Modernity and "Whiteness" 9781509533602

Table of contents :
Cover
......Page 1
Title page......Page 4
Copyright page......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Foreword
Diana Fuentes......Page 8
Translator’s Preface......Page 19
Introduction......Page 22
The novelty of the modern......Page 26
Modernity and the “challenge” of “neo-technics”......Page 31
Modernity, capitalism, and Europe......Page 38
The essence of modernity and actually existing modernity......Page 42
2 “Technological Rent” and the “Devaluation” of Nature......Page 45
3 Meanings of Enlightenment......Page 51
The appearance of the subject and the possibility of Enlightenment
......Page 54
Enlightenment as the “destiny” of the West......Page 58
Enlightenment in myth......Page 59
Modern Enlightenment......Page 60
4 Images of “Whiteness”......Page 63
5 “American” Modernity: Keys to its Understanding......Page 77
“Feeling and courage”: A myth of “American” modernity......Page 94
Notes on the “natural form”......Page 95
6 From Academia to Bohemia and Beyond......Page 99
7 Art and Utopia......Page 114
The humanism in existentialism......Page 131
Sartre and Marxism......Page 141
A......Page 148
B......Page 149
C......Page 150
D......Page 151
10 Meditations on the Baroque......Page 153
Guadalupanismo and the baroque ethos in the Americas......Page 162
11 The Mexican ’68 and its City......Page 175
Responses to questions from the audience......Page 191
12 Mexican Modernity and Anti-Modernity......Page 195
Introduction......Page 207
Chapter 3 Meanings of Enlightenment......Page 208
Chapter 4 Images of “Whiteness”......Page 210
Chapter 5 “American” Modernity: Keys to its Understanding......Page 212
Chapter 6 From Academia to Bohemia and Beyond......Page 214
Chapter 7 Art and Utopia......Page 217
Chapter 8 Sartre from a Distance......Page 219
Chapter 10 Meditations on the Baroque......Page 221
Chapter 11 The Mexican ’68 and its City......Page 222
Chapter 12 Mexican Modernity and Anti-Modernity......Page 223
Index......Page 224
EULA
......Page 239

Citation preview

Modernity and “Whiteness”

Critical South The publication of this series was made possible with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Nelly Richard, Eruptions of Memory Néstor Perlongher, Plebeian Prose Bolívar Echeverría, Modernity and “Whiteness”

Modernity and “Whiteness”

Bolívar Echeverría Translated by Rodrigo Ferreira

polity

First published in Spanish as Modernidad y blanquitud © Ediciones Era, Mexico, 2010. All rights reserved. This English edition © Polity Press, 2019 Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 101 Station Landing Suite 300 Medford, MA 02155, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3360-2 ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3361-9 (pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Names: Echeverria, Bolivar, author. Title: Modernity and “whiteness” / Bolivar Echeverria. Other titles: Modernidad y blanquitud. English. Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2019. | Series: Critical South | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018061204 (print) | LCCN 2019011285 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509533633 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509533602 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509533619 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Group identity--Latin America. | Whites--Race identity--Latin America. | Capitalism--Latin America. | Multiculturalism--Latin America. | Civilization, Modern. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General. Classification: LCC HN110.5.A8 (ebook) | LCC HN110.5.A8 .E5425 2019 (print) | DDC 305.809/08--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061204 Typeset in 10.5 on 12.5pt Sabon by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Limited The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Contents

Foreword – Diana Fuentes vii Translator’s Preface xviii Introduction xxi   1 A Definition of Modernity

1

  2 “Technological Rent” and the “Devaluation” of Nature 20   3 Meanings of Enlightenment

26

  4 Images of “Whiteness”

38

  5 “American” Modernity: Keys to its Understanding

52

  6 From Academia to Bohemia and Beyond

74

  7 Art and Utopia

89

  8 Sartre from a Distance

106

  9 Where is “the Left” Now?

123

10 Meditations on the Baroque

128

vi Contents

11 The Mexican ’68 and its City

150

12 Mexican Modernity and Anti-Modernity

170

Notes 182 Index 199

Foreword Diana Fuentes

For Bolívar Echeverría, white skin is not a guarantee of “whiteness.” However, the latter is in fact an essential requirement of the way of life demanded by capitalist modernity. The difference between these two notions is not just a play on words or a subtle linguistic shift (a gesture so typical of our time, when making an intervention in the use of language has become a primary tool for critique), although there is an element of both of these in this move. Without a doubt, it is a provocation that challenges the longstanding identification of racial whiteness with the image or representation of the modern way of life and its dominant ethos. Yet, above all, it is evidence that the foundation of modern identity does not have in principle a specific racial scheme, although, contradictorily, it has been and continues to be constituted by a kind of racism. Echeverría uses the concept of “whiteness” to introduce a fundamental question: to what extent is the capitalist way of modern life necessarily entwined with the identity category established by white skin? Or, in other words, is modern identity based on elements – even if not fully separate ones – different from the ethnic and racial features of whiteness? Echeverría (1941–2010) was a philosopher of Ecuadorean origin who spent a large part of his life, and developed a significant portion of his theoretical work, in Mexico. Like

viii Foreword

that of many of the most renowned Latin American intellectuals of recent decades, his thought was in a close relationship with some of the most important debates in critical thinking in twentieth-century Europe, and followed a strategy that, in his own terms, could be called “semiophagic.” Referring to Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 “Anthropophagic Manifesto” – which proclaimed, “We are not only barbarians, we are not only Caliban, we are anthropophagous,” as a means to deliberately take ownership of the barbarity attributed to native Latin Americans by colonizers – Echeverría’s appropriation of European thought voices a similar claim. Native Latin Americans took the conquerors’ cultural code and transformed it from within to make it their own. They reassigned the symbolic meaning of the Other, recreated and revitalized it into a new meaning that they could absorb and integrate into their own code. In this regard, Echeverría goes even further, as he takes up the term mestizo (whose semantic and political force has had a long presence in the history of Latin America, particularly in Mexico), and mobilizes it in relation to the survival strategy created spontaneously by the urban indigenous population after the destruction of their ancestors’ world during the conquest. He thinks of mestizaje as the strategy that artisans, servants, construction workers, etc. quietly executed while building the new colonial temples, plazas, and cities. Knowing that they were unable to go back to their pre-colonial world and that they would never be able to be the same as their colonizers, the indigenous population played with the conquerors’ code and represented it in a way that turned it de facto into something new, into a new world that they could inhabit. Following this strategy, they managed to perform as Europeans, to infiltrate and transform Europeanness from within. For Echeverría, this spontaneous practice of mestizaje was an indirect means of resistance and fundamental to Latin America’s particular mode of interiorizing modernity. Bolívar Echeverría was trained in European critical thought, as first practiced by the Frankfurt School, itself determined by Karl Marx’s critique of political economy and strongly inspired by ontological phenomenology. He first arrived in Freiburg, Germany, in 1961 with the explicit

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objective of studying with Martin Heidegger, whom he had enthusiastically read alongside texts by Jean-Paul Sartre and Miguel de Unamuno previously in Quito, where he was part of the avant-garde intellectual Ecuadorean group Tzántzicos (“Headshrinkers”) and their journal Pacuna. This group of Ecuadorean poets and philosophers defined themselves by their radical critique of what Echeverría called “the intellectual marasmus of their time.” Without having the opportunity to study with Heidegger – who by that time no longer offered open courses – Echeverría entered the Free University of Berlin in West Berlin, and joined the group of students who edited Der Anschlag, a journal created in 1962 by Rudi Dutschke, who was the most prominent leader of the German student movement of ’68 and with whom Echeverría maintained a long friendship until his death in 1979. As Echeverría himself pointed out, Berlin at the time was not only geographically and politically divided, it was also fraught with social tensions, which in their explosiveness gave way to a highly creative underground intellectual and political life. Studying Marx’s work in this environment, Echeverría developed a reading of Marx that distanced him from the ideological discourse of the Soviet Union, but, at the same time, brought him close to a broader wave of re-readings that helped reinvigorate Marxism. These readings affirmed the radical power of Marxism to critique the powerful mechanisms of social subordination developed both by twentieth-century capitalism and by the Soviet bloc. Echeverría’s relationship with Dutschke’s group, through which he read György Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, among others, and discussed the Latin American political situation with interest, is proof of his solid intellectual formation and political involvement during those years. Shortly before, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 had brought to life for the whole world that Lukácsian phrase that Echeverría often quoted: “the era of the actuality of the revolution,” i.e., the fact that the time had arrived in which the revolution against modern capitalism seemed imminent. From this point forward and for the whole following decade, this meant thinking about the horizon of possibilities from which to revolutionize history itself. Moreover, this explains the renewed interest in those

x Foreword

authors who decades prior, away from all traditional schemas and dominant tendencies, had produced readings of Marx’s work that focused on his radical interpretation of capitalism as a mode of configuring all forms of social life, from the seemingly most insignificant and finite to the most extensive and historical ones. It is under the influence of the authors of this unorthodox Marxism, such as Roman Rosdolsky and Maximilien Rubel, that Echeverría approached Marx, and understood that it was impossible to revolutionize social life without attending to what Sartre called the instances of “practico-inert” mediation. As in the case of many radical Latin Americans living in Europe, it was during this same time that Echeverría also passionately read Frantz Fanon, an author who, as some of Echeverría’s last essays demonstrate, made an indelible mark on his thinking. After having obtained the degree of Magister Artium in Germany, Echeverría arrived for the first time in Mexico in 1968 – that paradigmatic, and also tragic, year from so many geographical perspectives. In Mexico, Echeverría joined the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in philosophy (1974), a master’s degree in economics (1991), and a doctoral degree in philosophy (1997), and where he worked as a professor and researcher for the rest of his life. During his first decade in Mexico, he wrote the essays that would constitute his first book, Marx’s Critical Discourse (1986), a text in which he displays his astute and ambitious reading of Marx’s Capital. Informed by Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of communist revolution and the conviction that “Marx’s discourse” constitutes the most powerful criticism of bourgeois society, that book contains a structural definition of Capital’s general argument, taking the dichotomy of value and use-value as its basis. During those years Echeverría was also part of the editorial committee of the journal Cuadernos políticos (1974– 90), a basic referent for Marxist thought in Latin America. In regard to his style of writing, Echeverría can perhaps best be described as an essayist. His writing contains an element of fragmentation that, as Adorno said, experiments with form and allows concepts freely to emerge and recognize themselves in language.1 This style, on the one hand, affirms the conviction, shared with critical theory,

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that it is impossible for philosophy to systematically grasp the totality of the real, a characteristic of all discourse on modernity; and, on the other hand, it also asserts the fact that Latin American philosophy has a peculiar way of using language. To philosophize in Spanish, and in Latin American Spanish in particular, for Echeverría, means articulating oneself in a language and with certain configurations of speech whose possibilities for reflective discourse differ considerably from those that European history considers as modern philosophical discourse, given that Hispanic philosophy has cultivated other ways of discourse that have been much more connected to poetry than to science. This feature links Echeverría’s work to the rich Latin American essayistic tradition, which stretches from an immemorial past across several fields, including literature, philosophy, history, politics, and journalism. Thus, for three decades Echeverría worked on elaborating an extensive critique of capitalist modernity, which he developed in relation to the specific contemporary reality of Latin America, in books such as Las ilusiones de la modernidad [The Illusions of Modernity] (1995), Valor de uso y utopía [Use-Value and Utopia] (1998), La modernidad de lo barroco [The Modernity of the Baroque] (1998), Vuelta de siglo [Turn of the Century] (2008), and the posthumous 2010 book that is now presented here to the reader as Modernity and “Whiteness.” One of the distinctive features of Echeverría’s thought is his particular understanding of modernity and its relation to capitalism. As a keen reader of the first generation of Frankfurt School writers, his critique of modernity resonates with Benjamin’s concerns about the disenchantment of the world and the social alienation in capitalism. Yet, above all, Echeverría’s work arises from being theoretically dissatisfied with Weber’s biunivocal correspondence between the spirit of capitalism and the Protestant ethic. For Echeverría, Weber’s description of this relation seems to imply that a non-capitalist modernity is impossible, or, in other words, that the only imaginable mode of harnessing the modern revolution of productive forces for human society is precisely that which is outlined by the Protestant ethic. In contrast to this view, and challenging a certain kind of narrative that has prevailed in Latin America, Echeverría does

xii Foreword

not identify modernity with capitalism. From his reading of Marx, Echeverría recognizes the fact that capitalism is the most typical modern historical reality, and that no aspect is as characteristic of modernity as capitalism. But, at the same time, he argues that one is not identical to the other. In his words, modernity, as a historical phenomenon of longue durée – in the Braudelian sense – is the particular character of a historical form of “civilizatory totalization,” based on a prior “neo-technic revolution” that established radically new relations between the human world and nature, as well as between the collective and the singular individual. Thus, Echeverría follows Lewis Mumford when the latter asks in Technics and Civilization, “Where did the machine take shape for the first time in modern civilization?”2 and then answers by describing a complex temporality involving more than one point of origin in a series of proto-modern experiences emerging from technical innovations tracing back to the eleventh century in Central Europe. The answer addresses a polymorphous fact of specific historical tensions and relations, which eventually led to change in the entire human experience. In Echeverría’s view, modernity is then the determining characteristic of a set of behaviors orchestrated around a new unitary principle established by neo-technics, different from the traditional constitution of social life, and that further perceives the latter as obsolete and ineffective. Thus, at its inception, as a new set of resources became available through a change in technological possibilities, modernity appeared as a kind of challenge to open up a different orientation for social order. This was a challenge to open up the horizon of possibility for a series of new relationships, both within what Echeverría calls “the social subject” and from the human toward “nature” or toward “the Other.” These new relationships would not be determined by the threat of absolute scarcity, as they had previously been in pre-modern societies. Modernity, defined in this radical sense, refers to the potential for material reproduction to be based on relative abundance. Undoubtedly, this argument echoes Marx’s idea of ​​communism, of the need to establish a new social order given the new conditions of possibility opened up by the development of productive forces. A distinctive nuance,

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however, is that Echeverría sees the possibilities opened by modernity as a promise “of a different model, where the challenge addressed to the Other follows instead the model of eros.”3 That is, it does not establish a destructive or predatory relationship to nature, aiming to transform it into an inexhaustible source of resources available for human use. Instead, it establishes the potential for a new relationship with the Other, which, freed from the capitalist productivist technique, can even open the possibility of mutual cooperation. However, in reality, this has turned out to be impossible under the conditions of established modernity, of “actually existing” modernity – as he calls it, in reference to the term “actually existing socialism.” This is a version of modernity whose history has become entwined with that of capitalism. Throughout this process, the latter has overshadowed and subsumed the liberatory potential of the former, forever staining it with the reduction of social life to mere labor power, and expanding its own presence at an accelerated and global scale. Thus, for Echeverría, modernity began with the neo-technic revolution and the consequent challenge that it set forth; whereas capitalism emerged with full force with the deepening, both extensive and intensive, of the process of valorizing value. The temporal dimension of their historical existence not only differs, but also responds to different points of origin. This is why, in the relation between modernity and capitalism, there is a discrepancy at play between form and content or substance. Modernity, on the one hand, is defined as the essence, as the substance of a historical reality founded by technological change and with the capacity to open up multiple possibilities. Capitalism, on the other hand, is a form or mode of production of human life that presents itself as the fundamental and exclusive order of the entire circulation of social wealth.4 Consequently, it is possible to imagine the essence of modernity without reducing it to capitalism, while it is impossible to think of or account for capitalism without modernity as an antecedent or foundation. This is one of the characteristic features of Echeverría’s contribution to the critique of capitalism: he explains how capitalism and its principle of accumulation restricted or constrained other incipient forms of modernity,

xiv Foreword

and therefore were able to establish a hegemonic and even absolute monopoly over modernity. Following this view, one can see modernity as a suspended reality, or, in other words, as a polymorphous phenomenon that was absorbed by capitalism, but that nevertheless contains an acting principle that has not yet disappeared and remains open as a possibility. Its reality resembles that of use-value; it is a principle and a foundation, but its current effectiveness is subject to the mediation of value. In response to Echeverría’s claims, it would be reasonable to ask this question: to what extent is this potential presence of modernity not a matter of a purely conceptual abstraction? In other words, is it possible to observe and verify the survival of other emerging modernities upon the triumph of the dominant forms of capitalism in all aspects of life? How could these incipient forms of modernity survive? Echeverría answers these questions in relation to the logical and historical development of the process of social-natural subsumption. This is why these questions are directly related to his claim that the key to understanding Marx’s critical discourse lies in the contradiction between use-value and value, a contradiction contained in the subject/object mediation process through which the human being becomes semiotically inscribed in capitalism. This perspective assumes that the domination of capitalism does not appear as a linear, homogeneous, absolute, or irreversible process, given that the historical persistence of this contradiction reveals the autonomy of use-value, either in moments of ephemeral existence, of unforeseen outbursts, or as subtle expressions in the deepest and most diverse aspects of daily social behavior. Echeverría’s work thus points to the need to study those instances that connect individuals with their collective entities, and to understand how the latter manifest the aforementioned contradiction in their contemporary life. The actually existing modernity, in its effort to constantly tame any of these unwanted expressions, demands a certain type of behavior functional to the logic of the valorization of value, a human being fit to succeed in capitalist production. This is why the process of capitalist accumulation has entailed the systematic oppression and repression of previous identities,

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ones that had to be replaced or reconstructed according to a new ethical model adequate to profit production. Thus, upon the need to understand the multiple potential modes of social concretion under capitalist modernity, Echeverría develops the concept of historical ethos. He argues that the classic Weberian characterization of the Protestant ethic is too restrictive, given that it deals with only one historical mode of being, that is, with the one that actively satisfied the demand for a new type of human being committed to increasing economic production. The spirit of capitalism represents the emergence of a new man, living by and for capital, which corresponds to a certain type of behavior or spirit, a certain productivist ethos committed to sacrifice and care for the wealth that has been conferred upon him, and for whom, in his attempt to fulfill these mandates, all pre-modern ways of life stand as an obstacle. But, for Echeverría, this productivist ethos, which he calls the realist ethos, represents only one of multiple possible forms to confront capitalist modernity. He distinguishes it from other possible forms; those that he calls the classical ethos, the baroque ethos, and the romantic ethos. The historical ethos is the concept through which Echeverría thinks about how structural social behavior, located both in the subject and in the object, and, in the context of the social constitution and historical establishment of capitalism, finds a way to make livable a set of conditions that are structurally unlivable, those determined by the abstract logic of value. In this way, he envisions a set of concrete materializations of a strategy destined, not to solve, but to integrate the undeniable facticity of capitalism into the spontaneous construction of life. And, for this reason, he insists upon the importance of finding traces of these materializations; this effort is crucial to critical theory’s attempt to think through the present era and to discovering potential ways to overcome the form of modernity that sustains it, that is, the capitalist one. This also explains Echeverría’s commitment to investigating the ongoing social consistency of baroque behavior upon today’s global civilizational crisis. So there is not only one ethos of capitalism, but four, and each refers to a different successive impulse of capitalism: the Mediterranean, the Nordic, the Western, and the Central

xvi Foreword

European. Each one represents a particular way capitalism has acted on society and a preferred dimension from which it has expanded. Among them, the baroque ethos was the first imprint, while the romantic ethos and its politics are the latest. However, in truth, the one that has always played a dominant role is the realist ethos, which has constantly forced others to combine with it. This is why it is only in a restrictive sense that we can speak about capitalist modernity as a civilizational scheme that requires and imposes exclusively the Protestant ethic.5 Echeverría develops these reflections in three essays central to the present text, “Images of ‘Whiteness’,” “Meditations on the Baroque,” and “‘American’ Modernity,” as he questions the alleged unidirectional relationship between modernity and Protestant, white identity. He argues that the historical relationship between the capitalist way of life and the Puritan non-European population has been hypostatized to become both a general identity and an essential condition for the ordering of national states. This relationship promotes a certain mode of existence, an appearance, a composure, to the point that it can even dispense with the racial features of whiteness, so long as individuals show their willingness to adapt to and internalize the capitalist way of life, that is, to become “white.” For this reason, he believes, it is possible to not have white skin and still be perfectly “white,” as has happened in many social dimensions of Latin America. This is the kind of identity racism that characterizes life in capitalist modernity. This argument is complemented by the essay on the baroque, which shows how, through mestizaje, Latin American modernity set off along a different path than the Central European one, and how the baroque ethos became a spontaneous strategy of resistance in colonial cities, one that still lurks in the shadows of their daily lives today. However, today, in the turn from the late twentieth century to the first decades of the twenty-first century, the baroque strategy loses force and yields territory to the overwhelming influence of Latin America’s powerful North American neighbor and its “American way of life,” a mode of modernity that now expands across almost the entire globe. These are some of the key elements that allow us to approach Bolívar Echeverría and to consider the pressing

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significance of his work. He believed that the crisis of modernity – the same civilizational crisis we experience today – should force critical discourse to rethink some of its fundamental political concepts. Thus, he posits a challenge for us to doubt the allegedly “real” or insurmountable rationale of the actually existing world, and for us to imagine and place our trust in the potential existence of another reality, less “realist,” less demanding, and not so gravely at odds with human freedom. Translated by Rodrigo Ferreira

Translator’s Preface

In the Foreword to this text, Diana Fuentes observes how Echeverría’s style affirms the existence of a particular quality in Spanish-language philosophy. She describes how this line of philosophy has cultivated certain “ways of discourse that have been much more connected to poetry than to science.” Indeed, Echeverría’s use of the Spanish language comes very close to poetry in his work. Words unfold in rhythm with one another, concepts entwine and grow apart with passion, and, above all, insights echo throughout the text in reference to other philosophical texts, creating a sense of vibrancy and vivacity as critical and historical connections emerge. The attempt to reproduce this quality in English, however, has not come without its difficulties. Through the text, Echeverría’s constant reference to multiple disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy, history, critical theory, and cultural studies, often creates a dichotomous situation: what might seem a simple vernacular term or a word commonly used in one discipline, when translated, turns out to be a specific technical term in another. For example, the Spanish word técnica, which in plural form or in reference to its general concept could be plainly translated as “technique,” I have decided instead to translate as “technics.” This is in line both with Lewis Mumford’s usage of the same term in Technics and Civilization – which Echeverría mentions



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xix

as a major influence on his work – and with contemporary English-language academic discourse in philosophy of technology (e.g., Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time). Along the same lines, other terms in Spanish, such as el mundo de la vida, sujetidad, objetidad, lo otro, and indígena, have also required specific attention. Where necessary, I have included the original text in brackets or a note attached to the translated text. Most notably, the term blanquitud has posed a particular challenge. Echeverría coins this term in Spanish to help distinguish between what he sees as two kinds of racism: one based on the whiteness of skin, blancura, and another primarily based on an ethical or civilizational character, blanquitud. However, even though Echeverría uses the term blanquitud to refer to the latter, at the same time, he chooses it precisely because he means it to resonate with the former. The term blanquitud is meant to remind the reader that the kind of racism based on blancura has not entirely disappeared. As he makes clear in chapter 4, “ethnic racism … is always willing to resume its protagonist role and tendency to discriminate … always ready to revive its genocidal program.” For this reason, in this translation, rather than rendering blanquitud in English as a different concept than whiteness (Echeverría on one separate occasion uses the term “whiteyness”), or attempting to coin a new term in English that might fail to capture Echeverría’s original meaning, the editors of this series and I have decided to render it as “whiteness,” always in quotation marks. We believe this term helps Echeverría stand close in dialogue with contemporary academic discourse on the concept of whiteness. Moreover, by using quotation marks around this term, we hope to remind the reader, as Echeverría often does throughout the text, that “whiteness,” in its ethical-civilizational form, is always a social construct, and therefore also always already a potential subject of deconstruction. In addition to the challenges presented by these terms, another source of complexity in the translation was the fact that the original volume in Spanish was published posthumously. It contains a number of pieces that, unfortunately, Echeverría did not have a chance to finalize. As the first note in each of the chapters concerned explains, some of

xx

Translator’s Preface

these pieces are transcripts taken from presentations at academic conferences, others are unfinished articles, and, in one particular case, there is a translation of a text that was originally written in English but then was irreparably lost. Together with the publisher, I have taken great care to render the content of these texts as close to the original as possible, yet, at the same time, considering their incompleteness, I have also made a number of editorial decisions to omit unnecessary or obtrusive details, such as redundant words recorded in the transcripts and inconclusive fragments of a text in progress, and to rectify incongruent bibliographical information where possible. Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank my friends, advisors, and colleagues who have helped me throughout this translation. I am very grateful to Raquel Serur for inviting me to participate in this project and for trusting me with Bolívar’s words. And I would also like to thank Kari Hensley, Alexander Galloway, Natasha Schüll, Nicole Starosielski, Emily Apter, Ignacio Sánchez-Prado, John Richardson, Andrew Sartori, Bruno Nouril, Alex Campolo, Ian Alexander, Tulio Lugo, and Sara Ferreira for providing me with their comments and support. Thank you.

