9
Always remembering that, in the case of Díaz, we are talking of proto-subjects,
operative within the transition from feudalism to capitalism. As we will be arguing in
detail later, it was one of the failings of Althusserians to have universalized the subject,
whose discourse is held to be constitutive of ideology.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 30
on the grounds that he is attached to a noble and operates strictly within the
confines of the nobility. Outside this hierarchy, the fool loses permission to
speak and thereby disappears from social life (cf. Rodríguez 2001b: 303-04).
It would be difficult to over-emphasize the novelty of Díaz's position
in comparison to the fool's. He is an example of a new kind of writer, one
who was trying, through his work, to have his merit recognized publicly. For
such a writer, it could never be simply a question of telling the truth. His
dilemma is that he must operate within a public sector increasingly dominated
by the pen as opposed to the sword. Díaz's disadvantages in this respect were
obvious enough, even to him: "porque yo no soy latino ni sé del arte" (Díaz del
Castillo 14). The barriers were not simply linguistic – the use of Latin was
opposed to the vernacular – but also stylistic, in the broadest sense. Díaz's
cultural baggage consists of little beyond a proverbial tradition and a body of
popular literature, notably the novels of chivalry. Everything suggests that, as a
plain-speaking man, he felt intimidated by the existence of "courtly norms," of
the kind that would eventually issue into the more elaborate diction of the
baroque. Of course, a resurgent organicism would never be able to dismantle
the public/private split, which the pressure of the bourgeoisie had created, but
it would effectively neutralize the "plain style" of animist ideologues and fill
the public space, not to mention animist literary forms, with its own ideological
obsessions (see Read 1992: 53).
Díaz's problems were further compounded by his own residual
substantialism. His ideological horizons are, to reiterate, still largely contained
within the serf (servant) /lord (Lord) dichotomy. Basically, he has performed
services that, he believes, deserve to be recognized. And such recognition could
only come, not from the market – hence the delay in writing and publishing the
Historia verdadera – but from the king. Undoubtedly, Díaz has reasons to feel
optimistic: the development of the Absolutist State had invested noble status
and landed property with new guarantees. At the same time, his desperation is
also a measure of the precarious situation of the encomenderos whose ranks he
had joined. The centrifugal forces of Absolutism were drawing previously
parcelized sovereignties into the ambit of the state, to the ultimate and obvious
benefit of the latter's ennobled bourgeois functionaries. Díaz was not the only
one to feel aggrieved.
Perhaps no other issue better captures the tensions in Díaz's text than
that of the role of supernatural forces in the historical process. The
supernatural per se, we should point out, does not necessarily betray a
substantialist presence, contrary to what might automatically be assumed.
Indeed, it could be (and has been) argued that the element of mobility integral
to magic will constitute a key ingredient of animist ideology.10 As far as the
10
Rodríguez maintains that the element of mobility inherent in the operations of magic
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 31
will be fully integrated into the new science (see Rodríguez 1990: 81 ff.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 32
their survival upon their own resources of wit, fortitude and intelligence.
Secondly, Francisco de Morla's chestnut horse performs a key defamiliarizing
function, in which respect it bears the burden of the passage's pervasive
literalism: Díaz sees the events being narrated with his mind's eye. And finally,
the passage finishes with the familiar attempt to guarantee the stable identity
of the proto-subject and of other referents through the thread of discourse
that connects them.
las matanzas pasadas estaba toda la tierra asombrada; y esto hice con
parecer del capitán; y llegados a la provincia saliéronnos a recibir veinte
y un señores y caciques, y luego los prendió el capitán, quebrantando el
seguro que yo les había dado, y los quería quemar vivos. (Las Casas
1946: 40)
Like Díaz's Historia verdadera, Las Casas' Destrucción de las Indias has manifestly
broken with the sacralized world of feudalism. It exudes a literalism in the
animist tradition, based on a direct knowledge of circumstantial detail. Twenty-
one lords and masters appear, not twenty-two, and for reasons that are very
literal, not symbolic, as would have been de rigueur in a substantialist text. The
impression we are given is of a colonizing experience that is "intensamente
vivida" (Rodríguez and Salvador 27). However, if Las Casas demonstrates
certain similarities with Díaz, the differences are equally striking. Confronted
by the uncompromising moralism of the Destrucción de las Indias, we suddenly
realize, retrospectively, that one thing the Historia verdadera never posed was the
problem of sin. Díaz's text, I am saying, is not "critical" and "moral" in the way
that Las Casas' is. Like La Celestina and the early picaresque, Historia verdadera is
an exercise in living in the present. Juan Carlos Rodríguez is particularly
insistent, within this context, on the dangers posed by our eminently petty-
bourgeois moralism, of the kind that, as exemplified by the work of Kant,
Rousseau and Hegel, leads us, unconsciously and in the most grotesquely
anachronistic manner, to oppose the purity of the "individual" to the impurity
of "society." Objectively, he explains with reference to the picaresque, we are
simply dealing with two varieties of animism, one that is lived from above, and
carries a moralizing overload, and one that is lived from below (Rodríguez
2001b: 127). While the former explains the tone set by Las Casas, the latter
would account for the essentially "amoral" and "acritical" feel to Historia
verdadera, judged by Kantian, empiricist or positivist standards, and for the
problem that we face in identifying the text from a bourgeois or petty-
bourgeois standpoint, in other words, from the standpoint of our own
ideological unconscious.
The distance between the texts of Díaz and Las Casas may seem slight,
but it corresponds to an important shift at the level of the ideological
unconscious. Moreover, it can be measured precisely: it is what separates the
two authors' respective accounts of the Cholulan massacre, defended on
tactical grounds by Díaz and condemned as gratuitous and morally offensive
by Las Casas (cf. Adorno 1988a: 246-47). Expressed more broadly: if the
Historia verdadera has points in common with Lazarillo, Destrucción de las Indias
shares with, say, Guzmán de Alfarache, an attachment to organicist notions of
natural places and what it is to sin against nature. One important consequence is
that Las Casas, in contrast to Díaz, does lend himself to assimilation to
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 34
In celebrating the arrival of a new critical paradigm, one based on dialogue, the
colonial critics of the '80s and '90s radically overestimate their originality. The
truth is that bourgeois ideology, from its very beginnings, has found it
impossible to imagine social relations other than in terms of an exchange
between two subjects, or a subject and an object, in a market, in an academy:
"Humanities scholarship begins with a reader and a book (or a viewer and a
painting or a film, etc.) and is an entirely intimate thing" (Adorno 1994: 151).
What they fail to realize is that the "dialogue," as a genre, along with the "free"
subject or reader, not to mention the intimacy that is the dialogue's defining
characteristic, are not universals, to be assumed, but historical phenomena to
be explained.
One first step towards this explanation would be to unpack all the
hidden assumptions entangled in this particular version of liberal
contractualism. It would transpire that, by implication, the truth of an
economic background ("matter") is envisaged as being "stamped" upon the
internal subject ("tabula rasa") as a "form of conciousness." The individual is,
as it were, "visited" by spirits. While not always stated in so many words, such a
position assumes, theoretically, the existence of a dualism between Literature
and the Economy, Literature and Society. There are, as Rodríguez points out, a
number of variations, from British empiricism to phenomenology and
Foucauldian post-structuralism. What we have tried to indicate, on the basis of
11
See also Rodríguez 1990: 243 ff.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 35
examples drawn from the Transition, is that such binary thinking needs to be
rejected in its entirety. In the words of Rodríguez: "La complejidad del asunto
es mucho mayor que la supuesta en tal dualismo, tal 'face à face.' O mejor
dicho, es otra" (Rodríguez 2001b: 62). Viewed from an Althusserian
perspective, social relations generate not material effects on a tabula rasa but an
ideological unconscious that saturates texts, irrespective of the degree of
consciousness or intentionality exhibited by the author. Hence our preference
for viewing social subjectivity as a condensation of structural forces, with
transitive effects but intransitively determined, as opposed to locating an
autonomous subjectivity at the center of social theory.
It was never likely that such a theoretical model would ever be given a
fair hearing within the North-American discipline of Hispanism, but for
reasons that have nothing to do with the inherent qualities of Marxism as
social theory. Much more relevant is the linkage between Soviet Studies during
the Cold War decades and recent post-Marxist theory, as part of a broader
collusion between the promotion of a "postcolonial discourse" and the brutal
restructuring of the global capitalist economy. The possibility exists, and needs
to be seriously considered, that the post-structuralist limitation to language and
textuality actually serves to make this restructuring more palatable, by covering
up the economic, political and social dislocation that it causes.
As Terry Eagleton has been the first to remind us, there is an irony to the
urgency with which post-structuralists have undertaken to deconstruct the
monadic unity of the contemporary subject. Why the rush to perform a task
that has already been successfully accomplished by late capitalism? The gist of
the argument is clear: meditations on écriture are anticipated by, if not causally
related to, a consumerism that has "scattered our bodies to the winds as so
many bits and pieces of reified technique, appetite, mechanical operation or
reflex of desire" (Eagleton 1986: 145), which is another way of saying, more
generally, that the dispersal of the subject is rooted in the conditions of
postmodernity. It was the irrelevance of these conditions to a premodernity, as
we have seen, that led Rolena Adorno to scrutinize more closely the credentials
of the decentered subject with respect to early colonial texts. And reasonably
so. The only danger for the colonialist lies, as we have also seen, in using the
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 36
encounter – almost a lovers' tryst – between two "free" subjects, otherwise the
author and the reader? Is not the critic charged explicitly with responsibility for
promoting the immediacy of this transaction, modelled manifestly on its
commercial counterpart, by removing the textual obstacles that threaten to
interfer with the exchange? And are not these obstacles the textual form taken
by historical and cultural specificities, of which, within the context of
bourgeois ideology, the subject-form is the prime example? Maximally
condensing our argument: Jakobson's notorious "I like Ike" is revealing, less
for any linguistic, political or even sociological function that it may be deemed
to illustrate, than for the extent to which it hinges unconsciously upon the
presumed existence of a subject "I." In other words, the sheer prominence that
such a statement lends to the subject-form is itself symptomatic of a specific
ideological unconscious, which "informs" the statement, linguistically, and
from which it (the statement) could be said to be emergent. We are indebted
for the Jakobson reference to the Spanish Marxist Juan Carlos Rodríguez, to
whose work I will now turn, by way of substantiating our broader claims.
Substantialism
Why the turn to Rodríguez? And what, precisely, is to be gained by substituting
a central conflationist, Adorno, with a downward conflationist, of manifestly
Althusserian extraction? Our response, as earlier, is succinct, if somewhat less
brutally to the point: Rodríguez's signal achievement has been to challenge the
otherwise eminently Althusserian view that ideology is the discourse of the
subject. In other words, the Spanish Marxist historicizes the subject form to
the extent of arguing not simply that it undergoes significant variation through
time, but that, much more contentiously, it can be, and historically has been,
absent, as an ideological category. These are considerable claims, but before we
address them directly, let us remind ourselves of the broad parameters of
Rodríguez theoretical apparatus.
While Rodríguez follows Althusser in envisaging social formations as
structured in terms of three main levels, the political, economic and
ideological, his practical application of the latter to a Spanish social formation
in transition (between feudalism and capitalism) manages to circumvent the
fallacy of "misplaced concreteness" and, by the same token, the temptation
that has dogged so many Marxists to regress toward a Kantian distinction
between empirical matter, otherwise the base, and a transcendentalized spirit.
Each level is always already determined, intransitively, by the place and
function assigned to it within the complex unity of the social formation. We
are talking of the copresence of the other levels and the influence that these
exert via the matrix effect of the social formation as a whole. That said, it
remains true that each level operates with a degree of relative autonomy, in the
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 41
sense that it is characterized by its own internal structures and distinct rhythms,
and as such, transitively determines the operation of other levels. Ideology,
naturally, is no exception: "Cada nivel ideológico está estructurado, pues, a
través de un núcleo clave que desarrolla el modelo de explotación necesario en
cada caso para todo Modo de Produccion" (Rodríguez 1998b: 6). This nucleus
is what Rodriguez refers to as an ideological matrix ("matriz ideológica"), which is
productive of its own internal logic even as it is determined, in the last
instance, by the prevailing relations of production.
How exactly does this relate to Spain in the 16th and 17th century? In so
far as transitional periods are, by definition, characterized by the presence of at
least two modes of production, the ideological matrix operative during the
colonial period must likewise have involved at least two ideologies. These are,
according to Rodríguez, substantialism, the dominant ideology of feudalism, and
animism, the emergent ideology of mercantilism, the conflict between which
explains the contradictory ideological dynamism of the age (Rodríguez 1990:
59 ff). (Adorno, let us recall, distinguished only one European ideology, namely
patriarchal ideology.) Only animism hinges upon the ideological category of
the subject or, more strictly speaking, a proto-form of the subject, namely the
"alma bella." Substantialism, in contrast, seeks legitimation through the
signatures of God, inscribed in the World conceived as a Book. These
categories are best appreciated as they work in practice. Let us begin by
considering the opening lines of the Poema de Mio Cid, as an example of one of
substantialism's favoured genres, the epic.
De los sos ojostan fuerte mientre lorando
tornava la cabeça y estava los catando.
Vio puertas abiertas e uços sin cañados,
alcandaras vazias sin pielles e sin mantos
e sin falcones sin adtores mudados.
Sospiro mio Çid ca mucho avie grandes cuidados.
Ffablo mio Çid bien e tan mesurado:
"¡Grado a ti, señor, padres que estas en alto!
¡Esto me an buelto mios enemigos malos!"
has written or inscribed the World as a Book, and that is simply reproduced or
remade by each lord (the Cid, the Infantes de Lara, etc.), on a daily basis, in this
life, with respect to his own lands and serfs/servants. In the Fall is written
already the promise of Redemption, just as in the figures of this degraded and
decrepit world, notably King Alfonso, are written the forms redeemed by
God's grace – the king who dispenses justice. To search in the past is not to
seek the causes that account for current events, but only to "certify" the
existence of an eternal truth, which continues to play itself out, today as in the
past. Texts, then, must be seen as functioning on several different levels, which
can be reduced to two, the literal and the anagogic. The former concerns a
literality of a distinctly medieval kind, which provides access, through the
process of an organicist reading, to the anagogic level. Feudal organicism does
not know chronology in the strictest sense: the literal time that presses upon
the Cid during his departure ('Allí piensan de aguijar', etc.) is quickly
surrendered to a figural chronology that images this earthly time as a
pilgrimage, and death as liberation. Nor can it readily accommodate the notion
of chance. Celebrations ("¡Albriçia …!") are in order at the moment of the
Cid's otherwise tragic exile for the simple reason that, as the figure of the crow
indicates (for those who possess the capacity to decipher appearances), the
Cid's future is already prefigured in the present.
For a mode of production to function, then, the key factor is not that
individuals entertain certain political or philosophical ideas but that they create
a form of ideological life, a "ser-como-soy," which, in the case of the tributary
mode of feudalism, is naturally defined in terms of blood and lineage. Thus,
"Yo soy Rui Diaz el de Vivar" defines not a subjectivity, which is "freely" made
and re-made on a daily basis, but a lineage, already possessed in the present, as
the seed of a permanent truth that unfolds through time. The Cid is not a
subject but a "vassal," a category internalized within the dominant nobility but
characterized by the same notion of "service" (to a lord). It is for this reason
that the Cid could never see the crow literally, from the perspective of his own
individuality, but was constrained to "read" it. The substantialist text knows no
"I"/"eye" that can see the "thing," just as its protagonists can never have a
"life," in the sense of a "private" realm of being. For the same reason, these
same protagonists can have no inside, as opposed to outside. This is
particularly true of the epic hero himself, who literally has nothing to say to
the little girl who greets him in what many modern readers find to be the most
lyrical moment of the poem. All of which explains why the plot dynamic of
the Poema de Mío Cid seems to falter at those moments when protagonists are
called upon to perform some act of deceit. The text always requires the
existence of two Jews and two Infantes, because motivations, like emotions in
general, must be visibly exteriorized in discourse or inscribed in the body, as
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 43
Animism
Now let us turn to animism, still following throughout the ideas developed by
Rodríguez.
The classic form of animism is Petrarchism, introduced into Spain by
Garcilaso and involving an erotic relationship or exchange between two
"beautiful souls." The latter are deemed to be superior by virtue of their
sensibility or capacity to love, which draws them together sympathically. The soul
is driven by the force of this attraction to try and "express" itself, which
requires that sympathy find the path along which it can flow outwards, towards
union with the other. Expression is achieved through words and through the
gaze – hence the importance attributed to eyes. Heat melts the material barriers
that stand in the path of love. Tears and sighs are also an expression of love,
although a less direct expression than the glance or words. The drying up of
tears is viewed negatively within the context of a Petrarchan erotica since it
implies an inability to express oneself. Dryness creates a material crust, which
blocks the movement of spirits and therefore their fusion. This in turn creates a
division between inside and outside, which frustrates attempts by the lover to
penetrate the other with his/her gaze. This inside/outside division, we saw
earlier, marks a crucial difference from substantialism, for which body and soul
are inextricably intermingled and which, as a consequence, is unable to
understand, let alone theorize, the existence of a hidden interior.