Introduction

“The human only exists as such if it is actualized in the plurality of its concrete versions, each of them different from the others, each one sui generis. To negate this diversity would be tantamount to the death of the human. Felicitously, this homogenization is impossible: the map of human diversity will never lose the infinite multiplicity of its color. Difference is inevitable. There is no force that can standardize the multiplicitous landscape of human identities.” Trust in these words underlies every action taken and every word spoken with pride and in admiration of the human. This is a species that, despite its devastating presence on the planet, still seems capable of reorienting its history and finding alternative modes of life that no longer imply, as its permanent condition of reproduction, the negation of itself and of the Other [lo otro]. Humanity itself is at stake in the affirmation of its own diversity, in resistance to and conflict with the unstoppable force of our times, which seeks to condense all humans into an obedient mass. The more homogeneous this mass becomes, the more docile humans will become to the demands of the current social order and to its deaf, yet relentless, will to catastrophe. There seem to be two conditions that sustain this trust in humanity: the first, originating in the past, remains active in

xxii Introduction

the present; the second, coming from the future, only begins to appear in the present. Traditional identity, which is visible in innumerable and unique forms in natural languages, in daily customs and habits, as well as in the cultures that critically cultivate it, comes from a design process that traces back to the depth of time and that endows this identity with an impenetrable nucleus, which has already been put to the test thousands of times and been proven capable of constantly reappearing in the most varied ways. Nothing can really alter it: not when human beings (whom it defines) act from the heights of arrogance and seek to conquer it and oversaturate it with foreign elements, nor when humans, in times of hardship, become embarrassed by it, subordinate it to other identities, deform and mistreat it, or believe themselves capable of rejecting it. Undoubtedly, traditional identity can be transformed, but it remains intact at its core, from which it consistently reappears and makes a mockery of any attempt to subsume it to a global and uniform identity. In addition, the appearance of new collective individuals of every kind, a symptom of the civilizational transformation of our times, implies a proliferation of identities unknown until now. The proliferation of these identities, each endowed with greater or lesser strength and permanence, serves as resistance to the uniform totalitarianism imposed over traditional identity by the productive apparatus designed in capitalist modernity. The main argument of the texts gathered in this volume attempts to problematize the humanist trust placed in these two apparent conditions related to the indispensable plurality of the human. The purpose of this volume is to explore the mechanisms that lead to that powerful homogenizing impulse to elude, and if not then to integrate, the forms of resistance presented by natural identities – both traditional and new – and to prevail over the centrifugal and multiplying tendency that they bring. “Whiteness” [blanquitud] – not whiteness [blancura] – is the pseudo-concrete identitarian quality destined to fulfill the absence of a concrete human identity in established modernity. The seemingly perfect machinery of production of social wealth, which in modernity serves the process of capital

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accumulation, nevertheless has a structural defect: in it resides a particular parasite. This machinery is designed in such a way that the parasitic agent, which has completely subordinated the host, must now take care that the latter does not become extinct. The modern productive apparatus is an inverted cyborg that is not completed by its mechanical part, but is instead completed by its organic part, without which it would be impossible for it to function. Capital needs its agents of accumulation, the worker and the capitalist, which in principle could be robots lacking any will of their own, to possess and reproduce at least a minimum of that exclusive human faculty, which is ultimately what keeps it alive. How to build a human identity whose free and spontaneous will becomes confused in its identification with the irrepressible tendency to valorize its economic value, a tendency that beats with the force of an artificial, “thingly will” [“voluntad cósica”]? The solution to this problem could only be offered by a type of human being whose identity is precisely “whiteness”; a type of human being belonging to a particular history that is already over a century old, but that nowadays threatens to spread throughout the planet. “Whiteness” is not, in principle, an identity of a racial order. The pseudoconcretization of the homo capitalisticus certainly – and necessarily, for historical reasons – includes certain ethnic features of the whiteness of the “white man,” but only as incarnations of other more decisive features, which are of an ethical order, that characterize a certain type of human behavior, a life or survival strategy. A certain “white” appearance, which can be revealed in highly quintessential forms, is required, for example, to define the ideal modern and capitalist human identity, which would in principle be an identity indifferent to colors. This is an appearance that does not avoid any disfigurement or distortion of whiteness, so long as these elements can contribute to demonstrating on a global scale that human free will and the automatic “will” of capital are unexceptionally interchangeable. The first five chapters of this volume address this concept of “whiteness.” Meanwhile, the final three are dedicated to analyzing a completely different modern identity, the baroque identity, which has appeared especially frequently in Latin America and particularly in Mexico. In conversation with

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the work of Edmundo O’Gorman, the meditations on the baroque included here try to show that the “new Adam,” the Ibero-American Creole exalted by the author of Meditaciones sobre el criollismo [Meditations on Creolism], is far from being the subject of the history of mestizaje. Rather, he was only a response to a “subjectness” [“sujetidad”] that began to emerge through the peculiar way in which the indigenous population “invented” itself through defeat after having survived a great devastation. Bridging each set of chapters, the book also contains four essays related to the history of modernity. One of them deals with the destiny of art in the era of “the actuality of the revolution” and discusses the emergence of avant-garde art in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century as well as Walter Benjamin’s thesis on the “post-auratic” work of art. Another one re-examines the concept of the political left in light of a re-reading of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism.

1 A Definition of Modernity

The novelty of the modern This wooing of the cosmos – this attempt at a new, unprecedented marriage with the cosmic powers – was enacted in the spirit of technics. But because the lust for profit of the ruling class sought to satisfy its ambition through it, technics betrayed mankind and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath. Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street”1

We should perhaps begin by stating the obvious: modernity is the determining characteristic of a set of behaviors that have been appearing in social life everywhere for many centuries and that common sense recognizes as discontinuous with and even opposed to the traditional constitution of life. Modernity further refers to a set of behaviors potentially in the process of replacing that traditional constitution of life, after having shown it as obsolete, or as inconsistent and ineffective. From another perspective, modernity can also be seen as a set of objective facts that are sharply incompatible with the established configuration of the lifeworld and that appear as substantial innovations, as facts meant to satisfy a need for transformation arising from the very bosom of this world.

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Taken as such, as a set whose elements complement and strengthen one another, modern phenomena appear as a civilizational tendency endowed with a new unitary principle of coherence or a new mode of structuring civilized social life and its corresponding world, of a new “logic” that would replace the ancestral organizing principle, which it designates as “traditional.” To clarify the matter further, I will discuss in no particular order three phenomena in which this characteristic of modernity is manifested or in which this new, modern “logic” is visible in action. First, I would like to mention that particular modern phenomenon that is perhaps the main one. I am referring to the emergence of a practical form of trust in the purely “physical” dimension – that is, not the “metaphysical” one – of human technical capacity, in a technique based on the use of a kind of reason that protects itself from delirium by means of a form of self-control of mathematical quality. It therefore attends preferentially or exclusively to the profane or non-sacred functioning of nature and the world. The central element of this first modern phenomenon is this trust, present in everyday behavior, in the human capacity to approach or to face nature in purely mundane terms. In other words, it is trust in the human capacity to achieve, through programmed and calculated action – itself derived from a kind of “mathematized” knowledge – more positive effects than those that the traditional approach to the Other, which was an approach of a magical order, could ever guarantee. It is trust in an efficientist immediate (earthly) technique, detached from any mediate (celestial) consequence not intelligible in terms of rational-mathematical causality. This trust expands and complements itself with other equally modern phenomena, such as the “progressivist” experience of temporality in regard both to life and to the world. This phenomenon refers to the empirical conviction that humans were placed on the earth to dominate it, and increasingly exercise their capacity to conquer it over time, following the straight and ascending timeline of progress. A spatial or geographical version of this progressivism is given by another modern phenomenon, consisting of what can be called “the determination of the city as the proper



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place of the human.” According to this trend, such a place has ceased to be the countryside, the rural world, and has been moved instead to the site of technical progress, where the technical application of mathematical reasoning is established, developed, and used commercially. As we can see, this is a new kind of trust that imposes itself over the ancestral technical trust. It opposes the capacity for humans to magically summon benevolent supernatural forces to intervene in their lives, to give rise to favorable actions either from the gods or, ultimately, from the Creator itself. This central modern phenomenon involves a kind of atheism in the realm of reflective discourse, a disbelief in magical metaphysical instances; it brings along with it everything we know from existing literature on modernity about the “death of God,” the “disenchantment” of the world (Entzauberung), according to Max Weber, or “de-deification” (Entgötterung), according to Heidegger. It is a phenomenon that consists of a radical substitution of the source of human knowledge. Any wisdom obtained through revelation is set aside as a “superstition” and, instead, wisdom appears as only obtainable through reason, which mathematizes nature, the “physical world.” Surpassing trust in the cyclical temporality of “eternal return,” a new kind of trust appears, which counts on human life and history being projected upward and forward, in the direction of improvement through time. Promises that “city air liberates” and that “life in the Great City is better” begin to appear, while the idea that agricultural life represents authentic human life gradually disappears, as does the Tolstoyan vision of paradise. A second major phenomenon that can be examined as typically modern involves what could be called the “secularization of the political” or “political materialism.” This is the fact that a primacy is awarded in social life to “economic policy” above all other types of policies that one can imagine. In other words, primacy is increasingly given to “civil” or “bourgeois” society to define political affairs. This constitutes a modern phenomenon insofar as it breaks with the past and imposes itself over the tradition of political “spiritualism.” That is, it imposes itself over a political practice in which the religious is fundamental, or in which the political is primarily and fundamentally related to the cultural (to reproducing

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social identity). Political materialism, the secularization of politics, implies the transformation of state institutions into a “superstructure” of that “bourgeois base” or “material” in which society operates as a struggle between private owners, defending their own interests in their respective economic enterprises. This is the determining factor of life in the modern state; the Other, the more communitarian, cultural aspect in the reproduction of collective identity, becomes secondary. Third, let us now think about individualism, that practical social behavior that presupposes that the elementary particle of human reality is the singular individual. This is a characteristically modern phenomenon that implies, for example, first, egalitarianism, or the conviction that no one person is superior or inferior to another. Second, it implies recourse to the notion of a contract, first private and then public, as the essence of any relationship that is established between singular or collective individuals. Third, and finally, it implies the democratic conviction that, if a republican government is necessary, it has to be consented to and decided on equally by all. Individualism is a modern phenomenon that is always in the process of imposing itself on the ancestral tradition of communitarianism, that is, on the conviction that the fundamental social unit is not the singular individual but a set of individuals, a collective individual, a community, however minimal it may be: a family, for example. It is also always in the process of eliminating the hierarchical differentiation that is generated spontaneously among individuals in the community, and of ignoring the allocation of social commitments made in pre-modern traditional societies that are both innate and transcendental to the singular individual. Individualism is opposed to all this: to the natural authoritarianism present in traditional public life; to having a natural social hierarchy; to the fact that the old or the wise, for example, may have greater value in certain aspects than the young, and to the fact that the “lords,” meaning the landowners, may be more important or more capable of making decisions than other citizens. Individualism is thus one of the major modern phenomena; it introduces an unprecedented way of practicing the opposition between singular individuality and collective individuality.



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These are three examples of modern phenomena insofar as they affirm themselves to be radically discontinuous with the traditional structure of the social world and as having been “called” to overcome and replace it. In reference to them, I would now like to briefly draw attention to two particular points that problematize this act of self-affirmation, of modernity affirming its actual presence as a radically innovative discontinuity with respect to tradition. The first thing that should be noted about modernity as a structuring principle of the “actually existing” modernization of human life is that it is a civilizational modality that dominates in real terms over other non-modern or pre-modern structuring principles that it encounters, but is far from having nullified, buried, or replaced them. In other words, modernity presents itself as a perpetually ongoing attempt to overcome them, but this attempt is not fully completed. This state of perpetuity must be maintained, and therefore it has to coexist with the traditional structures of the social world. In this sense – more so than in Habermas’s terms – we can say that the modernity that we know up to now is “an unfinished project,” always incomplete. It is as if something within it incapacitates it from being what it intends to be: a civilizational alternative “superior” to the ancestral or traditional one. This is the first peculiar fact that, in my opinion, must be taken into account in regard to these modern phenomena. The second fact worth noting, from my point of view, is that established modernity is always ambiguous and always manifests itself in an ambivalent manner with respect to the search by social individuals for a better provision of satisfactions and greater freedom of action. In other words, the modernity that exists in fact is always positive, but at the same time it is always negative. Indeed, if modernity is presented as a necessary rupture or discontinuity with tradition, this is undoubtedly because it allows singular individuals the provision of both larger and better satisfactions and the enjoyment of greater freedom of action. However, what is interesting is that the experience of this “superiority” turns out to be an ambivalent experience, given that – although it is positive with respect to these two needs, to which it claims to

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be responding – at the same time it is negative in regard to the quality of those satisfactions and that freedom. Something of the old, some aspect, some sense of the ancestral and traditional always remains as insurmountable, as preferable in comparison to the modern. The ambiguity and ambivalence of modern phenomena and their modernity are elements that should not be ignored in their examination.

Modernity and the “challenge” of “neo-technics” I would like to turn to a second point in these reflections on the concept of modernity. Perhaps the most convenient way to define modernity is to describe where it comes from, what its origin is, what its basis or foundation is; in other words, to date, even in a general and approximate way, its historical appearance. Perhaps in this way the modernity of these modern phenomena can be better perceived or defined. First, it must be said that, in the historical discourse on modernity, a good number of “early-modern” or protomodern phenomena have been identified in moments long before the nineteenth century, the “modern century” par excellence. These phenomena have been identified by writers, not only in moments when the historical beginning of modernity is usually located, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but also in the Renaissance, with the emergence of the “new man.” For some writers, this “new” figure stands in clear contrast to the “old” human of medieval times: it is a bourgeois man who believes that he can “make himself” ex nihilo, who can intentionally recapture the qualitative density of concrete human identity that had been sacrificed by European evangelizers and their radical Christianity, and who is contemptuous of the “earthly world” and its qualities. Other writers have identified a correspondence between the appearance of modernity and the discovery of America, given that it was from that moment that the world stopped being a closed universe and became open toward infinite borders, as Alexandre Koyré says. Yet other writers have placed the emergence of modernity much later in history; they argue that it really begins with



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the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century and, therefore, that it properly corresponds to the nineteenth century, to the consolidation of the Great City that then took place. However, most interestingly, there have also been writers, such as Horkheimer and Adorno, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, who detect a budding modernity already present in the ancient Western world, thus underlining the Western character of modernity in general. Some of these writers have focused, for example, on the presence, within the tradition that starts from Greek mythology, of a figure like Prometheus, the Titan who gives fire to mankind, who breaks the ancestral monopolistic dominion of the priestly caste over it as a means of production and over the management of its use. In doing so Prometheus awakens in the hearts of mortals the hope that “things change,” that misery can be mitigated, and that time can cease to be the always repeating, cyclical time of “eternal return.” By opening up new possibilities for the use of fire, Prometheus awakens the idea of ​​a temporality that ceases to be closed and is open toward the future, thus inaugurating an essential element of modern phenomena and their modernity. Yet, other writers, such as Horkheimer and Adorno, have emphasized the proto-modernity of a Homeric figure like Odysseus, the hero who already makes a detached or “enlightened” use of archaic mythology and is capable of unfolding himself as a subject that has himself available as an object. Odysseus can talk to himself about himself as if he were with another and talking about another, and thus he can manipulate the moment of conquering nature present in the renunciation (Entsagung) or productivist postponement of pleasure, in the self-sacrifice of singular individuals. For these writers, the character Odysseus is already a sketch for a new type of human being, a proto-bourgeois, an individual identifiable as modern. Within this category, other writers have also spoken of the Greek technē, which mythically represents itself in the figure of Daedalus, the craftsman, the inventor par excellence, who, for example, among so many other feats: devises a simulacrum of a cow so that Queen Pasiphae can deceive nature and enjoy the wonderful bull given by Neptune to Minos, her husband; suggests to Ariadne and Theseus the

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use of a guiding thread to escape from the labyrinth after killing the Minotaur; and also makes a pair of wings, equal in effectiveness to those of a bird, with which to fly away from the island of Minos, which had been converted into a prison. He is also the artist who breaks with canonical hieratism in visual arts by making efficient cause visible in them. With the figure of Daedalus appears the first clearly “technical” man: he who proposes, invents, calculates, and designs new instruments by imitating from the human perspective, and for the human realm, the effectiveness of nature’s behavior. Connected intimately with the mythic figure of Daedalus is Theseus, the founding hero for Athenian Greeks – also the involuntary murderer of Aegeus, his father, the sacred king, and conqueror of Minos, the guarantor of sacredness in exchange for the blood of young Greeks. Theseus was known for discovering the profane legitimacy of political power and establishing sovereignty and autonomy in the polis over the traditional and divine sovereignty of prior kings. In sum, there has been no shortage of fascinating evidence pointing to the fact that the modernity of modern phenomena was already visible in glimmers during the epoch of ancient Greece. *** Without dismissing any of these approaches, it seems to me, however, that modernity is better explained by identifying its origin and foundation in a different historical moment, much later than the appearance of proto-modern phenomena in ancient Greece. I am speaking of a moment in the history of technics, which would be around the tenth century of our time, and that has been highlighted by Lewis Mumford in his work Technics and Civilization, following the tradition of Patrick Geddes, and in agreement with the work of Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, and other students of medieval technology, such as Lynn White. By the way, this would be the same historical moment that Walter Benjamin implicitly refers to in his essay on the new work of art, when he speaks of a “second” or a “ludic” technique. It is the historical moment of a “technological revolution,”



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as these authors call it, which was already revealing itself around the tenth century, during what Mumford calls the “eo-technic phase” in the history of modern technics, prior to the “paleo-technic” and “neo-technic” phases recognized by his teacher Geddes. This is a technological revolution that would be so radical, so strong and decisive – given that it managed to penetrate even the very sources of energy and the material (physical-chemical) consistency of the instrumental realm – that it could be compared to the so-called “Neolithic Revolution.” It was a radical change that involved relocating the key to the productivity of human labor, shifting it toward the capacity to decide on the introduction of new means of production, to promote the transformation of the technical structure of instrumental equipment. With this shift, the secret of productivity in human labor ceased to be located, as had happened throughout the Neolithic era, in the fortuitous or spontaneous discovery and use of new instruments copied from nature. Instead, it began to reside in the capacity to deliberately undertake the process of inventing new instruments and correspondingly new production technics. This would be the moment of the “eo-technic” revolution, or the “dawn age” of modern technics, as Mumford put it. The main aspect of this technological shift is that it opened the possibility for human society to base the construction of civilized life on a completely different form of interaction between the human and the natural. This new form of interaction would be based on only a relative scarcity of natural wealth, and not, as in traditional archaic societies, on an absolute scarcity of natural wealth or on the absolute reticence of nature in the face of the scandal provoked by the humanization of animality. In contrast to the archaic construction of civilized life, where nature (the Other, the extra-human) needed to be treated as a threatening enemy that had to be overcome and dominated, on the basis of this new technique, the construction of civilization could now treat nature more like an opponent/collaborator, committed to mutual enrichment. The narcissistic conversion that defends the threatened “sameness” [“mismidad”] of the human through the transformation of the threatening Other, “Nature,” into a pure object that only exists to serve as a mirror to the self-projection of the human as a pure subject

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becomes unnecessary at the same time, as this threat ceases to exist for the human thanks to the technological revolution initiated at the “eo-technic” moment of technological history that Mumford describes. With that neo-technic revolution that began in the tenth century, for the first time in history the possibility appeared for the interaction between the human and the Other not to be directed toward the elimination of one another, but toward collaboration between the two to invent or create new forms within the Other. It presented the possibility for human labor to design itself not as a weapon to dominate nature, either in the human body or in external reality, and for human subjectness to not imply the negation of the, inevitably mysterious, subjectness of the Other. The transition to neo-technics implied the “death of the numinous God,” the enabler of a magical or Neolithic technique: a death that came to join the “agony” of the “religious God,” the protector of the ancestral political community. This is an agony that has been experienced for at least two thousand years with the increasing commodification of social life, that is, with the subservience of human communities to the power of the “invisible hand of the market” to conduct their earthly affairs. *** As a first attempt at formulating a definition of modernity one could say that it consists of the acquiescent and constructive response or reaction by civilized life to the challenge brought on by the neo-technic revolution of productive forces that developed during medieval times. Thus defined, modernity would be the attempt made by civilized life to integrate and promote neo-technics (that “second” or “ludic” technics described by Benjamin) both in its own functioning and in its reproduction of the world. Modernity would be the positive response from civilized life to a previously unknown fact that it recognizes when it “perceives” in productive practice that the key to human productivity is no longer the improvement or inventive use of previous technology, but instead the focus is on inventing new technologies. In other words, it



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recognizes that the key is not in the casual advancement of the same instruments but in the planned introduction of new instruments. It represents the moment when Daedalus reappears, no longer as the sporadic figure of exception in the field of labor and arts but as the figure of the very condition of its full realization. Then it can be said that modernity is not the characteristic of a civilized world that is already reconstituted in accordance with the post-Neolithic technological revolution, but that of a civilization that is engaged in a long, difficult, and contradictory process of reconstitution, a historical process of “very long duration” – using Braudel’s term – that by no means is assured of fulfilling its goal. Already by the first century of the second millennium something that, exaggerating Freud’s formulation, we could call “a discontent in civilization” (a Stimmung or “mood”) seems to have begun to prevail across all civilized life in Western Europe. This “discontent” affected it minimally at first, but later, starting in the sixteenth or eighteenth century, became increasingly severe, until by the end of the nineteenth century, it became a truly determining emotional horizon to daily experience. The practical experience of this “discontent” grew as social or institutional structures reproduced themselves in traditional forms because they were still indispensable for life, but simultaneously their content grew increasingly rare, making them a simple simulacrum or imitation of what they were in the past. Such would be the case, for example, of Christianity, an essential feature of the pre-capitalist Western civilization to which Western modernity resorted in its first stages – and to which it continues to resort to this day, albeit in a caricatured version – in order to root itself in traditional uses and customs and to hide the fact that the “absolute scarcity” through which it justifies its morality has ceased to be “natural” due to neo-technics, and has become artificial, reproduced only for the purposes of capitalist accumulation. This “discontent in civilization” consists in practical experience of the fact that without traditional forms one cannot lead a civilized life, but that these forms have themselves been emptied of content, have become a mere hollow shell. The content of social forms consists in the need, stretched across all individual members of a community, to sacrifice a

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part of themselves to contribute to the collective struggle of affirming the sameness of the community in contrast to the Other, to nature (and to others, the “natural” ones). Social forms are nothing other than organs or means of sublimation of self-sacrifice, of a productivist repression that in principle has already lost its raison d’être. To further clarify the relationship between the form and content of traditional institutional realities it is useful to observe, even briefly, as an example, the current object of celebration at weddings. In these ceremonies, the object of celebration is the sacrifice made by the social community of the sexual polymorphism of its singular individuals, of the form through which freedom of sexual identification is repressed. This is a sacrifice that, being necessary only in the archaic state of social construction, is still consecrated and praised in modern times as natural, necessary, and even desirable by all those who submit to it. For instance, consider the sentence imposed on males to wage war and to produce “like a man” or the sentence imposed on females to procreate and manage the home “like a woman.” This double condemnation that excludes (and punishes) other options in sexual identification or “gender” is the content of the institutional form of marriage. It is a form that represents the ontological loss of those “proto-human” males and females, of those individuals of undecided sexual identity, as if marriage represented the ascent to a “full humanity,” to humanity supposedly created by God to be sexually bipartite. Marriage as the foundation of the family structure, which is the atom of traditional societies, is an institutional form of human procreation that has to disguise the emptiness of its content in modern times – and how increasingly despicable the necessity of sacrificing sexual polymorphism has become – precisely through the celebration of that necessity in nuptial ceremonies. The experience of this unsustainable and at the same time indispensable character acquired by archaic forms of human procreation in modern times is only an example of an almost thousand-year-old “discontent in civilization.” This general “discontent in civilization” shows that the need for sacrifice, not having disappeared as it should have in accordance with modern life, has weakened. The ancestral civilizational form, although not yet fully delegitimized, has



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now become deeply questionable. It suggests that effective or actually existing modernity has not yet fully accepted or simply cannot fully accept its own basis. In other words, modernity has not yet fully integrated neo-technics – the “second” or “ludic” technics – and the promise of abundance and emancipation that it offered. It cannot yet fully affirm itself over its own basis instead of continuing to sustain itself on the archaic, Neolithic technique based upon the conquest of nature. From this inconsistency in actually existing modernity – with its will to obstruct the very tendency that awakened it – there precisely emerges the capacity for archaic or traditional social forms to survive.

Modernity, capitalism, and Europe If one wants to find an explanation for this inconsistency in historically established modernity, one has to look at the historical meeting point between modernity and capitalism. For this purpose, it is important to take into account a distinction that goes back to Aristotelian philosophy and that allows us to speak of an essential or “potential modernity,” as opposed to effective or actually existing modernity, which we have already mentioned. We could say that the appearance of neo-technics, of this technological revolution that started in the tenth century, has brought something like a “challenge” to civilized life, a challenge to act in response to it: to reject it outright or to accept it, promote it, and integrate it within its own actualization, thereby submitting itself to alterations in each concrete case. The fact that this was a “challenge” can be verified by the countless transformations in labor processes that were experienced at that time all over the world and that appeared as different reactions in civilized life to the spontaneous technical transformation of productive forces. Historians of technics relate the fact that many civilizations, in the East first and then also in the West, have responded to the challenge of neo-technics, have actualized the essence of modernity to transform it into an actually existing modernity, and have done so in very different ways. There has, however, been one civilization among all of them that particularly

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concentrated on the quantitative aspect that the new productivity gave to human labor, and that for this reason has promoted neo-technics in a more abstract and universalist way, more distinguishable and “exportable,” more evident at the economic level and more successful in historicalpragmatic terms. It was precisely the “historical success” of this Western response that made the Christian-Roman West a truly European and capitalist world. As point of origin for the expansion of capitalist modernity, “historical” Europe has been identified with both modernity and capitalism. We must not forget, however, that, aside from this “historical” Europe, there have been and there are still other “losing,” minority, clandestine, or even unconscious Europes that have been willing to try to articulate different actualizations of modernity. The key to the successful abstract productivist response by the Christian West to the challenge of neo-technics was, following Fernand Braudel’s framework, located in the fortuitous historical encounter of two altogether different facts, which occurred in Europe but not in other places in the world. The first fact was that the small dimensions of the civilized world within which the presence of the neo-technic revolution was experienced in practice – the dimensions of the “small European continent,” as Braudel called it – facilitated the interconnection of multiple neo-technic outbreaks within a “manageable” geographical space. This scenario was also energized – as Braudel himself says – by a very peculiar “dialectic,” the “North–South dialectic” of love and hate between Mediterranean Europe and the Europe of the North Sea. The unification of the means of production across the “small European continent” through the peculiar dynamics of the “North–South dialectic” contributed decisively to make the Christian-Roman West’s response to the neo-technic challenge highly effective and more promising in practice. The other fact that helps explain the historical success of the Western response to the impact of neo-technics is that, by that time, Europe’s merchant economy already hosted a considerable amount of capitalist behavior. According not only to Braudel but above all to Marx, when he speaks of the “antediluvian forms of capital,” capitalist behavior already



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existed in the Mediterranean world from the Homeric era. Since then, capitalism had been – if only from outside through trade and usury – determining the process of production and consumption of European societies, imposing its imprint on them and converting them to a previously unknown productivist faith. Thus, the coincidence of these two facts – on the one hand, the self-motivated dynamics of relatively minor and easyto-interconnect productive forces; and, on the other hand, the already decisive presence of primitive capitalism in the merchant economy – can help explain how the ChristianRoman West’s reaction to the appearance of neo-technics became the version of modernity that found the greatest possibility of developing in pragmatic terms. In the West, neo-technics was converted into the basis for an exceptional increase in the productivity of private enterprises and for the achievement of extraordinary profit – a type of profit that, as Marx explains in his critique of political economy, is the most immediate pragmatic goal of the economy, for both merchant and merchant-capitalist purposes. And, although the private entrepreneur does not have a general overview of the economy, he does introduce technical innovations in his work process, and he keeps them secret for as long as possible because he knows that in practice this guarantees him a greater profit than the one obtained by other entrepreneurs – “capitalist” or not – against whom he competes. Neo-technics is thus perceived from a perspective in which it is nothing other than the key to achievement of an extraordinary profit. It is the key to triumph in market competition, a triumph that can only be overcome by finding a new use for the same key. *** It is important to underline that this peculiar use of neo-technics unleashed a process in which neo-technics itself, on the one hand, and the capitalist economy, on the other, entered into a symbiotic relationship of significant consequences, one that only began to reach its optimum level at the start of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century.

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This was a process that had been adjusting for a long time, maturing its organicity, until finally, in the eighteenth century, it became the defining characteristic of the capitalist mode of production described by Marx as the “real” subsumption of labor under the process of self-valorization of value. Modernity, the self-revolutionary response that civilization provided to the challenge posed by neo-technics, in the West thus became tied to the method by which an answer was there formulated. It was tied to the organ that was successfully used to enhance the multiplying factor of neo-technics, and thereby became confused with capitalism. Capitalism became transformed into a servo-padrone of modernity; capitalism was invited to become its means of response to the neo-technic revolution, to become its master, the lord of modernity. Hence, one can say that, starting from that century, actually existing modernity, first in Europe “and then in the whole world,” became an actualization of the essence of modernity, which we are now justified in calling “capitalist modernity” [“modernidad capitalista”]. The capitalist method discriminates and chooses among the possibilities offered by neo-technics, and only actualizes or realizes those that promise to be functional for its own goal, the accumulation of capital. In doing so, it demonstrates that it is only capable of fostering and integrating neo-technics in a unilateral and impoverishing way; it treats it, in fact, as if it were the same old Neolithic technique, only quantitatively enhanced. In this sense, resorting to it implies not only neglecting but also even systematically repressing the qualitative aspect of neo-technics, the challenge aimed at transforming the “natural form” – as Marx called it – or the “use-value” of the process of reproduction of the objective wealth of society. It also implies, therefore, repressing everything that concerns the possibility of a new relation between the human and the Other, the extra-human or nature. Neo-technics is seen as a technique of appropriation, as a technique that has been actualized as a more powerful instrument of conquest and dominance over nature, when – as we have seen – what it affords is precisely the elimination of all kinds of relationships based on dominance or power. One can say, then, that modernity – that is, the civilizational revolution in which humanity has been engaged for



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a long time – in its capitalist version, which is the one that, coming from Europe, has imposed itself around the world, follows a self-defeating path of perverse gloating. It plays an absurd game which, were it not for the blood and tears that it involves, is like a scene from a Charlie Chaplin movie, in which he attempts to climb upward on a downward escalator that is moving faster than himself.

The essence of modernity and actually existing modernity The reproduction of life, the production/consumption of use-values, obeys a logic or a qualitative principle particular to the actualization of a concrete community, of an identifiable social subject. Faced with this “natural” logic, as Marx calls it, the self-valorizing realization of capitalist commodity value has a different organizing principle, which is not only foreign but also contradictory to it. The capitalist mode of reproduction of social life implies a state of subordination or subsumption of the principle of “natural form” to the principle of capitalist commodity self-valorization. Nothing is produced, nothing is consumed, no use-value can be realized in the practical life of capitalist society if it is not acting in support of or as means to the valorization of value, the accumulation of capital. It is precisely this capitalist mode of reproduction of life that ultimately determines the response of Western civilization to the challenge launched by the appearance of neo-technics. Internalized and promoted along this line in practical life in the West, the new technique – the second or ludic technique of which Walter Benjamin spoke – looks at how its own intrinsic tendency toward abundance is reduced and diminished, and, similarly, how this tendency toward emancipation is distorted and inverted. First of all, capitalist modernity generates just the opposite of what was promised with neo-technics. Capitalist accumulation makes use of neo-technics, not to establish a world of relative abundance or scarcity, but to artificially revert to absolute scarcity, that condition for the “law of capitalist accumulation” by which the growth of exploited and marginalized masses becomes the sine qua non for the creation of

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wealth and the dazzling achievement of progress. Second, the realization or actualization of capitalist modernity culminates in the “phenomenon of alienation,” described by Marx and later by Lukács. The human being during capitalist modernity is subjected – “enslaved,” Marx would say – to a metamorphosed version of himself in which he exists only as an economic value that values ​​himself. The human being is reified as capitalist commodity value and enslaves himself to that self-substituting metamorphosis in which he has deified himself as an absolute subject whose unquestionable will must be religiously obeyed. The promise of emancipation for the singular individual, which was suggested as a possible response to neo-technics, is fulfilled, but turned into the opposite, into the use of freedom as an instrument for the totalitarian restraint of the life of each and every human being. If the world of modern life is ambivalent, as we mentioned at the beginning, this is due to the fact that subjectness – the character of the human being as subject – only seems able to realize itself as an alienated subject; in other words, the human subject is able to assert himself, but only to the extent of, paradoxically, negating himself. Capitalist modernity is an actualization of the modern tendency toward abundance and emancipation, but it is at the same time a “self-sabotage” on behalf of that actualization, which ends up disqualifying it as such. This is the secret of the ambivalence of the modern world, of the totally unstable, at the same time fascinating and abominable, consistency of all the facts characteristic of modern society. Benjamin was right about capitalist modernity and its history: every “document of culture” is also, simultaneously, a “document of barbarism.” To conclude, it is necessary to make clear an important point: the capitalist realization or actualization of modernity falls short of potential modernity. Capitalist modernity is not able to exhaust its essence as a civilizational response to the challenge launched by neo-technics, to the possibility of abundance and emancipation that neo-technics opened for human life and its relationship with the Other. It is undeniable that in practical experience of every kind there is a spontaneous drive, tension, or tendency directed toward an actualization of the essence of modernity that is different



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from its actual, capitalist version, toward a non-capitalist actualization of that essence. These tendencies seem to refer to the existence of potential or essential modernity as an entity that has been “denied” in and by actually existing modernity – to a virtual or assumed entity that is suggested “in the negative” within it – but is reluctant to submit to it and disappear. Thus, a disagreement and a conflict between both levels of modernity is posed: the potential, virtual, or essential versus the actual, empirical, or real. The first is always dissatisfied, harassing the second from within the most distant horizons or the smallest details of life. The second is always trying to demonstrate the non-existence of the first. Thereby a loophole in everyday life is also opened, through which utopia can be glimpsed – that is, the vindication of all those aspects of modernity that are not being actualized in its capitalist version.

2 “Technological Rent” and the “Devaluation” of Nature

For a thing to be sold, it simply has to be capable of being monopolized and alienated.1 Karl Marx

I would like to recall here a passage from Marx’s argument in his critique of political economy that can help explain several of the most important characteristics of the modern civiliz­ational crisis experienced at the turn of this century: a crisis that seems to usher in the end of a very long historical period. As we know, in Marx’s critical discourse, the transition from a theoretical analysis to a historical analysis of capitalism contains a significant set of extremely complex questions. Undoubtedly, among them one of the most relevant relates to Marx’s assertion that in actually existing capitalism, in historical capitalism, the reproduction of capital can only be realized if it establishes a kind of compromise with the reproduction of other forms of wealth, not only different but rather openly opposed to the capitalist form. This is the case in regard to the reproduction of a peculiar form of pre-capitalist wealth, the wealth of the landowners – the grandchildren of the old warriors and feudal lords – which has as its foundation the violent monopolization of the use of a natural multiplier of the productivity of human



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labor. This multiplier is based on the ownership of particularly fertile land, rich in minerals or energy sources, etc., or in the control of a natural institution that imprints a necessarily cooperative dimension on the use of productive forces. To decipher this mechanism it is essential to remember that, when conceptualizing the “average rate of profit,” Marx reveals that its composition favors the integration of a “communism between capitalists.” The composition of this rate of profit, he points out, equitably distributes the totality of surplus-value that, as a whole, the capitalist class has sucked from the working class. Among other things, a decisive factor this distribution has to take into account is that the reproduction of capitalist wealth depends invariably on a particular function of the landowners. It depends on a peculiar non-commodity service that this “national” nobility fulfills for the actualization or embodiment of capital. At stake here is the institutionally accepted violence of this pre-capitalist class, which consumes a considerable portion of global surplus-value, and whose violence is precisely that which allows capital to exist in the actual world. In fact, this consecrated violence places a limit on the self-destructive tendency of the commodity-based economy: a tendency to destroy its very base, the concreteness of the lifeworld, which invariably derives from its drive to reach the absolute commodification of all use-values. Indeed, by setting this limit, it provides capital with the possibility of acquiring a concrete body, of having an empirical or historical presence. In Marx’s critical discourse, this thesis on the compromise between capital and the anti-capitalist class is linked with another thesis that states that the reproduction of capital must integrate a non-commodity factor to concretize its historical or empirical existence. The immediate reason or the direct reason to increase the productivity of the labor process, according to Marx, derives, for all capitalists, from their eagerness to appropriate an unjustifiable part of the common global profit, a disposition that leads them to seek to overcome the sacred market laws of equivalent exchange. The relentless pursuit of this “extraordinary profit,” as Marx calls it, has an essential function in historical capitalism: to unleash again and again the permanent technological revolution that

22 “Technological Rent” and the “Devaluation” of Nature

is just one of its main distinguishing characteristics. Each new technical discovery that increases productivity provides the capitalist who introduces it into the labor process with the opportunity to sell its commodities above the normal price, an opportunity that would inevitably only be transitory if the economy were purely commodity-based. In other words, this opportunity endows the capitalist with the power to sell those commodities at a price that is above the value that has been objectified in them. A technical discovery can include an unprecedented and improved field of material transformations; it can bring with it new elements for new use-values aimed ​​ at satisfying new needs. It is similar to the situation caused by the scarcity of good land in agriculture or the rarity of earth supplied with minerals and energy sources. Therefore, it can be included under the rubric of what, from Marx’s conception of the labor process, has been referred to as “non-produced means of production”: one of those multipliers of labor productivity that are naturally determined, that were discovered and conquered by humans, but whose existence is not due to them. In fact, a technical discovery, like the discovery of a new continent five hundred years ago, of course constitutes a product, but it is a product that ceases to be such due to the necessary insufficiency of the entity that made its discovery to properly conquer it. In other words, the investment of capital in scientific research and in technical experimentation leading to a technical discovery becomes relatively small as it makes the discovery actually profitable; it remains on an economic scale too low in comparison to the requirements needed to adequately exploit it. Land and technology, these “non-produced means of production,” correspond to the peculiar class of commodities that “have a price without having any value,” commodities for which we must pay even if they themselves are not a product of the labor process. While the name for the price of the best land is “ground rent,” the name for the price of advanced technology is “extraordinary profit.” These two prices are not usually considered in the same category only because they do not seem to correspond to each other. While “ground rent” shows itself to be a stable and independent amount of money, “extraordinary profit” hides itself and can



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only be detected as an imprecise and transitory part of the price of other commodities. These two impure profits, not justified by commoditycapitalist legitimacy – a legitimacy based on the law of value and equivalence of labor – must come, then, from the purely capitalist common fund of profits. The reproduction of capitalist wealth can only continue if the composition of the average rate of profit includes, on the one hand, the profit determined by property based on violence, not on labor, and, on the other hand, the profit determined by property based on ownership inequality, again not on labor. If we now consider the way in which these elements allow us to advance from the study of capitalism, described as a theoretical model, toward its empirical reality, in which these elements appear as actual characteristics of historical capitalism, we have to recognize two relevant facts. The first is the conversion of extraordinary profit itself into a kind of rent: technological rent. The second is the tendency of this technological rent to grow at the expense of ground rent: to replace it as the main recipient of that part of the capitalist profit reserved for non-capitalist property. The temptation to obstruct the diffusion of technological progress is always there in the capitalist producers who obtain extraordinary profit for their exclusive use of it. But this temptation, as such, cannot last long; it has to become accepted, become normal and institutional behavior, as has been the case in the real life of historical capitalism for the last hundred years. Any transitory advantage, which is the basis of extraordinary profit, is left behind to become a permanent advantage, which is the basis of a new type of rent opposed to the old ground rent. The owner of a new technology can protect his monopolistic use of it and can sell its use to other producers. In this case, he becomes the owner of a technological multiplier of productivity in the same way that a landowner owns the best land. If we call ground rent the money that landowners receive for the use of their land, we can also call technological rent the money that technology owners receive for the use of “their” technology. A new or modern “lordship,” a lordship founded on monopolistic property over the newest available technology, thus emerges as a hidden figure and a protagonist in the

24 “Technological Rent” and the “Devaluation” of Nature

actual history of capitalism. This is a lordship entirely different from the old one – because it is based solely on economic subordination and not physical subordination of market competitors; yet it is equally important for the actual existence of the capitalist reproduction of wealth. It is a lordship that must establish an agreement with this process of reproduction due to its power over the conditions for its realization, that is, over the dynamics of concrete social needs and over the consequent transformation of use-values. A longue durée historical fact seems to prevail throughout world economic history from the beginning of the nineteenth century, throughout the “era of imperialism,” managing to extend its scope to our time. This was revealed a few decades ago by the oil crisis, when ownership of the technology to exploit it proved to be more important than ownership of the deposits themselves. This fact constitutes a systemic trend that has gradually changed the main position in the appropriation of rent, taking it from the realm of the “lords of the land” to the realm of the “lords of technics.” This is a trend, found within the difficult and secular battle between these two realms, that very clearly shows the decline of ground rent and the consequent rise in technological rent. What purposes does remembering and developing this pair of Marxian theses fulfill in regard to the discussion on the relationship between historical capitalism and technological rent? At least three of the main characteristics of the crisis of capitalist modernity and of its empirical manifestations, I believe, could be better understood if we took into account this secular trend governing both forms of rent, ground rent and technological rent, in the real history of capitalism. First, it leads us to recognize the inexorable inability of all kinds of economic policy to break the vicious circle of underdevelopment, that is, to overcome the systemic difference that exists between certain national economies that are in a continuous process of development and others that are, correlatively with respect to them, in a permanent process of underdevelopment. Second, it leads us to observe the relative depreciation of natural products and of land in general, which tends to unleash not only a catastrophic situation for agriculture on the world-system periphery, but an unstoppable generalized



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devastation of nature – which is accompanied, of course, by the devastation of the “native peoples.” Third, it allows us to explore, as a result of the victory of technological rent over ground rent, the loss of sovereignty of all nation-states in the world-system, which has been happening together with a re-feudalization of economic life and the emergence of a transnational quasi-state since the second half of the twentieth century. As can be seen, all these characteristics have to do with the replacement of a direct or brute nature with a mediated or technologically pre-elaborated version of nature as the object of any kind of appropriation that authorizes a non-capitalist owner to demand and receive a considerable part of the bourgeois profit. To round out the analysis of the first of these characteristics, we can conclude that, if a nation-state is incapable of breaking the vicious circle of underdevelopment, it is not always or not exclusively due to a “deformed constitution” of its active population or of its political culture, or to the consequent lack of productivity of its labor process, two facts that generate a disadvantage in fair competition with other nation-states in the world market. People can conclude that the subject of the nation-state, that is, the national conglomerate of capital, has “chosen” to organize its accumulation around an inequitable or non-commodity base governed by a disproportionately high ground rent, and that, at the same time, this choice condemns it to systematically lose in competition with other national capital conglomerates that have “chosen” to organize their accumulation around an equally inequitable non-commodity base governed by an even more disproportionately high technological rent.

3 Meanings of Enlightenment

What God has orderly disposed, the unquietness of man to the farthest extent of his power has strained itself to trouble, and confound, and what through his inability he could not reach, his working fancy has endeavoured to disorder. Baltasar Gracián, The Critick, The Fifth Crisis1

Given the disastrous behavior of all protagonists in the “European war of 1914–1945” – of Western and Soviet military leaders and prime ministers, popes and general secretaries, aristocrats and trade unionists, politicians and generals – we can agree with one of Macbeth’s most famous statements. Standing at the beginning of the same historical era as that which culminated in this war, he said: “Life … is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” The conviction that history “signifies” or is endowed with any progressive sense – an enlightened conviction that secularizes belief in the salvific aspect of divine creation – inevitably disappears. History does not seem to have a sense, but, at best, a “counter-sense.” For Horkheimer and Adorno, what is “worth thinking about” is this “counter-sense”: Why is “a wholly enlightened earth … radiat[ing] with triumphant calamity?” Why is “humanity, instead of entering into a truly human state … sinking into a new kind of barbarism?”2



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In Dialectic of Enlightenment, “humanity” refers to the European or Western version of humanity; in this text, there is the established conviction that this humanity has been endowed with the power to subjugate other humanities, by force if necessary, and that it has in fact done so and will continue to do so. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the key to humanity or the Western civilizational project – and therefore the intelligibility of its historical “counter-sense” – is in the Enlightenment. According to them, the Enlightenment consists of the establishment of the free or profane use of reason – as opposed to its ancillary or hermeneutic use, one respectful of previously revealed truths – as an instrument for the production of knowledge and the consequent increase of human power in the confrontation with and will to dominate nature (the almighty non-human). The peculiarity of Western history is that the barbarism into which it has fallen is not due to the “decay” of its civilizational principle (as Spengler thought, when describing the weakening of “Faustian” civilization) but precisely to the opposite movement: to the fuller deployment of that same principle. (In Walter Benjamin’s Theses on Historical Materialism, which greatly inspired Horkheimer and Adorno, he said: “The barbarism of fascism does not come to interrupt progress, but is the result of its continuation.”3) As is evident now, when the culmination of progress has turned out to be catastrophic, the “counter-sense” inherent in the entire history of the Enlightenment can only be explained by virtue of a peculiar “dialectic” of self-negation that seems present within the Enlightenment’s self-affirmation. This is a “dialectic” through which the loss of human fear of “nature” is transformed into (re)new(ed) terror upon “nature’s” frightful mutation. But what is the essence of the Enlightenment? Why abandon that comforting refuge found in stories (myths) that tells us about the character of the almighty Other, about its name, and about how to behave in relation to it in order to survive? Why go out to face the hardships of the unknown, to confront the almighty Other, armed only with reason, seeking to discover its secrets and learn where to attack it in order to subdue it and thus be able to live at our whim?

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Dialectic of Enlightenment is not only a sui generis text in the history of philosophy; it is also a text that fights to transmit a new type of philosophical thinking. Informed by the work of authors such as Marx and Nietzsche, it clearly knows that it has to fight against a “depravity” in discourse: “thought is being turned inescapably into a commodity and language into celebration of the commodity.”4 To cultivate reflective discourse without falling into this depravity, it becomes necessary to abandon established modern scientific discourse, to depart from the moldy tradition of philosophical discourse, and to dare to shake its deceptive semantic harmony, even at the cost of reaching a level of crypticity [cripticidad] that may seem impenetrable. Dialectic of Enlightenment thus refuses to offer a clear, complete definition, without fissures or contradictions, of what Enlightenment is. The reflective richness of the text by Horkheimer and Adorno undoubtedly rests, to a large extent, on this agonistic quality. And the best way to respect this quality is to accept the invitation it offers the reader to “intervene” in the text and to treat it as an “open text.” This is precisely what I will attempt to do next by proposing a classification of the meanings with which the word “Enlightenment” (Aufklärung) appears. It should be noted from the start that, except in the third essay – on the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche, and morality – this word is seldom used to refer to the historical fact that led to its coinage, that is, to the secularization and rationalization of much of the collective mentality that, originating in France, spread throughout Europe throughout the eighteenth century. By “Enlightenment,” Horkheimer and Adorno most often refer to the essence of what, according to Kant, is at stake in the Enlightenment, and not to the Enlightenment itself.5 It seems reasonable to suppose that a specific narrative underlies the different uses or meanings that the word “Enlightenment” has throughout the five essays and supplement that constitute Dialectic of Enlightenment – a narrative that describes multiple aspects of this concept as it navigates through various fields of intelligibility, not only different from but at times even incompatible with each other. One aspect is shown when Enlightenment appears almost confused with the “human condition,” another aspect in



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ironic respect to the archaic gods, another one in triumphant celebration of capitalist industry and Nazism, and a final one in resistance and struggle against the totalitarian oppression of religious politics, both old and modern.

The appearance of the subject and the possibility of Enlightenment Hardly formulated, almost implicit in the work, Horkheimer and Adorno’s most basic and determining concept of Enlightenment refers to it in its original state. The Enlightenment appears in this concept only in nuce, as a possibility, as a fundamental ontological fact without which it would be inexplicable. Horkheimer and Adorno affirm that it is necessary to recognize, not only in history, but also in the current constitution of the human being, an “act of violence that befalls men and nature alike.” This is an act of violence through which “the human” constitutes itself by standing out and “detaching” itself from, or transcending, what then turns out to be “the Other.” It is the subject’s act of self-affirmation (Selbstbehauptung) as realization of his “freedom” – understood, starting from Kant and Schelling, as the ability to circumscribe and provide order to a concrete or identified cosmos.6 From the transcendence of the absolute indeterminacy of being emerges a pure capacity to determine: “freedom,” the human being’s character as a subject. Sartre describes it as such at the same time that Horkheimer and Adorno work on Dialectic of Enlightenment; in the midst of “being-in-itself,” as a failure, appears a crack, a gap, a “bubble of nothing,” which is the “being-for-itself”: human existence.7 In the indefinite opening of the Other appears the circumscription or enclosure of the cosmos, the subject’s “territory” of self-affirmation. By establishing limits and order, this act necessarily implies a transcendence over that Other from which it has emerged. It is an elementary act of violence (bias) that consists in “changing one’s place or own way of being,” or simply “re-functionalizing” the Other’s elements that help constitute the cosmos.

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Indifference on behalf of being (the Other) toward the human, a simple “chaos,” “emptiness,” or “absence of order,” is forced to appear as a true “dis-order” [“des-orden”], as a hostile presence, as a projection of the subject himself, but in the negative: the “eternal and infinite universe” or the “wild naturalness,” which, in its enigmatic action, surrounds and penetrates the subject and its cosmos. In the same way as for phenomenological ontology, for Horkheimer and Adorno there is no continuum between the human being and the natural being. In anthropological terms, “Man” is not “the culmination” of the “history of Nature,” hominization is not “progress” within the same line of development as “natural harmony.” Rather, it is an interruption of this history and the beginning of another one. It is the “flight forward,” the desperate leap of a disobedient animal, which with “a cry of terror”8 feels condemned to succumb (given its “anomaly”) to the “natural law” of the supremacy of the strongest. As transcendence of the “natural” Other, and particularly as “trans-animalization” of the “proto-human animal,” this humanization of being in general or of the Other is necessarily a “determined negation”; it is a separation from the animal but it is also, in equal measure, an animalization of that which is separated from it: an animalization of subjectness. It is a “re-formation” of the natural, but it is also “naturalization” of form; it is a “cosmification” that violates the Other, but it is also re-actualization of otherness through the cosmos. Transcendence, as “trans-naturalization,” is not a violent action that only belongs to the past. It is also an action that is always happening or taking place in the present. It never ends. The fundamental violence involved in the human transcendence of being in general unleashes a conflict between the human and the Other that has no solution. This is an “anger” or “enmity” that does not accept “reconciliation” (Versöhnung), if “solution” or “reconciliation” ever mean a return to the state prior to the self-affirmation of the subject, a renunciation of freedom. As we will see later, for Horkheimer and Adorno a true “reconciliation” between the human and the Other can only occur, paradoxically, by insisting on that



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“new” phenomenon that has appeared in the midst of the Other: precisely, the renewed exercise of freedom. (For them, freedom is not, as for Kant, “more bad than good,” but is “beyond good and bad,” beyond concordance or discordance with a natural harmony, which, as is clear from what has been said, is only valid insofar as it is “reconstructed.”) The possibility of Enlightenment lies in this fundamental ontological “violence” that is in the subject’s self-affirmation (Selbstbehauptung) with respect to the Other and that constitutes the “self” (Selbst) in its concrete subject or identity (Selbstheit), as determined “trans-naturally” (or “meta-physically”). In certain passages, Dialectic of Enlightenment seems to understand the violence in Enlightenment exclusively as aggression and not as transcendence. It portrays it as a “sin” against “Creation,” as an act of hubris against the natural order, which the modern human being increasingly repeats and for which – dialectically, once having transformed himself into “nature” or a source of hostility toward the human – he receives a terrible punishment. “Civilization is the triumph of society over nature – a triumph that transforms everything into mere nature.”9 However, the text as a whole allows us to reconstruct a concept of Enlightenment according to which violence toward the Other can be seen not only as a sin or as hubris, but also as a particular way of respect and exaltation in the form of a challenge. The constitution of subjectness over the substrate of animal naturalness brings with it the attempt or tendency of the subject to “persevere in its being,” to repeat itself as identical to itself in different situations over the course of time and over the extension of space. To be a subject is to affirm an identity for oneself. This tendency of the subject to remain “the same” can nevertheless be carried out in two completely different ways – for which reason the term “persevere,” just like the term “Enlightenment,” can mean two totally opposite things. This is a difference of decisive importance for Dialectic of Enlightenment. As a matter of fact, perseverance on behalf of a subject on his own being as spatio-temporal self-affirmation (or Selbstbehauptung) does not necessarily have to go the way of self-preservation (or Selbsterhaltung). It is carried out in two

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ways or with two opposing senses: (a) as self-endangerement (Selbstpreisgabe); or (b) as self-preservation (Selbsterhaltung). Self-affirmation may simply entail fidelity to the form that the subject made for himself when transcending the Other (and identified it as such), when going through the experience of “trans-naturalization,” which accepted and assumed the trace of negated and “surpassed” animality. This fidelity consists in the attempt to reach a metamorphosis or translation of that form to any different substance over the course of time or extension of space (Ovid: “forms changed into new bodies”). Perseverance here describes the effort to rescue a form, a volatile entity, from the threat of disappearance when it is put to the test or placed in danger by changing circumstances. As an instance of metamorphosis, perseverance does not protect any “earned territory” or any inheritance or substantial integrity. It is not capable of founding or submitting to any destiny. It is a gratuitous, contingent act, without foundation, of insistence in a form that must continue to assert its existence. Perseverance can, however, take another path, the one that Horkheimer and Adorno see emerging in their time through the macabre apotheosis of the “authoritarian state.”10 A subject’s self-affirmation can consist in a consolidation or substantiation of its identity form, in the sheltering or conservation of that substance as an “earned territory” or a “power reserve” taken from the Other (already converted into mere “chaos”). Perseverance here is the subject’s effort to protect its “sameness” [“mismidad”] as if it were a power similar to one that the subject presumes to be the essence of the Other. It is a kind of perseverance that accumulates that “sameness”-power [“mismidad”-poder] and that, therefore, founds and obeys a destiny. The first mode of perseverance begins with a challenge that respects the “other subjectness” of the “Other” insofar as the Other maintains its presence as nature (fysis) or perpetual creation. It advances by affirming the contingent and random character of the subject’s identity and its cosmos in the midst of the Other. The second mode advances by nullifying the otherness of the Other and its transformation into a “chaos” or “wild nature” that needs to be conquered and domesticated. It moves by affirming the absolute necessity of the subject’s identity and its cosmos



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and by subsuming the Other’s reality to that necessity. The first mode is aimed at finding for the subject and his cosmos his own place in the midst of the Other, while the second mode is directed at subsuming the Other to the subject and integrating it into its cosmos. The disconsolate and “pessimistic” tone that prevails throughout Dialectic of Enlightenment undoubtedly expresses the political conditions of the time in which it was written. These were times that offered their authors only reasons to doubt the very possibility of the first mode of the subject’s perseverance in being or identity. Everything led them to identify perseverance with the second mode, that of the subject’s self-preservation (Selbsterhaltung) as identical with itself, and to disappointingly witness that negative dialectic that led Enlightenment or self-affirmation to “bite its own tail” and conclude in the devastating negation of the subject. In any case, in flashes almost erased by the prevalence of that dialectic, there never cease to appear in the book sporadic remarks according to which a “good” Enlightenment, of perseverance through the metamorphosis of identity, can still be possible. For Horkheimer and Adorno, only once Enlightenment has taken back ownership of itself, that is, has returned to actually practicing contingent self-affirmation of the human subject, can it “break through the limits of Enlightenment.”11

Enlightenment as the “destiny” of the West Proposition IV, corollary XXII, of Spinoza’s Ethics, write Horkheimer and Adorno, “contains the true maxim of Western civilization”: “the endeavor of preserving oneself is the first and only basis of virtue.”12 They thus try to locate a mode of civilized behavior that was “chosen” earlier (some eight centuries before our time), in the Mediterranean world centered on Greece, and that, overcoming difficulties again and again, increasingly consolidated and imposed itself as a dominating “destiny” in the history of the West. It is the Enlightenment’s behavioral mode of self-preservation (Selbsterhaltung) or of civilization freed from magic that ensures the validity of its forms through the reification of life

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in the dynamics of commodity exchange. This is a mode of behavior that the West “chose” repeatedly over another alternative – that of Enlightenment through self-endangerment (Selbstpreisgabe). This alternative mode, historically defeated and dominated, has accompanied Enlightenment since then, disobeying its “destiny” from the widest angles.