The same neo-Platonic philosophy that sustains the Petrarchan lyric
also functions as an ideological support for the new theoretical discourse of
Copernican science. The "soul of the world" is the Sun, whose beneficent rays
penetrate and purify every part of "this world" and thereby dismantle the
cosmic hierarchy on which scholastic Ptolemaic science was based. A social
hierarchy remains but no longer structured in terms of "blood" and "lineage."
The determining criterion is a certain spirituality that, imparted to the soul at
birth, radiates from within, with varying intensity, in accordance with the
relative sanctity of the individual concerned. Its effect is to render the material
body transparent and translucent. As the sixteenth-century animist, Cristóbal
de Villalón, explains: "Tiene por objeto y fundamento este amor celestial a la
hermosura del anima: la qual es un resplandor del vulto divino que en ella dios
infundio al prinçipio de su creaçion como en naturales hijos suyos. Y esta
hermosura es aquella inclinaçion de obrar virtud: la qual aunque dios la
imprima en todas las criaturas que son capaçes de amor mas perfectamente la
infunde en las animas" (Villalon 204). To be sure, Villalón's beautiful soul is
not yet the free subject, a category that will be secreted subsequently by more
classically bourgeois formations. But that is not to say that it does not value
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 44
"freedom" is what will keep the new relations functioning. In other words,
narratives are now justified by the literal gaze of a free subject, in its early
proto-form, just as, in a curiously dialectical interplay of specular images, the
same narratives, in their exteriorized, discursive form, justify their authors. "I
was there," "I have seen," "I have observed. Therefore it is true," etc. And
because there is an "eye"/"I," there is now also a "thing," seen in all its
literalness, as opposed to being "read," as it was under substantialism, and
treated as the bearer of God's hidden signature. We are talking here, it should
be emphasized, about the internal logic of the text, independently of whether
the text happens to be fictional or non-fictional in form, an internal logic that
will also manifest itself in other art forms, most notably in the perspectivism
that was transforming the visual arts at the time.
Necessarily, modes of social interaction have been radically
transformed: within the new urban space, people are bound by the ties not of
"fidelity" but of "friendship," in the common pursuit of food and "gain." The
serf, who has escaped into the city, "where the air is free," becomes
successively the servant of many masters, to whom he is "freely" contracted
and to whom he sells his labour power. Otherwise, he must join the new,
unemployed poor who roam the streets, to the despair and annoyance of civil
authorities. And now it is that the splits start to occur, beginning with that
between the public and the private, between the street and the home. These are
the new circumstances, in which Lazarillo prospers but in which the feudal
escudero, marooned in time and space, struggles to survive. Likewise, whereas
the archpriest, to whom Lazarillo addresses his text, never utters a word "in
public," Lazarillo does not hesitate to "publish" his innocence as part of his
"life." And needless to say, the divisions are also internalized: if the Cid
coincides absolutely with his exterior person, the new subject learns never to
take things on their face value, and is himself a devious schemer. Lazarillo's
survival skills, his capacity to outwit the chance that governs the world, rest
precisely on the knowledge that all codes lie.
undergo internally (see Rodríguez 1990: 66 ff). The breach with the feudal
order effected by Augustinianism, he argues, makes possible the irruption of a
feudal animism that, when combined with a chivalric emphasis on interior
virtue, will faciliate in turn the solidification of the bourgeois matrix of the
first phase. It was no longer sufficient, given this combination of animism with
chivalry, to possess lineage, be a good vassal or a generous lord, etc.; nobility,
true nobility, increasingly depended upon the possession of a gentle heart. It is
precisely such transitional phenomena and nuances that Adorno's over-arching
categories cannot accommodate. She proceeds by collapsing the courtly,
chivalrous tradition into imperial ideology, and thereby obscures the ideological
complexities and contradiction of Spain's ideological legacy to the colonies
(see Adorno 1988c: 66).
Much the same applies to Adorno's and Rodríguez's respective views
on "magic" and "witchcraft." For whereas in Adorno, magic is defined in
logical, binary terms, in relation to reason (Adorno 1988c: 64), Rodríguez
always argues historically. And in historical terms, the rebirth of witchcraft,
together with the resurgence of interest in alchemy, contributed crucially – or
so Rodríguez suggests – to a new valorization of the living spirit of things,
whose manipulation lay at the heart of the supernatural arts. In combination
with the ideology of certain religious movements (notably Augustinianism and
Franciscanism), magic and alchemy not only helped prepare the ground for the
break with a hegemonic scholasticism but would provide a source of
legitimation for the new forms, once this break had occurred. These medieval
currents do not yet constitute bourgeois ideology – to begin with, the crucial
ingredient of neo-Platonism is lacking – but there is little doubt as to the
direction in which they point (Rodríguez 1990:80-81).
Similarly with regard to "reason" and "science," two notably ideological
categories that Adorno unhesitatingly parades as masculine archetypes, arrayed
alongside their feminine counterparts, but which Rodríguez complicates,
through a number of historically nuanced distinctions, of fundamental
importance to an understanding of the transition (see Rodríguez 1990: 61-66).
The first such distinction concerns the opposition between scholastic
rationalism and its bourgeois counterpart. The latter, in the form of Cartesian
"Reason," differs radically from its scholastic predecessor, amongst other
things through the importance that it attaches to the beautiful soul, now
transformed into a Cartesian subject (which is not to say that Cartesianism
does not also compromise with scholasticism, residual elements of which
abound in the texts of Descartes). The second concerns mechanicism, an
ideology that represents the phase most removed from substantialism. Here,
continuities are shown to be as decisive as ruptures, in that mechanicism never
breaks entirely with earlier ideologies during the Renaissance – Galileo, for
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 47
12
Almesto's account is a copy of an original report by Francisco Váquez, with a few
minor additions and alterations. I have used the edition by Rafael Díaz, which only
marks the more important changes.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 50
the latter remained filled with "blood," "tyrants," "lies," "betrayal," "service,"
"words and deeds," "vassals," etc., in other words, with substantialist ideology.
It is this ideology that, during the course of the expedition, is corroded from
within, and finally overwhelmed, by individual attempts to engage in the
activities of trade, commercial transaction and exchange. Significantly, Orsúa
himself seems to have sensed the dangers of a bartering mentality that knows
no fixed relationships, no natural, God-given positions: "[… ciertos indios]
venían a vernos y a rescatar con nosotros, aunque si no era ascondidamente no
osábamos rescatar con ellos, porque el Gobernador lo había mandado, no sé a
qué efecto" (117-18). Possibly, he feared its destabilizing impact on "gente baja
y de poca suerte y los más oficiales de oficios bajos" (123). The freedom of
market exchange easily slides over into freedom of another kind – "luego
tuvieron por apellido libertad" (126), which sweeps Ursúa away and replaces
his world with Aguirre's denaturalized counterpart. That is why, wherever
market relations prevail, those implicated in them will be found to teeter on the
edge of "treachery." The concept of personal gain, it should never be
forgotten, comes at a price.
13
What Rodríguez says of Guzmán de Alfarache could well be said of
Jornada de Omagua y Dorado: "Así podemos comprender por qué el
Guzmán se construye como un texto donde forzosamente debe aparecer una
escritura 'literal' presentada siempre (como ocurría en los Autos
Sacramentales o en los libros hagiográficos) como la transparencia de otra
escritura interior más verdadera; de ahí la referida estructura 'dual' del libro
y su alternancia entre 'narración' y 'digresiones' morales" (Rodríguez 2001b:
221).
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 55
14
To quote Rodríguez: "La intervención de la literalidad narrativa
sobre la problemática organicista supone, pues, tanto la puesta en solfa de la
dualidad inscrita en el organicismo como la justificación de cualquier
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 56
and opacity. The substantialist can only retrieve this situation by attributing the
lack of correspondence to the work of the Devil, a device already deployed to
explain the fate of Orsúa. But such a solution can never be totally persuasive or
adequate to the new disorder. Feudal mentalities may well fantasize about the
possibilities of regressing to feudalism, but the success of such an enterprise
was never very likely.
notwithstanding, still demonstrate the operations of the eye that sees the thing:
Y porque he visto este pájaro con mis propios ojos en el invierno,
metido el pico en la hendidura de un ciprés y asido a una ramita a él,
como muerto, que no se bullía, y dejando señalado el lugar, volví a la
primavera, cuando los árboles retoñecen y tornan a brotar, y no lo
hallé. Lo oso poner aquí y creo lo que los indios de él me dijeron, y
alabo al todopoderoso y omnipotente Dios, que es poderoso para
hacer otras mayores misterios. (1, 19)
Modern scholarship, in its enthusiasm to emphasize cultural otherness,
has seen in Spanish ethnocentrism evidence of a covert, and at times not so
covert, attempt, on the part of an imperial power, to reconfigure the culture of
the conquered, in conformity with its own. That such forces were at work is
undeniable, of course, as indeed was the natural tendency to misrecognise
strange artifacts and objects in terms of familiar categories. At the same time,
we believe that the current preoccupation with reproducing,
phenomenologically, the self-awareness of indigenous peoples, with the
corresponding emphasis upon cultural incommensurability, has obscured the
very real structural resemblances between otherwise autonomous cultures. The
transition from lineage to tributary modes, it is worth recalling, was a global
phenomenon, evinced by shared productive modes, of the kind that depend
upon the capacity of the ruling class to limit the economic and political
strength of other fractions and classes, in the process of extracting surpluses
from peasant populations (see Haldon 157-200 and passim). Prevailing forces
of production, it should be added, impose limits where they do not determine,
in any absolute sense, the empirical forms taken by prevailing social relations.
By the same token, they impose structural similarities between cultures, to be
explained as the product not of direct influence but of cultures working within
the constraints of common modes of production. From all of which it would
follow that the processes of "subjection" and "vasallage," which Durán
observes within indigenous society, were grounded in the existence of a global
tributary mode; and that the coincidence between, on the one hand, indigenous
categories and, on the other, "grandes," "duques," "condes," "hidalgos," "gente
plebeya," etc. not to mention "pechos," "tributos," "servicios," "galardones,"
"Mercedes," etc, was anything but the fevered product of the Spaniard's own
imagination. But these, and other such issues, raise the whole question of
cultural (in)commensurability, and it is to this that we now turn.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 60
after the momentous events of 1989 and 1990, it is easier than at any time
since the late fifteenth century to perceive all of the ways that Europe has a
common culture and destiny" (Greenblatt 9). Within a decade or so, it became
rather harder to view the Old World in quite the same way. We have in mind
not only the resurgence of regional nationalisms and the outbreak of racist
and xenophobic violence throughout Europe, but the "terrorism" that has,
more recently, rocked the First World. From the early 1990s, if not before, it
was clear to some that while the emphasis upon Otherness had undoubtedly
served its purposes in the past, in the struggle against neo-colonialism, the
more recent preoccupation with ethnic identities lent itself to political reaction
of the ugliest, most nightmarish kind. One outcome, within the academy, was
the reinstatement of the unfinished project of the Enlightenment, in those
areas where it had been prematurely abandoned (see Norris). By the same
token, the celebration of cultural differences becomes much more problematic
in situations that find "servants of their Lord" (also serfs of their lords),
originating in the "evil" heartland of the Middle East and Afghanistan, pitted
in literal and ideological battle against the "free subjects" of the "civilized
world."
Some re-considerations, then, are urgently required. Has not
postmodernism been guilty of reducing the problem of signification to intra-
discursive relations in abstraction from reference? While science is not an
ideology-free zone, is it not absurd to claim that knowledge is nothing more
than what consensus decrees? If our knowledge cannot be privileged, what
makes the knowledge of others immune to criticism, even if they belong to
another culture? In the absence of some kind of ethical naturalism, how is it
possible to invoke shared, extra-discursive human capacities for suffering?
Our aim is to address these and related issues from within the context of
Spanish imperialism. We will begin by assaying an indirect approach.
integration, that, by a simple inversion of the binary code, we are treated to the
spectacle of a strangely uniform European civilization: "When the Italian
quattrocento juggled with modes of representation, using old or new systems
according to the objects being painted, it drew from the same cultural source,
in the same society; it took its inspiration from different but, despite
everything, related sources" (62).
Doubtless, there are virtues to such inversions: by turning the tables, a
whole series of imperial powers that for centuries unhesitatingly, and with
impunity, lumped the most disparate cultures together under the guise of the
"Other" are now cast as strikingly uniform. The tactic is one that, for example,
Stephen Greenblatt, turns to good effect. Thus, while explicitly recognizing the
diversity of national cultures and religious faiths that Europeans took to their
colonies, the author of Marvelous Possessions also chooses to emphasize the
communality of these same cultures when the moment came to juxtapose
them to their colonial counterparts: "For European mimetic capital, though
diverse and internally competitive, easily crossed the boundaries of nation and
creed, and it therefore seemed to me a mistake to accord those boundaries an
absolute respect" (Greenblatt 8). National and religious ideologies aside, the
argument runs, Europeans combined to form an impressively unified "mobile
technology of power," which indiscriminately subjugated all the territories with
which it came into contact (8-9). At all points, the reflex is always the same.
European diversity is conceded – "so many different and conflicting ways of
seeing and describing the world" (23) – only to be retracted: "Europeans
deployed a lumbering, jerry-built, but immensely powerful mimetic machinery,
the inescapably mediating agent not only of possession but of simple contact
with the other" (23).
Such a view, we believe, comes easily to writers whose knowledge of
"Renaissance" culture is not matched by a knowledge of its "medieval"
counterpart, and who, moreover, tend, by virtue of their scholarly formation,
to view Europe through the prism of English culture. England's entry into
modernity, it is pertinent to recall, was notably idiosyncratic. Centralization was
achieved at a relatively earlier stage – by the 16th century national life was
heavily focused on London, which functioned as a market for an agricultural
system increasingly organized along capitalist lines. Likewise, at the political
level, the effects of England's bourgeois revolution were only partially reversed
by the Restoration (Wood 1999: 54-57). Students whose mind-set is dictated by
this scenario are ill-prepared to grapple with European absolutism, particularly
in the form that it assumed in Spain, whose transition from feudalism to
capitalism was notoriously extended and fraught with every manner of set-
backs, reversals and feudal revivals.
Bearing this in mind, let us return to the Codex of Tlatelolco, to
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 63
Constructing a Bridgehead
Let us begin where Stephen Greenblatt begins his Marvelous Possessions, a work
that has achieved something like classic status in colonial studies, namely with a
section taken from Columbus' logbook for Tuesday, December 18th, 1492:
[…] yo vide que le agradava un arambel que yo tenía sobre mi cama; yo
se lo di y unas cuentas muy buenas de ámbar, que yo traía al pescueço,
y unos çapatos colorados y una almarraxa de agua de azahar, de que
quedó tan contento que fue maravilla; y él y su ayo y consejeros llevan
grande pena porque no me entendían, ni yo a ellos. Con todo, le
cognoscí que me dixo que si me compliese algo de aquí, que toda la isla
estava a mi mandar. Yo enbié por unas cuentas mías adonde por un
señal tengo un exçelente de oro en que esta<n> esculpido<s>
Vuestras Altezas y se lo amostré, y le dixe otra vez como ayer que
Vuestras Altezas mandavan y señoreavan todo lo mejor del mundo, y
que no avía tan grandes príncipes, y le mostré las vanderas reales y las
otras de la Cruz, de que él tuvo en mucho, "y ¡qué grandes señores
serían Vuestras Altezas!" dezía él contra sus consejeros, "pues de tal
lexos y del cielo me avían enbiado hasta aquí sin miedo". Y otras cosas
muchas se passaron que yo no entendía, salvo que bien vía que todo
tenía a grande maravilla. (Greenblatt 135)
Greenblatt's reading of the above passage is clear enough: Columbus
moves with unseemly haste from his confession of incomprehension to the
barefaced expression of his intention to expropriate the island, by wilfully
misconstruing the presumably innocent, ritualistic invitation, on the part of the
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 65
groups, namely that "substances in transition between the natural and the
artificial were dangerous" and that "what lies in water is neither above nor
below the ground" (18). Relativists, like Pagden, want to assert things about
alien beliefs, such as their relationship to local conditions and conventions, and
to pronounce upon the formal logical relations between them. But how is this
possible in the absence of translation? How can the Taino theories be
identified as alternatives or indeed to be known to be incommensurable if
translating them is impossible? Without translation, there are quite simply no
grounds for ascribing beliefs to people in other times or places, including those
that Pagden attributes to the Taino Indians.