Enlightenment in myth According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the presence of Enlightenment as the subject’s self-assertion of preservation does not correspond exclusively to modern civilization. They recognize it earlier in magical behavior and mythical discourse.13 “[T]he myths [in modern times] which fell victim to the Enlightenment were themselves its products.”14 According to them, magical behavior acts as a peculiarly cunning weapon for preserving the identity of a human subject: through mimesis, the magician becomes an invented figure of the almighty Other. Acting “hostile,” he speaks on the Other’s behalf to engage in dialogue with the human community. Then, he enters into a contract with it through which it agrees to make an exception in its “hostility” in exchange for a sacrifice, in which the community offers a part of itself. The magician’s astuteness consists in behaving as if human existence had some importance to the Other. In treating the Other as if it were beholden to what the human being does or does not do, he attributes to the Other a need it does not have, a projection of the internal coherence of communal identity. In this way, if something happens in the Other that turns out to be unfavorable to the human, this does not mean something casual or fortuitous, but a deliberately hostile action provoked by the Other, an action that can then become a matter of negotiation. Raised to the hierarchy of almighty power, the Other becomes subtly subjugated to human power. In magical-mythical mimesis there is a particular imposture: that which will be imitated is created in the very act of imitating it.15 Magical behavior imprints on the Other a need that corresponds to its own identified cosmos. It offers a terrifying figure with which the human being can imitate himself in order to demand something



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of himself, for the sake of reproducing his own identity, a sacrifice to which he would not otherwise submit. Myth, in its own right, by giving a name to the figure in which the Other appears, making it a character in its own story and showcasing it in a reciprocal relationship to the human, puts into words the mimetic behavior in magic and thus justifies the necessity of sacrifice in preserving its identity. Magic and myth document a double-edged process that imposes itself in historical conditions of absolute scarcity: that of the subjection of nature, on the one hand, and that of self-repression, “renunciation” (Entsagung) or social sacrifice, on the other hand. For this reason, for Horkheimer and Adorno, “myth is already [self-preservational] Enlightenment.” Moreover, myth sets in motion an “endless process of Enlightenment” that, instead of being interrupted, as expected with the arrival of modern times, still continues to this day, and in an exacerbated manner.

Modern Enlightenment Modern Enlightenment lives by “disenchanting the world,” by fighting off myth insofar as it aims to express and apologize for the “mimetic” behavior pertaining to magic when it resorts to human sacrifice as an instrument to subjugate nature. But, ironically, its fight is carried out from the same position as that of myth, only “more developed.” The “destiny” of Western or modern Enlightenment began to take hold when the subject distanced himself from managing his own cosmos. This was an operation that endangered the subject’s integrity when confronting the thenunsolvable conflict between social justice and communal survival. The subject thus went on to insure this survival – as a way to protect himself – by entrusting it to the “invisible hand” of the market (Adam Smith). The subject reified it as an operation that no longer required his intervention and that happened to be met accidentally or “automatically” by the infinite web of the “processes of realization of value” transforming goods into commodities. This reification or transfer of subjectness, this reduction of political selfsufficiency, is a sacrifice similar to that in magical-mythical

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behavior that the enlightened subject in the pre-capitalist era of modernity made in exchange for the Other’s good will toward his identity as owner in the “world of commodities,” or as accumulator of abstract economic value. But the destiny of Western or modern Enlightenment imposed itself on it even when, already in capitalist modernity, the mercantile mechanism of distribution of social wealth was disobeyed, avoided, and occupied by the unsettling presence of commodity-capital. This refers to the presence of the valorization process of commodities, which are in constant self-valorization thanks to the exploitation of wageearners who produce and consume them.16 To survive with the identity of an owner, of “lord and master of nature,” the subject now had to sacrifice not only his role as manager of the cosmos, but, radically, his very role as a subject, his subjectness. He had to be reified radically, to become an “alienated subject” in the form of that self-valorizing value that inhabits commodity-capital. To be the owner of capital wealth is to be the owner of an economic value whose self-affirmation cannot be stopped until it has completely submitted to the use-value of social wealth, as long as it has not reduced the qualitative totality of the world to its purely quantitative version. “[Modern] Enlightenment,” the authors say, “is mythical fear radicalized.”17 While “mythical fear” arises from the threat of the Other appearing as chaos, the “enlightened fear” of capitalist modernity already appears from the simple threat of the otherness of the Other. It appears from the “rest” of the Other that is irreducible to the figure of “chaos” and that lies in the promise of pleasure announced in the qualitative consistency of use-value in the goods of this world.18 “For enlightenment [in capitalist modernity] is totalitarian as only a system can be.”19 Identity is maintained and safeguarded by immanence: “Nothing is allowed to remain outside. since the mere idea of the ‘outside’ is the real source of fear.”20 Only if the chaos shown in the concrete consistency of things ended up consisting entirely of a mere negative projection of the subject and its cosmos – exclusively that part of it “not yet” conquered and invaded – could the enlightened subject’s fear of the Other then vanish. However, this feeling of safety in a perfectly preserved



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identity awarded by the negation of the Other as such would be a sensation lacking a subject to feel it. In the negation of the Other in favor of a fully alienated subject, the landscape that remained would be totally devastated. The Enlightenment would have completed its “dialectic.” In carrying out his purpose of self-emancipation, the human took a path that has paradoxically led him from being submissive to a power located in the Other, in chaos, in wild nature, to being submissive to an equivalent power, except now located in himself. This appears in himself as a subject that fully safeguards his identity ultimately by reifying himself and alienating himself as a capitalist economic value that is always in the process of valorization. To stop sacrificing a part of himself, as he had to do in pre-modern times, the subject, in this perverse dialectic, has gone on to sacrifice all of himself. To this Enlightenment, which pursues the self-preservation of the subject at all costs and recoils from the idea of self​​ affirmation as “endangerment” of itself, Horkheimer and Adorno say: “All who renounce give away more of their life than is given back to them, more than the life they preserve.”21

4 Images of “Whiteness”

… his eye is blue he shoots you with leaden bullets his aim is true … Paul Celan, “Death Fugue”1

The word “spirit” that appears in Max Weber’s famous text The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism undoubtedly refers to a kind of demand or request placed by the economic life of society on its members for a certain type of behavior. “Spirit” is an ethical solicitation or demand required by the economy. The “spirit of capitalism” thus consists of the demand or request made by modern practical life, based on the capitalist organization of the production of social wealth, for a special mode of human behavior and for a special kind of humanity, capable of adapting to the demands of increasingly improving the functioning of capitalist life. According to Weber, the ethos requested by capitalism is one of “work discipline, worldly asceticism, virtuous and moderate behavior, productive rationality, [and] the search for stable and continuous profit.”2 In short, it is an ethos of productivist self-repression for the singular individual, of sacrifice to care for the portion of wealth that life has entrusted to him. For Weber, the ethical practice that best represents this ethos requested by capitalism is that of Protestant Christianity, and especially that of Puritanism or



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Calvinist Protestantism, that which left the center of Europe and historically extended to the Netherlands, to the north of the European continent, to England, and finally to the United States of America. In the preliminary note to his Sociology of Religion, Weber suggests that the ability to correspond to the ethical request of capitalist modernity, the capacity to assume the ethical practice of Puritan Protestantism, may have had an ethnic foundation and been connected to certain racial characteristics. The following reflections attempt to problematize Weber’s approach to this topic by describing a kind of “racism” constitutive of capitalist modernity, a “racism” that demands the presence of ethical or civilizational “whiteness” [blanquitud] as a condition of modern humanity, but that in extreme cases, such as the one of Nazi Germany, further demands the presence of ethnic, biological, and “cultural” whiteness [blancura]. One can speak of there being a “zero point” in regard to the concrete identity of modern human beings: the pure ethical or civilizational functionality that individuals possess regarding the reproduction of wealth as a process of capital accumulation. At this basic level, the version of human identity proposed by “actually existing” modernity consists of the set of characteristics that constitute a human being built to satisfy and fully internalize the behavior requested by the “spirit of capitalism.” On the road that leads to this zero point for modern human identity, different determining factors of traditional life, such as inherited semiotic and linguistic subsystems, and pre-modern or simply non-modern uses and customs, are systematically and relentlessly oppressed and repressed in market dynamics throughout history. These different determinations of the “natural form” of a (singular or collective) individual are precisely those identitarian determinations that hinder the construction of the new type of human being required for the increasing improvement of commodity capitalist production and that must be replaced or reconstructed according to the realist, Puritanical, or “Protestant-Calvinist” version of the capitalist historical ethos.3 For the purposes of the present text, it is important to point out that the “economic-religious sanctity” that defines

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this zero point in modern-capitalist human identity is a “sanctity” that must be visible, manifest; it needs to have sensory perceptibility, an appearance or external image by which it can be distinguished. The modern character of an individual, his actual internalization of the capitalist Puritan ethos, or, in other words, his “sanctity” in having been chosen by divine grace, is recognizable above all in the high degree of productivity of his labor. The evidently productive aspect of his actions is what places him above the line that separates categorically the “winners” or salvati from the “losers” or sommersi. But this character is not only present in statistical data. It is also shown in images that correspond to that evident sanctity, in all the set of visible features that accompany an individual’s productivity: from the clean and orderly physical appearance of his body and his environment, to his proper use of language, to the discreet positivity in his look and attitude, and to the restraint and composure in his gestures and movements. Yet the zero point of modern individual identity is really an unsustainable, evanescent point that historically yields immediately to a first or initial level of identity concretion: the level of identity that corresponds to national identity. Indeed, it is only exceptionally that the masses of modern society are amorphous and anonymous. They are usually masses identified by their realization of a state-historical project of some shared enterprise of capital accumulation. In other words, they are masses endowed with an identity of “false concretion,” as philosopher Karel Kosík would say; nonetheless, ultimately a concrete one that has national consistency. Now, as far as these reflections are concerned, it is remarkable that modern national identity, even if it is based on state enterprises established on non-European (or only vaguely European) societies because of their “color” or their “culture,” is an identity that cannot fail to include, as an essential and distinctive feature, a very special feature that we can call “whiteness.” Modern nationality, whatever it may be, including even that of states with non-white (or “tropical”) populations, requires “whiteness” from its members. This may undoubtedly seem surprising at first sight, since the idea of national ​​ identity would seem to exclude its subsumption



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to any more general identity (for example, a “European” or “Western” identity) transcending the particular ethnic determinations of community “nationalized” by the capitalist state. The explanation for this potential paradox of a nation that is “of color,” yet also “white,” can be found in the fact that the founding – that is, the first and exemplary – constitution of modern economic life was capitalist-Puritan and happened casually to take place, as the concrete life of a state-political entity, among the racially and identitatively “white” populations of North-Western Europe. This is a fact that made the “white” appearance of these populations assimilate to the indispensable visibility of that capitalist “sanctity” in modern human beings, and consequently made the former difficult to distinguish from the latter. The productivity of labor as a symptom of modern sanctity and as a “manifestation” of the deep “destiny” of national affirmation came to include, as an indispensable companion, the racial and “cultural” whiteness of the working masses. The identitarian-civilizational feature that is meant by “whiteness” was consolidated, in actual history, on a casual or arbitrary basis, on the ethnic appearance of North-Western Europeans, on the background of racial-cultural whiteness. Over three centuries (from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century), that casual or arbitrary coincidence gradually became more and more necessary and eventually became co-determining of capitalist modern human identity in its Puritanical or “realist” version. In other words, due to its overwhelming frequency, the fact that the “visible saints” were also, in addition to everything else, “of white race and customs” lost its factuality and became instead an indispens­able condition. It is thanks to this quid pro quo that being authentically modern came to include among its essential conditions belonging in some way or to some extent to the white race, and consequently also to relegating, as a matter of principle, all singular or collective individuals that were “of color” or simply foreign, or “non-Western,” to the abstract field of the pre-, anti-, or non-modern (or non-human).4 But the process was actually somewhat more complicated. It is interesting to note that, during this surreptitious transition from being casual to being necessary, the condition of whiteness for modern identity happened to become a

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condition of “whiteness,” that is, its ethnic order became subordinated to the identitarian order imposed by capitalist modernity when that included it as an element in the new kind of humanity it promoted. This is the reason why, in principle, in capitalist modernity, individuals of color can obtain modern identity without having to completely “become” white [“blanquearse”]; it is enough for them to demonstrate their whiteness. We can refer to “whiteness” as the visible aspect of capitalist ethical identity insofar as it is overdetermined by racial whiteness – a racial whiteness that relativizes itself when exercising that overdetermination. It is a character’s composure, a composure that denotes “whiteness,” and not racial whiteness, that stands out in the representations of the new human dignity across numerous portraits of bourgeois or modern human beings in fifteenthand sixteenth-century Flemish painting. Whiteness is there, but precisely only as a redundancy (Hans Holbein, Jan van Eyck, Gerard ter Borch, etc.). This remark is also valid for representations of the nude human body made at the same time. In Lucas Cranach’s painting Adam and Eve, the two figures are undoubtedly white, racially, yet it is not their whiteness but the innocence of their sensuality that the painter circumscribes and emphasizes. We can say, then, that the kind of identitarian racism constitutive of modern-capitalist human being is a promoter of civilizational “whiteness,” not of ethnic whiteness. In other words, it is a tolerant racism, willing to (conditionally) accept a good number of racial and “cultural” alien, foreign, or “strange” features. However, no matter how “open” it may be, this identitarian-civilizational racism does not cease to be a kind of racism, and can easily, under exceptional circumstances, readopt virulent radical or ethnic fundamental expressions, as we shall now see. The intolerance that characterizes “identitarian-civilizational racism” is much more elaborate than that of ethnic racism: it focuses its attention on more subtle indications than whiteness of skin, such as evidence of internalization of the capitalist historical ethos. These are the features that serve as criteria for the inclusion or exclusion of singular or collective individuals in modern society. Unlike the ethnic



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fanaticism found in pursuing whiteness, such forms of racism represent an intolerance that easily strikes against even humans of impeccable racial whiteness, but whose behavior, gestures, or appearance indicate that they have been rejected by the “spirit of capitalism.” The “racism” of “whiteness” only demands that the internalization of the capitalist ethos be made manifest in some way, with some sign, in external or corporal appearance. The biological traits related to racial whiteness are a necessary but not sufficient expression of that internalization, and they are also rather imprecise within a wide range of variations. In the Nordic countries of the region with the most developed capitalism, despite being an army of indisputably “white” race, a large part of the “industrial workers’ army” that Karl Marx spoke about has always failed in its endeavor to attain full “whiteness.” This is true for not only the “reserve army” composed of the unemployed and marginalized, but even the “active workers’ army.” Blacks, Asians, or Latinos who have shown signs of “good behavior” in terms of US capitalist modernity have come to participate in “whiteness.” Further, although it may seem unnatural, they have eventually come to participate in “whiteness,” to appear racially white. Michael Jackson’s manipulation of his facial ethnic features is just an exaggerated caricature of the identitarian and somatic manipulations that other “non-whites” trapped in the “American way of life” have made and continue to make in regard to their behavior and physical appearance. I am referring, for example, to those Black Americans who in the 1960s received the nickname “Uncle Tom,” whose infallible “whiteness” has today allowed them to triumph, in politics, business, and entertainment, and whose emblematic figure is former Secretary of Defense Condoleezza Rice. But I’m also referring to so many other groups “of color” whose adoption of “whiteness,” whose “Americanization” or internalization of the realist ethos of capitalism, contributes to the capacity for “American modernity” to flaunt itself as the only valid and effective modernity; these are groups whose emblematic figures are, for example, the Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi or Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo.

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The ethnic racism of whiteness, apparently surpassed by and in the civilizational or ethical racism of “whiteness,” is always willing to resume its protagonist role and tendency to discriminate and eliminate the Other, always ready to revive its genocidal program. Mass media do not grow tired of reminding everyone in a slyly threatening way of the fact that whiteness lurks underneath “whiteness.” It is enough for the capitalist state to enter into one of its stages of sovereign recomposition, to be forced to restructure and redefine the national identity that it imprints on its population, for the definition of “whiteness” to return to fundamentalism and resuscitate ethnic whiteness as an indispensable proof of obedience to the “spirit of capitalism,” as a sign of humanity and modernity.5 The paradigmatic example of the possibility of this kind of regression is found in the history of German society: in the catastrophic re-establishment of the German state as a National Socialist state between 1933 and 1945. The racism of “whiteness” was then replaced by a kind of racism exalting whiteness, in which the hysterical claim to Aryan racial purity was accompanied by an equally hysterical revival of the traditional anti-Judaism of European populations. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the vast majority of Germans of Jewish origin easily fulfilled all the requirements of “whiteness.” Their enthusiastic and constructive assimilation to the world of modern Europe had led many of them even to commit that extreme somatic self-transformation that Woody Allen makes fun of in his movie Zelig. For this reason, the dysfunctionality that Nazi ideology was interested in finding between the Jewish population and the new National Socialist project of a capitalist state was one that could only be distinguished, treated, and extirpated if the execution of this new project, which supposedly also implied the project of a new nation, posited a fundamentalist return to racial whiteness as an indispensable condition of modern humanity. It had to posit the return to an original or pure whiteness, emphatically North European, Germanic, or Aryan, that could not be confused with the mestizo whiteness [la “blancura” mestiza] that had hidden under the tolerant “whiteness” that prevailed in modern liberal capitalist nations, and



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whose traits were outstandingly present among Jewish Germans. Two closely interrelated reasons allow us to explain – not to justify – the fact that the Nazi movement channeled the racist reaffirmation of ethnic whiteness into an exacerbated form of anti-Judaism. First, it was a constitutively demagogic movement, which disguised with revolutionary rhetoric its deeply counter-revolutionary tendencies, and therefore needed to hide from the proletariat, which it was actively deceiving, evidence of its effective continuity with the capitalist state it claimed to attack. The only way to do this was to resort to overtly violent actions that would carry out an apparent “radical transformation of the establishment.” Along these lines, the violent attempt to wrest the Jewish part from the German social body (1 percent of its population), in order to “purify and strengthen” it, explicitly aimed to be shocking, to demonstrate a more powerful and pure “revolutionary will” than that of “Marxism.”6 This had the advantage, furthermore, of being a relatively harmless action for “the system,” an irrelevant detail in the German economic and social functioning of capitalism. Second, the tendency to make Jewish people the “scapegoat” of all social calamities, which had a tradition dating back to the Middle Ages, had regained strength at the end of the nineteenth century in Northern European societies. This general revival of European anti-Judaism reached its apex in Germany after World War I, in the mid-1920s, at the end of the devastating inflation that further pauperized the working masses and benefited the “plutocratic elite.” This was the same social group that petty-bourgeois public opinion, in a completely irrational manner, accused of having all members of the German population of Jewish origin as participants and accomplices. Nazism took advantage of the tradition of anti-Judaism located in the European petty bourgeoisie, of that sentiment that transformed a positive charge of admiration-envy of Jewish people into a negative charge of contempt-rejection. Petty-bourgeois Europeans cultivated hatred and resentment toward Jewish people because they considered them superior. In contrast to the petty-bourgeois Europeans, who let their ancestral community ties disappear with the total

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commodification of their lives and its consecration by Puritan Christianity, Jewish people maintained and cultivated those ties in daily life. Jewish people had managed to save the nucleus of the Heimat, that “natural” symbiotic combination of territory and ethos (which micro-historian Luis González calls “matria”), in the middle of that total Heimatlosigkeit (“lack of matria”) and devastation into which modernity had plunged the human being, according to Heidegger. According to the petty bourgeois’ feeling of envy, Jewish people “had the advantage” of having developed an anti-corrosion or anti-dilution strategy to protect “natural” identity and effectively combated the profound modern anonymization of social life, which they themselves had wrongly attempted to remedy through national identity. German society’s deep motivation at that time, which Nazism hijacked and distorted, was to achieve a similar goal, that is, to reconquer the virtues of community life annihilated by capitalist modernity. But the strategy that Nazism developed to achieve that goal had an opposite direction to the one spontaneously adopted by the German population of Jewish origin. The Nazi strategy was not a strategy of resistance, like the Jewish one, which was characterized by an anti-capitalist baroque expression within capitalism. Instead, it was a romanticist, ultra-capitalist strategy that aimed to achieve a “rehumanization” of capitalist economic life through a state-völkisch corrective. The Jewish strategy of defending “natural” communal identity, a strategy the Nazis both admired and despised at the same time, and demonized under the term “parasitism,” had shown that this goal – maintenance of the Heimat, of the community, in the midst of commercial atomization – was attainable. However, it could only be obtained by resisting the destruction of concrete identities involved in capitalist life. This was precisely the reason why the Jewish presence became for Nazism the first major hindrance it had to eliminate. Contrary to the Jewish Germans’ enthusiastic affirmation of a tolerant version of “whiteness” as a requirement for entering into modern humanity, the Nazi recomposition of the capitalist state sought to eliminate this requirement and establish instead an inescapable condition for belonging to the human race. This condition involved a fundamentalist



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version of whiteness, that is, an extreme racial whiteness, an Aryan whiteness, which was meant to be the natural carrier of a “regenerated” modernity. The psychotic episode experienced in the racist recomposition of the German nation, projected and put into practice by the Nazi movement, is evident. The very idea of a​​ racial community that “naturally” possesses the regenerative virtues of capitalist modernity is an absurd and completely unsustainable one. It is therefore interesting to consider the various attempts made in everyday German society to capture this absurdity during the twelve years of the Third Reich. Given the fact that the visual arts work with images and that racism refers directly to certain characteristics of the image of the human body, the attempts made by this discipline during this period of German history to put into practice this absurdity are especially illustrative.7 Racism was the programmatically exclusive content of artistic production promoted by Nazi Germany. It was expressed in a style of art that sheltered and protected itself from what painter Adolf Ziegler – known by his colleagues as the “Master of German Pubic Hair” – called “degenerate art.” This was nothing more than the style of art produced at the time by the avant-garde artists of “modern art” in favor of the revolution of modern aesthetic forms, a style accused of Judaism and communism (or “Bolshevism,” as the Nazis pejoratively called it). The art promoted by the Nazi state pretended to, as Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect, put it, “regain strength for the return to classical aesthetic forms and proven Western representations of the human body.” “The visual arts of our days,” he said, “have rediscovered classical and natural simplicity and with it the true and the beautiful.”8 It was, however, a style of art that ended up precisely taking a step back in representation of the human body from the previous rupture with Egyptian hieratism, with which Western visual art began among the Greeks of the seventh or sixth century BC, and instead reinstated the attempt to realistically represent the human body through a special kind of hieratism, striking because of its unsustainable rhetoric. Far from the Egyptian figures’ hieratism, which made them seem resting comfortably in themselves, certain of their

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immortality, the hieratism of Nazi sculpture, exaggerated to the threshold of the grotesque, was guided, according to critic Klaus Wolbert, by the principle of rigidity (Prinzip der Starre). This principle strove to symbolize inner moral consistency (Innerlichkeit) as the hidden core of the human’s bodily presence on earth, but instead only managed to reproduce the appearance that the European human must have had after being punished for many centuries during the Christian Middle Ages. Nazi hieratism affirmed itself in open opposition to the sensuality found in Mediterranean or Oriental images of the human, a quality that implied for it an impudent moral inconsistency, an Äusserlichkeit or surrender to the foreign or public. Instead of expressing a certain quality of rest, Nazi hieratism transmitted a feeling of tension about to explode. Overdetermining the futuristic dynamism and expressionist gestures that characterize above all Arno Breker’s heroic bas-reliefs (The Guardian, Comradeship, etc.) or his “symbolic-ideal” figures, such as Partei and Wehrmacht (also called The Torch Bearer and The Sword Bearer), which represented the Nazi Party and the German Army, there is another peculiar dynamism, paradoxically hieratic, found in having a heroic act frozen in its exemplariness. This dynamism perfectly agrees with the monumental and empty, yet at the same time small-town kitschy, style of the new Reich Chancellery, which had been designed and frantically built by Speer in 1938–9 in the face of imminent war as a “building capable of intimidating the enemy.” Not all pro-Nazi artists produced Nazi art; most of them just superficially adapted their art to the rhetoric of Nazism. This was done especially by the Traditionalists (such as Wissel, Rieger, Willrich), the Symbolists (such as Kolbe, in The Human Couple, Klimsch, or Thorak himself, in his titanic group entitled Comradeship), or certain “Neo-Objectivists” (such as architect Kurt Otto). The few truly Nazi artists, who intended to make specifically Nazi art and felt “aesthetic empathy” with the political movement driven by Hitler and his cronies (like Arno Breker, in sculpture; Adolf Ziegler, in painting; Albert Speer, in architecture; and Leni Riefenstahl, in cinema), found in Breker’s formal style, if not a prescriptive model, surely an example to imitate.



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Breker – whom the official press called the “Michelangelo of the Third Reich” – articulated a specific “hieratic dynamism” in his visual representation of the human body. His sculptures tried to express, through a special distortion of the human figure, the presence of a spiritual demand that would act from within the “Deutsche Innerlichkeit” (the predominance of inner life in the German man) on the appearance of the human body, granting it a unique specificity and “beauty.” This demand corresponded only to a man who, in pursuing an ideal, is always able to overcome himself, and does so heroically, since such a feat implies sacrifice of oneself. The existential attitude of Entschlossenheit, of “resoluteness,” that was described by Heidegger in his classic 1927 work, Being and Time, and that was also ostensible in Hitler’s 1924 decision to resume his political adventure after a few months in the Landsberg prison, seems to be the model that inspired Breker when he decided create an alternative version of the figure of David by Michelangelo in 1938. Giving David an Aryan-Nazi character, Breker set himself on the formal path to making the series of sculptures that would later make him famous. Breker’s search for symbiosis between Aryan and Nazi qualities in the representation of the “new German man” was also undertaken by other sculptors. For example, in The Torchbearer, by Willy Meller (in the Ordensburg Vogelsang, the Nazi military training facility in Eifel Park), or in the set of athletes sculpted by Karl Albiker and Joseph Wackerle for the Berlin Olympic stadium in 1936, the Nazi idea of a German virtue that can reach individual realization in fusion with the massive community of the Volk is reflected, when the human figure retains the same texture and continuity as the stone and becomes almost indistinguishable from the wall before which it stands. The strength of popular community is underscored by this continuity, since it suggests a kind of return of the human to the category of the mineral. Much less original than Breker was the painter Adolf Ziegler, a promoter of that exhibition in which emboldened common sense believed that it could mock the revolutionary forms of “modern art” by presenting them as proof of “degeneracy.” In his painting Terpsichore or in the triptych The Four Elements, he intended to replace the Mediterranean

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ideal of female beauty, which was centered on sensuality, with another, specifically Aryan one, centered instead on modest expression of productivist moral virtue, both in procreative love and in work. The political counter-revolution of the Nazi movement had its equivalent in the formal counter-revolution of art that became a part of it. The significance that Nazism had for the European revolution was the same significance that Nazi art had for the formal avant-garde exploration of “modern art.” The art that belonged to National Socialism sought to uncover and emphasize the virtues and graces of Aryan whiteness, presenting its biological consistency as the indispensable condition for genuinely reconquering “whiteness” and as the unmistakable mark of a will to “regenerate” modernity. However, the only thing it effectively achieved with its figures praising Aryan whiteness was to uncover or reveal the necessity for heroic suicide in adopting “whiteness.” Paradoxically, what it came to exalt against its own purposes was the sacrifice of the natural form of human life and the qualitative wealth of the human body, insofar as it stands in creative relationship to the multiple use-values of life. What it managed to announce was a new type of human selfdestruction that must be fulfilled in exchange for a reformed and authoritarian continuation of the good functioning of capitalist modernity. The betrayal that Breker’s work implied in regard to the formal revolution started by the sculptural work of his master, Auguste Rodin – the end of avant-garde exploration through visual possibilities and the opportunistic acceptance of a racist canon for the representation of the human body – eventually led to Breker’s artistic failure. The aesthetic counter-revolution that he undertook nevertheless had less catastrophic effects than the other counter-revolution, which he accompanied and intended to inspire. Victims of the first were himself and the art of sculpture in Germany; victims of the other were, instead, an alternative to the capitalist version of modernity, the one that came with the communist movement, and, along with it, the twenty million people who died in the war and in extermination camps in Europe. The standard racism of capitalist modernity is a racism based on “whiteness.” This is the case because the type of



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human being required by the capitalist economic system is characterized by a willingness to submit to a determining fact: that the logic of the accumulation of capital dominates the logic of concrete human life and imposes on humans every day the need to self-sacrifice. According to this view, this is a disposition that can only be guaranteed by the ethics embodied in “whiteness.” As long as this system and this type of human being prevail, racism will be an indispensable condition of “civilized life.”