Feudal Animism
Having argued so far that colonialists have been guilty of exaggerating the
incommensurability between Spaniard and Indian, I now proceed to the
inversion of this argument, through the claim that these same colonialists have
not been sufficiently attentive to the differences within Spanish culture. In
particular, I wish to focus attention on the Augustinian movement of
spirituality that, from the 13th century onwards, constituted a challenge internal
to scholastic substantialism. The significance of this movement, with respect
to Columbus' alchemic obsessions, lies in the importance that it attached to the
notion of transformation, involving the suppression of scholastic substantial
forms, otherwise those qualities deemed to be inherent in, and organic to,
natural beings, and their substitution by an animistic structure that permits the
manipulation of elements that are no longer deemed to be substantially
unalterable. The continuities are obvious – the notion of reading the world as
a book and of signatures inscribed in nature. But so too are the innovations,
notably the importance attached to the spiritual voices believed to inhabit
creation. While not yet radical enough as to constitute a "break," these
innovations represent an ideological force to be reckoned with by the
dominant, substantialist orthodoxy. Indeed, even after the rise of a qualitatively
distinct, secular variety of animism, as a consequence of the impact of neo-
Platonism, from the end of the 15th century, elements of feudal animism will
continue to cling to the new alchemy and, subsequently, to modern science,
symptomatic of which is the fear attached to overstepping the bounds of
knowledge (see Rodríguez 1990: 78-87).
Such is the backdrop to what Pagden refers to as "the opaque
operations of Columbus' own mind" (Pagden 1993: 18). Let us pause to tease
out still further some of its implications. We are dealing, it bears repeating,
with ideological incommensurabilities and transitions internal to the European
tradition. Likewise, it is important not to lose sight of the resistance that
substantialism presupposes to the whole notion of transformation.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 77
engages in a frontal attack upon notions of "blood" and "lineage," upon which
the whole ideological edifice of substantialism rests:
De todo esto se entenderá la gran significación que tiene el hacerse
Dama el peón que – sin prenderle – corre siete casas. Porque todas
cuantas buenas noblezas ha habido en el mundo y habrá, han nacido, y
nacerán, de peones y hombres particulares, los cuales con el valor de su
persona hicieron tales hazañas que merecieron para sí y para sus
descendientes título de hijosdalgo, caballeros, nobles, Condes,
Marqueses, Duques y Reyes. Verdad es que hay algunos tan ignorantes
y faltos de consideración, que no admiten que su nobleza tuvo
principio, sino que es eterna, y convertida en sangre, no por merced del
Rey particular, sino por creación sobrenatural y divina […] (272).
The relevance of such a passage to the ambition of the colonizers of the New
World should be obvious. Columbus himself carried fascination with the
numinous glitter of gold to new heights, nor is there any doubting that at some
level his preoccupation with conversion was driven by the dream of social
mobility. He certainly set new standards in tenacity when it came to defending
the rewards and privileges bestowed upon him by the Catholic Monarchs. In
his wake, many an illiterate orphan would have dreamed of becoming a
Marquis, and some – notably Pizarro – were able to realize their fantasies. But
needless to say we are less concerned with the fates and fortunes of individuals
than with the whole mercantilist project, notably its generalized faith in the
transformative power of gold. Structural processes were underway that were to
lead to the radical transformation of prevailing social relations, and it is to
these that we shall now turn.
feudal animism, which allowed for the irruption and solidification of the
bourgeois matrix of the first phase, Rodríguez leaves us in no doubt as to the
significance to be attached to the "break" between the feudal problematic and
animism in its subsequent, secular form. The bourgeois matrix, we indicated
above, is always characterized by the continuous production of the "subject"
or, to be more exact (as regards the period in question), of a proto-subject or
beautiful soul. Lyric poetry, in the tradition of Petrarch, will "bare" its form
and, in the process, establish a hierarchy based not on the notion of blood but
on sensibility and the capacity for love (Rodríguez 1990: 115 ff). In prose the
favored genre will be the "dialogue," to be counterpoised to the feudal
"dispute." Designed to explore the theme of "friendship," the dialogue is
homologous, at the ideological level, with commercial exchanges, at the
economic, exchanges that presuppose the existence of salaried labor, as this
will take shape, contemporaneously, during the course of the 16 th century
(Rodríguez 2001b: 48-49). To be free is to be freed from one's possessions,
with the exception of labor power, which the subject is thereby compelled to
exchange. It is for this reason that, in these early stages of bourgeois
development, the subject takes the form of a pícaro or member of the poor,
who recounts his "life" as readily as he sells it on the open market.
Having glimpsed the emergence of such notions in Oviedo's text, let
us turn to one in which the impact of animism is more immediate and striking,
namely the Naufragios of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. The advantage of
Cabeza de Vaca is that, through his work, we can examine the experiential
moment of the rupture, when organic structures break down and the
individual is driven back upon his own resources:
Trabajando por llegar allá, nos hallamos en tres brazas de agua, y por
ser de noche no osamos tomar tierra, porque no habiamos visto tantos
humeros, creíamos que se nos podía recrecer algún peligro sin nosotros
poder ver, por la mucha oscuridad, lo que habíamos de hacer, y por
esto determinamos de esperar a la manana siguiente. Como amaneció,
cada barca se halló por sí perdida de las otras; yo me hallé en treinta
brazas, y siguiendo mi viaje a hora de visperas vi dos barcas, y fui a
ellas, vi que la primera a que llegué era del gobernador. (Cabeza de
Vaca, 113-14)
There are, it has to be said, certain problems associated with this close
attention to discrete textual moments, in that it lends itself to what Rodriguez
himself has warned is a species of sociological "experientialism." It is vital, the
Althusserian reminds us, to view the "ideological unconscious" primarily not as
an individual or, for that matter, institutional phenomenon, but as a structural
phenomenon, insofar as it is secreted, originally, in the prevailing relations of
production. That said, it is difficult not to linger upon the ideological
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 81
16
Enough has been said, we believe, to provide a context in which to further rectify some
of the positions assumed by New Historicism. We have in mind Greenblatt's second
chapter on The Buke of John Maundeuill. A "Book," notice, in the substantialist
tradition, not a "life" (of Lazarillo, etc.), which will be the genre initiated by animism.
Given this status, it makes no more sense in the case of Mandeville to recuperate some
notion of a consistent subjectivity than it does in the case of, say, Juan Ruiz, whose
Libro de buen amor remains precisely that, a "book." For such a subjectivity, as
Greenblatt discovers to his surprise, is destined to remain fantasmal, symptomatizing
the absence of an authentic traveller (Greeblatt 34). The notion of the "Mandeville-
effect," it should be added, rooted as it is in the postmodern concept of subjective
dispersal (the "death of the subject"), misses the point entirely and illustrates once again
the manifest ahistoricity of New Historicism. We are here addressing not a period
during which the bourgeois subject enters into crisis, but during which it was only
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 82
beginning to be produced. The feudal text, we cannot reiterate sufficiently, does not
operate through the notion of the "subject," for the simple reason that "freedom" was
never at issue for the bonded serf, and vassals were only "free" to choose the object of
their allegiance. All of which explains why Mandeville's text should culminate in the
"author"'s visit to the Holy Land, in which this land itself is projected as a Book to be
read (see Greenblatt 39). True, we are also forced to contemplate the existence of many
books, which could be construed as a premonition of things to come. But there is no
gainsaying the fact that the feudal text that remains is pre-eminently a gloss, in the
tradition of feudal substantialism.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 83
obscured by the Fall, and can only be recuperated through the multiple levels
of commentary. Commentary must necessarily focus upon appearances, since
these are, when all is said and done, the only evidence that we possess
concerning the intentions of the Author. It is in this sense that, according to
Rodríguez, the Calderonian Dialectic of the Dream may be said to presuppose
the notion of a real dream. The Althusserian explains:
"Salvar las apariencias" significa, pues, impedir que todo se convierta en
fenoménico (como pretende el platonismo). Es consecuencia, una
dialéctica que provoca la famosa estructura denominada usualmente
como "desengaño barroco", desengaño que se expresa a través del
"ojo" o del "oído" (los dos elementos básicamente captadores de la
apetencia de las apariencias según Santo Tomás) y que supone una
actitud moral idéntica a la expresada en la Dialéctica del Sueño.
(Rodríguez 1990: 65)
The substantialist understanding was challenged from several
directions. Firstly, as Rodríguez indicates above, by a Platonic tradition that, in
its religious branch, argued the need to dismiss this world in its entirety, as a
mere shadow of the next. Secondly, and more importantly, however, by the
secular version of Platonism, animism, that we considered above, together
with its subsequent mechanistic, Cartesian and empiricist developments, based
on the notion of the possessive subject. Through the importance that they
attached to this world, as opposed to the next, these bourgeois ideologies lent a
new meaning to the very phrase "to save appearances." For the first time, the
gaze latches onto a material, phenomenal reality, as something that offers itself,
in itself, as a source of delight. During the course of time, as bourgeois
ideology assumes its dominant forms, experiences become productive of
"hypotheses" that can be tested "experimentally," and whose results have to be
"verified." As Rodríguez concludes: "Frente a esta presión doble, el
organicismo supone la práctica del desengaño en el sentido que acabamos de
describir (esto es, según se plasma en la dialéctica calderoniana del sueño)
como deseo de 'salvar los fenómenos', de adecuarse, en definitiva, a la lógica de
las apariencias como verdades imperfectas, pero irremediablemente necesarias
en cuanto que sólo a través de ellas se puede leer los signos sagrados del orden
de Dios que rigen el mundo organicista" (66).
While Pagden is alert to the feudal tradition of "reading" and to the
existence of a corresponding "theory of knowledge," which "relied very largely
upon exegesis and hermeneutics, and claimed that the external world and all
human life was legible, secundum natura" (Pagden 1993: 52), he is constrained, by
virtue of his own ideological unconscious, to interpret Columbus' compulsion
to "save the phenomena" (22) in strictly empiricist terms. The slippage from
"experience" to "experiment" is almost imperceptible but real, so that suddenly
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 84
las Naciones del mundo son hombres, y cada uno dellos es una no más la
definicion, todos tienen entendimiento y voluntad, todos tienen cinco sentidos
exteriores y sus cuatro interiores, y se mueven por los objetos dellos, todos se
huelgan con el bien y siente placer con los sabrosos y alegre, y todos desechan
y aborrecen el mal, y se alteran con lo desabrido y les hace daño" (III, 296). Yet
from the standpoint of a resolutely historicizing Marxism, we have also
attempted to offer a word of warning, by returning the debate to the realities
of ideological, political and economic struggle. Emphatically, if Las Casas was
anxious to couch his argument in terms of "human nature," it was in part
because he "unconsciously" repressed the notion of exploitation that was
integral to the slave system, which he actively promoted, albeit for a relatively
short period, together with its counterpart with respect to feudalism, whereby
"lords" extracted the social surplus from their "serfs"/"servants." And at no
point was the Dominican about to confess that, as a member of the holy
orders, he himself stood to benefit from the distribution of this social surplus.
Our conclusion is inevitable: it was possible in the 16th century, as in our own
day, to be relatively vocal in one's promotion of human nature, while being
somewhat less forthcoming with respect of human equalities.
imperialism that allows it (the elite) to live in what Bhaskar, with unwonted
brutality, refers to as "conditions of plenty" (Bhaksar 1991b: 135). In order to
sustain these and related claims, we turn in the present chapter to Walter
Mignolo, whose mature work, notably The Darker Side of the Renaissance and
Local Histories/Global Designs (2000), while ambitious in scope and aim – they
question the very basis of European thought, with respect to its implication in
colonialism – yet remains thoroughly rooted in the cultural semiotics that
characterized the colonialist's earlier work.
Hence the need to lay claim to a materialism: "I placed a heavy accent on the
materiality of culture and on human beings' (as individuals and communities)
own self-descriptions of their life and work" (Mignolo 1995: 320). Everything
is about the struggle to avoid death, to reproduce, etc. This is not, to be sure,
the world of classical idealism, which, by definition, foregrounded the realm of
ideas, but that is because a crucial slippage has taken place, from ideas to the
semiotic or linguistic, or rather – because we are in the world of actualism – to
"languaging." For performance is to be understood, above all, as a discursive act,
in the tradition of Gadamer and his latter-day followers, notably Rorty, for
whom being is manifest in language. The transformation is less radical than
might seem, at first sight, to be the case, in that the pivotal opposition remains
the same: between, on the one hand, a phenomenal or empirical realm subject
to strictly deterministic laws and, on the other, an intelligible realm of human
being, where agents are free to perform at will. All that has happened is that
the Kantian problematic has been displaced onto discourse, which now offers
the scope for freedom, creativity and performativity previously reserved for
thought.
All this, of course, is transferred, in the case of Mignolo, to the realm
of coloniality, where "languaging" is not an object or real mechanism but an
actual process, not a competence but a performance. A performance that is an act
of total transcendence, in which it is possible to conceive of "thinking beyond
thoughts and languaging, indeed beyond language" (Mignolo 2000: 254),
defined through the recursive capacity of language: "languaging in language
allows us to describe ourselves interacting as well as to describe the
descriptions of our interactions" (254). Finally, the sign finds its referent, but
only in the form of other bits of languaging, a somewhat incestuous
encounter, perhaps, between subject and object, but a felicitous one for all that,
conceived "as the difference that cannot be told, and not as an 'area' to be
studied" (Mignolo 2000: 69) or, in other words, as a form of almost angelic
communion bordering on the ineffable. And so what might seem like the outer
reaches of a colonial territory turns out to be very familiar terrain: the site of
an encounter between two beautiful souls, of eminently petty-bourgeois
extraction. The romantic myth of self-creation re-enacted!
It is a shame to disrupt the happy union, but there are a number of
problems with this scenario. Principally, it is easy to see that the notion of the
subject as free to choose between new descriptions can encourage the
voluntarist view that we are always free to choose any descriptions, or that our
performances escape the restraints of social life, not to mention the limits
imposed by ecology. What such a view ignores, among other things, is the
existence of objective social structures (from language to economic systems)
that totally transcend the level of the self, for whose "performance" they are a
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 91
Deprocessualizing History
The failure to thematize ontology is only the first of Mignolo's sins. The
second is the tendency, rooted in the same irrealism, to deprocessualize history.
Mignolo's primary target is less history per se than the liberal version of it,
which tells a tale of gradual progress to the summit of European excellence.
As in the case of his fellow postmodernists, even the faintest glimmer of
progress in human history is greeted with withering scorn. So concerned is he
to block such narratives that Mignolo has recourse to a "flashback" (Mignolo
1995: xiv-xv), through which to disrupt the narrative flow. Of course, one
understands the problem: "developmentalism" translates, for colonial peoples,
into forms of humiliation and degradation so all-encompassing that the
colonized have only belatedly begun to recover something of their history and
dignity. That said, Mignolo's insistence on the "coevalness" of cultures and his
refusal of the concept of historical progression is a hard call. For certainly,
outside the world of irrealism within which he moves, there is just one little
problem, namely, to take Adorno's example, the relationship between the
slingshot and the megaton bomb. What exactly is Mignolo saying: that there is
no historical evidence of progress in man's productive forces? Even if we limit
ourselves to moral values where, certainly, the historical record is more
ambiguous, a persuasive case can be made for degrees of moral advancement
(see Sayers). The "freedom" of capitalist society may be ideologically inflected,
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 92
18
Antonio Quilis, the editor of the modern edition of the Gramática, alerts us to the
terminological distinction in Nebrija between "palabra" and "voz," the first referring to
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 94
somewhat from Mignolo's central thesis concerning the taming of the "voice."
Nebrija, to reiterate, is actually advocating the secondary status of writing.
True, the grammarian celebrated alphabetic writing as the end result of an
evolutionary process, but as things stand, he appears to have a point regarding
the proliferation of signs under the pictographic or syllabic system, when
compared to the economy of the alphabetic system (cf. Havelock 94). Literacy,
we do not doubt, was put to all kinds of ideological uses in Western society,
but that was only to be expected within a class society.19 Revealingly, the
prohibition upon evolution is quickly lifted in the European context:
Renaissance men of letters, such as Nebrija and Aldrete, "could not have had
the perspective one has today on colonized peripheries" (Mignolo 1995: 67).
Such performative contradictions constitute the weft and warp of Mignolo's
text.
We will restrict ourselves to a number of comments with respect to
Mignolo's reading of Aldrete, who, it is claimed, inclines towards the priority
of speech over writing (1995: 43). The contrast that Mignolo proceeds to draw
with Nebrija is, we believe, scarcely more justified, and certainly no more
helpful, than Migniolo's earlier analysis of Nebrija. True, Aldrete tended
toward an Aristotelian conventionalism that prioritized speech, but the contrast
is not with Nebrija, whose position (we have seen) basically coincides with his
own, but with the Platonic naturalists such as Andrés de Poza (see Read 1977a)
and, within the realm of orthography, Pedro de Madariaga, who attaches great
significance to writing (see Read 1978b). More importantly, Mignolo's reading
exhibits the same interpretive bias that led him seriously astray in the case of
Nebrija. Basically, the colonial critic is out to target Aldrete, and deploys his
rhetorical skills to that effect. The Spaniard, "[w]ith a calm and ghastly
conviction" (1995: 33), states that the Amerindians, disrespectfully referred to
as "aquella gente," lacked any kind of letters and, therefore, civility (34). He
then "blatantly" proceeds to argue the correlation between their lack of letters
and their lack of dress (letters being the dress of speech). Now while Aldrete is
certainly a creature of his times, who took on board uncritically many of the
stereotypical characterizations of Amerindians circulating in Spain, Mignolo's
moralism is not, we believe, the appropriate response and compares
unfavorably with the contributions of liberal scholarship, some of which is far
more sensitive to the nuanced interplay between cultural stereotypes and the
newly acquired "scientific" knowledge otherwise in evidence in Aldrete's text
(cf. Guitarte).
Details aside, Mignolo's discussion is marred throughout by lessons
the word in its "graphemic" aspect and the second to the word in its "phonic" aspect
(Nebrija 1980: 46).
19
For the importance of language to the relations of production, see Read 1992: 48-49.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 95
imbibed from Foucault and his other postmodern authorities. We have in mind
particularly the tendency to collapse different kinds of power into one
category, notably power conceived in its transformative capacity into power
conceived as exploitative and dominative. From a power that is intrinsically
exploitative, Mignolo moves to the generalized suspicion of knowledge and,
more specifically, science, which is portrayed as a universally oppressive
discourse. There is a striking contrast here with the Althusserian tradition, for
which science produces knowledge effects that may or may not be
contaminated by power (see Resch 228, also Bhaskar 1993: 153). While
ideology invades sciences on a daily basis, through the spontaneous behavior
of its individual practitioners, and while it might not always be easy to separate
truth-seeking procedures from those relating to social functionality, a
distinction is always possible in principle. That principle presupposes, at root, a
commitment both to ontological realism and judgemental rationalism, to be
contrasted with the irrationalism so deeply pervasive of Mignolo's texts.
Realists are emphatic that we can have better or worse grounds for adopting a
particular view.
the latter, was to establish the connections and necessary mediations between,
on the one hand, the more general aspects of the relevant social formations
and, on the other, linguistic and orthographical theory, on the outer reaches of
the ideological level. Suffice it for our present purposes to focus briefly on two
scholars writing at the end of the period in question, Bravo Graxera (1635),
notable for his defence of writing and etymological orthography, and Mateo
Alemán (1608), who will usefully serve to offset Mignolo's simplistic view of
the period as dominated by subservience to writing.
In contradistinction to Foucault, with his emphasis upon uniform,
epistemic practices, we insist that there had to be at least two approaches to
issues of orthography in Spain during the transition from feudalism to
capitalism, for the simple reason that, as we argued earlier, there existed at least
two ideologies: substantialism, the ideology of a dominant nobility, and
animism, the ideology of the emergent bourgeoisie. The first rests upon the
importance of "blood" and "lineage," and the substantial nature of clothing,
therefore of orthographical trappings. In the words of Gonzalo Bravo
Graxera: "Son las vozes el cuerpo del sentido, la Orthographia el vestido de las
vozes, decente es que se vistan las letras con aliño, i propriedad" (Bravo
Graxera, fol. A3v). Interestingly, and pace Mignolo, Bravo Graxera sees
himself as battling against a dominant phoneticist bias, which accorded pre-
eminence to speech. To this bias, Graxera opposes the need to preserve
etymology and thereby information concerning the derivation of individual
words. Within the horizon of substantialism, things gravitate towards what
they substantially are, upon reaching which they would ideally come to rest.
Stasis, not movement, is the norm: "Lo mismo es de las palabras peregrinas,
que viven entre nosotros; aunque por la dificultad de los characteres, ò por
otras causas las vistamos en nuestro mismo trage en la sustancia" (fols 4v-5r).
True, for Bravo Graxera, words manifest the concepts of things, as
Aristotle says, but they are, in other respects, no different from tables and
chairs in that they have their own substantial qualities, which are interfered
with on pain of radically transforming the meaning of words, as when "h" is
omitted from "hombre" and "traher". Words, that is to say, function not as
signs but as signatures, written in the book of God, the transformation of
which threatens to obscure God's message, already jeopardized by the effects
of the Fall: "[…] porque no carecen de mysterio los menores characters de las
vozes sagradas i mas los que están explicando su origen" (fol 17v). The specter
of chaos is conjured up, given the idea that each province might adapt
orthography to its own dialectical norms of pronunciation. Manifestly, Bravo
Graxera was resisting the forces of change that, during the transition, were
threatening established hierarchies, as feudal interests were undermined by a
new mercantilism. Social change, for the etymologist, corresponded, in any of
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 97
And these, we insist, are not the stray remarks of some individual eccentric,
but the cogent expression of a new social class, epitomized by Juan de Valdés'
command to "write as we speak." True, such animist sentiments were
increasingly repeated at a writer's peril, in the face of a resurgent feudalism,
masterminded by the Inquisition, but clearly, even in the early 17th century, we
are still some way from the blanket condemnation of speech suggested by
Mignolo.
Los Francezes, para pintar sabio à su Ercules, no le ponian plumas en
la mano, sino cadenas de oro en la lengua […]. Pues que sean las
palabras, mucho (sin comparacion) mas duraderas que los escritos no aí
duda; porque, si se considera la verdad, senzilla i desapasionadamente,
las palabras quedan inpresas en los animos que son eternos […], i los
escritos nos los dejaron en hojas de palmas, cortezas de arboles […]; lo
cual, se gastó con el tiempo. (fol. 82r)
we are still left with a question to resolve: if the objects have nothing in
common, then why are we comparing them? Mignolo replies as follows: "If
the properties that make an object a book are neither in the object nor in the
class of objects of which the book is one example (mainly because there is no
such thing as an essential meaning supporting all different ideas of the book
but, rather, changing conceptions of sign carriers), then we have to seek an
answer to the question within the specific cultural descriptions of similar kinds
of objects" (1995: 120). Presumably, he has in mind a theory of similarity or, in
Wittgensteinian terms, "family resemblance," but the question is never
clarified, and related issues are left unresolved. What, after all, explains the
breathtaking similarity between, on the one hand, the Mexicas' commitment to
reading the world and, on the other, feudal, substantialist notions of the World
as a Book? Mignolo is even less forthcoming on differences within the
European tradition. We have in mind, particularly, the transition from the
notion of the book to the preoccupation with individual "lives." Such a
transition, it should be noted, fits in rather snugly with the Althusserian focus
upon the existence of two ideological matrices, of feudal substantialism and
bourgeois animism (see Rodríguez 2001). The book is a quintessentially
substantialist genre, the "life," a new creation by animism. Mignolo is silent on
such issues, confirming the suspicion that, "with an arrogance thinly masked as
humility," in the words of Eagleton, "the culture of the Other assumes that
there are no major conflicts or contradictions within the social majority
themselves" (Eagleton 2003: 21).
Far more worrying than these omissions, however, is the way in which
Mignolo uses differences between cultural objects to argue that the Mexicas
were also alien to "the Western notion of truth" (1995: 108), since at this point
cultural (and epistemic) relativism begins to transform itself into something
qualitatively different, namely judgemental relativism, relating to classificatory
schemes imposed by the various imperial powers that are deemed to enact the
coloniality of power: "[…] the entire planet […] becomes articulated in such
production of knowledge and classificatory apparatus" (2000: 17). Now while,
as we have insisted throughout, science is certainly implicated in issues of
power, including those that involve master-slave relationships, this fact can
form no basis for the ontological irrealism that Mignolo seeks, somewhat
surreptitiously, to instate. There is a fundamental difference in principle
between, on the one hand, categories of cultural objects, embedded in
localized communities, and, on the other, scientific categorization, which
presupposes the existence of natural kinds, established on the basis of real
underlying essences or mechanisms. The molecular structure of a metal is not
something that European scientists have brought into being and seek brutally
and arbitrarily to impose upon the rest of mankind. Categorial realism makes it
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 100
clear that you can be wrong in your basic characterization of the world, and
that the history of science is one of increasingly accurate categorization of the
world, as access is gained to progressively deeper levels of reality (Bhaskar
2002c: 138).
Predictably, matters are brought to a head over cartography. It is hard,
at first blush, to see exactly where the problem lies. Maps, it is clear, have been
burdened throughout the ages by every manner of ideological baggage. That
much, we can all concede. The problem arises regarding the question as to
whether maps can be said to refer or correspond, in their essence, to reality.
Realists would insist that they can. Mignolo, just as brazen, argues that they
cannot or rather that the difference between, say, Jesuit and Chinese
cartography was relevant "not at the level of true correspondence between
maps and the world but at the level of power" (1995: 225-26). On this basis,
maps are reduced to exercises in power, notably of the kind involved in
master/slave relations, and thereby relieved of any referential responsibilities.
While the world may appear to be opposed to the word or map, "[t]he
dichotomy vanishes when a distinction is made between existence (or the
materiality of what is there) and the description of what there is." Mignolo
continues: "A description of the world is what makes it relevant to us, not its
mere existence. The domains that human being can perceive or describe are much
more limited than what there is. Expanding knowledge is, precisely, the human
capacity of expanding the range of descriptions without exhausting the
ontological domains" (227).
Now this is familiar enough territory. The tactic is to reduce culture to
textualization, whose density constitutes a reflective barrier to the external
world. Language, we saw, is not about denotation but one's capacity to impose
descriptions or, rather, redescriptions on the community. But books and words
are one thing: they may be said to have a density that leads inexorably toward
idealism, in some shape or form. Can Mignolo pull off the trick regarding
maps, where issues of practical adequacy seem, on the face of it, more
compelling? As the colonialist himself concedes: "[T]he problem was (and still
is) that López de Velasco was closer to the 'real' shape of the New World than
Guaman Poma" (253). A problem? Possibly, but not one really to trouble the
irrealist, who rejects any notion of correspondence and whose discourse has
the capacity to suck up whole land masses in the twinkling of an eye: "America
was not an existing entity in the middle of an unknown ocean, waiting to be
discovered, but […] a European invention." (264). It is all very strange. On the
one hand, Mignolo concedes the existence of a land mass, but then, on the
basis that our understanding of it is mediated through imperialist language and
culture, immediately withdraws the concession: "Putting the Americas on the
map from the European perspective was not necessarily a task devoted to
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 101
finding the true shape of the earth; it was also related to controlling territories
and colonizing the imagination of people on both sides of the Atlantic:
Amerindians and Europeans" (281).
On closer inspection, everything hinges on an adverbial phrase. One
might accept that the task cartography set itself was not simply that of finding
the true shape of the earth, but "not necessarily"? Surely, a map would not be a
map if it were not "necessarily" committed to representing reality. Moreover,
could not the two issues – representation and power – be interconnected?
Couldn't finding the true shape have something to do with a state's capacity,
including military capacity, to control a territory? Not for the first time, one is
struck by just how undialectical Mignolo is as a thinker. Consider also the claim
that: "Economic expansion, technology and power, rather than truth,
characterized European cartography early on" (311). Here the "rather than" is
certainly a genuine concession, although minimal. But once it is conceded that
truth is relevant, why should that relevance not have something to do with
economic expansion, not to mention the possession of superior weaponry and
militaristic strategies? After all, it was the Mexicas who lost the imperial
struggle with the Spaniards. Is it not conceivable, indeed, very likely, that the
Spaniards' superior capacity to visualize space (if, indeed, that is what they
possessed) was one of the deciding factors?
As always, problems regarding reference spill over into the question of
evolution. Mignolo objects to the idea that cartography may be said to progress
or that maps gradually become more accurate. But in that case, how do we
explain that, toward 1555 "the world began to look to our hypothetical
European observer very much as it does today for many people on this planet"
(1995: 267)? Presumably, following the logic of Mignolo's argument, because
Europeans imposed their regional wishes by force, on a global scale. But such
logic cannot help but seem rather curious. One wonders how the irrealist is
able to cope on a day-to-day basis, given that his physical well-being, if not
survival, will sometimes depend on the representational accuracy of his maps.
The answer, of course, is that he copes at the cost of ongoing performative
contradictions. Thus, Mignolo concedes, in an unguarded moment, that, when
compared to their European equivalent, Amerindian maps were "very
imprecise as far as location (longitude and latitude) is concerned" (299). But if
one's real location is an irrelevance, why the concern about issues of precision?
We are reminded of Bhaskar's story of the idealist who protested the world to
be a figment of his imagination and then insisted on leaving by the door on the
ground floor, as opposed to the window on the third.
It is at this point, if not before, that one begins to suspect that the nub
of the issue must lie elsewhere. Specifically, we would draw attention to
Mignolo's tendency to equate correspondence with resemblance or, as he terms
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 102
not ask is why he chose Wallerstein and not Rodríguez, who had developed a
whole research program on the transition from feudalism to capitalism that
was perfectly tailored to suit the requirements of the Hispanist. Several reasons
suggest themselves. Firstly, Mignolo is convinced that Marxism, whatever its
virtues as a system of economic analysis, is mired in an expressive totality of
Hegelian extraction (2000: 86). 20 Secondly, Rodríguez is an intellectual who
operates in Spain, a country whose theoretical culture has been systematically
repressed in the North American academy (with the active collusion of
Mignolo). Thirdly, and somewhat paradoxically, Rodríguez's very strengths
were a drawback as far as Mignolo would have been concerned: what he
(Rodríguez) offered was not a supplementary package to the Mignolo brand of
colonial theory, but, through his highly developed theory of the ideological
unconscious, an alternative to it. In contrast, World System Analysis is
characterized by a deficiency that Mignolo was able to turn to good account,
namely its bias toward political economy as opposed to cultural analysis (see
Shannon 204-07). The little that Wallerstein does have to contribute to the
latter is curiously wayward. For while he recognizes the 16th century as a key
stage in the development of a world system, he argues that it was only in the
18th century that an appropriate ideology appears. In his own words, the world
system "functioned for three centuries […] without any firmly established geo-
culture" (quoted Mignolo 2000: 56). As Mignolo observes, such limitations
render Wallerstein complicit with a postmodern concept of modernity that, by
foregrounding the Enlightenment, minimalizes the Iberian contribution to the
"epistemological imagery of the modern world system" (56).
Mignolo naturally sees his own role as rectifying Wallerstein's biases
and omissions. However, in contrast to the Althusserian approach, in which
the economic, political and ideological are pervaded, notwithstanding their
autonomy, by the matrix effect of the mode of production, Mignolo's whole
work rests predictably upon the assumption that it is consciousness or ideas
that ultimately determine material being or material things, to the exclusion of
economic analysis, at least of a Marxist kind. The implicit model is one that
postulates the existence of an ideology or, to use Mignolo's term, "imaginary"
that imprints itself upon the subject qua tabula rasa, in the form of contents,
themes or ideas. What this reduces to, as a moment's contemplation will reveal, is
a neo-Kantian split between form and matter, to be contrasted with the
Althusserian or critical realist view, for which ideology is secreted
unconsciously, at the level of social relations. By the Althusserian estimate, to
imagine ourselves as free agents, given the complexity of this structural mode
20
Such a critique would be of dubious relevance to Rodríguez, given the Althusserian's
notorious opposition to the Hegelian element in Marx and his commitment to "unity in
differences."
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 104
In the end all academics, through their work, simply tell the story of their own
lives, and Mignolo is no exception (cf. Read 2003a). Gradually the thread of an
autobiographical sub-text emerges into the light of day. His birth in Argentina,
his university education, the books he read, including an early, extra-curricular
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 105
acquaintance with Derrida, the cultural cringe and consequence animus against
Europe, the shift to France, the relocation in North America, the frustrations
of the subaltern intellectual within the American academy, his current cultural
predilections, the burgeoning interest in colonial issues, etc. Yet in the end, as
an exercise in self-reflexivity, the narrative fails, and it is not hard to see why.
The references to different loci of enunciation are strictly geographic. "By
bringing this piece of autobiography into the foreground, I have no intention
of promoting a deterministic relationship between place of birth and personal
destiny. I do not believe that someone born in New York will be a broker,
anymore than someone born in San Luis Potosí will be a miner or someone
born in Holland a miller" (1995: 6). But, one wonders, what of the more social
determinations behind Mignolo's formation? On a point of detail, which
quarter of his native city was he born in? Was it a public or private school that
he attended? And while we are on the subject, what did his father do for a
living? Without such information we are left with a postmodern narrative that,
while it refuses the impersonality of its modernist counterpart, demonstrates a
notable lack of reflexivity, and for predictable reasons. For as Bhaskar explains:
"Reflexivity involves an understanding of the self in relation to its context; and
the consequence of the failure of post-modernism to sustain adequate
contextualization means that its increasing emphasis on self is ultimately
nugatory of any true understanding" (Bhaskar 2002a: 34-35). And thus comes
home to roost the last of Mignolo's irrealist birds.