5 “American” Modernity: Keys to its Understanding

“You are expensively dressed,” said Karl … “Yes,” said Robinson, “almost every day I buy myself something new. How do you like the waistcoat?” “It’s very nice,” said Karl. “The pockets aren’t real, mind, they just look like pockets,” said Robinson, and took Karl’s hand so that he might convince himself of this. Franz Kafka, Amerika1

The “Americanization” of modernity during the twentieth century is a general phenomenon: there is not a single feature of civilized life during this century on which “Americanism” or “American identity” has not put its mark as some form of overdetermination. It is a phenomenon that does not occur only, as one would expect, in North American societies, where it first emerged in the seventeenth century, but that is present, since the end of the nineteenth century, across the whole planet. The expansion of “American” modernity beyond its original borders has not occurred solely or preferentially in more or less recent post-colonial regions – where, as in Asia or Africa, European modernity remained in a separate area, as a strange or elite dimension – but has occurred, even with special force, in regions with old roots in modernity, such as Europe and Latin America.



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Also, as of the recent turn of the century, as in all of modern history, societies and extra-European states – from the Far East, for example – have paid for access to the civilizational advantages of modernization with a greater or lesser “Westernization” of their lives, only now “Westernization” has been reduced to an “Americanization.” In the epoch of the “globalized” world, “Americanism” has imposed itself as the “standard” or minimally universal identity that all inhabitants of the planet must share to the extent that they aspire to be adequate users of modern goods, to participate in “civilized” life. The interest in distinguishing the specifically “American” elements of contemporary modernity comes from various facts and trends. The global economic, social, and political deterioration of the last half century, which now seems to be leading to a catastrophic situation of unknown and radical magnitude, follows a line of development defined by one of the multiple versions of capitalist modernity of civilized life: the “American” version. Any attempt to slow down, perhaps reverse, or even just survive this deterioration and its consequences must ask about the resources available in today’s modern civilization in order to be truly viable. It would be wrong to suppose that these resources remain the same or are of the same kind as those previously available to modern civilized life in the last century, which were used in an attempt to counteract its own aberrations but were actually squandered, with well-known catastrophic results. Differences at all levels (in the technical, as well as in the social and the political levels) between the modernity prevailing a century ago (the “European” one) and the one that currently dominates (the “American” one) may be evident in general, but are confused in the particular. Only if they are accurately described and critically examined can the specificity of the latter be recognized below its apparent similarity to the former, and new resources be found to adequately combat it. 1. Capitalist modernity is a “civilizational project” that was conceived unconsciously and spontaneously in the practical life of European societies at the beginning of the second millennium of our era. Its purpose has been to rebuild human life and its world through actualizing and developing the possibilities opened up by a technical revolution

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that began to take place around the planet in that era. The peculiarity of this project of modernity is the mode in which it commits to civilizational reconstruction. This is a mode that contains a very particular purpose: to give “another turn of the screw” to the millennial commodification of the human lifeworld, a process that had begun eight or nine centuries before the Christian era. In other words, its purpose is to radicalize the process of “subsumption” or subordination through which the “natural form” of life is being subjected to its “double,” the “value form” that it develops as commodified life.2 This process of subsumption transitions from being only an external or “formal” fact to being a “real” or “technical” one. It “internalizes” or incorporates the particular capitalist mode of reproducing wealth within the very composition of the instrumental realm, of the system of social apparatuses, and thus consolidates exploitation of human labor into its salaried, proletarianized form. The process that leads to the generalized telos of the valorization of value, induced by the capitalist mode of reproduction of social life, is undoubtedly the dominant process in the history of European modernization. However, it is far from being the only one. Other proposals of modern life that stand for the telos of the human “natural form” appear next to it and harass it repeatedly throughout that history. Nonetheless, this process until now “has never lost.” 2.  The civilizational project of capitalist modernity could only have been carried out in concrete historical terms. First, it was executed by invading the pre-existing figures of civilization in Europe and imposing itself within them, or even replacing them. And, second, it was executed by repressing the civilizational pre-figurations that resulted from other, non-capitalist actualizations of that technical revolution. For this reason, the concrete historical reality of modern civilization in Europe only becomes understandable if one sees it as the realization of a civilizational project that brings with it the capitalist mode of social reproduction, as one that has crushed all forms of resistance presented by different pre-modern civilizations and multiple non-capitalist sketches of modern civilization. In the fight against or confrontation with this resistance, the capitalist side has always triumphed because it has made a dynamic set of compromises with those



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other civilizations and civilizational proposals already established. These are compromises that have allowed the latter to refunctionally reproduce certain essential features of their “natural form” of social life and that have forced the former, the capitalist side, to divert and delay its self-affirmation. Especially in the Mediterranean world, and as a result of a thousand-year-old history, the “formal subsumption” imposed by commercial and usurious forms of capital (those that Marx called “antediluvian”) on Western civilization had already soaked into social life. It was visible in a rich framework of uses and customs, and in a broad and complex set of identities fervently cultivated daily. For this reason, the shift that took place in the eighteenth century from the predominance of these “antediluvian” forms of capital to the predominance of “productive capital” – the form of capital which consummates the “real subsumption” of social life under capitalism – proved to be a considerably difficult step. In fact, it was so difficult that it led to the opening, starting with the French Revolution, of a whole historical era, that of the “actuality of the revolution” (as György Lukács called it). This was an era in which an alternative project for modernity, the communist project, came to endanger the capitalist option that was actively trying to perfect itself. (Fernand Braudel records the difficulty of this step when he speaks of a “strangeness” and “awkwardness” in the production process of capital.) 3.  The history of modern-capitalist civilization bifurcates in the seventeenth century. At this point, there appear two branches or lines of development that are juxtaposed, parallel, and contiguous to each other, but also autonomous: the European line, clearly the main, most typical one, and, a seemingly secondary line, the “(North) American” one. What distinguishes these two branches from each other is the degree of compromise established between the realization of a capitalist civilizational project and the civilized (pre-modern and modern) reality that already existed in each one and that it had to take into account. The European line of modern civilization is an “impure” one due to the high degree of compromise that it required. It is a line that advanced slowly and sinuously by transforming a “pagan” social identity. This is an identity endowed with its own

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consistency and dynamics, which forced the capitalist “value form” to adapt to multiple complex sets of “natural” or concrete forms of life, some still pre-modern and others already properly modern. The “American” line of civilization is instead a practically “pure” one, due to the tenuous quality of the compromise between capitalist and “natural” forms found therein. It follows an almost rectilinear trajectory, on which it unfolds without major setbacks, over a rather flat or elementary civilized life. Along this line, the “natural” identification of life that needed to be refunctionalized was reduced, quintessentially, to ardent faith in the sacred Judeo-Christian scriptures and blind obedience to their moral directives. 4. Behind the purely doctrinal differences that seem to distinguish the Christians of the European branch from the Puritan colonists of the American branch – including the differences that led to the latter being “expelled” to America – other differences are hidden. These are more determining differences, which have to do with how “elaborate” (mestizo-ized) or “elemental” (pure) was the civilized life that each branch represented in the process of modernization. European modernity is, fundamentally, derived from the Southern European or Mediterranean world, while “American” modernity derives rather from North-Western Europe. This geographical difference points toward an identitarian difference of great importance in consolidating the capitalist mode of reproducing social wealth. The first is a “Catholic” modernity, while the second is a “Protestant” modernity, not so much in the theological sense of these qualifiers as in their identitarian-political sense. In other words, this difference refers to their degree of Christianization of everyday life, the extent to which the Christian religious structure, the ecclesia, has managed to assert itself or replace the community or polis as the social and identitarian referent for singular and collective individuals. European Catholic or Mediterranean modernity presents a relatively low level of Christianization because it comes from a process of evangelization whose destructive effect on the identities and pagan cultures of Mediterranean societies has faced strong resistance. These are the same factors that have forced it to follow a peculiar “strategy” of integration



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or mestizaje in which Christian identity and culture could become increasingly relative and “loosen up.”3 Protestant or North-Western European modernity presents, however, a high degree of Christianization because it developed during a process of evangelization whose devastating effect had advanced without any great obstacle on the ruins of Northern European (Celtic and Germanic) identities. Without having to make any significant concession or to enter into the complexities of mestizaje, it imposed a Puritanical Christian identity in their place. 5. “American” modernity, as a prolongation of particularly North European modernity, finalizes something that Christianity seems to have been tasked with preparing. This is a society endowed with an “ethos” that makes it capable of giving a positivist, “realist,” acquiescent, and docile response to the “spirit of capitalism” (Max Weber), to the demand that it makes for a certain type of human being capable of being functional within human subsumption under capital, for a certain type of humanity that possesses ethical-anthropological “whiteness” as a basic characteristic of its behavior and appearance.4 In the “American” version of capitalist modernity, an exaggerated North European version of the same, the commodification of life, the subsumption of its “natural form” to its “value form,” is fulfilled when the latter is in a state of extreme weakness, when it scarcely has any possibilities of resisting the former. This is when the creativity of “natural” life becomes hindered, enclosed in inertia or repetition. It is when there is nothing, or almost nothing, in the practical experience of social individuals that leads them to perceive a contradiction between producing and consuming objects as “earthly goods” and doing so as commodities, “heavenly goods,” or pure economic values. The gradual but consistent subsumption of the “natural form” to capital in “(North) American” modern life explores beyond all limits the possibilities of quantitative increase of commodity production and consumption. Separately, however, it imposes a repetition without substantial alterations of the ancestral qualitative consistency. New use-values must thus be discovered starting with the demands of private owners – rich in money but unable to break collectively with

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the established system of necessities – on nature, which is in principle inexhaustible. This process contrasts to the one that takes place in European modernity, where new use-values​ have been discovered and repurposed by capitalist value but without negating the social-natural “logic” or creativity that emerges from spontaneous collective interaction with nature. This is a concretely identified interaction that is always in conflict, since it aims to revise the “contracts” between humans and between humans and nature that are objectified in the qualitative consistency of human life. Considered at the essential level of history of actually existing modernity, the “Americanization” of modernity in the twentieth century seems undoubtedly to be a moment of culmination. It is the arrival of the closest possible interconnection between the consolidation of neo-technic productive forces and a capitalist process of realizing their potential revolution. It seems as if the capitalist logic of self-valorization of the commodity value has conquered or reached the highest possible degree in its effort to subsume the “natural” logic, or logic of use-value of modern social life, a degree in which the two are almost identical. However, if what is taken into account is the concrete history of modern life, the Americanization of modernity entails a radical impoverishment. It implies, first, a sharp break with pre-modern history, not only pagan but also Christian. This is a historical past without which modernity, as a “determined negation” of other previous civilizational forms, is severely diminished in its historical substance. Second, it also implies a systematic elimination, within daily life, of the competition between multiple forms of life or different possible “ethe” within capitalist modernity. It tends, in fact, to ensure the monopoly of one of them in particular, the capitalist one that accompanies the “realist” (“Protestant” or “Puritan”) ethos.5 6. Three centuries after their separation, the European and the “(North) American” branches of modern history then came together again starting in the second half of the nineteenth century. By then, while the former had led capitalist modernity to a state of self-denial, the latter had led it to its full realization. “European” modernity, challenged by the communist project, was in complete crisis because it



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was not able to satisfyingly conclude the task of completely subordinating the “natural form” (either in its traditional or in its new versions). “American” modernity, by contrast, was in full growth and expansion, satisfied with having completed the same task. The communication channels installed between both versions of capitalist modernity were not at the service of a “return,” of a reinsertion of the “American” version into the “European” one, but of an invasion of the former into the latter. The former tried to absorb and replace the latter in a slow and still unfinished process throughout the twentieth century. 7. The symbiotic relationship that emerged between the two branches injected new energy into and revitalized “European modernity,” especially from the end of World War II in the twentieth century. But it was a transfusion that addressed only the parts that “American modernity” considered “redeemable.” Hence, this symbiosis opened up in European modernity a split between its remade “American” version, and its pure or “authentic” version, one faithful to the traditional “European” identity and that, for many reasons, was in deep crisis. “To be modern in a European way” today implies recognizing, as Jean Baudrillard did, that an “American truth” had always been waiting, as a destiny to be fulfilled, on Europe’s horizon. At the same time, it also implies recognizing that its concrete historical substance – that which capitalist modernity turned all its forces against and was “dispensable” from the “American” perspective – was the only thing that legitimized and gave specificity to “European” modernity. For its part, the “(North) American” historical branch of capitalist modernity also underwent considerable modifications as a result of this symbiotic relationship. These modifications have been as decisive as, or even more decisive than, those observed in the European branch, and have come to complete its identity, making it precisely the “American modernity” that exists today, the “American way of life.” 8.  Perhaps the main empirical historical key of “American” modernity lies in the casual or “providential” coincidence of a particular project in regard to community life, the Puritanical Christian project, with an equally particular natural fact, that

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of relative abundance in the natural means of production. Perhaps it lies in the unexpected encounter of a morality that sought eternal (celestial) salvation through compulsive commitment to productive labor (the “workaholism” of our days) with a natural situation exceptionally favorable to increasing labor productivity. The importance of this “foundational” encounter in the “American” redefinition of modernity cannot be overemphasized. A scheme of moral behavior conceived to guarantee survival in conditions of “total threat” to human survival, designed and perfected by millennia of living in “absolute” scarcity, was ultimately put to the test, after a “second exodus of God’s people,” this time to America, in a radically different situation. This was a situation in which there was only “relative” scarcity, that is, a certain degree of abundance, of acceptance – and not of rejection – of nature toward the human. These facts about the “New World” came by themselves to challenge past patterns of moral behavior, to demonstrate that the land where human beings lived was not necessarily, as it seemed for the majority of people in Europe, a “vale of tears,” a “place of trial and suffering.” These facts came above all to demonstrate that earthly wealth is not only the fruit of human sacrifice in war or labor, that it does not consist in pure economic value, that is, in the crystallization of that sacrifice. They showed that it comes only through human effort (as Marx reminded social democrats), because nature contributes its part “for free.” They showed that social wealth is an objectification of human activity – not as a projection on an empty and indifferent substrate, simply there “for free” – but as a “collaboration” with nature, as an action that completes or “complements” a “natural action” that is always in process by itself. However, for the project of “American” modernity – which does not pursue social perfection but capitalist profit – it was better to cling to the safety provided by faith. It stayed away from the political project that comes with questioning the supernatural foundation of public or social affairs. It reaffirmed belief in the Puritanical scheme, in its sacrificial essence: it is preferable to continue paying with the giving up of pleasure, with blood and sweat, the debt contracted



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with Jesus Christ to reach a sure salvation, even if it comes in “the great beyond” – in other words, to continue living life as a sacrifice – than to interact directly, without any divine guarantee, with a nature in which abundance will always be unreliable, unpredictable, and uncertain. The founders of “American” modernity minimized the active contribution of nature to the constitution of concrete wealth; they discounted it. By reaffirming the purely human origin of social wealth, they negated the “natural” quality in the use-value of everything that, because of being accidental or fortuitous, cannot serve as an immediate substrate for commodity value. Nature was reduced to a “menu” of opportunities, in which the entrepreneurial individual finds, after an arduous initial search, the one that was “reserved” for him. (As is well known, the march of territorial appropriation toward the North American West advanced by eliminating, devastating, and exterminating everything that did not serve hic et nunc directly as “raw material,” be it the “pseudo-human” indigenous people or the forests and animals.) In the capitalism that sustained European modernity, the “ground rent” that funded the excesses of the “leisure class” (Thorstein Veblen) also consecrated, separately, and in its own way, the precious character of nature. In twentiethcentury capitalism, which has sustained “American” modernity, “technological rent” – that is, the objectification of human creativity – came to displace “ground rent.” With this change, nature’s price was lowered as it became relatively “superabundant” and nature lost the precious character it always had. The destructive abuse of nature thus became a minor issue. 9.  At the basis of “American” modernity there seems to be an empirical fact: that in America there is a “Manifest Destiny” assigned by God to the community of godly Divines or Puritans (Calvinists, not Quakers) recently disembarked from the Mayflower and to their descendants. This is a destiny that became evident in God’s bestowal upon the neo-English colonists of a natural Lebensraum to conquer freely, extending from the Far West to infinity. Far from helping to demonstrate the lack of substance in that ethics and raising questions about it, the unusual and exaggerated multiplication of “visible saints” – due to the

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deployment of productivist Puritan ethics in unexpected conditions of natural relative abundance – came rather to empirically “over-legitimize” that ethics. The natural exuberance of the “New World” – the “promised land” – caused unusual generosity in the “invisible hand” of the market. It caused an ironically excessive validation of an ethics of exceptional “chosen ones” or of “visible saints.” Exception thus almost became the rule. The “winner” or the one chosen by God to be saved became the “normal” or most typical human being in “(North) American” society; the “loser,” the representative of “white trash,” became the anomalous minority confirming the rule. As an assembly of “visible saints,” the parish community of farmers, the community of communities, the WASP “nation,” felt favored by an evident “destiny of salvation.” 10.  The most defining and determining transformation of all that capitalist modernity underwent with its “Americanization” is undoubtedly the introduction of what might be called “American hubris.” This attitude consists of what many authors have described as an “artificialization of the natural” or a “naturalization of the artificial.” The “natural form” of human life, with its project of subjectual self-affirmation [autoafirmación sujetiva], is that which grants necessity or “naturalness” to the objects of its world. Therefore, a certain quality of life or its world can be said to be “artificial” when it is the result of the fortuitous combination of other qualities that occur with mere quantitative increase; that is, when it does not obey a “project” or intention and lacks the “necessity” or “naturalness” discovered/established by a subject. Expressed in historical terms: it is when it is the effect of a simple extended realization of the economic value of commodities, and not of a concrete “internal” transformation, “concerted in some kind of democracy,” of life and its world or set of use-values. The hubris or absolute unrestraint of “American” modernity consists of its pretense of having finally reached the total subsumption of the “natural form” of human life and its world to the “value form.” This subsumption comes not only to refunctionalize that life both “from the outside and from within,” but plainly to deny in it that “natural form.” It manifests itself in practical life through tacitly



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refuting “naturalness” as the foundation of the lifeworld, through inherently vindicating in practice the self-sufficiency of its “artificiality.” By contrast, respect for that social and historical “naturalness” in European modernity seems to be the cause of its own decline and crisis. “American modernity” represents the enactment of a new “artificial naturalness.” This is a naturalness characteristic of commodity-capital value, a value able not only to selfvalorize independently of “natural” use-values, but also to promote, on its own – as the ghost of “a great pretender”– the appearance and constitution of substitute use-values. “American modernity” disregards the elementary “natural” task of any concrete civilizational project, that of simultaneously creating in human life sufficiency in the subsystem of social production capacities and satisfiability in the subsystem of social consumption needs. For this purpose, the expansion of production capacities, however infinite their possibilities for growth, can never coincide – following an asymptotic parallelism – with the always indefinite openness, the constitutive metaphysical insatiability, of consumption needs. The fundamental distortion of the use-value to which great modern industry technically or “naturally” tended – a distortion that from the eighteenth century transformed it from being an instrument for the workers’ liberation into an instrument for their organic enslavement6 – serves as basis for the use-value “design” that the commodity-based capitalist economic value induced in production by the mere act of imposing its self-valorization within the random play of the market. It is a monstrous use-value by definition. It is useful, certainly, but not to feed life; rather, to help human beings achieve suicide and devastate the nature in which life unfolds. 11. It is no wonder that this aspect of “American modernity” enjoyed until recently, especially in a vast layer of the European intelligentsia, a positive and even enthusiastic welcome.7 “(North) American” civilization has praised itself as self-sufficient, as the owner of an “artificial naturalness” that allows it to dispense with the ancient and modern “naturalness” of life, an action warranted by the conditions of a radical and generalized civilizational crisis. Besieged in its “small continent” (Braudel), “European” civilization

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– which respects “natural” use-value, but only to drown it in its purism – is diminished to the edge of automatism. Meanwhile, in the vast rest of the world, other “natural” civilizations do not find the way to harmonize their own tendency to invent a version of modernity with their fundamentalist defense of a substantialized identity. Standing on this unstable ground, “American modernity” has been able to show its “validity.” It has been able to ignore and make others miss the unsustainable nature of its hubris, of its absolute unrestraint: the devastation that it implies for human beings and for the nature that makes them possible.8 12. If we examine what distinguishes “American” modernity from European modernity – the former being an independent historical prolongation of the latter – its distinctive feature seems to be its total or unrestricted disposition to assume the facticity of progress. In other words, American modernity is distinguished by its realization of a productivist impetus of “production for production’s sake,” one characteristic of the accumulation of capital and favored by the “invisible hand” of the market (Adam Smith). This is a tendency to surrender to the accelerating changes that this abstract productivism introduces into practical life and social reality. “Americanism,” or “American identity,” thus presents itself, on a first empirical level, as a form of progressivism – a general feature of capitalist modernity – radicalized or taken to the extreme. It presents itself as a progressivism that has eliminated the identitarian (“cultural”), social, and political obstacles that restrained its presence in European modernity. “American progressivism,” the total surrender of its modernity to progress, can be described both as a particular way of constructing the temporality of the social world and as a particular way of actualizing the politicity [politicidad] of social life. Given the consequences it has for these two elements of the construction of the lifeworld, “American progressivism” is shown first as a “presentism,” and second as an “apoliticism.” Accordingly, “American progressivism” essentially implies a systematic closure of everyday experience in the face of past and future determinations of society, conceived as a supratribal community or as a proper republic. In other words, it



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leads to indifference in the face both of historical commitments objectified or crystallized in the lifeworld and shared by all, and of expectations projected into the future from the current life of society as a whole. “American progressivism” generates phobia toward any political position that seeks to “impose” on it, from its own polis or its urban time-space, any transcendental or meta-private determinations to social life. This is a life that is always lived in a series of presents by innumerable “tribes” or ad hoc communities composed of private individuals, committed to carrying out a certain enterprise. The unlimited unleashing and acceleration of progress could only really come from “American” modernity, where the resistance of “use-value” to commodity “value” is completely disarmed. After centuries of subjugating the Germanic peoples, Roman-Christian colonists had in certain cases been able to achieve a mass production of human beings, whose idiosyncrasy or “natural” identity was reproduced in extremely elementary terms. In this regard, this was an identity similar to that of the Calvinist and Puritan communities that arrived to colonize New England and thus assumed, on a parallel path to the European ones, the “historical task” of capitalist modernization. To substitute for one technique another “more efficient” one, for one produced good another “better” one, is the proper procedure of progress. In the dominant modernity, the efficiency of the former and the quality of the latter must in principle be defined by referring to a human identity figure that is already commodified in its productive and consumptive potential. They must respond to a design of the lifeworld in which the telos of valorizing commodity value dominates over that of the “natural form.” What is “most efficient” or “best” must be determined in reference to the criteria of a human being interested exclusively in abstract productivity or “productivity of value,” factors that showcase both his own activity and the objects that it produces. (Productivity, for that matter, is that which legitimizes each individual’s membership of or belonging to the community.) The “American dream” is committed to a kind of progress that, while aiming to “improve” the human being and his world, actually “improves” or increases the degree of submission of the “natural form” of life to its “value form.”

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13. The use-value of multiple elements of the twentieth century, including its cities, countryside, and media, is deformed, inverted by design to replace the telos of democracy with the telos of valorization. The use-value of an individual automobile (from the Ford Model T and the Volkswagen onward) does not respond to “natural” transportation needs. In other words, it does not respond to needs that are socially concrete, that the modern human being sovereignly decided to have. On the contrary, it is a use-value that “anticipates its desires” and instills in it a need that does not belong to it, but to capital, which satisfies its own need of accumulation precisely through the modern human being. The same goes for the use-value of having a home or domestic utensils as “indispensable for the modern housewife”; of diet and health, or of hygiene and care of one’s own body (as if it were an instrument of labor and consumption); of leisure and entertainment industries, and so on. Globalized, omnipresent, “American modernity” floods the world market from all sides with commodities whose use-values are designed and generated from the needs of self-valorizing value. It overwhelms the market with goods that, for the same reason, do not lead to liberating fruition – the sort endowed with the “weak Dionysian force” that is in all enjoyment determined by the “natural form” of life – but only to a kind of satiety that comes from abundant consumption – one allowed by the availability of a certain amount of money, the representative of any commodity. “American” modernity is that which necessarily promotes the phenomenon of “consumerism,” that is, of quantitative compensation for the impossibility of achieving qualitative enjoyment in the midst of satisfaction. This is a phenomenon clearly exemplified in the “Give me more!” of the pornography industry, in the precariousness of sexual enjoyment amid the overproduction of orgasms. 14. American modernity’s triumph, the demonstration of the superiority of the “American way of life” over other modes of being modern within capitalism, has succeeded thanks to a process of permanent “civilizational negotiation” that becomes especially perceptible in the “culture industry” (Horkheimer and Adorno) and its worldwide attempt to put the festive and aesthetic creativity of society at the service



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of the practical self-praise that the establishment needs on a daily basis. The culture industry promotes the emergence of an overwhelming “wealth of forms” into the universe of goods produced. This is a fact that becomes evident both in the accelerated succession of changes in fashion (in automobile, home, and “self” design) and in the excitement of entertainment. There is such a wealth of forms that they uncontrollably invade both the singular and collective human experience. Through them they express – beyond the exaggerated representation found in Hollywood stars and cinema, rock music and its derivatives, television and its encouragement of passive commitment to sports and sports heroes, and the pseudo-interaction of videogames – a profound dynamism, itself conflictive and ambivalent, of an imposed reality. In fact, within the process in which this imposition is fulfilled – especially in the mixture of forms that occurs in New York and other large American cities, on which “​​WASP America” turns its back as if these were Sodom and Gomorrah – we cannot know to what extent it is capital, with its peculiar “will to form” [“voluntad de forma”], that simply uses and abuses “natural forms” (both traditional and modern) as its own resources. We cannot know either to what extent these “natural forms” mimic the forms induced by capital in order to be able to resist and survive precisely through their own “deformation.” 15.  The WASP temperament has undoubtedly and decisively contributed to the “rhetorical plane” of “Americanism” that has dominated modernity over the last hundred years. But, just as “German-ness” is not enough to causally explain the reality of Nazism, “North-American-ness” is insufficient to account for the historical figure of capitalist modernity. Far from being an extension of it, “North-American-ness” is rather that which capitalist modernity uses as an instrument for its own historical affirmation. More than the idiosyncrasy of an empire, “Americanism” is the empire of “idiosyncrasy”: that of the human being shaped in the image and likeness of commodity-capital. “Americanism” is not an identitarian characteristic of the “American” nation imposed by the United States upon the world, but a peculiar mode of civilized life that casually “used” US history to achieve its universalization, while at

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the same time absorbing certain features of the “natural” behavior of the population of this country. Indeed, one can say that the twentieth century, the century of “American modernity,” has been, above all, the century of the counterrevolution, of the restoration of capitalist dictatorship after the momentary “collapse” to which “European modernity” and its “socialist deviation” led it. This was suspected, as early as 1922, by a special envoy of the Parisian newspaper L’Illustration who, despite being dazzled, also made some prescient observations. He wrote: Even if for a superficial observer the automobile and Bolshevism seem to possess an extremely complex relation with each other, I am convinced – and this in no way is a paradox – that there is no more effective remedy against the Bolshevik microbe in the United States than the automobile. One can affirm, without fear of being wrong, that the automobile will kill Bolshevism, or rather that the automobile puts the country completely out of reach of Bolshevism. The automobile is the vaccine par excellence that immunizes the entire country. Every car owner becomes ipso facto a declared and active enemy of Bolshevism. And not just any current owner but also any future owner; that is, almost everyone, understanding that everyone here is able to achieve one’s dream and buy for two or three hundred dollars this small, fast-paced mechanism, which immediately gives one freedom of movement, mastery of the road, and which transforms one, in certain aspects, into the analog of a Vanderbilt or a Rockefeller.9

In the twentieth century, in “America,” one manufactures one’s own destiny; one is lord and master of nature. Labor, the source of commodity economic value, is absolutely creative: regardless of its mode of realization, which is a divine matter; it is enough for each person to participate in it so that use-values obediently flourish for him. Rich or poor, strong or weak, white or black, man or woman, all are equal and happy as long as they are free to exercise this miraculous activity. The process by which the capitalist economy undertook the real subordination or subsumption of the new technological and geographical phenomena that appeared at the end of the nineteenth century has been accompanied in the



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West by a simultaneous process on the most immediate plane of contradiction between society and capital: the social and political plane of class struggle. This is a process that has turned diverging interests between capitalists and proletarians into a converging interest, a process that has been manifest in the “class collaboration” devised and promoted by reformist social democratic labor parties.10 Having eliminated the most evident revolutionary identity – the one previously belonging to the mass of labor-force owners and through which deep human resistance to the valorization of capitalist value was manifested socially and politically – capitalist value, which is the true subject in commodified life, began to behave as if it were at last reaching its full realization, as if it were about to reach its ultimate historical goal: to completely and absolutely subsume the natural form of production/ consumption processes. “European” capitalist modern societies were engaged in open combat against the anti-capitalist revolution that they had themselves awakened, and thus were not able to offer to the renewed form of capital the concrete substance it needed for its realization.11 Only “American” capitalist modern society could do it, and with plenty of substance to spare. Only in it, as the L’Illustration correspondent detected, is conviction in the absurd, and therefore unacceptable and repressible, quality contained in any concern about the undoubtable “humanism” that inspires capital when guiding the invisible hand of the market really a spontaneous militant conviction, endowed with firm foundations. There were few who warned from the start that, after the naive arrogance with which “American hubris” began to show itself, the catastrophically dangerous triumph of the counter-revolution was hidden.

“Feeling and courage”: A myth of “American” modernity The epitome of the “winner,” the “great entrepreneur,” the man who disagrees with common sense, with standard rationality, who trusts his “hunch” and is willing to make a strange sacrifice: the use of surplus violence against himself

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and others in order to achieve his goals. He is a criminal redeemed by success: a hero. He is a “freak”: Citizen Kane and similar others, such as Jonas Cord Jr., Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, Hearst, etc. He is an admirable and even “loveable” monster that becomes a role model for anyone who seriously aspires to success in life. In order for “the early American” to pass the threshold into the granted, yet still unconquered, territory of abundance, he was forced to commit an act of violence. This act was directed not only against the Other, but also and above all against himself. It was an act of self-sacrifice that more than compensated for the Other’s sacrifice. Just as Westerns constantly remind the world on film, massacring Indians and razing forests matters little in comparison to the main goal: the “death and resurrection” of an exceptional man capable of taking on the foundational responsibility and task of killing the former and cutting down the latter. This is a “moral” hero whose unjustifiable action is forgiven by the magnitude of what it achieves: a revived Christ, from whose previous sacrifice now arises happiness for the community of “little men” and their families.

Notes on the “natural form” 1. According to Karl Marx’s critique of political economy, in merchant-capitalist social life there are two inherent structuring principles, two narratives or rationalities contradictory to one another: that of the “natural form” or mode of life and its world and that of the “value form” or mode of economic abstraction. The latter, that of “value,” is permanently in the process of dominating or “subsuming” the former, the “natural” one.12 2. The “logic” or rationality inherent in the process of social life in its “natural” (historical-social) form is that which corresponds to the needs of human reproduction as a being that identifies itself concretely. This means: it is the principle of coherence that derives from the subject’s self-reproduction, a practice in which freedom is realized through self-trans-formation [auto trans-formación]. It is the tendentially “democratic” creation or re-creation of his form



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in accordance with the possibilities afforded to him in the “Other” or nature. This “logic” or principle corresponds to the human subject, both singularly and collectively, insofar as he is a qualitative totalization, a permanent game of selfidentification, an animal free to make and remake its own polis, a zōon politikon. 3. The “natural form” of human life – the process in which the human reproduces himself and the world in which he unfolds – is properly a social and historical form. It is the way that the human subject has to affirm and identify himself while defining or determining himself in reference to the Other, to “nature.” It is the “meta-physical” form that the human animal’s “physical” or vital functions adopt when it begins to exercise subjectness, that is, when it begins to be “free” (Immanuel Kant). The fundamental act the human subject makes in constituting his own identity, in constructing a way of life that humans can collectively recognize as ideal for themselves, is to integrate into a single harmonic and dynamic system two different subsystems. These are his production capacities subsystem – with which he attempts to overcome scarcity and reluctance from the Other – and consumption needs subsystem – with which he pursues full self-realization. In other words, the human subject seeks to articulate the always limited quality of the first subsystem with the always unlimited quality of the second, and to do so in such a way that neither one nor the other can be experienced as such, neither as limited nor unlimited. One can, therefore, say that the ultimate origin of the richness in forms or qualitative diversity in human life and its world is found in the “democracy” or communal fulfillment (both singular and collective) of autonomy and political self-sufficiency, in one of its multiple forms. This is the sine qua non for the subject to realize his own subjectness as a cosmic foundation. 4.  In his “natural form,” the human subject is a “semiotic being.” This is because his self-reproduction, as a “free” activity, implies an act of self re-formation [re-formación], an act of communication through which he (at a specific point in time) indicates to himself (at a later point in time) that a new form will be taken. Goods or objects with use-value carry this message from one point to another, which consists exclusively of a certain alteration of objective forms. This alteration is

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made or “encoded” [“cifrada”] at one point and accepted or “decoded” [“descifrada”] at another point according to an elemental code or symbolization that contains all the infinite possibilities for determining the Other’s or nature’s use-value. The human subject’s realization, as an act of selftransformation, takes place through his consumption of the object, or rather, through his “consumption” of the object’s form imprinted on it during the production process. 5. The “logic” or rationality inherent in the process of social life in its “natural (historical-social) form” extends to the constitution of the cosmos, that is, to the structure of the “lifeworld” or “world of use-values.” This is the case, first, because the reproduction of human life – as a process of permanent self-realization, self-formation, or self-identification – can only be fulfilled through the objective mediation of produced goods (or products with use-value). Second, this is the case because in these goods is found the incessant play of past forms or meanings – once again realized in the present and projected toward the future – through which the subject carries out the alterations of his own identity. 6. Human life in its “value form” is like a “double” or a “ghost” of what it is in its “natural form.” It is an objectified projection of its own reproduction process insofar as it has, among other things, the capacity to create or destroy economic value within the world of capitalist commodities. In other terms, it is such insofar as it can abstractly and sufficiently act as a vehicle for the process of self-valorization or accumulation of capitalist value. 7.  The rationality inherent in the process of social life in its “value form” expresses an “objective obsession” toward abstract productivism. It is a “compulsion” that comes from “things themselves” and that corresponds to a need to “produce for the sake of production” that emanates from the capitalist “world of commodities” and is demanded by the automatism found in the expanded reproduction of pure economic value, by the “self-valorization of value.” It is a structuring principle that acts on and shows itself to “commodified things” and that tends to organize life as if it were exclusively a process in which the human subject, as pure labor-power, must be exploited in each reproductive cycle, compelled to produce that “surplus-value” that



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will then, as “additional capital” [“pluscapital”], support capitalist accumulation. 8.  The subsumption of the “natural form” to the “value form” can be described as this ghost’s permanent “effort” to maintain and affirm its dominance over real being: “Le mort saisis le vif,” as Karl Marx liked to say. Nothing is produced or consumed in purely modern society if its production or consumption is not a vehicle for capital accumulation. With regard to social life itself, this subsumption consists in the phenomenon of “alienation.” Life’s subjectness, its political capacity to identify itself or decide by itself on its form, is replaced by its ghostly representative, by the “will” to selfvalorize present in economic value as guided by the world of capitalist commodities. This is a “will” that acts automatically, “from the things themselves,” which thereby acquire the function of “fetishes,” of objects that “miraculously” socialize private owners, who are asocial by definition. In regard to the lifeworld or the world of “earthly goods,” it consists in the replacement of the “natural” design of use-value with an “artificial” one, emanating from the pure requirements of capitalist valorization. 9.  The devastating effect that capitalist subsumption has on human life and on the current figure of nature that shelters it is clear. The goal repeatedly reached by the process of reproduction of wealth in its capitalist mode is genocidal and suicidal at the same time. It consists, first, of “improving” the process of exploitation of human beings as labor-power, which also entails condemning entire populations to death in life (if not to death itself) in order to reduce the worldwide “price of labor.” Second, it consists of “perfecting” the irrational and counterproductive exploitation of nature (currently considered as a simple reservoir of certain materials and energies), in insisting on destroying its equilibrium, so long as its destruction serves the alwaysconverging interests of capitalist accumulation.

6 From Academia to Bohemia and Beyond

The mime presents a subject as a semblance. One could also say that he plays his subject. And here we have touched on the polarity which lies at the root of mimesis. Walter Benjamin1

The avant-garde artists of “modern art” introduced a whole revolution into modern art-making. This fact is broadly accepted by art writers and historians. However, there is complete disagreement in regard to its interpretation. What exactly constituted this revolution? The ideas I propose below are intended to help clarify this question. This revolution has already been the object of innumerable descriptions. So, I will focus on one quite representative description of it. Creators of modern art, especially in painting, understood mimesis or imitation of nature as follows: a reproduction, to be perceived sensorially, that aims to be as true as possible in relation to real things. They saw in “naturalism” the fulfillment of this principle, a repetition “faithful to the natural aspect” offered by things. For their part, these artists’ contemporaries considered their work to be unacceptably daring when they saw that, by portraying objects, they began to arbitrarily alter their shapes and colors, and to abstract observable reality to the



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point where it became impossible to recognize what quality of things they were attempting to represent. People then began to talk about “abstract” art and saw it as the extreme opposite of naturalist art.2

If we examine the revolution of modern art described in this way, the fact stands out that it implied a 180-degree turn in the objective or telos pursued by artists in their work. From directing their effort toward the goal of increasing the resemblance or similarity of the object in their work to its exterior model, these artists began to strive precisely toward the opposite goal. They strove to make present, emphasize, and even exaggerate the immense remoteness of that similarity, although without ceasing to suppose it in the last instance. They made it seem as if they were not interested in maximizing the proximity or minimizing the distance of that similarity. What they pursued was not to represent a model in order to produce more “aesthetic” knowledge of it, as if greater verism would also bring about greater pleasure. On the contrary, they sought to establish a very peculiar mimetic association with it, unconcerned with its evident lack of realism. What interested them was something else: to derail the act of “representing” as such. More generally, these artists seemed to reject that position of power from which artists generally transform the world into a simple “model” of their reproductions and make the public their mere spectator or passive receiver. They also seemed to have deeply doubted that a work of art can be closed or ever finished, so long as there is someone – even the same person yet at another time – who has not yet enjoyed it. For them, a work of art is made with the purpose of living in the world in a special way, and not of dominating it. For this reason, it is above all something more than a product that the “creator” has reached and that he delivers over to the “spectator.” It jumps over the functional separation between sender and receiver. It is made to always remain “unfinished,” since the receiver, who really completes it, is always at every time different. The beginning of the history of the “avant-garde” movement in “modern art” is often recognized in the work of Impressionist painters. Indeed, the rebellion against the

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task imposed on art by modernity consists of more than just leaving the work of art “half done,” in a state of “mere sketch,” as it seemed to their contemporaries. What they did was intentionally explore art as if it were necessarily a “sketch,” a representation that does not fulfill its purpose because it is uncertain of itself as such. By replacing the precise, analytical perception of a work of art with a more diffuse, “Gestaltic” one, Impressionism departed from the act of creation/contemplation that treated it as a closed and finished object. Its veristic precision or realistic “finishing,” which was aimed at passing an epistemological test, was for it not only a useless, inessential feature or “virtue” of a work of art, but also implied a betrayal of the type of perception that would correspond to it. Paradoxically, a “Gestalt,” “inattentive,” or “unconcentrated” reception – to speak as Walter Benjamin later did – was not necessarily an indication of the receiver’s indifference to a work of art, but quite the opposite. This is clear in the intense yet subliminal or subconscious “reception” that architectural works have (and whose consumption as use-value ​​is given in the way people inhabit them, in which they “interpret” them as if they were a musical score). This reception consists rather of a particular contribution to its “completion” or to its full realization. It is an intervention that would not be ex post facto upon the finished work but would always be active as an essential part of the performance that makes it an occasion of aesthetic experience. It is perfectly understandable that critics reacted to “modern” artists by expelling them from the trade that bourgeois society had enshrined as “art” and describing what they did as “non-art.” They were right in suspecting that the attitude of these “non-artists” implied a certain contempt, if not true rebellion – a challenging and scandalous rebellion – against the determining task that modern civilization had commissioned artists to perform. Within this civilizational project, the artist had to deliver to society images of life, the world, and its objects, in which these were portrayed or imitated as faithfully as possible so that, being sensorially perceived, recognized in their representation, they provoked in those appreciating them the pleasure of appropriating what they represented. The work of art requested by modern



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capitalist society was tasked to complete the pragmatic appropriation of reality – the nature and social world, be it real or imaginary – that the “new” human being carried out through mechanized industry and the peculiar technical-scientific knowledge that accompanied it. And it did so in a special way: its appropriation of reality was on the one hand indirect and, on the other, direct. On the one hand, it was indirect because, in the object that it makes appropriable, reality itself is not there but is substituted for or “represented” by a symbol or simulacrum; while, on the other hand, it was direct or pleasurable (“aesthetic”) because the symbol that represented that reality was apprehended as a kind of sensorial cognitive “advance” of the “true” appropriation of reality, the pragmatic appropriation, that would be fulfilled by the products of human industrialized labor. Artworks, such as those of “modern art” and its “avant-garde,” that did not flatter this desire for symbolic appropriation of the world, but instead questioned and ridiculed it, were in principle unacceptable works that had to be excluded from normal or formal consecrated life by capitalist modernity.3 The approach that avant-garde artists took – which manifested itself above all in practice, although also in theory – challenged the task or “mission” that modernity attributed to art. It denounced modernity’s intentions to reduce the number of human activities categorically defined as artistic activity, the main promoters of that sui generis phenomenon of aesthetic experience. It rebelled against the modern capitalist conviction that aesthetic enjoyment is most essentially experienced through cognitive appropriation of the world. Its attitude was profoundly anti-cognitivist. We must remember here that this attitude of contempt for modern art did not appear until the second half of the nineteenth century. Before, throughout all modern history, this attitude was only secretly present at the base of production of the most fascinating artists from the Renaissance to Romanticism: from Michelangelo and Da Vinci to Goya and Delacroix, including Titian, Velázquez, and Rembrandt, to mention only painters and a few famous names. In all of their work it is remarkable how the act of representation or imitation of reality is subordinated to its mode of execution, a mode that itself questions the act of representing and that

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was then only appreciated as a “mannerism” or unmistakable style, a singular and unrepeatable touch or “aura.” Kasimir Malevich, in the Suprematist Manifesto of 1915, observed: in art history from the Renaissance onward there is a mode of producing objects as representatives of their external reality that demands work be done on objectivity itself and that carries objectivity to the limit of evanescence. This is the work one can see below the surface of all these exceptional artists’ work. Indeed, that rebellious attitude to the mandate of subordinating the aesthetic to the cognitive is not strange throughout the history of modern art; what happened was that, being exceptional and not deliberate in the previous centuries, it then generalized and became militant and programmatic at the end of the nineteenth century.4 The “modern” avant-garde artists proposed a 180-degree turn in art’s telos: from pursuing the pleasurable acquisition of knowledge through immediate cognitive appropriation of a representation of the world, they instead went to look for simulacra of the world capable of provoking a joyful derangement from its apparently natural presence. More radically, it was a turn that brought with it a proposal to redefine the essence of art, of relocating its belonging within the whole of human existence. From having pragmatic production as its matrix, art had to move on to have one of a completely different order: festive expenditure. In the second half of the nineteenth century artists relocated to a different place of residence. Art abandoned academia and became attached to the bohemian world. Its place was no longer in workshops, well endowed but far from popular life. Instead it was found now in places like the Moulin de la Galette, where life was freed from its productivist compulsion. The rejection of pragmatic representation that this “altermodern” – more than “modern” – art put into practice was accompanied by an affirmation of festive mimesis. It brought with it the project of re-centering art’s essence on its archaic, pre-modern matrix: partying. Art’s rejection of the academy and predilection for the bohemian world was expressed in the middle of the progressive effervescence of Paris, the “capital of the nineteenth century,” and implied a profound change in the main stage of artistic activity.



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Partying is usually understood as a secondary event in normal life. It is understood as an act of catharsis that more or less periodically melts away the brute or savage energy that has been left over and accumulated after being repressed by civilized life in its effort to guarantee the ongoing validity of its forms. To see in it something other than a mere appendix to productivist life or, even more, to consider it as an essential way of being in human existence – as having a hierarchy perfectly comparable with, if not superior to, non-festive ways of being – is something that could only appear after Nietzsche’s book on Greek tragedy. This book was contemporary both with the emergence of the communist project of an alternative modernity to the capitalist one, and with the birth of so-called “modern art” and the avant-garde.5 In festive existence, the human being seems to be “beside himself,” if it is assumed that being “in himself,” which would seem most desirable, corresponds exclusively to an existence given entirely to the reproductive activity of the species and of the “earthly goods” necessary to sustain it. Indeed, the same places that productivist existence bypasses are subjected to transfiguration for the purposes of festive existence. Time itself disregards the mechanical rhythm of pragmatic movement and then adheres to other, completely altered ones. The human body, which produces and reproduces itself, becomes conditioned to them by food and drink, as well as by unusual, intoxicating, or hallucinatory smells. The world of routine is turned into “another world.” If not abolished, the telos and norms of pragmatic existence seem suspended, out of date, temporarily replaced by other imprecise instances that can only be roughly called “telos” and “norms.” The reason for this is that festive existence consists of a simulacrum. In its own “separate world,” of trance or of transfer, on an expertly crafted ceremonial stage, it unfolds “as if.” It plays a game in which, thanks to its theatrical de-realization of the real, to its staging of an imaginary world, it creates a momentary swaying between destruction and reconstruction of the concrete qualitative consistency of life and its cosmos. It creates a movement of back-and-forth between the negation and restoration of the sub-code that in each case singles out or identifies human semiosis, a movement that de-forms and re-forms the current

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forms structuring a determined “lifeworld.” The experience of the ecstasy upon which the festive existence unfolds is that of a mimetic return to the status nascendi of the opposition between cosmos and chaos, to the state of plenitude when the sub-code of human semiosis is being constituted that moment in which the un-formed [lo informe] is acquiring form and the unspeakable is becoming speakable, in which objectness and subjectness are being founded. “Beside himself,” the human being of festive existence nevertheless has evidence for being indispensable to the one who is “in himself,” to the non-festive, basic, or normal human, who posits himself as a priority. It is as if, paradoxically, beneath the manifest telos of the latter – the accumulation of products and procreation – his productive existence presupposes another telos. This is secret telos that he must keep repressed, but without which he cannot go on because it is the sine qua non of the former. It is the telos of unlimited satisfaction in production, of wasteful consumption of “earthly goods,” that telos that precisely seems to guide festive existence. Partying is the most finished version of the homo ludens behavior studied by Johan Huizinga. It connects to playing as the second tube of a telescope does to the first. It is in truth the same game, but on a “higher” level or scale. It has gone from “risking” the necessity of there being any cosmos as such – of its ability to establish norms or rules – to “risking” the necessity of the form of a given cosmos as a concrete or identified lifeworld, of the concrete realizations of cosmic rules or norms. It is a game that works now, not abstractly on the facticity of the cosmos as a formal system, but on its substantial facticity: on the qualitative key of the totality of forms of a concrete lifeworld. In partying there is a rupture or virtual and temporary interruption in the ordinary mode of human existence. This happens through a disruptive irruption, in its midst, of what could happen in an extraordinary version of it. It is as if, in it, chaos – the Other, having been humanized or “domesticated” as the counterpart of the human cosmos – made a gesture of threat, pretended to explode out of that humanization or “domestication” that has it shackled, to destroy it (even if it does so playfully, only to rebuild it later).



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Whether in the openly ceremonial, public version of the collective individual, or in the intimate, improvised version of the singular individual – the example of which would be, most typically, the state of passionate love – festive existence reactivates mimetically and emphatically the very foundation of the peculiar mode of being human. It reactivates the freedom or capacity to create necessary order from sheer contingency. It does so after finding exceptional traces of itself in ordinary or everyday productivist existence, as well as in the memory that remains from when it originally manifested in extraordinary existence, and in the desire for it to reappear. Defined as one of the two hemispheres or dimensions of everyday life – the routine, pragmatic, or productivist one, and the disruptive, wasteful, or ludic one – festive existence makes evident a bipolarity or structural “Manichaeism” that seems to characterize human existence. One corresponds to the ordinary moment of existence, which would be an automated or organic behavior, self-preservational and “essentialist.” The other one corresponds to extraordinary moments, which would be free or trans-natural, self-questioning and “existentialist.” In its political as in its private version, freedom in behavior – affirmed as a trans-naturalization or transcendence of animal automatism – can only be unstable and ephemeral, since all stability and permanence imply an essentialization or “re-naturalization” that will eventually deny that transcendence. It is an exceptional trace in the middle of the routine continuum of daily, pragmatic, and productivist existence: a trace that must vanish so that the other basic human behavior, the organic or automatic one, can return dialectically, and become a motive for longing again. The disruptive-festive hemisphere of everyday existence brings into play this second mode of human behavior, the extraordinary or free mode. It emphasizes its radical difference from ordinary, organic, or automatic behavior. *** It is well known that every work of art or, more generally, any act of aesthetic consequence introduces – although

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not necessarily in a spectacular or scandalous fashion, as partying does – an essential set of exceptional, spatiotemporal ruptures [recortes espacio-temporales] within the pragmatic-functional continuum that characterizes all spacetime inhabited by productivist life. Mimesis or theatricality – that is, the poetic expression of language, the rhythmic movement of the body, the musicalization of sound, the architectural design of space – is “out of tune,” interferes or clashes with the productivist march of life every day. A painting, for example, interrupts the functional continuity of the wall surface, which was made to protect a certain microcosmos of human dwelling. The sculptural work does the same with the functional continuity of the spatial volume it encompasses. Artistic events are like bubbles or instants of unproductive, unjustified, luxurious waste, appearing in the middle of a compact mass of life and of a world given over to pragmatism and productivism in order to guarantee social survival throughout the “Neolithic era” or “era of scarcity.” If artistic events are accepted within that space-time, it is only thanks to a compromise that routine life accepts with that other dimension with which it shares daily life. This other dimension is heterogeneous, is strange, and implies a rupture in the continuum of routine life. However, at the same time, this other dimension – the ludic, festive, and aesthetic dimension – is indispensable and complementary to it. The result of artistic activity – of the “work of art” – induces or at least propitiates the experience of mimesis of a world that has already been transfigured through partying. It prepares the repetition of that ecstatic experience that coincided with that first transition that led the human to assert himself concretely in difference from “the Other,” to invent a code and at the same time an identifying sub-code for the semiotic innervation of specifically human behavior. The work of art, as both a dysfunctional element in routine life and a cosmic presence with apparent trans-temporality or permanence, is deceiving. Anchored in the material with which it is made – word, space, sound, color, material consistency, smell, taste, etc. – and sure to seduce some of the human animal senses – mental attention, sight, hearing, smell, etc. – it would seem that it does not require entering into “a state of fusion” back to the dynamic consistency of



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shared artistic activity, which truly belongs to it. It would seem to be self-sufficient and not need anything or anyone to arouse an aesthetic experience in human beings. The fetishization of the work of art aims to eliminate its “performative” moment – that moment of disruptive invasion in everyday automatism – from which the work itself comes and which is re-realized through it. The fetishization of the work of art seeks to negate that act in which whoever enjoys it, and does so in the way demanded of him, “completes” it. As such, it is one of the characteristic phenomena that occur around the work of art as programmed by capitalist modernity and that the “modern art” revolution set out to overcome.6 *** When speaking of the “modern” avant-garde and pointing out that its activity revolved around the festive mode of human existence and not around its productivist and pragmatic mode, I mean to suggest the following. “Modern” avantgarde art supposes or proposes a definition of art radically different from that which prevails in capitalist modernity. This is the definition that one of the leading avant-garde artists, Pablo Picasso, arrived at in his pictorial practice after examining the type of “representation” implied by the sculptural figures of African art. It states that art affirms itself as a mimesis of second degree, which does not imitate reality, but rather its festive de-realization. It is a mimesis that does not portray objects in the lifeworld but the transfiguration they endure when they become included in another mimesis, the one that festive existence makes of extraordinary moments in the human mode of being.7 When Giorgio de Chirico suggests that a “metaphysical work of art,” under its realistic, serene aspect, “nevertheless gives the impression that something new must be happening in that same serenity and that other signs, beyond those already evident, must be acting from below on the rectangle of the canvas”; when someone like Kandinsky or Brancusi invokes the “spirituality” of plastic creation; when Kasimir Malevich says that “in art an absolute supremacy of pure plastic sensibility must prevail over all naturalistic descriptivism”

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and proposes to look for “a non-objective art, in which the figurative or representative is totally nullified” (“My painting White Square on a White Background,” he says, “was not so much an empty picture, an icon erased and placed in a frame, but an invitation to perceive the non-objective or the objective in statu nascendi”); when Marcel Duchamp dismisses the artist as a creator and describes him as a “finder”; when Vladimir Tatlin refers to the “other mobility that exists in the immobility of sculpture”; when Arnold Schönberg affirms the possibility of an “absolute music,” exclusively focused on “its own language”; when Bertolt Brecht theorizes about his “epic theater” as a self-conscious mimesis; when Dziga Vertov distinguishes between the function of the human eye and the repressive reality of the gaze, and proposes the cinema as a liberator of vision; when Adolf Loos, and even more so the Bauhaus, strive to find a “functionality” for architectural space that can transcend “from the void” that which corresponds to pragmatic habitability; they all pose the problem of art as a practice that can remove itself from the sphere in which it seems to be a representation of life and the world, directed to a special, “aesthetic” type of cognitive appropriation. It can become a new practice that can venture into another sphere, in which its relationship to life and the world is of a different order. This order is what I’m trying to define here as that of a mimesis of second degree, in reference to a first, festive mimesis, in which the human being necessarily reaffirms, in the space of his imagination, the specificity of his freedom in face of the automatism that is equally necessary to his existence.8 A painted landscape does not reproduce the landscape that is outside the walls of the human dwelling but the one that surrounds it and was the background for partying. It reproduces what happens with the Other, the non-humanized, by accepting and positioning itself, in a singular instance, as the chaotic background of a human cosmos. In turn, this cosmos accepts and affirms itself as just another version, even though a special one, of the Other. The real, pragmatic-empirical apple that adorns the table and calls to be bitten, to sweeten and refresh the biter’s mouth, is not the apple that is painted, portrayed, or represented in Cézanne’s painting. Yet it is undeniable that in this



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painting there is something like a “representation” of “this apple.” We could say that what is represented in it is a kind of “proto-apple.” It is the fruit of an apple tree, insofar as it is seen, smelled, touched, bitten, and tasted. But all this is so only through the festive re-actualization of a hypothesis based upon the fact that the apple tree has ceased to belong to the ecological chain and has agreed to become above all human food, a vehicle for sensory form (a flavor), for a practical meaning invented or created by human beings, improvised and introduced by them when there was none before. It is not the object of productive-consumptive praxis but its “festive ghost” that the painter has before him as a “virtual model” for his “reproduction.”9 Art would thus be the human activity that focuses on the attempt to repeat, in conditions of non-festive everyday life, the experience that takes place within that space-time rupture in which festive mimesis hallucinatingly re-actualizes deep space-time. It plunges into the depths either of past time, or of the “Jetztzeit” or “now-time” that Benjamin speaks of, in which a first transit, the foundation of the “cosmos,” makes the experience of the Other as such. This is an experience that makes what would otherwise be “unbearable” (like the presence of the “angel of the beautiful” in Rilke’s “Elegy”) be effective. In other words, it makes the absolutely “ineffable” become a counterpart to the cosmos as simple “chaos” or emptiness of meaning. It makes the indistinguishable become palpable, audible, and visible and acquire consistencies, such as smells and tastes, tones and rhythms, profiles and colors. It makes the unformed become a perceptible presence, endowed with form. It makes the unspeakable and disconcerting become speakable and concerting. *** Two concluding remarks on the re-actualization of artistic activity as a mimesis of festive mimesis. A.  The rebellion of modern art against the artistic program of capitalist modernity, its relocation of the essence of art in the festive mode of human existence, necessarily led to the most radical possible rupture with its everyday occurrence.