21
Each case had its complexities. Williams, for example, managed to negotiate a
rapprochement to Marxism in later years.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 107
it has to be said, are the last thing on the minds of the newer generation of
culture critics who, their opposition to Eurocentrism notwithstanding, are busy
shopping in the more fashionable parts of Paris. Here, relativity, linguisticism,
ontological irrealism, judgemental irrationalism, the emphasis upon individual
identity, and Power (as opposed to exploitation) are all the rage. We believe,
and will be aggressively arguing, that these positions are sustained by a social
theory that is weak and incoherent.
22
For a useful discussion of what the transition meant for (post)colonial studies in
general, see chapter 1 of Bart Moore-Gilbert.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 108
its textual ambiguities. Closer scrutiny reveals that the colonialist is not denying
the existence of an external world or, presumably, our capacity to refer to it,
but is simply confessing to being "less interested" in this existence than he is in
the world of discourse, a position that is confirmed in his more recent work:
"My use here [of the northern frontier of New Spain] seeks to foreground a
geographic area that was written about, imagined, and mapped from a
colonizing perspective, rather than a natural entity that was discovered, known
and charted" (Rabasa 2000: 21). As if to counteract any bias towards irrealism,
Rabasa adds: "It would be erroneous, however, to think that the people
involved in colonial enterprises lacked the resolve to verify what a
philosophical realist would call the brute physical facts and were content with
ideological, willful claims to the territories" (21). True, it is not altogether clear
whether Rabasa himself is equally attached to the belief in "brute physical
facts," but the implication at least is that he is no idealist. Representation, then,
and misrepresentation of the New World are perfectly feasible, or so Rabasa
can be taken as implying: the emphasis is simply elsewhere, on what is in a
name ("America"), which would explain why "fiction" and "history" are not
mutually exclusive but "complementary forms," whose relation, presumably
would need to be carefully nuanced.
In sum, there seems little to object to here. Indeed, the preoccupation
with language, as the medium and vehicle of social thought and even of life
itself, is indisputably something to be lauded. It was, after all, one of the
achievements of Modernism to insist that reality does not spontaneously offer
itself to the gaze – the claim of earlier 19th-century movements such as
empiricism – but had to be revealed, laboriously. Further to which, most
people would now generally concede that no discourse may lay claim to
epistemological privilege when it comes to accessing reality. And if there are
scholars, such as (allegedly) Tzvetan Todorov, who are concerned with issues
of correspondence between Columbus' words and the reality to which they
(mistakenly or otherwise) refer, then surely Rabasa is quite entitled to concern
himself with the production, by Columbus, of a "New World code" and the
construction of a "complex artifice" through which to "entice the imagination
of his contemporaries" (Rabasa1993: 53). By the same token, he is also
justified in focusing on the way in which actual events are narrated, and on
associated questions (regarding whose complexity we can all agree), leaving on
one side (but not excluding) questions of historical veracity (160).
Yet there are moments, it has to be said, when Rabasa, appears to be
going beyond such straightforward claims. The stimulus here derives from a
Nietzschean tradition that preceded the rise of high Modernism and from
writers influenced by it, such as de Certeau, for whom historiography – as
quoted by Rabasa (8) – "bears within its own name the paradox – almost an
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 109
while still holding out for the existence of a real world, replete with structures
and generative mechanisms, which function independently of us (see Bhaskar
1989a: 44-54). And thirdly, there is a certain irony in the fact that Rabasa
castigates Pastor for her blindness to Eurocentric devices when he is engaged
precisely in reducing ontology, which deals with the question of being, to
epistemology, which grapples with the problem of how we can know being.
For such a reduction, as Roy Bhaskar has insisted, has been the founding
gesture of European philosophy since Descartes (see Bhaskar 1978: 36-45).
How might the debate develop from here? One imagines that Rabasa
would feel inclined to reiterate, firstly that he had only ever wished to promote
an interest in the "geographic invention" of the world, rather than – a simple
shift of emphasis – the "truth" (whatever that might mean) of the historical
record itself, an interest in representation and discursive exchange, rather than
actual historical events; and secondly, that his decision to mount a critique of
colonial discourse from within the framework of a colonizing language and
culture, however effective, tactically speaking, was bound to come at a price,
namely, contamination by the very Eurocentrism that is the object of his
critique. But the colonialist might also wish to argue, more aggressively, that
the "ontological primacy" (Rabasa 1993: 7) of America was never a matter of
indifference to him, as proven by the importance he attaches to "very real
forms of colonization and exploitation" (215n 2); and his insistence that
racism has "very real consequences" (4), which included the loss of possibly
80% of the indigenous population between 1576 and 1580 (125). Finally, it
could conceivably be claimed that evidence of a belief in reality can be found
throughout Rabasa's work. Consider, for example, the manner in which he
dismisses as "nothing but a textual illusion" the notion of an imperialist
conquest carried out by a handful of Spaniards (122), the obvious implication
being that other notions are much more firmly grounded. And the examples
could be multiplied.
So why, then, are we making such an issue of the colonialist's irrealism?
For the following reasons: firstly, the balancing act, between the subjective and
objective, is a mere tactical maneuver, resting on little more than the semantic
ambiguity of such terms as "invention"; secondly, the force of the realist
statements made by Rabasa is constantly undermined by a relativism that
threatens, theoretically, to leave nothing untouched – even racism, however real
its consequences, is significant as an "illusion" or "European construct" (4);
thirdly, it is difficult to know how the respective fictions that Rabasa postulates
can be evaluated in the absence of a common reference point in an extra-
textual world; and finally, because Rabasa's brand of ontological scepticism is
conducive to a radical paralysis of the will that has the capacity to invalidate
any political program. This last point is worth elaborating. If what we do is
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 113
more or less arbitrary, then there is very little point in doing anything. But
clearly, decisions must be taken – what Bhaskar calls the "axiological
imperative" (Bhaskar 2002a: 236) – and in the absence of rational criteria for
choosing what to do, there is always the temptation to do nothing, which,
needless to say, is but one other way of taking a decision. Convention, we are
saying, licenses the politics of inertia, a reminder that debates about
epistemology and ontology can impact upon revolutionary politics. We will be
exploring this issue further below, but before we do, let us tease out a little
further the contradictory basis of Rabasa's brand of post-Marxism.
Performative Contradictions
"Leaving aside the question of whether his critiques of earlier interpretations
are accurate or not, this transformation of the problem has cleared the ground
for examining reconstructions and reinterpretation of 'discovery' no longer in
the light of a correct version but according to the systems of representation
prevalent during specific historical moments" (Rabasa 1993: 215n 2). The
specific reference is to Edmundo O'Gorman's reconstruction of the
"discovery of America." What such statements demonstrate, more generally, is
the ease with which the neo-Kantian splits the universe into two parts, the
domain of the socially determined, on the one hand, and the world that is
external to it, on the other, before proceeding, in typically postmodern fashion,
to privilege the former over the latter. This operation, which Rabasa performs
repeatedly, at times with aplomb, at other times with a touch of élan, is
worrying, on several counts. Firstly, it is tantamount to a failure to universalize,
at a time when postmodernism itself has extended across the globe and cries
out for analyses with a corresponding reach. And secondly, it leads Rabasa
inevitably into contradiction as soon as he starts to promote interpretations of
his own, to be appreciated by the "discriminating reader" (27), and to denigrate
commentators that are deemed "reductive and naïve," "tend merely to repeat
what they take to be obvious" (26), "betray a dull wit" (34), etc. For there is
only one possible way in which such comparisons can be drawn, and that is by
reference to the external world that Rabasa marginalizes, without whose
controlling influence it is not clear how anyone is to be prevented from
constructing the object in any way they want. To pretend otherwise is to
produce a text, as Rabasa manifestly does, that is bound to be riddled with
performative contradictions of every kind.
Of course, one understands his problem. Having reduced ontology to
epistemology, the colonialist finds himself without an ontology, or at least with
a reality whose natural kinds, categories, causal hierarchies, etc. are simply
imposed upon it by mankind, from the outside. From such a thoroughly
Nietzschean standpoint, it is impossible to say what reality is. Now this, it goes
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 114
without saying, is all very well in theory, but its consequences for any practical
program or activity are catastrophic. The fact of the matter is that
epistemology will have an ontology – quite simply it is impossible to speak
intelligibly without one – and in the absence of a formalized one, will secrete
an informal one (see Bhaskar 2002a: 37-40); which explains why Rabasa will
sometimes assume an ontology that corresponds with positivism, otherwise
the "factualist" realm of "things" and "events" that elsewhere he goes to such
lengths to condemn. At this level, one might say, Rabasa has effectively
critiqued empiricist epistemology, but not its ontology, which returns, like
some form of the repressed, to entangle his arguments and reduce them to
incoherence.
And it is not simply positivism that begins to rear its ugly head but a
whole series of humanist, liberal, rationalist and even Marxist discourses from
which Rabasa has previously distanced himself. Where, other than from these
discourses, does Rabasa extract his factual information on the "colonialist
machinery" constructed by Spanish imperialists, on the encomienda and
repartimiento systems, etc. as the basis of "such salient colonialist features as the
institution of slavery" (Rabasa 1993: 75)? On what basis, other than that
provided by these discourses, can he argue that the new scriptural economy of
the "Renaissance" is "capitalistic," in that it reproduces the terms of ownership
of territories (56), as part of some over-all, not to say, universalizing historical
process of "secularization"? Or know that the anti-slavery laws of 1542 were
followed by plagues that greatly diminished the number of tributaries and gave
momentum to the appropriation of land by Spaniards; that the 1540s and
1570s witnessed radical economic, social and political transformations; that
Francisco de Oviedo was the Crown's official chronicler from 1532, etc.? It is
not that Rabasa fails to list his sources but, on the contrary, that he lists them
only too well, and that many presuppose realist ontologies that stand
disqualified by his discursive brand of irrealism. To reiterate, one understands
the nature of Rabasa's dilemma: he sometimes needs concepts for what has
previously been ejected into an inaccessible or non-existent outside. And
needless to say, he is entitled to presume (although no thanks to him) that his
readers have a rough idea of what constitutes, say, a "conquering and
capitalistic enterprise" (75). But that is not the point, which is that he has no
right to draw upon a liberal scholarship that he has mocked for its
epistemological naivety, and upon a Marxist scholarship whose "ground," let us
recall, he aims to "destroy."
There is, it has to be said, a terrible irony about all of this, namely that,
in attempting to move beyond Europe, Rabasa has become mired in its
philosophical, Kantian heartland, just as, in attempting to move beyond
modernism into a post-modernism, beyond Marxism into a post-Marxism, he
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 115
23
The Marxist will insist that the dialogue, as opposed to the feudal dispute, is a generic
form secreted by mercantilist relations – hence its proliferation in the 16th century (see
Rodríguez 1990: 368-72).
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 118
by elaborating a narrative that maps our blind spots and opens areas for
counterdiscourse while decolonizing our present picture of the world" (212).
At the same time, the discursive unconscious differs from its
ideological counterpart in fundamental respects. To begin with, the
postmodern historicization of the subject form is never completed. There are
several reasons for this: firstly, the demands of disciplinary specialization, not
to mention the prevalent postmodern reluctance to engage in grand narratives,
discourage the colonialist from pursuing the complex history of the subject's
transformations since the 16th century;24 and secondly, because, in the last
instance, Rabasa aims not to engage but to transcend history, by tracing, from
the time of Columbus, "forms of subjectivity still influential today" (Rabasa
1993: 75). Moreover, his attachment to judgmental relativism precludes the
kinds of radical "breaks" that Althusserianism permits and indeed theorizes, as
part of its view of the history of science. Moments of sudden insight are
possible under the discursive regime, but are immediately re-contained within
an implicit ontology that is flat, unchanging and unstructured: "Perhaps the
curious notion of an awakening of America can sum up the intention of this
essay: America as a regime of signs and self-evident facts about its discovery
must be 'reawakened' with an interrogation about geographic, cartographic and
historical constituents underlying our present picture of the world – not to
demystify, but to invent the Americas anew" (214). The gesture is a familiar one,
as is the performative contradiction that underlies it. At one moment, the
possibility is held out of accessing reality, of gaining (progressively) deeper
insight into it; at the next, the same possibility is snatched back again, into the
transitive domain of invention. The final outcome is a kind of oscillation,
between the libertarian impulse to resist everything and a calculated, resigned
accommodation to Power, the latter diffused throughout the whole of society.
abstract because it deals with universals; a universal is never more than a part
of any concrete being; science derives from more concrete forms of
knowledge; and science abstracts from the emotional content of knowledge.
"We can thus embrace the richness of scientific inquiry in its ongoing
reconsideration of its categories in the different and differing disciplines (the
one is also plural) without abandoning the opaqueness as well as the
translucent experience of the singular" (320n2).
Obviously, this is not the place to undertake a wholesale dismantling of
scientific positivism and its phenomenological inversions.25 Suffice it to
contrast the scientific realist position of Marxism, which understands the job
of theory as the "empirically-controlled retroduction of an adequate account
of the structures or mechanisms producing the manifest phenomena of socio-
economic life", often in opposition to and out of phase with their spontaneous
mode of appearance (Bhaskar 1991a: 491). In the human sciences, these
mechanisms will include people's own beliefs and self-perceptions. Their
adequate re-presentation in thought is a social, historical and relatively
autonomous process, characterized by Althusser in terms of a series of
"Generalities" (Althusser 183-89). This process, conducted within the transitive
dimension, goes hand in hand with the recognition of the independent
existence and transfactual activity of the object of such knowledge within an
intransitive dimension. A concrete being, within this conceptual framework, is
viewed as the result of conjointly acting generative mechanisms; it just is the
conjunction of these mechanisms. Collier explains: "Since this is a relation of
emergence, the higher stratum being emergent from the lower, one may call
the irreducibility of the concrete particular to the mechanisms which conjoin
in it horizontal emergence" (Collier 1989: 102).
Needless to say, this kind of scientific realism clashes with Rabasa's
traditionally humanistic disdain for scientific inquiry, which surfaces with
particular vehemence in his discussion of the work of Urs Bitterli. According
to Rabasa's synopsis, Bitterli views the voyages of discovery as "deeds whereby
the recently found territories are not merely discovered but actually come into
existence in the act of their discovery" (Rabasa 1993: 38). On the face of it,
this would appear to correspond to the colonialist's own view of the
"invention" of America. But even this, it transpires, does not sufficiently
implicate knowledge in power and the process of imperial conquest, insofar as,
allegedly, Bitterli seeks to salvage the scientific method by dating it from the
second phase of the voyages of exploration during the 18th century. Rabasa
sees this as a covert attempt to defend "the pretended autonomy of science
from politics" (39), which can be contrasted to his own determination "to
avoid the powerful illusion generated by a rhetoric based on scientific truth"
25
For this, see Bhaskar 1989a: 124-32.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 122
(29). The latter position is not one that Rabasa is prepared to surrender or
indeed negotiate in any way, and it is renewed with added vehemence in his
more recent work: "The culture of conquest is not an ideological component
that we can separate from some sort of objectivist discourse, but indeed is part
and parcel of the production of colonial knowledge" (Rabasa 2000: 131). The
tactic is clear: we are being invited to consider science as implicated
inextricably in ideology and rhetoric.
It is an invitation that we must decline. The primary distinction
between ideology and science, we argue, is not one that separates different
practices – the result of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness – but different
aspects of the same practice, in its relation to its environment. Of course, if
one were to give a detailed causal account of the development of a research
programme – how it was organized, financed, hypothesised, applied, and so on
– the relevance of epistemic and ideological foctors would need to be
considered. But there are clear criteria (which is not to say they are easy to
apply) for distinguishing the ideology from the science. As Collier elaborates:
"[I]n so far as mechanisms are set up which allow the mechanisms present in
the intransitive object to determine the result, it is science; in so far as
mechanisms are set up which allow the relations of power in society to
determine the result, it is ideology" (Collier 1989: 29). While science does
achieve progressively more refined knowledge of deeper and deeper levels of
reality – a view, to be sure, which plays a relatively limited role in
Althusserianism proper (Bottomore 450) – it never frees itself from the
clutches of ideology. A research topic can be studied as ideology, which
facilitates social functionality, and as science, arrived at through truth-seeking
procedures. The more ideological motives are present, the more epistemic
mechanisms require scrutiny. Conversely, when the science is sound,
ideological considerations lose their relevance.