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This is the moment in which it mimics, and thereby also questions, the most elementary and decisive features of the archaic “natural form,” of the basic Neolithic civilizational model, which still prevails underneath modern human life and its world. “Modern art” is only properly modern – that is, something other than modern-capitalist – to the extent that its mimesis, which takes place simultaneously with critical reflection on the essence of modernity and its capitalist deformation, brings into play the archaic Western concretion of that “natural form” or the basic Western identification of its civilizational structure. In other words, it is such insofar as it comes to desecrate, disregard, and mock the canon that portrays the ideal or desire for perfection of that “natural form.” It is such insofar as it aims to question and relativize its practical definition of “beauty.” For these Western artists, Western “beauty” ceases to be the privileged object of aesthetic experience, since it consists of having reached the highest possible degree of “purity” [“casticidad”] or “classicity” [“clasicidad”], of fidelity to a “sub-code” that concretizes or identifies the code of human semiosis that belongs to all the same types of sub-code that precisely enter into crisis with modernity. (This is because they are sub-codes that had to be constructed in the midst of pre-modern Neolithic scarcity, that is, of unbridgeable reciprocal hostility between the human being and nature.)10 A farewell to pure beauty, taking “anti-classicism” as “anti-purism,” had already begun in Delacroix’s time and in the “discomfort with the West.” It was then prolonged in the “Orientalism” of “modernism” and came to culminate in Picasso’s “Africanism,” to which would be later added all the abominable “isms” that were gathered by the Nazi state to assemble its large Degenerate Art exhibition in 1938. The “ugliness” of a “demoiselle d’Avignon” (if compared to the beauty of one of the women in a harem painted by Ingres) is not an obstacle for the avant-garde artist. On the contrary, it is the best means of access to aesthetic experience. B. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the social and political movement that called itself “communism” appeared in Europe and attempted to transform “bourgeois” or “modern” society through revolution. This revolution aimed to replace the capitalist mode of wealth reproduction



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– a mode of reproduction that prevents the human being from exercising his political autocracy and that needs to mercilessly exploit and, even, frequently eliminate producers – with another mode of organizing social life in which, within the abundance of goods, which was now achievable, freedom, equality, and fraternity could prevail. This movement was revolutionary insofar as it ventured outside of everyday politics, into the extraordinary dimension of the political, where human existence can radically exercise its freedom to establish and re-establish the elementary forms of human coexistence. Those who followed this movement, those revolutionaries who were committed to “change the world, change life” [“cambiar el mundo, cambiar la vida”], advanced along the same streets as those on which the “revolutionary” or “avant-garde” artists of “modern art” traveled. Confusion was inevitable. For many, the revolution taking place in the realm of the imaginary and the revolution taking place in the realm of the real seemed to be one and the same. In fact, the festive mode of human existence, in reference to which avant-garde art affirms its specificity, is in a mimetic relationship with the extraordinary event par excellence. This event is the establishment or re-establishment of concrete forms both of human sociality and of the interrelation with the Other, the non-human. In other words, it is the event of revolution. Art shares with partying the character of being an ephemeral revolution. We must add that, in order to complete its own “revolution,” “modern” avant-garde artists needed a revolution to also take place “in life,” a revolution that they saw themselves precisely initiating. The new relationship between author and enjoyer of the work of art required not only permutability between the functions of sender and receiver. It also required the establishment of social conditions in which the activity that produces opportunities for aesthetic experience is not confined within the orbit of “professional art,” but is instead encouraged in everyday life. This means: not only as intermittent compensation for following the routine, but as a break or a permanent fold in it, dialectically connected with it. Contributing to the establishment of these conditions was something that avant-garde art considered as its task.

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For the revolution that was making its way on the social and political level, its coincidence with the “revolution” happening within art was also an essentially important fact. Only the radical civilizational reach that characterizes the social – insofar as it asserts festive existence and its implacable “destructiveness” – could teach the political to change the “mode of production” from a capitalist to a communist one. Only it could teach the political to go all the way to the core, to where the archaic forms of life and its world – which are reproduced opportunistically, underneath any “enlightened” claims to innovation, in capitalist modernity – need to be replaced by others constructed from the possibility of an abundant and emancipatory harmony with nature, which were opened up by the essential advent of modernity. With World War II and the destruction of Europe by Nazism and those who defeated it, avant-garde artists completed their life cycle. The “revolutionary” nerve that led them through an admirable adventure had dried up along with the failure of communism and the end of a whole “era of revolution.” The culture industry, or, in other words, the capitalist management of new artistic techniques and of new types of artists and publics, had also managed to integrate into its operation many elements that were typical of avant-garde art, and even make the “art of rupture” into an art in the “tradition of rupture.” This is an art that returns to its trade consecrated by “actually existing” modernity, to academia now restored as the “academia of the non-academia,” to be run by “art critics,” galleries, and patrons. However, it is interesting to note that the avant-garde turn of a hundred years ago, which brought art back to the deranged realm of festive existence, has not been nullified. Nowadays an extended “wild aestheticization” [“estetización salvaje”] of everyday life, practiced by artists and improvised publics, oblivious to the world of the “fine arts,” seems to indicate that, in spite of everything, not all is lost.

7 Art and Utopia

… without registering [one’s] spirit with any political party, be it [one’s] own or [one’s] neighbor’s, can give rise to, not new political tones in life, but new chords on which those tones ring. César Vallejo, 19271

The essay on the work of art is unique within Walter Benjamin’s overall work. It occupies in it, next to the unfinished manuscript on historical materialism, an exceptional place. It is the work of a political militant, of the kind that he had shied away from being throughout his life, convinced that, in the discursive dimension, the political is in play, and sometimes even more decisively so around objects apparently outside of politics itself. But it is not only exceptional within Benjamin’s work. It is also such within the two discursive spheres that it addresses: that of Marxist political theory, on the one hand, and that of theory and art history, on the other. Neither in one field nor the other have scholars known well where to locate the topics discussed in this text. It is, moreover, a perfectly understandable exception, if one takes into account its author’s extreme sensitivity and the radical manner in which he internalized the historical crisis in which he lived. The moment in which Benjamin writes this essay is itself exceptional; it brings with it a point of

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historic inflection as few others in modern history have. The fate of world history was then decided in Europe and, within it, Germany stood at the crossroads. It represented the precise moment in which the life of European societies had to be decided between, in the words of Rosa Luxemburg, the “leap to communism” or the “fall into barbarism.” By 1936 it was still possible to think, as most leftist sympathizers did, that the future was still up in the air: that it was equally possible for the Nazi regime to fail – opening the doors to a proletarian rebellion and the anti-capitalist revolution – or to consolidate, become irreversible, and complete its counter-revolutionary program, thus plunging history into catastrophe. The Walter Benjamin that had existed until then, the author who had recently published an incredible book on the baroque, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and who was preparing an all-encompassing analysis of the deep history of the nineteenth century, whose first draft (the only one that remained after his suicide in 1940) we now know as The Arcades Project, could not continue to exist. His life had been permanently interrupted. His persona, as a perfectly identifiable presence in the cultural world, whose work had been inserted as a considerable element in the subtle mechanism of European discursive life, vanished along with the disappearance of that life. Persecuted first for being a “Jew” and then for being a “Bolshevik,” deprived of all private or public resources to defend himself in “times of hardship,” he was transformed overnight into a pariah, into a proletarian whose ability to work was no longer accepted by society even with the bare minimum value of a reserve crisis was more visible in his work than in that of any other leftist intellectual in Germany in the 1930s. Exiled in Paris, where many of the writers and artists expelled by Nazi persecution tried to remain active and support each other, Benjamin remained, however, distanced from them. During this period, he maintained a certain level of contact with communist intellectuals. For example, in April 1934, he gave a lecture in the Institute for the Study of Fascism, entitled “The Author as a Producer,” which contained hints of some ideas later found in the essay on the work of art. However, his impression of the prevailing



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idea among these communist intellectuals on the relationship between artistic creation and revolutionary commitment was completely negative. While the party disparaged the qualitative consistency of avant-garde intellectual and artistic work and was exclusively interested in the value that it could offer as propaganda on the stage of politics, for their part the authors of this work, the “bourgeois intellectuals,” did not see in their approach to communism anything other than the opportunity to equip themselves with the “politically correct” position that was missing in their work. This is a disagreement that Benjamin critically examined. He later had the opportunity to witness an episode of it, in June of the following year, during the “Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers for the Rescue of Culture.” On that occasion, the Austrian novelist Robert Musil was able to speak ironically about the politicization of art, understood as a commitment to the politics of political parties. Politics can “concern us all,” he said, “just as hygiene concerns us all as well,” only no one would think to ask us to develop a special passion for it. The essay on the work of art had as its immediate motivation the need to establish an essential relationship between avant-garde art and political revolution. At the same time, it served as a lifeline for its author. It was part of a desperate attempt to survive by remaking himself into another person through an act of fidelity to an “in itself” that had become impossible. For him, writing this essay was a way to continue working on “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” also known as The Arcades Project, in completely different conditions from those in which it was originally conceived. In a letter to Horkheimer, dated September 18, 1935, Benjamin explains this essay’s meaning: The issue this time is to indicate the precise point in the present to which my historical construction will orient itself, as to its vanishing point … the fate of art in the nineteenth century, has something to say to us … because it is contained in the ticking of a clock whose striking of the hour has just reached our ears. What I mean by that is that art’s fateful hour has struck for us and I have captured its signature in a series of preliminary reflections. … These reflections attempt to give the questions raised by art theory a truly contemporary form: and indeed from the inside, avoiding any unmediated reference to politics.2

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Benjamin is convinced that the “decisive moment in art” took place in his time. In full agreement with Paul Valéry’s quote, which he uses as an epigraph in his essay, Benjamin thinks that in the “craft of the beautiful” radical changes take place as a result of the conquests made by modern technics. He thinks that not only the material, the procedures of the arts, but also artistic invention and the very concept of art are in full transformation. However, further beyond Valéry, he thinks that these radical changes in the very substance of art have to do, in the same way as with “the conquests made by modern technics,” with a profound reconfiguration of the social world.3 According to Benjamin, the art of his time – which is also our time in some way – was experiencing a crucial moment of metamorphosis. This was an essential transformation that took it from being “auratic art,” in which “use-value” as cult value is predominant, to become a totally profane art, in which “use-value” as exhibition value, or for aesthetic experience itself, is predominant. In all types of works of art that history has known we can distinguish two contrasting poles of objectivity or presence, which compete against each other to determine the use-value of a work of art for those who produce and consume it. According to the first pole, the artwork has value as a witness or living document, as a fetish within a cultic act or a ritual ceremony, as a festive re-actualization of supernatural and superhuman events within the natural and human world. According to the second one, the work has value as the detonator of a profane experience of the contingency that dwells in the necessity of the human-natural world, the experience of aesthetic beauty. According to Benjamin, this aesthetic experience of the objectivity of the artistic object is not derived from a magical experience, from the internalization of a supernatural and superhuman event. It consists of a relationship with the world that, although related to that experience, is, however, completely autonomous. Apart from the cult of objectivity that exists in the use-value of the artistic object, it also possesses an objectivity characteristic of it as an artistic object. The work of art as a fetish, that is, concentrated in the cultic pole of its use-value, has the function of a relic.



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In other words, it has the function of a living witness or metonymic prolongation not only of a past ceremony, but also, indirectly, from the religious sacrifice that it, in turn, festively repeated. The automatism or routine of everyday life is broken in the festive ceremony by the internal re-actualization of an extraordinary political act, a “revolutionary” act of realization and re-realization, in which the qualitative consistency of the lifeworld is destroyed and vertiginously reconstructed, bringing to fullness the dignity of the human being as subject as well as that of his world and life as object. It is a re-enactment whose time and place are those of an imaginary stage expressly dedicated to an ecstatic magical-political trance in which all consecrated members of a community participate in principle. By contrast, the work of art as such, concentrated in the public or profane pole of its use-value, the pole of “exhibition,” serves to promote and induce in those who enjoy it the aesthetic experience that properly takes place in the distanced or non-ecstatic mimesis of those imaginary disruptive effects that the festive suspension of everyday automatism introduces into social existence. When dealing with the cult value of a work of art, Benjamin does not recognize it only in works made in connection with religious life. He also distinguishes it in works that claim a civil or profane character. The aura or cult value of a work of art does not come only from its insertion into the sacred archaic dimension of pre-modern social life. It also comes, in our time, from its insertion into another dimension equally “magical” and “religious” but denied as such by the commitment to profanity or secularity characteristic of modern life. To the virtue of delivering representations of the world capable of accompanying the modern human being in his practical appropriation of the real, certain works of art add an extra characteristic. This characteristic gives them a unique and incomparable artistic quality, reputed as exceptionally high, which makes them artworks incommensurable with all others. It makes them alien to all interchangeability (unlike other artworks, with which they share the general use-value of delivering portraits of the world), and reluctant to subordinate their use-value to exchange-value

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or economic commodity value. These works of art hold a special prestige in the market and can thus reach an arbitrary, unusually high price, alien to the dispute of supply and demand. The cultic use-value of these modern works of art is concentrated in their extraordinary or unique genius, which comes to light through its opposite, in the form of a “genius rent” [“renta de la genialidad”], within that very special, cold, yet exciting “ceremony” that is the act of commodity exchange. In the act of exchange as a “cultic act,” and by virtue of bargaining or struggling in supply and demand, the necessity of the market as a world of commodity “fetishes” or as a “miraculous” mediator or enabler of social life is re-actualized, questioned, and restored. It destroys and reconstructs on a daily basis the necessity of that founding sacrifice for modern sociality, which consists in the offering of use-value to commodity-capitalist value, in the subsumption or subjection of “natural” social life, with all its richness in qualitative singularities, to the reproduction of the modern “god”: capital. The ability to re-actualize this sacrifice is the new religiousprofane cultic use-value, which comes to take the place of the previous religious-sacred cultic use-value. The modern artist, the man of genius who is behind the unique and extraordinary work of art, behind that commodity that, with its arbitrary price, mocks the laws of commercial equivalence, is the paradoxical profane homo sacer that “officiates” at this ceremonial re-enactment of modern sacrifice. The creativity concentrated punctually and exceptionally in his work, in his sui generis commodity, is the negative version – the still “natural,” singularized, use-valueforming version – that existed prior to its sacrifice, to the automatism of labor objectified as economic value in other commodity products, but that was destined to it. Already in the baroque era, the man of artistic talent – someone like Francesco Borromini, for example – was admired as a mysterious being, blessed and at the same time cursed by God. Similarly, although in less Catholic fashion, during the time of the “Romantic fever,” that same man was idolized as a “genius,” as a participant in the creativity of a supernatural



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subject. This was either as a source of “inspiration” – as in the case of Louis-Hector Berlioz, for example – or, after the avant-garde era, in the second half of the twentieth century, as the reason for psycho-existential marginalization – as in the case of Jackson Pollock, for example. According to Benjamin, at the beginning of Western European art the dominant pole in works of art was that of the “aura,” or “cultic use-value.” But this fact changed throughout history. “Exhibition value” had been overcoming that dominion to the point that, already by the second half of the nineteenth century, it became possible to speak of a decline in the aura or “cult value” of the work of art, and of a concomitant rise in the dominion of “use-value for public exhibition,” or for aesthetic experience. What essentially characterizes a work of art endowed with an “aura”?4 Like the halo or nimbus that surrounds images of Catholic saints or the “ornamental contour that surrounds things as in a case in Van Gogh’s last paintings,” the aura of works of art also brings with it a kind of “alienation effect” or “estrangement” (V-effekt). Juxtaposed to that described by Brecht, this effect occurs when those who contemplate it perceive how a “meta-physical” objectivity comes to supersede and even replace the merely “physical” objectivity of its material presence. The “aura” of a work of art is the way its objectivity or cultic presence lets itself be perceived from the experience of its aesthetic objectivity. It is by virtue of the aura – which works of art can share with certain enchanted natural events – that this objectivity, a “nearness,” something familiar in it, is presented only as the precarious appearance of “a distance,” as something extraordinary, worthy of worship. Aura, Benjamin says, leaning on the definition given by Ludwig Klages,5 is “the unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be.” The cultic or auratic objectivity of manmade work is shown in the unrepeatable and perennial character of its singularity or uniqueness. Its value resides in the fact that it was the site where, in a unique moment, an epiphany or revelation of the supernatural occurred, an epiphany that endures metonymically in it and that it is possible to approach via a certain ritual. For this reason, the auratic work of art, in which “cult value” prevails, can only be an authentic work;

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it does not admit any copy of itself. Any reproduction of it is a desecration. *** Opposed to an auratic artwork, the profane artwork, in which the “exhibition value” predominates, is always repeatable, re-actualizable, without ceasing, however, to be also unique and singular. Detached from its service to cult, a musical work of art, for example, which pre-exists stored in the memory of the musician or in the notations of a score, really comes to exist every time it is performed by one of its innumerable interpreters. There is no original and authentic performance that is being copied by others. Created above all for the purpose of being “exhibited” or of surrendering itself to aesthetic experience, it is there in infinite versions or different actualizations, and it is nevertheless, in each case, always unique. Its uniqueness is not perennial or exclusive, like that of the auratic artwork, but re-actualizable and inviting. It is always the same and always another. It is an artwork made to be reproduced or that only exists under the mode of reproduction. The same can be said, considering the other extreme of the “system of the arts,” of architectural artwork, despite the fact that it seems to be made once and for all, in a single finished version of itself, and to exist as unique, unrepeatable, inimitable, and irreproducible. To be “exhibited,” to surrender itself to aesthetic experience, is for the architectural work of art the same as being inhabited. In turn, its inhabitance implies a kind of improvisation of innumerable variations around a theme or spatial sense proposed by it, which makes it into an artwork that repeats and reproduces itself tirelessly, as if it were different in each episode of human life to which it serves as a stage. It is not possible to inhabit the work of architectural art without re-actualizing in it that which could be called its “status as score,” in which, like music, it too, paradoxically, is always pre-existing itself. When Benjamin speaks of the decadence and destruction of the aura, he refers to something that happens with the perennial and exclusive singularity or uniqueness that



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pertains only to works of art whose value is rooted in their service to cult. It is a fact that he, being faithful to the artistic tradition in which he was formed, in private, would seem to regret, but that, simultaneously and in full ambivalence, he salutes in the name of potentially realizing the utopia that seems inscribed in it. Benjamin tries to convince himself and his readers that the way in which aesthetic experience has been reached thanks to the auratic artwork is about to be replaced by a better, freer way of doing it, a way even able to redefine the very notion of aesthetics. In contrast to Hegel, for whom art “dies” if it is deprived of its highest metaphysical task – that of being the most finished figure of spirit6 – for Benjamin, art only begins as such once it is emancipated from its metaphysical aura.7 In the text of this essay one can trace nevertheless a singular and tragic idea of what ​​ has been and tends to be the destiny of art in the unfolding of history. It seems that for Benjamin the most fundamental artistic quality of the work of art has always been a parasitic phenomenon that, despite its deep autonomy, has never had and may never have an independent existence. In other words, it seems for him that independent or purely aesthetic art appeared as such in the modern era, during the Renaissance, still tied to the Christian religious cult and its value, precisely at the moment when the decay or decomposition of that “cult value” began. Then, appearing as “modern” or avant-garde art, and acting as a fleeting bridge between two extreme epochs, it began to vanish as independent or pure art, being delivered to the experience of a social life that was only developing and that integrated and diffused in itself the aesthetic experience that it was able to arouse. From suffering because of its insertion into a cultic artwork, the object of pure art would move on to suffer for being expelled from an artwork that had been dedicated exclusively to it. The status of the emancipated artwork, of purely aesthetic use-value, was thus transitory. It was there during the time of the avant-garde, between the archaic status of being subordinated to the cultic artwork and the future status of being integrated into the artwork of everyday enjoyment.8 The technical reproduction of the work of art – as an overwhelmingly repeated sacrilege against the art that was and still is produced in obedience to auratic

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vocation – is for Benjamin undoubtedly a factor that accelerates the wear and decay of the aura. Yet it is above all a vehicle for what art could be in an emancipated society, one already outlined in the artistic activity of the avant-garde or of self-proclaimed “modern art.” There is a certain work of art that suffers from the fact of its reproducibility or technical “multiplicability” as an external factor to itself – positive or negative – and another very different one that assumes that fact as an essential moment of its own constitution. One is the work of art, like that of the avant-garde, whose production and consumption technique is determined only “formally” by exhibition or aesthetic value. Another is the work of art in which that determination has become “real” and has come to alter its very production and consumption technique. This is the work whose first outline can be studied, according to Benjamin, in revolutionary cinema. In the work of art constitutively altered by its commitment to exhibition, Benjamin would find the most promising possibility opened by the radical process of metamorphosis art was experiencing in his time. The new technique outlined in the production of goods in general would be concretized as such first in the sphere of artistic production, and this would manifest in an art practice completely dedicated to satisfying in everyday life the need for a mundane or earthly, “materialistic” aesthetic experience. Between the new technique of artistic production and the demands pertaining to emancipated – post-auratic, openly profane – art, there was for Benjamin a deep affinity that encouraged these two factors to look for each other and mutually promote each other’s refinement. *** A large part of the essay on the work of art contains Benjamin’s reflections on cinema as the art form most characteristic of the era of technical reproducibility. Along with a critical examination of the new type of acting and the new type of reception that it requires from its interpreters and audience, there are sharp observations on cinematographic



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editing techniques and other aspects that he thinks are decisive in cinema, including its supposed psycho-social prophylactic function. It is not, however, the actually existing cinema, already dominated by “American modernity” that motivates his reflections, but cinema as an experimental advance of what the new artwork can be. For this reason he does not stop taking into account that cinema can also be an example of the potential aberrations into which the work of art can fall if it only uses the new technical procedures to insist on the production of auratic artworks, betraying their affinity to the profane essence of art. The decline of the aura of the work of art is not due, according to Benjamin, to a spontaneous action that technical advances in artistic production would perform on it, but to the use of these advances from a post-auratic, “avantgarde” perspective.9 This statement then necessarily raised questions about the origin of this perspective. Benjamin’s response to these questions was met with discomfort, if not misunderstanding, even among his closest friends.10 Gershom Scholem, for example, could not find the philosophical link between his “metaphysical conception” of the aura and its decay, in the first part of the essay, and his Marxist lucubrations about the new art, in the second part of it. Scholem said: In a long and passionate conversation about this work that I held with him [Benjamin] in 1938, he responded to my objections: “The philosophical link that you do not find between the two parts of my work will be delivered, more effectively than I, by the revolution.”11

The reason for this is that, for Benjamin, the answer to any question about the foundation of an anti-auratic tendency in the history of contemporary art had to be sought in the resistance and rebellion of contemporary masses against the state of alienation to which capitalist modernity condemned their political subjectness. These were actions that, according to him, had matured during a whole century and that, after overcoming the counter-revolutionary death rattle of Nazism, would be able to consolidate themselves as a postcapitalist transformation of social life. Benjamin detected the

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emergence and generalization of a new type of human mass as the demographic substratum of the new modern society. In his mind, this was a human mass willing to re-socialize starting from the spontaneous practical proposal of the “class conscious proletariat” or, in other words, from a workers’ rebellion against the socialization imposed by the capitalist economy. It was the amorphous, anonymous masses – whose modern identification as national masses had catastrophically weakened as a result of World War I – that were in search of a new form of actualization to their daily life. This was an actualization that they prefigured as being of a different, formal, and transitory type but no less potent than those archaic substantial actualizations that were manipulated and refunctionalized in capitalist modernity to compose “eternal” national identities. Benjamin detected in the new masses a new type of “perception” or sensibility, which would be the “formal rubric” for the changes that would characterize the new epoch and, above all, the “decay of the aura.” These masses tended to underestimate the unrepeatable singularity and perennial durability of the work of art and instead to value its re-actualizable singularity and transience. They rejected the sacred and esoteric remoteness of the cult of a “beauty” crystallized once and for all as the “appearance of the idea reflected in the sensible quality of things.”12 They sought, on the contrary, the profane nearness of aesthetic experience and the opening up of the work to improvisation as inventive repetition.13 These were the masses with revolutionary tendencies, which also proposed a completely new way of participating in aesthetic experience.14 Unaware of the traditional overdetermination of the aesthetic experience as a ceremonial event, these new social masses posited a new type of “participation” in it, both for the artist and for the audience. They affirmed an essential interchangeability between the two, as bearers of a reciprocal function. They introduced a confusion between the “creator” of the work, whose old priestly character they did not know, and its “admirer.” The work of art was for them an “open work,”15 and its reception or enjoyment did not require the “recollection,” concentration, or collective understanding that its traditional “contemplation” demanded. Used to