Eurocentrism
Once history has been discursively "deprocessualized" (to use Bhaskar's term),
we are left with the basic opposition between a demonized Europe and its
angelicized Other, namely indigenous culture. There are moments, it is true,
when even Rabasa is struck by the crudity of such dichotomies, and the need
to move beyond the "crass, culturally defined dichotomies of Self-Other
(which reproduce ad nauseam the Europe and its others complex)" (Rabasa
1993: 123). "The West", the "Western episteme", "Western dominance", etc.,
he concedes in his more recent work, are always a shifting field, rather than a
homogeneous entity (Rabasa 2000: 199). Having said which, at no point can
the colonialist radically complicate a structure that sustains his core concept of
Eurocentrism, which in turn sustains the notion of the discursive unconscious.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 123
26
The unthinking, even naïve manner in which Rabasa deploys such terms can be
usefully contrasted with the knowing suspicion with which Rodríguez treats the same
items, together with the contrast that he establishes with his own notion of the
"transition": "[…] el sistema de transición tampoco supone una 'unidad' interna, según
la idea de espíritu de la época (o simplemente de época), que se propaga básicamente a
partir del horizonte fenomenológico de principios de siglo, según esa especial mezcla de
enunciados kantianos y hegelianos" (Rodríguez 1990: 124). He explains later: "De
cualquier forma, es claro hoy ya para nosotros que la noción de Renacimiento (como la
de Edad Media) supone una enorme vaguedad respecto a lo que realmente pretende
definir. Más: Renacimiento y Edad Media son términos que sólo tienen aplicación
dentro de la lógica teórica de la ideología burguesa en general" (135).
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 125
27
For an extensive discussion of the historical transformations of animism, particularly in
its petty-bourgeois forms, see Rodríguez 2001a: 129-97.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 127
Conclusion
We can locate discourse theory with respect to its broader historical and social
coordinates: it is part of the "steady trek from erstwhile revolutionary
positions to left reformist ones" (Eagleton 1991: 202) that took place in the
1980s and '90s. Ideologically, it deploys pluralism (cultural differences) to
neutralize any systematic knowledge of the material (economic) difference
between exploiter and exploited, a difference that informs all cultural practices
and relations; and to displace attention from issues of class to those of
ethnicity and nationalism. Significantly, Rabasa took from Turner the
knowledge of the shortcomings of Hegelian Marxism, but not the view of
third-world reformism – the dream of a "third way" between socialism and
capitalism – as "an expression of the ambiguity of the petty bourgeoisie which
is threatened by the working class with the abolition of property and
threatened with extinction by the concentration of capital" (Turner 76). The
omission is unfortunate, given its obvious relevance to the career trajectory of
the "pocho," otherwise a Mexican who (as Rabasa explains) has been co-opted
by imperial culture (Rabasa 1993: 20). Such co-option, we suggested above,
comes naturally to, and is to some degree inevitable in, the migrant intellectual
who arrives in the American academy from a nation that is cast in a
subordinate position within the global system, but more often than not from a
class that is dominant within the nation in question. Such nuances are
important but are readily lost in the rhetoric about "Europe and the Other,"
together with the fact that in class societies power is not distributed equally,
nor is it the effect primarily of discourse; and that the theoretical attempt to
discredit the idea of totality, within the context of political reformism, serves
in the last instance to preserve global systems of exploitation.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 129
are accumulated from the outside are expressed in the literary work through
the use of appropriate linguistic tools. A significantly different emphasis, then,
compared to the Kantian tradition, but one nevertheless encompassed by the
same, let us call it positivist, horizon, within which history is conceived as
recognizing itself in its origins, in the human spirit. One age, the argument
runs, succeeds another, through a process whereby Man, the Subject of
History, either "reveals" or liberates his full, ratiocinative capacities or
"develops" the same through the application of new technical means (see
Rodríguez 1990: 125-28).
While exhibiting peculiarities of its own, the notion of "encounter" is,
like "discovery" and "invention," rooted in the same dominant ideology.
Ontologically, it implies the existence of objects that collide or "encounter"
one another in an empty space, after the fashion of billiard balls.
Epistemologically, it operates in terms of a Subject, the original source of
which is "Man," a category on which Pagden will never relinquish his grip.
History, within this framework, will again take the form of a series of epochal
shifts, "the one already closed, the other still in a state of becoming" (Pagden
1993: 92), engineered by "powerful human agents" (96), progressively
articulated not only by protagonists of Pagden's narrative but by the liberal
historian himself. For after all, the task of the reader, within the dominant
ideology of empiricism, is always to "extract" or disengage the essence of the
text by eliminating what is accidental to it, in other words, what obscures this
essence. The result will be less an analysis than a description of the text, a
description that will constantly teeter on the edge of paraphrase.
Rodríguez, by way of contrast, breaks with all these liberal categories:
[…] para nosotros es obvio que este paso desde las formaciones
feudales a las formaciones capitalistas sólo puede ser explicado de
acuerdo con lo que constituye la base misma de cualquier tipo de
formación social; esto es, a partir de la específica "combinación" en
que se interrelacionan las diversas fuerzas sociales que realmente
intervienen en la constitución de cualquier formación social en la
"ruptura" del feudalismo. (Rodríguez 1990: 128)
The emphasis here is not upon individuals, who, from the Althusserian
standpoint, are simply supports through which social relations are mediated.
Nor is Rodríguez particularly concerned with the "technical" organization of
society, at the specifically political, economic and ideological levels. Everything
hinges rather upon the social relations themselves, which, in the case of
feudalism, consist not of "subjects" but of "serfs" and "servants", in
opposition to their lord or Lords.28 The combined impact of such
28
It should not be supposed, from his emphasis upon abstract social relations, that
Rodríguez is offering a species of rationalism. On the contrary, as other sections of
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 131
Teoría e historia indicate (1990: 136-42), he recognizes the need for additional
specificity, that is, knowledge at a more historically determinate level, which interacts
with higher levels, in an open-ended process.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 132
(Pagden 1993: 52). On this ability many chroniclers were to rest their case, not
least of all Las Casas, Fernández de Oviedo and Acosta.
Autopsy, it transpires, needs to be set off against an alternative, canonic
principle, based on the prevalence of the notion of the world as a book, whose
message must be deciphered, with references to the appropriate authority or
authorities. This second principle, Pagden elaborates, presupposed a theory of
knowledge that dictated the cognitive practices of early historians of America:
"[It] relied very largely upon exegesis and hermeneutics, and claimed that the
external world and all human life was legible, secundum scriptura" (52). The key
canonic text, naturally enough, was the Bible, to be supplemented with the
Church Fathers and, when necessary, the various Classical authorities. Needless
to say, this motley collection was sometimes the occasion for conflict, notably
when Christian sources were called upon to discredit their classical
counterparts, but taken together they constituted an impressive canon to be
off-set against their modern competitors. Pagden explains:
Whenever an alternative structure did present itself it was likely, at least
at first, to be dismissed as false simply because it was an alternative. All
that could be seen or demonstrated by experiment had ultimately to be
made intelligible in terms of one or another component of the canon.
As the Spanish Carmelite Domingo de Santa Teresa stated in the late
eighteenth century, although Descartes's epistemological scepticism
seemed to be intelligible, it had already been refuted a priori by "the
authority of Aristotle and St Thomas and Scotus, and all the other
doctors and theologians who thought the contrary." For such people –
and they are largely representative of the intellectual world to which
nearly all Europeans before the mid-seventeenth century belonged –
there was no possibility for immediate and authoritative knowledge
outside the "structure of norms" provided by the canon. (52-53)
We are left, then, with an opposition between two epistemologies, one
based upon the category of experience and on what could be gleaned by way
of experiment, and the other based upon reading, as a source of authoritative
judgement. Both enjoyed a relationship that, while mutually supportive and, to
some extent, symbiotic, was fundamentally contradictory and fraught with
tension. Let us explore it more closely.
The slippage on Pagden's part from "experience" to "experiment," with
respect to the autoptic principle, locks the latter into a "process of continuing
negotiation" whereby "scientific understanding" was "built up" (53),
cumulatively, in an ongoing spiral of progress. Symptomatically, Acosta did not
hesitate to debunk Aristotle for his obvious shortcomings, when measured
against the evidence of the senses. However, as Pagden continues to explain,
the difficulty "was always seeing the discrepancy between the observation and
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 135
Otro monte hay, en aquella provincia, que llaman Masaya, del cual
hablaré como hombre que le vi e note después de haber oído muchas
fábulas a diversos hombres que decían haber subido a verle. Visto he a
Vulcano, e subido he hasta la cumbre de aquel monte de que sale
continuo humo; e allá encima está un hoyo de veinte e cinco o treinta
palmos en hondo, y en él no se ve sino ceniza, entre la cual sale aquel
sempiterno humo que se de día, e dicen algunos que de noche se
convierte en un resplandor o llama. Pero yo estuve allí, el día que
llegué, dos horas antes que fuese de noche, y estuve el día siguiente
todo, e con otros salté en tierra, e subí a ver aquella cumbre, y estuve
encima más de un cuarto de hora; e bajado, estuve en aquel puerto
también aquella segunda noche hasta que fue de día, el tercero que allí
llegué con la serenísima Reina de Nápoles, mi señora, a quien yo servía
de guardarropa, mujer que fué del Rey don Fernando Segundo; e con
siete galeras estuvo Su Majestad en aquel puerto el tiempo que he
dicho, año de mil e quinientos y uno, e desde allí fuimos a Palermo.
(Fernández de Oviedo 1958: IV, 392-93)
Substantialism and animism are not to be seen as reified ideological
structures, but force-fields that, conjointly, play across the body of texts, with
the result that what may seem, at first sight, to be a relatively homogeneous
text, such as Oviedo's history, will, on closer inspection prove as elusive, fluid
and complex as the social relations that determine it. Note, for example, the
above reference to "service" to Oviedo's mistress, the Queen of Naples, buried
deep in the heart of an eminently literalist passage. Such moments are to be
seen as, in the last instance, the effects of underlying social relations, not of
the individuals through whom these relations are mediated. The point cannot
be emphasized enough. It is not in Las Casas that we are to search for the
origins of substantialism, just as literalism is not ultimately rooted in Oviedo.
Individualities come to consciousness within social structures of whose
mechanisms they are "mere supports," to use Althusser's misunderstood
phrase, and whose totality massively transcends their singularity and that of
their texts.
The Althusserian approach, we are saying, is sustained, in contrast to
its empiricist counterpart, by an explicit theory of ideology, to be
contextualized within the much broader context of a social formation, the
latter defined as "a totality of instances articulated on the basis of a
determinate mode of production" (Althusser and Balibar 189). Ideology is one
such instance among others, notably those of economics and politics. The
structure of the whole is "immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the
term, that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects," in short, that the
structure “is nothing outside its effects" (209n5). The whole becomes what
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 139
Althusser calls an "absent cause" because it is present only in and through the
reciprocal effectivity of its elements. One major consequence of these
theoretical innovations is the rejection of the paradigm or problematic of
ideology as part of the realm of consciousness. In Althusser's own words:
"Ideology is indeed a system of representations, but in the majority of cases
these representations have nothing to do with 'consciousness': they are usually
images and occasionally concepts, but it is above all as structures that they
impose on the vast majority of men, not via their 'consciousness.' They are
perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects and they act functionally on men
via a process that escapes them" (Althusser 233). Ideology, it follows, is an
objective social reality or, more specifically, an organic part of the class
struggle.
Such, then, are the contrasting positions of Pagden and Rodríguez on
ideology. On the one hand, an under-theorized belief in ideology as the
conscious possession of an individual agent, on the other, ideology as the
effect of relations of production, mediated through an ideological matrix. It
remains to assess the explanatory power of each.
relatively precise Europe. And while blood remains important, there has been a
significant shift of emphasis: "La causa que me movió a intitularme de la
devisa de la rosa no es la sangre, porque yo soy de parte muy estraña della, mas
es la voluntad que me a traydo desde muy lexos a conoçerla y preçiarme de ser
invencionado y desvisado de vuestra devisa" (85-86). Chivalrous heroes are
defined by their courtly "virtue," which is, in the last instance, an interiorized
quality of their "soul." And thus, amidst the disquisitions on "service," a "free
subject" gradually takes shape:
Y con estas exclamaciones y otras muchas palabras que dixo de hombre
lastimado, pudo muy bien conoscer Laterio que salían del ánima. Mas
como era cuerdo, diole la respuesta que allí convenía; y como cessó el
Cavallero de la Rosa, sin responder, su ayo estuvo gran rato sin dezir
palabra, y desde a algún espacio començó su habla diziendo: -- Señor,
no quiero poneros culpa en lo que me avés dicho, porque ay causas que
os desculpan y son éstas: yo os he servido desde que naçistes y nunca
supe ni sospeché que ninguna dama ni señora del mundo os enamorase
hasta agora (puesto que siempre os vi fauo rescerlas y servirlas, pero no
para que os diessen pena) y pues começáys a provar los dardos de
Cupido, no me maravillo que se os assienten en el coraçón y os pongan
la vida en aventura. (94-95)
The stage is set for an ideological clash between animism's religion of love and
its ecclesiastical counterpart, a clash that, as indicated above, Laterio anticipates
and attempts, for pedagogical reasons, to defuse.
The distinctive quality of love is its inwardness, symptomatic of which
are the splits that, however embryonically, threaten to fragment the organic
community of feudalism. We have in mind, with respect to Oviedo's romance,
the delicate interplay between what passes privately ("secretamente") and
publicly ("públicamente"), a distinction that feudalism proper fails to draw and
whose presence indicates the extent to which the dominant mode has been
undermined, ideologically. Consider the constant exchange of letters that,
while a further instance of the feudal preoccupation with texts (within texts),
also betrays an increasing concern with privacy, the domain par excellence of
beautiful souls. While we are still some distance from the dialogues and intimate
interchanges characteristic of bourgeois animism, it is significant that
Claribalte and his princess are married firstly privately and then publicly (225,
289), with Laterio functioning as "testigo de vista" (227), a phrase that will
become the hallmark of all future literalism.
Christian Animism
Given Pagden's inadequate handling of a book of chivalry, whose ideological
complexities we have been at pains to explain, it is not surprising to see the
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 142
29
The failure to grasp this point, which is nothing less than that of the radical
historicity of literature, has occasioned all kinds of confusion. The greatest danger remains
that of collapsing 16th-century bourgeois culture into its 18th-century counterpart. In the
words of Rodríguez: "[…] si señalamos que el 'yo autobiográfico' no existe en sentido
estricto en el Lazarillo, lo hacemos una vez más para oponernos a la habitual lectura –
viciada – que acostumbra a dar por supuesto el sentido del 'yo' y de tal 'autobiografismo.'
Esto es, para oponernos a la habitual identificación del Lazarillo con la noción de 'sujeto' –
kantiano, empirista, pequeñoburguesa de los siglos XVIII al XX" (Juan Carlos Rodríguez
2001b: 132).
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 144
Non-Organic Aristotelianism
One effect of the political reversals – quintessentially the defeat of the
Comuneros – experienced by the emergent Spanish bourgeoisie in the early 16 th
century is to postpone indefinitely the kind of bourgeois revolution that
launched England and, eventually, France upon the road to modernity.
Ideologically, a resurgent substantialism quickly establishes itself in Spain as
the dominant ideology, at which point animism begins to live something of an
underground existence, its place taken by a non-organic Aristotelianism that is
able to "live with" its earlier, feudalizing counterpart. But why, specifically, the
need for a compromise discourse of this kind? Rodríguez explains:
El por qué es obvio: las relaciones sociales mercantiles siguen existiendo (aunque
su realización clave sea sólo a nivel económico) y siguen segregando por consiguiente
30
For further details, see Read 2004.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 147
31
For further discussion of this stylistic phenomenon, as it appears in the Poema de Mio
Cid, see Read 1983: 11.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 149
substantialism and animism, in the case of the Marxist. Yet appearances can
prove deceptive, as a more detailed comparison between the two scholars
reveals. On the one hand, we have an idealist brew, concocted of elements
drawn from empiricism, Kantianism and Hegelianism, and, on the other, a
brand of Structural Marxism that defines itself precisely in terms of its
opposition to all three bourgeois ideologies. Pagden, no doubt, poses the
relevant issues in terms that speak far more directly to the Anglo-Saxon
academy, and in a manner far more accessible than his Althusserian
counterpart. That said, he unconsciously embraces an empiricism that can
offer few prospects for a theory of the "ideological matrixes" towards which
he so lamely gestures (Pagden 1995: 125), and even fewer prospects for a
theory of the specific matrix that holds the colonialist himself so firmly within
its grip and with which he would need to "break" before the serious task of
ideological critique could get underway.
In his La isla que se repite, Cuban critic Antonio Benítez Rojo re-reads one of
the digressive "fictions" within Las Casas' Historia de las Indias, concerning a
plague of ants that occurred in the Caribbean islands in 1519-21, and, through
the deployment of the key Freudian notion of the uncanny, argues that it
rehearses the Spaniard's deeply entrenched sense of guilty complicity in the
importation of Negro slaves, who were currently "plaguing" these same
islands. The initial goal below will be to review, metacritically, the theoretical
apparatus that Benítez Rojo brings to bear on Las Casas' text. Psychoanalytic
readings, as we know, have long been a commonplace of (post)colonial studies,
although never conducted with an easy conscience. The problem, in its general
outlines, is fairly clear. On the one hand, few would contest the transhistorical
existence of a psychic human apparatus, succinctly alluded to by Freud himself
in his famous observation concerning the Trobian islanders: "Don't they have
an anus then?" On the other hand, we have the warnings of Franz Fanon
against the uninhibited application of "European" theoretical categories to a
psychic economy of the colonized, on the grounds that the latter is manifestly
inflected by the material brutalities of imperialism. Benítez Rojo is himself
firmly persuaded of the relevance of psychoanalysis: the texts of Las Casas, he
avers, constitute nothing less than a "performance psicoanalítica" (Benítez Rojo
1998: 139). Reading Benítez Rojo against the grain, we will argue that, while
the existence of an unconscious association between the ants and Negroes is
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 150
32
Needless to say, Benítez Rojo is by no means the first to focus upon Las Casas'
problematic role in the importation of African slaves to the Caribbean. Indeed,
traditional authorities have focused unflinchingly upon it. And what they have had to
say, for the most part, seems eminently acceptable. Henry Raup Wagner, for example,
rightly argues that the widespread use of slaves in Southern Spain explains in itself Las
Casas' initial acceptance of Negro slavery and why he personally advocated it.
Similarly, we would agree that the Dominican's zeal to defend the cause of the Indians
readily explains why he continued to advocate this same slavery until relatively late in
the proceedings (Wagner 247). Nor would we necessarily question the view that Las
Casas' advice "had no effect on the course of events" (246). What is far more debatable,
and certainly more relevant to our present concerns, is the claim by Wagner's editor,
Helen Rand Parish, to the effect that Wagner's work "is free from every preconception
save one, which he had derived from his own study of the material. He felt strongly that
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 151
Uncanny Visitation
Let us begin where Benítez Rojo begins, namely with those sections of Las
Casas' text that deal with the plague of ants that overran the islands of the
Caribbean in the early years of the 16th century. The citation below is taken
directly from Benítez Rojo's text, which uses the Fondo de Cultura Económica
edition of Las Casas' Historia de las Indias of 1965. Our own references will be
to the first edition of this work, which appeared in Spain in 1875-76. For once
these editorial details will prove to be of some consequence:
[…] hicieron ventaja las hormigas que en esta isla se criaron a las de
Sant Juan, en el daño que hicieron en los árboles que destruyeron, y
aquéllas a éstas en ser rabiosas, que mordían y causaban mayor dolor
que si avispas al hombre mordieran y lastimaran, y dellas no se podían
defender de noche en las camas, ni se podía vivir si las camas no se
pusieran sobre cuatro dornajos llenos de agua. Las de esta isla
comenzaron a comer por la raíz los árboles, y como si fuego cayera del
cielo y los abrasara, de la misma manera los paraban negros y se
secaban; dieron tras los naranjos y granados, de que había muchas
huertas y muy graciosas llenas en esta isla; […] dan tras los cañafístolos,
y, como más a dulzura llegados, más presto los destruyeron y los
quemaron […] Era, cierto, gran lástima ver tantas heredades, tan ricas,
de tal plaga sin remedio aniquiladas; […] solas las heredades que había
de cañafístolos en la vega y las que se pudieran en ella plantar, pudieran
sin duda bastar para proveer a Europa y Asia, aunque las comieran
como se come el pan, por la gran fertilidad de aquella vega […]
Tomaron remedio algunos para extirpar esta plaga de hormigas, cavar
alrededor de los árboles, cuan hondo podían, y matarlas ahogándolas
en agua; otras veces quemándolas con fuego. Hallaban dentro, en la
tierra, tres y cuatro y más palmos, la simiente y overas dellas, blancas
como la nieve, y acaecía quemar cada día un celemín o dos, y cuando
otro día amanecía, hallaban de hormigas vivas mayor cantidad.
Pusieron los religiosos de Sant Francisco de la Vega una piedra de
solimán, que debía tener tres o cuatro libras, sobre un pretil de una
azotea; acudieron todas las hormigas de la casa, y en llegando de comer
dél luego caían muertas; y como si enviaran mensajeros a las que
estaban dentro de media legua y una alrededor, convocándolas al
Casas's life and writings were inseparable; you simply could not discuss one without the
other" (xix). For what such writers and critics fail to see is that the assumption of a
strong "personality," otherwise a "free subject," committed to expressing an authentic
interiority, in a manner that "set [Bartolomé de las Casas] far above most men of his
age" (247), is the most basic preconception of all, as both Benítez Rojo and Rodríguez,
in their different ways, set out to prove. For further discussion of subjectivity in the
context of slavery, see Read 2003b, 2003c
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 152
banquete del solimán, no quedó, creo, una que no viniese, y víanse los
caminos llenos dellas que venían hacia el monasterio, y, finalmente,
subían a la azotea y llegaban a comer del solimán y luego caían en el
suelo muertas; de manera que el suelo de la azotea estaba tan negro
como si lo hobieran rociado de polvo de carbón; y esto duró tanto
cuanto el pedazo de solimán, que era como dos grandes puños y como
una bola, duró; yo lo vide tan grande como dije cuando lo puiseron, y
desde a pocos días lo torné a ver como un huevo de gallina o poco
mayor. Después vieron los religiosos que no aprovechaba nada el
solimán, sino para traer basura a casa, acordaron de lo quitar […]
Viéndose, pues, los españoles vecinos desta isla en aflicción de ver
crecer esta plaga, que tanto daño les hacía, sin poderla obviar por vía
alguna humana, los de la ciudad de Sancto Domingo acordaron de
pedir el remedio al más alto Tribunal: hicieron grandes procesiones
rogando a nuestro Señor que los librase por su misericordia de aquella
tan nociva plaga para sus bienes temporales; y para más presto recibir el
divino beneplácito, pensaron tomar un Sancto por abogado, el que por
suerte nuestro Señor declarase; y así, hecha un día su procesión, el
obispo y clerecía y toda la ciudad echaron suertes sobre cuál de los
Sanctos de la letanía tenía por bien la Divina Providencia darles por
abogado; cayó la suerte sobre Sant Saturnino, y […]celebráronle la
fiesta con mucha solemnidad […] Vídose por experiencia irse
disminuyendo desde aquel día o tiempo aquella plaga, y si totalmente
no se quitó, ha sido por los pecados […] La causa de donde se originó
este hormiguero, creyeron y dijeron algunos, que fué de la traída y
postura de los plátanos. Cuenta el Petrarca en sus Triunfos, que en la
señoría de Pisa se despobló una cierta ciudad por esta plaga que vino
sobre ella de hormigas […] y así, cuando Dios quiere afligir las tierras o
los hombres en ellas, no le falta con qué por los pecados las aflija y con
chiquititas criaturas: parece bien por las plagas de Egipto. (Quoted by
Benítez Rojo 1998: 117-18)33
The moment, as it is contextualized by Benítez Rojo, was a crucial one,
economically and socially, in the development of the Spanish colonies,
occurring, as Las Casas himself is at pains to explain, between a catastrophic
"plague" of smallpox, which decimated the Indian population and, in
consequence, the most readily available source of labor power, and another
"plague," otherwise the numerous Negroes who, having been imported in their
thousands to rectify the labor shortage, had escaped from captivity and were
proceeding to harass the white settlers. Benítez Rojo follows other
commentators in viewing such textual interpolations as carefully constructed
33
For the same passage in the 1875-76 edition, see Las Casas 1875-76: V, 24-27.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 153
34
I am not personally familiar with the plant conerned. The definition given in the
Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado, 2002, is interesting: "Planta arbórea grande y frondosa,
de 10 m. de alto, de tronco ramoso, hojas compuestas, flores amarillas en racimos
colgantes y fruto en la legumbre leñosa de pulpa negruzca y dulce, empleado como
purgante; fruto de esta planta." The tree-like nature of the plant is confirmed by Las
Casas himself, who refers to it as a "tree" (1875-76: V, 24). This brings to my mind
bamboo, a plant with which I am familiar, that, while often relatively small individually,
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 155
can grow into large clumps that readily pass for "trees."
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 156
no es menester comer con ella pan ni otra cosa, y es de excelente sabor, e sana
e de gentil digestión: que nunca he oído decir que hiciese mal a ninguno" (248).
Among their other virtues, plantains last well, which means they are useful to
take to sea: "saben mejor en la mar que en la tierra" (248). What Oviedo does
confirm, let us note in passing, is that the ripe plantain is a favorite food of
ants, which supports the association between bananas and ants that Las Casas
seeks to establish.
A Case of Conscience
At this point, Benítez Rojo turns momentarily from the plague of ants to the
existence of the slave plantation and its alleged repression from the text of Las
Casas. Attention focuses in this respect upon another section of Historia de las
Indias, cited by Benítez Rojo (1998: 125-26), in which Las Casas explains the
circumstances that led to the importation of Negro slaves into the Caribbean
and his own soon-to-be-regretted participation in it. Benítez Rojo's first task is
to re-write the text, so as to transform it, or more charitably, to emphasize its
status, as a mea culpa (127), whereby to engineer an inversion of the
master/slave dichotomy, through the violence inflicted upon the white Spanish
settlers by escaped slaves: "Al final de su acto de contrición resulta que son los
'negros' los que ejercen presión sobre los 'blancos'" (127). Integral to Benítez
Rojo's argument is an attempt to unsettle the meaning of "slave," as the term is
used by Las Casas, through its juxtaposition to the notion of "free man."
Now there is much that is troubling about the above, beginning with
the citation of the passage from Las Casas and the form that it takes. Allegedly,
Benítez Rojo executes "[u]na edición más o menos objetiva del texto del
mencionado capítulo" (1998: 125), but if we focus upon the first ellipsis, we
discover, after consulting the original, that the omitted material deals
extensively with precisely the topic that Benítez Rojo claims Las Casas to be
systematically repressing, namely the whole issue of slave plantations. Indeed,
what emerges is a veritable history of the early sugar trade, with the names of
people and places, and dates to match, extending to information regarding the
nature and extent of financial investment, trade practises and technological
development within the industry (Las Casas 1975-76: V, 28-29). It was
doubtless this passage that explains Benítez Rojo's earlier confession (see 1998:
74n 120) to having based his summary of the history of the slave plantation in
part on information derived from Las Casas' own text! Of course, the claim
has always been that what concerns Benítez Rojo is the omission of any
reference to plantation slavery from Las Casas' account of the plague of ants.
We understand that, but the suppression of such references elsewhere can only
enhance the force of Benítez Rojo's claim, and in a manner that is not entirely
legitimate.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 157
Oedipal Torments
Having established to his satisfaction Las Casas' evasive, guilty complicity in
the beginning of the slave trade, Benítez turns to what he describes as the
"objetivación escatológica del Edipo." The substance of the critic's claim is
that Las Casas was unconsciously or subconsciously repressing what he
otherwise intended to confess, namely his own implication in what he came to
see as an act of sinful transgression. Crucial to the argument is an earlier part
of the Historia (chapter 102) in which Las Casas covers the same factual basis
regarding the birth of negro slavery but omits his own complicity, other than
through a marginal footnote (subsequently incorporated, within brackets, in
the 1965 edition of the Historia): "Este aviso de que se diese licencia para traer
esclavos negros a estas tierras dio primero el clérigo Casas, no advirtiendo la
injusticia con que los portugueses los toman y hacen esclavos; el cual, después
de que cayó en ello, no lo diera por cuanto había en el mundo, porque siempre
los tuvo por injusta y tiránicamente hecho esclavos, porque la misma razón es
dellos que de los indios" (quoted by Benítez Rojo 1998: 132). Benítez Rojo
speculates that Las Casas added this marginal comment "después de que la
redacción de la noticia de la plaga de hormigas le trajera la culpa y el miedo que
el mecanismo represivo del preconsciente le había hecho olvidar" (1998:132).
The suggestion is that the story of the ants, occurring as it does in close
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 158
proximity to Las Casas' guilty confessions, enabled the cleric to decodify the
"plague of ants"/"plague of negroes" parallel. Equipped with this insight, he
returned to his earlier discussion of slavery to acknowledge his complicity in a
marginal aside, as a kind of retrospective amendment. Benítez Rojo suggests
that, at the earlier point, Las Casas' interest "estaba dirigido, en lo fundamental,
a las tribulaciones de los indios." Only later, after writing about the ants, did he
make the necessary connections, "que su culpa y su temor al castigo divino le
habían impedido hasta entonces ver" (133).
The reading is an intriguing one, and worthy of close scrutiny. In
substance, the psychoanalytic exegesis hinges on the description of the solimán
as being of the size of "two fists," which, following the ravages of the ants,
was reduced to an object the size of an egg (135). The logic of argument is as
follows: unconsciously, Las Casas envisages the plague of ants as an Oedipal
punishment, whose resolution, through the intervention of a heavenly father,
is tantamount to a partial castration – hence the reduction of the genitalia to
the size of an egg. The supposition here is that the genitalia correlate with the
soul, whose condemnation to hell is equivalent, in metaphorical or symbolic
terms, to a supreme act of castration. If we accept the reality of such linkages,
the possibility exists that the ants/negroes association was indeed a psychic
reality for Las Casas, to the extent that it constituted a "preámbulo necesario
para su examen de conciencia y su arrepentimiento" (136). The claim is that
Las Casas was himself alert, however subliminally, to the relevant connections:
"Al autoanalizarse, logró que su temor al castigo del Padre flotara en el umbral
que comunica lo uncanny con lo sociológico, lo literario con lo histórico" (136-
37).
Is this account convincing? While the association that Benítez Rojo
seeks to establish between the plague of ants and the "plague" of Negroes is
well founded, the descent into Las Casas' libidinal unconscious is far from
persuasive. To begin with, we are asked to take on trust the equation between
the soul and the genitalia, which, while it might be possible to sustain
metacritically or even mythically, needs textual support at the applied level, if it
is to be convincing. The details that are forthcoming are far from conclusive.
Everything rests finally upon the existence of the two "bolas" ("balls"), but
these would be far more arresting if they were found to correlate with two eggs
instead of one.
The web of associations is, in sum, a frail one, and risks degenerating
into a playfully libidinal exercise of its own, which, as a theoretical base, is
totally unable to sustain the massively idealistic superstructure that Benítez
Rojo proceeds to erect upon it: "Hay que tener en cuenta que la performance
psicoanalítica del texto de Las Casas es desencadenada por su responsabilidad
hacia la esclavitud del negro y hacia la plantación; esto es, al reconocerse ante la
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 159
Ley como culpable de haber 'deseado' y puesto sus manos con violencia sobre
aquello que era patrimonio privado del Poder Divino. En mi opinión este
complejo hace que podamos considerar la psiquis de Las Casas como
protocaribeña – también su relato uncanny –, puesto que este proceso de
transgresión, culpa y temor al castigo por la 'posesión' contranatural del esclavo
africano dentro del degradante régimen de la plantación establecía una
modalidad ajena a la experiencia medieval europea, incluso a la concepción
aristotélica de esclavitud, lo cual supo distinguir bien Las Casas" (139-40). The
leap is a prodigious one, from the specificities of an individual psyche to the
level of the Moving Spirit, thinly disguised as a Caribbean way of being. And it
is possible because Benítez Rojo was only ever operating at the level of
discourse, because the individual "fundador de discurso" whose psyche the
critic was scrutinizing had already been abstracted from the material flow of
history. Hence the ease with which the solimán is turned into genitalia: when it
comes to spirits, anything can become anything. Hence also the inevitability of
the final act of transcendence. From the very beginning the stage has been set
for the grand finale, when history steps aside to allow for the entry of
Repetition: "la literatura caribeña más estimable en Occidente, al igual que la
historiografía, repite una y otra vez, dentro de sus variaciones polirrítmicas, el
combate mitológico de las hormigas y el solimán en tanto presencia ausente"
(1998: 140).
We are loath to join Benítez Rojo in what is manifestly a flight of the
Imagination. Why our suspicions? Is our claim that people in the 16th century
did not possess individual psychologies? Obviously not. Yet we are going to
argue that Benítez Rojo can prioritize what is manifestly the "free subject"
("psychology"), of the kind beloved of bourgeois ideology, only in the absence
of a theory and history of ideological production. For it is our view that the
key to understanding the texts adduced by Benítez Rojo lies in the historical
production of subjectivity. And it is here that the Cuban critic is most lacking,
necessarily so in that the kind of post-structural, postmodern methodology
that he deploys is unable to provide the necessary historical ballast. A complete
change of theoretical terrain is necessary, to facilitate which we will turn to the
work of Juan Carlos Rodríguez.
Capitalism, by way of contrast, required "free men," who for that reason had
to be "freed" of all their possessions, with the exception of their labor power.
The ideological unconscious here at work, or so at least we have seen
Rodríguez theorize, is "originally" secreted at the level of productive relations,
"subsequently" thematized within the ideological state apparatus, and "finally"
returned to the base where it legitimizes the prevailing relations of production.
Rodríguez elaborates: "Pero a la vez estoy planteando lo que me parece
realmente decisivo: el sentido de la vida como una ontología del ser en tanto
que ontología histórica del ser explotado, o más aún, en tanto que ontología de
la vida como explotación a través de la relación entre el yo y el yo soy"
(Rodríguez 2001[c]: 410).
The reality of the ideological unconscious is clear. But what of the "I"?
Nobody, least of all Rodríguez, is denying the weight of our genetic legacy or
that it is via the fragmented flux of desire, resistances, and frustrations,
otherwise our dreams and nightmares, that we struggle to express the personal
pronoun "I." That said, however, everything hinges on psychic processes
("procesos yoicos") as opposed to distinct forms of the ego ("yoes").
Moreover, it is at this point that the "I" intersects with the "I am," which, being
historical, belongs to language and thereby to the historical form of
individualities. And herein lies the rub: it is always the system that subjectivizes
us, that forces us to state our name, that extracts our genetic identity: "En
consecuencia si nuestro inconsciente libidinal (nuestro supuesto yo) está desde
ya siempre atrapado, configurado, por el inconsciente histórico, por el lenguaje
ideológico de nuestra realidad familiar y social, sólo a través de ese lenguaje
podemos decir yo soy. Con lo cual las cosas se complican hasta el extremo.
Porque si es evidente que el yo no puede existir más que a traves del yo soy, ¿qué
sentido tiene entonces decir yo fuera de la historia, fuera de nuestra realidad
social que es donde el yo soy se inscribe?" (404).
To further pursue this debate, Rodríguez offers a reading of Freud that
opposes a "weak" Freud, who believed in the existence of an authentic subject,
prior to, indeed repressed by, its Culture or the social system, to a "strong"
Freud, for whom the psyche only ever exists as a process, otherwise "un
subsuelo de nada," "un poco de humo y un mucho de vacío." The difference
between these two subjects, as far as the Spaniard is concerned, is enormous.
The first presupposes the existence of a transhistorical, barbaric unconscious,
to be contrasted with a consciousness that, metaphorically speaking, assumes
all the trappings of civilization. The second concerns a subject that is
structured by its entry into the symbolic, an entry that constructs the libidinal
unconscious retrospectively. Of course, the first subject has sometimes offered
a vantage point from which to denounce the propagators of alienation and
antagonists of freedom and authenticity. But the reality is that it has never
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 161
35
The Althusserian notion of the ideological unconscious needs to be distinguished
categorically from its Lacanian, libidinal counterpart, the symbolic, which is likewise
located in the exterior. The incompatibility between language and desire in the French
psychoanalyst "follows simply from the nature of language as such" and, in
consequence, "returns psychoanalysis to a historical and political vacuum" (Dews 108).
It is true, of course, that Althusser himself toyed with the Lacanian notion of
interpellation in the constitution of the subject, but in a manner that preserved the
individualizing, apolitical, ahistorical foundation of psychoanalytic thought and which,
accordingly, proved ultimately unworkable within Marxism (see Lovell 43-46; also
Lock). Rodríguez's own approach, as we have characterized it above, suggests the need
to withdraw the concept of ideology from the terrain that it was asked to occupy by
Althusser, namely the universal constitution of the individual subject, so as to focus
once again on historically localized social relations of production.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 163
deploy words that are every bit as material and substantial as tables and chairs.
Indications are that otherness was reserved for the next, as opposed to this,
world, which led me, some years ago, to characterize the semantics of the
Poema de Mio Cid as radically exteriorized, and to emphasize the paramount
importance in this work of gesture, action and the spoken word. The
suggestion was that there existed a more or less strict parallel between "homo
exterior" and "homo interior" (Read 1983: 7), which enabled the reader easily
to map the former upon the latter. By extrapolation, the medieval text was
concerned not to expose the workings of private emotion but rather to
promote "the tangible representation of emotion" (9).
Undoubtedly, there is much to recommend such an approach in that it
resists the tendency to "psychologize" the Cid and promotes an interpretation
that corresponds more with feudal, as opposed to modern expectations. But
the danger with The Birth and Death of Language was always that, its historicist
credentials notwithstanding, it failed to problematize the one conceptual
category most in need of problematization, namely that of the transcendental
subject itself. The assumption was that the latter, while undergoing diachronic
variation, remained in essence unchanged. It was a Moving Spirit whose hidden
depths were always already there, although buried by the residues of time. Once
this inner world was dis-covered or "liberated," or so at least it was implied,
"Man" would emerge in his full splendor. The virtue of Rodríguez's work is
that it makes no such assumptions: "En estricto: para el organicismo feudal, la
relación interior/exterior no se planteó jamás" (Rodríguez 1990: 205). The effect
of the transition was to unsettle this correspondence, and so to institute a
number of oppositions, between the private and public, mind and body, form
and content, etc. that would raise insuperable problems for substantialism, as it
was driven to accommodate itself to this new order. By way of a compromise,
God's signatures were transferred to the interior of the "soul," disengaging
themselves to some extent from external reality, with consequences that
Rodríguez is quick to highlight:
Aunque el organicismo no pueda reconocer la dicotomización entre lo
privado y lo público, sí que reconoce de algún modo su impacto al
presuponer ahora que se ha abierto un abismo entre el reino de las
apariencias (o de las "costumbres") y el reino del espíritu (o de la "fe").
(Rodríguez 2001[b]: 234-35).
The ideology in ascendance, we have seen, was animism, the earliest
form of bourgeois ideology, which does indeed function through the category
of the subject or rather, at this stage, of the "alma bella." It is embodied
quintessentially in the tradition of lyric poetry or Petrarchism that entered into
Spain through Garcilaso. In contrast to the inextricable intermingling of body
and soul, as postulated by substantialism, animism eradicates all hierarchies
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 164
the goal (common to much traditional criticism) of duplicating the text's self-
knowledge by way of reproducing its phenomenal forms. The theoretical
concepts that they bring to bear, of the ego, id, uncanny, etc. in one case, and
modes of production, social relations, ideology, etc. in the other, are their
concepts. But from this point onwards, their trajectories begin to diverge.
Benítez Rojo's reduction of Las Casas' text to an individual mystery abolishes
its character as a determinate ideological production of a determinate historical
matrix. The presiding category is that of the transcendental subject, whose
internal complexity is partly the result of its having to absorb fundamentally
social dimensions of human being. Benítez Rojo's stated goal, from the
beginning, is to emphasize the open multiplicity of the Caribbean, collapsed
into a textuality that repeats itself, in an endless play of paradoxes and
displacements, in a causally indeterminate process that ultimately defies
explanation. Las Casas' virtue, viewed from this perspective, is that he
exemplifies an early, proto-form of this transhistorical Caribbean writing.
By way of contrast, the Marxist critic, while he might well begin with
the subjective understanding that people have of their own society, sees the
text as an ideological product that totally transcends the psyche of its author.
Certainly, particular ideological structures may only be "real," as opposed to
real, but they constitute, and this is the point to be emphasized, objective
structures, which are not to be seen as originating in the interior of the
"subject." The latter is simply an ideological category whose localized
production is to be specified, historically. Agents are individualities that
mediate mechanisms totally transcending their consciousness and even
unconsciousness, in the Freudian sense, although these same agents may well,
and in fact often do, react back upon and "unconsciously" transform these
structures. Hence the tendency of Rodríguez to introduce scare quotes that
warn readers against discerning "intentions," conscious or otherwise, in agents'
actions or states. The oscillation between the feudal, organicist perspective and
its animist counterpart, which we have observed at work in Las Casas' text, is
neither a function of "psychology," nor emphatically of "psychic richness," but
of the productive, ideological dialectic in which it is situated (Rodríguez
2001[b]: 170-71).
To illustrate the practical consequences of these contrasting
interpretive stances, let us return briefly to the opposition between slavery and
freedom, as elaborated by Benítez Rojo. Las Casas' mea culpa, we recall, was,
according to the Cuban critic, the moment when the master/slave opposition
underwent an inversion, whereby the slave owners, the Spaniards, were
projected as the objects of violence, at the hands of the slaves. What I wish to
draw attention to here is not simply the ease with which, in what is obviously a
deconstructive turn, the material brutalities of slavery have become an issue of
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 167
textual play. More disturbing is the extent to which, in the process, writing
collapses into reading, in the sense that the text becomes an accomplishment
of the reader. Symptomatic of the slippage is an increasing textual density:
"[…] la descripción de la figura circular de este canon, tan al uso, ha sido
lograda a partir de un origen geométrico" (Benítez Rojo 1998: 128). The end
result is an openness to meaning that finally obliterates all recollection of
production.
Faced by such over-writing, the instincts of the Marxist critic will be to
pull back. Ideologies, he is likely to remind the deconstructionist, do not
descend from the realms of some "moving spirit" or materialize
spontaneously, as if by magic, nor, for that matter, are they born out of the
deep recesses of the Freudian unconscious. Rather they are secreted by specific
sets of social relations that it is incumbent upon the critic to analyze in their
historical specificity. Textual evidence, after all, is far from lacking in the case
of Las Casas, whose narrative throughout is refreshingly attentive to the grim
hand of Necessity and to labor relations in the early days of the colonization.
Indeed, the Dominican attributes Columbus' compulsion to enslave the Indian
population to his pressing, nay immediate, need to turn his expeditions into
profitable enterprises. Even if we limit ourselves to those sections of Historia
de las Indias which engage Benítez Rojo's attention, it will become clear that the
critic has spurned material, historical specificities, with respect to the relevant
social relations, to raise the debate onto a suitably abstract level, where he can
indulge in his instincts for free-flowing post-structuralist play. Indeed, the issue
of slavery and the various forms of serfdom or bound labor were always
associated in Las Casas' own mind with the project of populating the
Caribbean islands with "labradores" ("workers") from Spain. "Asentada, pues,
la corte, y los Consejos vadeándose, comenzó el padre Casas á proseguir la
sacada de los labradores, entrando en el Consejo de las Indias […]. Y porque
una de las mercedes que habia pedido que el Rey hiciese á los labradores, fue
que se les diesen las granjas, ó estancias o haciendas que el Rey en esta isla
tenia, que no eran de mucho valor, para que luégo se aposentasen y comiesen
dellas (cosa y socorro muy necesario para que los labradores se abrigasen, y
consolasen y mantuviesen hasta que estuviesen para trabajar y ayudarse y tener
de suyo)" (Las Casas 1975-76: V, 33).36
Our aim, let us make perfectly clear, is not to call into question Benítez
Rojo's use of the categories of "slave" and "freeman." On the contrary, we
believe these to be of fundamental importance. The problem is that, as
deployed by Benítez Rojo, they serve, in their abstraction, to disengage debate
36
While Las Casas' suggestions regarding the importation of African slaves may have no
direct or immediate effect upon the Caribbean slave trade, his plan for aided emigration
"was promply taken up by the Council [of the Indies] that spring [1518] and finally
enacted despite a whole series of obstacles that held it up for months" (Wagner 41).
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 168
from the material realities of labor relations, relations that, judged on the basis
of Las Casas' own text, are every bit as fluid as the post-structuralist's "fluxes"
and "eccentricities":
Pero, porque no parezca que nos aprovechamos de cavilaciones,
abiertamente se prueba que esta encomienda es servidumbre, porque,
segun todos los que definieron al libre, liber est qui gratia sui est, pues si
las vidas, si las industrias, si los trabajos, si los frutos que dello
proceden, todo es ajeno y para aquellos que los tienen en encomienda,
yo no sé dónde está la libertad de los indios, sino sola escrita en las
leyes pero no ejecutada en los que habian de gozar della. Si decís,
señores, que se les da salario y alimentos por sus trabajos, no
aprovecha, pues todo aquello no es la mitad de lo que acá se da á un
esclavo, y éstos pálios de libertad de que allí se usa se convierten en
cruezas y en mayor daño de los indios, porque si fuesen esclavos serían
mejor tratados y guardados y sus dueños ternian por jactura la muerte
dellos. (Las Casas, V, 62)
Manifestly, Las Casas is engaged in an ideological struggle over the definition
of "freedom" within a specific set of conflictual, contradictory social relations,
relations that are, ultimately, conditional upon the existence of different modes
of production. The limits of the friar's conceptual horizon are not "his," but
those of the socially and historically localized ideologies that constitute his
world and pervade every aspect of his existence. As such, they are what render
his texts determinate and finite, that explain how he can object to the notion
of the Indians as slaves without transcending the notion of "service" and so
without aspiring to a more encompassing "freedom," understood as the
inalienable property of an individual subject. And finally, by the same token,
they are the silences within Las Casas' discourse, whose presence corresponds
with an absence, a determinate absence that sets precise restrictions upon what
can be said and thought.
Obviously, from the liberal standpoint, the result cannot help but seem
a particularly painful paradox or oxymoron whereby one "freely" chooses the
lord/Lord to whom one is bound through service: "[…] debe procurar que
sientan que no son siervos, sino libres debajo del yugo de Jesucristo, nuestro
Salvador" (III, 394). The tension is produced by the fact that, while Las Casas
is trying to create a realm of "freedom" within servitude or serfdom, he is also
attempting – and this needs to be emphasized – to limit the freedom of the
Indians: "[…] siendo verdad que libertad absoluta daña a los indios, por su
mala disposicion" (395). The end result is a "qualified servitude," defended,
with respect to the Indians, on the basis that "la total libertad les dañaba"
(412). The seeming illogicality can be resolved only at the level of language,
where metaphor transforms slavery defined in terms of economic exploitation
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 169
into slavery to sin: "[…] en la verdad, no hay otra libertad verdadera, sino
aquella servidumbre que nos estorba el pecado, el cual verdaderamente nos
hace siervos" (395).37
The animism that suffuses many of Las Casas' writings, notably through the
importance attached to "bearing witness," is progressively driven underground
in Spain, after flourishing briefly during the opening decades of the 16 th
century, by a resurgent feudalism. Likewise, it disappears from almost all
European social formations during the 17th century, although in their case for
the reason that it is displaced by more advanced, classic bourgeois ideologies,
such as Cartesian rationalism and Anglo-Saxon empiricism. It re-emerges in
the 18th century, now specialized in its role as the ideology of the petty
bourgeoisie, in those countries, notably Germany, in which the bourgeois
revolution remained unrealized (Rodríguez 1990: 347 ff). In France, it assumes
a Roussonian cast, whereas in England it survives in a poetic tradition from
Donne to Blake. Much modern melodrama, popular literature, including the
Gothic novel, and opera fall within its ambit, as does the primitive socialism of
Saint Simon, Fourier and Blanqui (Rodríguez 2001[a]: 129 ff). As can be seen,
the forms that it takes are diverse, but always mediated through the telltale
conception of art as the expression of the soul, staged in the form of an erotic
encounter between two beautiful souls. In Benítez Rojo's own words: "En cada
lectura el lector seduce al texto, lo transforma, lo hace casi suyo; en cada
lectura el texto seduce al lector, lo transforma, lo hace casi suyo. Si esta doble
seducción alcanza a ser 'de cierta manera', tanto el texto como el lector
trascenderán sus límites estadísticos y flotarán hacia el centro des-centrado de
lo paradójico" (Benítez Rojo 1998: 39). The image of this little exchange is a
compelling one – its ramifications are infinite – but, for all its claims to
transcendence, it is secretly modeled upon the financial transaction. Animism,
let us recall, is secreted by social relations of the first, mercantilist phase of
capitalism, which unconsciously model all human interaction on market
strategy. This same animism will bequeath to classical liberalism the image of
society as originating in a social contract, signed by two free, individual
subjects.
Doubtless it is their social positioning, caught between two rival,
37
The ambiguities and nuances surrounding Las Casas' views on slavery have tormented
scholars over the years. Lewis Hanke, for example, seriously questioned whether Las
Casas was a committed Aristotelian in this respect. The Spanish Dominican, he
suggests, merely paid lip-service to Aristotle's doctrine of "natural slavery," before
proceeding to refute its application to the Indians (Hanke 1970: 58). What is always
beyond dispute, however, and consequently "will come as no surprise," is that Las
Casas' doctrine is "all of one piece" (Hanke 1974: 79). For what such unity
symptomatizes is the stability of the "free subject" that classic bourgeois ideology can
never call into question.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 170
38
For some personal reflections, see Read 1998: 28-29.
Malcolm K. Read Latin American Colonial Studies: A Marxist Critique 171
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