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the mode of apprehension of architectural beauty – which would be that of a transformative use or of “turning into a habit” [“acostumbramiento”] – their creative reception of the work of art, without ceasing to have profound effects, was unperceptive, inattentive, and “distracted.” The art that corresponded to this new type of mass in freedom, post-auratic art – which, for those who did not want to say goodbye to the aura, would be a form of post-art or simply non-art – was thus an art in which the political would overcome the magical-religious. And its political character was not due to its contribution to the pro-revolutionary cognitive process but to the fact that it proposed an exemplary revolutionary behavior.16 The new art created “a demand ahead of the time of its possible satisfaction.” It trained the masses in the democratic use of the “system of apparatuses” – the new means of production – and prepared them for their recovered function as subjects of their own social life and history. Benjamin’s reflections on the work of art in the age of the new technique culminate theoretically in a distinction that acts as the foundation of the whole of his utopian discourse. One thing was the current technical basis of the process of capitalist social labor, which continued the technical strategies of archaic societies, all aimed at responding to the hostility of nature by seeking its conquest and submission. Another very different thing was the new technical base that had been developed in that process, repressed, wrongly used, and distorted by capitalism, whose principle was no longer the appropriation of nature, but a “ludic telos” aimed at creating forms in and with nature. This was a new technical basis, implying a new way of opening up toward nature or, in other terms, the discovery of “another nature.” Dealing with the new “system of apparatuses,” in which this “second technique” was already outlined, would require the action of a democratic and rational subject able to take the place of the automatic and irrational subject of established society, which was capital in its process of self-reproduction. The new art would be the one to move ahead and set that subject in action, that would teach him to take his first steps. ***

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It is difficult not to agree with Werner Fuld, one of Benjamin’s biographers, when he states, “characteristic of this essay is that it was completely extemporaneous.”17 Indeed, despite the undisputed fame it has had in the history of aesthetics and nineteenth-century art theory – it is enough to mention the importance it had for André Malraux’s influential work or how inspiring it was for the “emancipation cinema” of the 1960s in France and Germany – we must recognize that its exceptional radicality, in this field as in political discourse, is so extreme that it has become an obstacle to its general reading and discussion.18 This is undoubtedly an extemporaneous piece of writing, but we should add that the reasons for this extemporaneous quality are not those that Fuld mentions. The type of cinema of which it speaks was already past and the discussion on film theory to which it tried to contribute had already ended ten years before. The reasons are different and of a different order. They have more to do with the abyss that, already at the time of its writing, had begun to open up between the history in which the author lived (the history of the communist revolution) and the history that started precisely from its failure (the triumph of the counter-revolution), the history in which we live today. To reconstruct the figure of an implicit reader as interlocutor of Benjamin’s “thesis” on modern art at the time of its metamorphosis, it is necessary to imagine him being completely different from common readers today. It is necessary to think of that other reader who could be in place of the current one if the utopia whose realization the author was counting on had actually taken place, and had not been replaced by a restoration of that same world that seemed to come to an end in the first decades of the last century. We must try to see in what actually exists now the results of a frustrated future, one that could then have been pre-lived in the present as the probable (and desirable) outcome of its conflicts. We must think, for example, that the Spain that was stopped and nullified in the 1930s by civil war, and that was conscientiously forgotten during the Franco regime, had a probable future that already gravitated, from its unreality, into the lives of Spanish people then and that would have differed essentially from the actual present of Spain. We must try to think that the actual present of Europe is located in a



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continuum that has nothing to do with the possible future that Europe had prior to Nazism, a future in which proper socialism, not one imported from Russia, was perfectly feasible and even, anticipating any “power being seized,” was already carried out in certain dimensions of life. *** Of all the critical readings that Benjamin’s “theses” on the work of art have received, perhaps the most acute and afflicting one is found at the core of “The Culture Industry” chapter in Horkheimer and Adorno’s famous book, Dialectic of Enlightenment. This whole chapter can be read as a refutation of Benjamin’s theses, as a refutation that, although not explicit, can be easily reconstructed.19 The revolution, which was meant to complete Benjamin’s essay, did not arrive. Instead came the counter-revolution and barbarism. This fact, of which Benjamin experienced the preview, as being persecuted by Nazis eventually led to his suicide, and which was suffered and observed in all its virulence by the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, was the background for the bleak overview of impossibilities that Horkheimer and Adorno describe for art and for the cultivation of forms in general in the world following the war. What they found was the antipode of the proletarian masses dreamed of by Benjamin. These writers found an amorphous mass of beings subjected to an “authoritarian state,” manipulated at the whim of the managers of a monstrous system generating tastes and opinions with the obsessive goal of reproducing, in countless versions of all kinds, a single apologetic message praising the omnipotence of capital and the pleasures of submission. The reality of the “culture industry” examined in that chapter is that “bad future” that Benjamin had already detected as a threat in his essay – in his observations on the pseudo-restoration of the aura in the cult of Hollywood stars and cinema – and that had come to take the place, as a cartoonish substitute, of the revolutionary future that Benjamin spoke of in his own present. ***

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There is no worse approach to Benjamin’s idea of ​​ postauratic art than to quickly compare it to the actual history of art in the second half of the twentieth century, a history that is clearly different from what Benjamin expected, and then declare it simply a failed prophecy. This comparison presupposes that the production of high-quality art, in traditional terms, throughout this period provides sufficient proof to show that art as such has continued to effectively exist. This claim forgets that the function that this artistic production used to fulfill in everyday life is an essential element of its definition. It underestimates the fact that this function has become secondary for that production and that its artworks are now exclusively consumed in an aristocratic layer or niche of society, separated from that circulation of forms that previously connected it with the spontaneous aestheticization of life. It is much better to look at Benjamin’s idea as a fulfilled – yet poorly fulfilled – prophecy:20 to observe that something like a post-auratic art did arrive in the second half of the twentieth century, as Benjamin anticipated, but not as he would have liked it to be. Instead it arrived in a different manner: via the “bad side,” which, according to Hegel in his pessimistic moments, is the one that history tends to choose in the face of a dilemma. Nowadays, the “aestheticization” of the world is no longer fulfilled through a formalization of the spontaneous production of art by the action of the “fine arts.” It has ceased to be, as was the case previously in modern society, an effect that extends over everyday life starting from traditional artistic production (of low or high culture). Now it is, on the contrary, the result of a “wild” cultivation of the forms of that world in daily life – a cultivation that takes place within the “actually existing” possibilities, that is, within a framework of action directly manipulated by the “culture industry” and its ideological order. It occurs, for example, through phenomena such as the current “post-music concerts,” which do not simply imply an alteration of the “high-culture” concert form, but a destruction and replacement of that form by “another thing,” whose character is difficult to specify, given its subordination to show business. The survival of auratic art, which would be irrefutable proof of how inaccurate Benjamin’s vision of utopia was,



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nevertheless presents disturbing indications. It represents the repeated occurrence, except in general terms, of what happened with theater at the time of cinema and with cinema at the time of television. The aura continues to exist in parallel with pseudo-post-auratic art [arte pseudopost­ aurático], but it has been relegated to certain niches that are treated as negligible by the culture industry and its mass media or, in the best-case scenario, are integrated into it as “research” or “head hunting” areas. Yet, above all, disregarding this fact and convinced of the superior quality of its works, the auratic art that has survived itself in the figure of “modern art” is content to repeat now what a century ago was the result of a revolutionary movement, the fruit of the avant-garde break with the kind of art requested by capitalist modernity. It limits itself to turning that rupture into heritage and tradition. Walter Benjamin was one of the last to arrive at classical communism and was perhaps the last one to defend it (with a radicality equal only to Marx’s and enhanced by the fantastical utopianism articulated by Fourier, whom he admired so much).21 His was not the communism of the “fellow traveler,” of the intellectual who sympathizes with the fate of the exploited proletariat or who even tries to empathize with him. It was the communism of the Jewish author-producer, who proletarianized, and even “lumpen-proletarianized,” himself in Germany at the time of the “stoppable rise” of Nazism.22 It is from this position that he could afford to write the last sentences of his essay: given the aestheticization that fascism introduces into politics, the self-alienated human, transubstantiated into that entity that Marx called “the substitutive subject,” or “self-valorizing value,” reaches such a degree of self-alienation that he becomes a spectator capable of “aesthetically” enjoying his own annihilation. Communism, as a historical project aimed at reversing this alienation, responds to fascism with the “politicization of art,” by practicing art as an exemplary preview of the communist future.

8 Sartre from a Distance

The humanism in existentialism In the philosophy that has entered into politics, the fundamental conception of existentialism is rescued thanks to an awareness that has declared war on the reality of the destruction of the human, knowing that this reality continues to triumph. Herbert Marcuse, “Existentialismus”1

Announced to start at 8:30 p.m. on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre’s lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” began an hour late. The organizers, who had just hoped to be able to fill the venue, were surprised and overwhelmed by the large number of people arriving. There was commotion, shouting, pushing, broken chairs, and women were fainting. Sartre had to improvise before an audience that had difficulty listening to him. He started his presentation, with his hands in his pockets, as if giving a lecture at the university. Though at first he felt uneasy, he then won the audience over little by little and ended to great applause. It was a crucial event in the history of French culture: existentialism had been officially born. Any “ism,” or intellectual fashion, although it may seem like a foreign phenomenon, exterior to the essence of philosophical



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doctrine, belongs to its moment of exposition, without which it does not come to be fully realized. The intellectual “isms” correspond historically to the era of liberalism, when “public opinion” existed or at least seemed to exist as the expression of citizens in the process of self-configuration. “Isms” were the living presence, with all that this term implies in regard to misunderstandings, deformations, and impoverishment of philosophers’ mental creations. The “ism” of existentialism was undoubtedly the “ism” par excellence and also the last of them. The “isms” that appeared after it, structuralism, postmodernism, etc., came when philosophy had already been deprived of the stage of “public opinion” as a site of exposition. After Paris ’68, “public opinion” was replaced, blow after blow, by an instance of social “self-consciousness” installed and reproduced directly by that all-embracing entity that Horkheimer and Adorno called the “culture industry” of capitalist modernity. The post-existentialist “isms” could not go beyond the reach of university corridors and columns in newspaper cultural supplements. The Parisian movement of ’68 was not just an opening act; it was also, to a large extent, an act of closure. It summoned for the last time, in the streets of its city and around the public prestige of rational discourse, citizens who were convinced of having political sovereignty. When it bid goodbye to existentialism in trying to overcome it, it also bid goodbye to the era of discourse as a decisive instance in formal political life. It exhausted and closed the importance of intellectuals and their “isms,” and in general of the “ism” as a figure of public opinion. In Paris, and especially in post-war Paris, intellectuals still had a leading role in social and political life. They were not the exotic, isolated, and ultimately insignificant voices that they are now under the dictatorship of the mass media. The ideological definition of citizens, and above all of those who for any reason appeared in public – politicians, legislators, scientists, businessmen, writers, actors, and artists of all kinds – was then a very important requirement in their performance as such. The plane of rational discourse, the place where ideologies are discussed, was the site of refereed conversation accepted and respected by the whole society. What was at play there was decisively important for its

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collective destiny, or at least so it seemed. The great intellectuals, the maîtres à penser, performed on that stage with a certain priestly quality; they were heard and respected by everyone. By the night of the formal birth of existentialism, the government of the restored French state, after the annihilation of the German National Socialist state that defeated it and occupied it for four years, was in the hands of the forces that had offered resistance to that occupation from opposite ideological positions. In other words, liberated France was divided between the followers of General de Gaulle, the “bourgeois democrats,” on the one hand, and the followers of the Communist Party, the “popular democrats,” on the other. The terrain within which they identified themselves, that of ideology or of a rational political project, seemed to be the determining field from which both sides drew their legitimacy and power. To appear within it with an alternative discursive proposal, as existentialism pretended to do, was therefore an event that was strongly overdetermined by the clash that kept that field in tension. Reading Sartre’s lecture sixty years later shows us a surprising aspect of its expository strategy. It is the strategy of a legal defense, of a plaidoyer. Sartre tried to disqualify the accusations directed at existentialism and that came especially from defenders of Catholic doctrine, on the one end, and militants of the Communist Party, on the other. These accusations of all kinds, however, could be summarized into one: the accusation of being anti-humanist. In a survey among intellectuals of all tendencies, promoted by the famous magazine Les Lettres Françaises in November of that same year, we find expressions like the following, by Pierre Emmanuel: “I do not want to talk about existentialism. It is infected. It seems to me to be a disease of the spirit, incurable. Why would we be led to believe that man is an abominable chancre on the face of nature?” Or like this other one, from the acute philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who refused to recognize at the time a position that would soon become his: “Existentialism is a rotten phenomenon that is completely in line with the decomposition of bourgeois culture. Humanism is a reconquest of human health. To say ‘hell is other people’ is to deny humanism.”2



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Why was it so important to defend existentialism against this accusation? Why did existentialism have to affirm itself as a form of humanism? It was not due solely to the fact that the French population, fresh from the Nazi era, from the epitome of anti-humanism, needed to erase all traces of collaboration by asserting itself as absolutely contrary to the Nazi, as humanist. It was important above all because humanism was then a concept of emblematic value. It was about finding a common identity capable of overcoming the heterogeneity of the two worlds that were quickly consolidating after the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, a shared political definition that allowed conviviality or peaceful coexistence between the two, anticipating the occurrence of the Cold War. Only the humanist identity was able to accept equally the two adjectives, that of “bourgeois” and that of “proletarian,” of being both liberal and socialist. Unlike the other great philosopher of existence, Martin Heidegger, who had recently experienced disappointment and resentment toward the political (embodied in the Nazi state he had supported), Sartre put so much effort into being recognized as a humanist because he believed that the struggle against Nazism had opened multiple opportunities for the revolutionary regeneration of politics. Adopting the humanist position was then the best way to start taking advantage of these opportunities. If read as a philosophical text, the lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” leaves much to be desired. It is an introduction to Sartre’s doctrine that vulgarizes and diminishes the radical quality of what he had written before in works such as The Imaginary or Being and Nothingness.3 Trapped in a moral problem, it exaggeratedly simplifies the complexity of the relationship between ethics and ontology, which is the core of the philosophy of existence. Too attentive to current politics, it leaves aside the problematization of its limits as a real actualization of the political. In any case, where Sartre remained close to the strictly philosophical script he had prepared,4 especially at the end of the lecture, he managed to brilliantly present the idea that “existentialism” defends above all and justifies its name: “existence precedes essence.” That is to say, what the human being is in each case, its factical consistency, is only sustained by his free acceptance

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of it. The human being and the human world transcend the necessity that determines what he should be in each case. The human being is free, and in his world he is the fruit of this freedom. Being free means being able to realize, from the negation of an established necessity, a different “necessity,” a “necessity” of another order, a “necessity” of its own that is itself “unnecessary,” free, contingent, based on nothingness, without physical burden or any metaphysical mission to fulfill.5 The human being only exists to the extent that he invents himself. By adopting such a consistency with his decisions, everyone assumes himself either as a vindicator or as a repressor of the human, either as free or as an automaton. By choosing between different possibilities, he is “condemned” to be chosen first as an embodiment or as a renunciation of freedom. There is a “will to freedom,” says Sartre, “which is implicit in freedom itself.” For this reason, for example, it is impossible “to choose oneself freely as a traitor.” Treason is an attack against a compromise between free beings, an aggression against freedom as such. Being a traitor implies a failure or a “prior” destruction of freedom. To “choose oneself” as a traitor it is necessary first of all to divest oneself of freedom, to commit suicide, to allow oneself to become an automaton-animal for which nothing can be more valuable than what survival instinct commands, to execute the “superior design,” either divine or human, to negate the freedom belonging to a commitment or oath with the very act of breaking it. Humanism was originally a generalized attitude among the elites of the new type of human being that emerged from the obsolescence of medieval Christianity in the merchant and capitalist cities of the fifteenth century in Europe. It was an attitude that, without being the only one, best characterized the attempt of this “new man” to recompose what the history of his traditional Christian humanity had systematically nullified, that is, the concrete qualitative richness of life and the lifeworld (the “earthly world”). It was an attempt to reinvent concrete identity for a new, post-Christian humanity. Where could those elites draw a model from to guide that recomposition and that invention, if not from that human identity of legendary perfection, of that ancient humanitas



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that had existed before the Christian era and that could well have a “renaissance”? From the Greco-Roman humanitas, this model attracted the humanistic attitude of the bourgeois class in the Quattrocento mainly because of its anthropocentrism: the old type of human being understood that the human being, and not some other superior being, was “the measure of all things.” In their superhuman dimension, the ancient gods, immortal and powerful, seemed not to exist for themselves but for humans; they were more fascinated by the adventures of mortals than by their own. This concentration of ontological importance in the human being, from which it extended over other beings, was highly attractive for the “new man” in the pre-Christian image of the cosmos.6 Within this image of the ancient cosmos that bourgeois humanism longed to reproduce, the “entrepreneurial man,” who since that time has believed himself to be steering capital rather than being steered by it, saw himself portrayed in his role as the center of the world and the engine of the dynamics of history. Human freedom had been shown in its purity in the fifteenth century, as a result of the implosion of medieval Christianity, and as Renaissance philosophers spoke about humanism with so much brilliance and hope. For example, in Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” God says to Adam, “You will determine your nature … without being constrained by any barrier, according to your will, whose power I have given you.” However, then hypostatized as “Man” or “Humanity,” human freedom was transformed gradually into the subject or foundation par excellence, in front of which everything else is a pure inert object or pure “Nature.” It was transformed through the capitalist selfdefinition of modernity into an object of “anthropolatry” [“antropolatría”]. This made it counterproductive and led it to enslave itself. Since then, the humanism pertaining to capitalist modernity has deified Man or Humanity insofar as it has awarded it the omnipotence that the alienated human being, that is, the value of capitalist commodity, proves to have in a lifeworld that only seems to exist as a “world of commodities.” The humanism consecrated by modern states and institutions has led the human being to adore himself, or rather, a version or metamorphosis of himself in which he is

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undoubtedly present, yet alienated from his own subjectness. As subject-capital, the human is active, but at the same time he lacks freedom. The human is confused with the power of the Other, the non-human, and is obedient to a will that he once had but that has now become a metaphysical necessity. Sartre, being a relentless and often acerbic critic of this modern humanism (as in Saint Genet, comédien et martyr,7 one of his most brilliant books), tries to return to the protomodern sources of humanism, to the earlier humanism of Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and so many others. Sartre’s humanism makes human beings stand out among other beings for three reasons. The first reason is the one mentioned above: “existence precedes essence,” that is, what matters in a human being is the fact that he exercises the freedom to which he is “condemned,” that he assumes or gives meaning to the determinations that condition his life, and not what those conditions make of him before or after he exercise his freedom. Sartre then insists on a second reason: the human being is “transcendent,” is a being thrown unto the world to transform it, “condemned” to being responsible for things going one way or another, for objects in the lifeworld remaining in the state they are in or moving to a different status. The third reason for the special character of the human being among other beings, for Sartre, is his being “condemned” to “engagement.” He is “condemned” to the fact that his presence among others alters them as essentially as theirs alters him, that his activity awakens reciprocities, and that he is therefore responsible not only for himself but also for others. “This relation of transcendence as constitutive of man … with subjectivity (in such a sense that man is not shut up in himself but forever present in a human universe) – it is this that we call existential humanism.”8 Sartre’s claims about humanism cannot be separated from those expressed by Martin Heidegger, his contemporary writer and teacher, in his famous letter of 1946 to Jean Beaufret, “On Humanism.”9 In it, the thinker from Messkirch undertakes a whole philosophical self-examination in response to Sartre’s 1945 lecture. Distancing himself from “existentialism,” Heidegger interprets man’s arrogance in regard to the Other or “Nature.” He sees the attempt by the Western human subject to establish the technical openness of being



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as a form of hubris or excess. He thinks this hubris has backfired upon humans in the shape of “unleashed modern technics” and its “destiny of devastation,” and can only be reversed if, through an “anti-humanism” capable of restoring ontological hierarchies (an anti-humanism that afterward, starting with Foucault, became so successful in postmodernism), humans begin to think that, prior to themselves, there is Being. Heidegger writes: The essence of … the human being lies in ek-sistence. That is what is essentially – that is, from being itself – at issue here, insofar as being appropriates the human being as ek-sisting for guardianship over the truth of being into this truth itself. “Humanism” now means, in case we decide to retain the word, that the essence of the human being is essential for the truth of being, specifically in such a way that what matters is not the human being simply as such. So we are thinking a curious kind of “humanism.” The word results in a name that is a lucus a non lucendo [literally, a grove where no light penetrates].10

It is interesting to note that Heidegger, by placing his thought on “the plane of being” and differentiating it from existentialism, which “remains” on the “plane of man,” seems to take a step back from his position in Being and Time. It surreptitiously weakens the idea of ​Geworfenheit, of délaissement (or thrownness), that is, of the lack of ground or contingency characteristic of the human condition, and reconstructs a metaphysical necessity for that human condition, a ground built from a meta-eksistential relationship between human beings and Being. Moreover, this is a Being whom this late Heidegger tends to substantialize and even anthropomorphize and “personify,” with strong yet imprecise theological insinuations. Being, according to Being and Time, the founding work for any philosophy of existence, is opened to humans only as a “sense” of itself, a “sense” that is constituted precisely with Dasein. In other words, it is opened only through or in virtue of human existence, and its manifestation for the human being cannot consist of anything other than precisely the human mode of being, in Dasein or human existence. Afterward, beginning in 1936 in the manuscript From Enowning, and more particularly in his letter to Jean Beaufret, Being starts to be discussed as capable

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of manifesting itself not only in human existence, but also to it, “from outside” or from “next” to it. Substantialized as something or someone of meta-eksistential order and bearing features undeniably close to those of the Christian God, Being “speaks” with a voice different from Dasein’s mode of being, which should in theory be his only voice, so that he, in a peculiar tautology, listens to it. The two main “philosophy of existence” tendencies diverge from each other at this point. Sartre’s existentialism follows the decidedly atheistic and anti-metaphysical path; it affirms the state of “projection” or condition of “thrownness” (of the Geworfenheit or délaissement), emphasizes the complete “groundlessness” (Bodenlosigkeit) and loneliness of man, and denies any possible “necessity” behind the contingency of human freedom. Heidegger’s “new thinking,” by contrast, offers a diffuse or indecisive invitation to consider the possibility that the human belongs to a design made by Being (or “esser,” Sein). He insinuates that freedom can consist, ultimately, in a mode of obedience (in the sense proposed by Ignatius of Loyola). *** There is nothing that can be taken for granted in the history of ideas. In it, as in the myth of Sisyphus, everything has to be thought each time over again. There is no place for the notion of progress; wisdom is not cumulative. No philosopher after Plato can be “better” than him because he is standing on his shoulders. However, we can speak of ideas from the past (or, rather, from a broader present, which encompasses both that past and our present) that refer in an exemplary manner to certain topics still perceived as current, ideas that are capable of enriching our thinking nowadays. The central idea in​​ Sartre’s humanism is one of them. If there is something that can characterize the modern era, this is, in the words of Karl Marx, the phenomenon of alienation, or, in other terms, the human surrender to an extrahuman “will” that seems to act from the realm of things. This is a “will” that, according to Marx, results from a peculiar “humanization” of things, from anthropomorphizing the



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value of commodities produced in a capitalist way when it appropriates the human will, embodies it, and subordinates it to its self-valorization process. The dominance of capitalist modernity turns all singular individuals who live according to it, voluntarily or involuntarily, into “partners” of their respective capitalist state entities, into accomplices to exploitation, both of others and of themselves. Above all, it pushes them toward abdicating their human dignity, to renouncing their character as free subjects, as architects of their own lives. Condemned to an abstract singularization that atomizes the modern human being and prevents him from living in community, the human experiences his alienated condition as a form of repression of his concrete singular individuality. To rescue himself from this impossibility is the horizon of his free action, which coincides and is confused with that of collective social and political resistance to the capitalist mode of production and its consequent alienation. Sartre proposed to the left that it rescue a political attitude that, properly belonging to it, was repressed by a behavior and an ideology self-proclaimed as “Marxist,” which by pretending to represent it, actually nullified it. He suggested it recognize the fact that revolutionary action does not consist of the mere fulfillment of a “historical necessity” and that it can only be the result of free and inventive coincidence with a public project of revolutionary politics. In this project, every militant follower involved, through the concrete singularity of his actions, transcends the state of affairs that compels him to be a realist and to keep his head down. Sartre’s work reminds modern human beings that the political can only be realized in politics if it is actualized at the basic level of individual singular existence. It reminds them that politics cannot be separated from morality, from the realm of each human having free choice in the concretion of his daily life. According to Sartre, the action of negating and transcending the realist demand to be modern in a capitalist way, the action of founding a necessity that transcends metaphysical necessity, that can go beyond the life guaranteed by capital and its economic-political organiz­ ation, is an action of resistance and transformation that does not correspond only to a major social and political subject,

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that is still yet to be constituted. Above all, it corresponds to the minor, singular, and intimate subject that can always constitute himself anywhere. Even if great forms of resistance to modern alienation are absent, there is always the possibility that it will regenerate and rebuild from small forms of resistance.

Sartre and Marxism If it attempts to become a politics … [existentialism] will only disguise as a double “yes” its double “no,” proposing to correct democracy by revolution and revolution by democracy. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Sartre and Ultrabolshevism”11

In 1960, Jean-Paul Sartre referred to his own theory, existentialism, as an “ideology.” He said: existentialism is “a parasitical system living on the margin of Knowledge, which at first it opposed but into which today it seeks to be integrated.”12 Knowledge is Marxism. Sartre’s definition of Marxism is undoubtedly also its most flattering. To construct it, Sartre even went so far as to invent a new meaning for the word “philosophy.” He speaks of it as a discursive entity or a very special figure of social discourse that is all the following things at the same time: a “totalization of knowledge, a method, a regulative Idea, an offensive weapon, and a community of language.”13 Marxism is “the philosophy of our time,” the third and last of all the philosophies most characteristic of modern history, after that of Descartes and Locke and that of Kant and Hegel. Sartre’s praise is direct and honest; it is without any trace of irony. It does not attempt to corrode the object it praises, trying to transform it into an empty shell. But it is a praise that ends up being counterproductive. It contradicts Marx and Engels’s wellknown assertion in The German Ideology that acknowledges that the capacity to “dominate,” to “totalize knowledge,” is not in the ideas of the revolutionary proletariat, but in “the ideas of the ruling class.” This description, to which Sartre first subscribes, is then undermined by his claim that “when the ‘rising’ class becomes conscious of itself … [t]his



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consciousness may be clear or confused, indirect or direct.”14 The real presence of Marxism, he insists, “transforms the structures of Knowledge, stimulates ideas … it polarizes the culture of the ruling classes and changes it.”15 This distinction may seem Byzantine, but it is substantial. While Marx speaks of the dominance of the ideas of the ruling class as a matter of fact in the reproduction of the established order, Sartre speaks of the dominance of the new “philosophy” as something that takes place within the confrontation between that order and the social and political forces that challenge it. It may be the case, as Marx would say, that the working class “has a better chance to win” in this struggle and is “dominant” in this sense, but, here and now, actual dominance remains on the side of capital and the classes it favors. Sartre’s praise would thus be counterproductive because, by elevating Marxism to the category of the “Knowledge” of our time, it deactivates in Marx’s discourse that which its author most valued in it: its critical character. For Marx, in fact, the discourse of revolutionary workers is a discourse specifically of transition and for the transition “from pre-history to history,” and to that extent lacks the proper quality of historical knowledge that accompanies the establishment of an economic and social order. It is a discourse that has the same force and the same evanescence that characterize the process of transition: it is a parasitic and demolishing discourse that aims to deconstruct the dominant discourse. His inaugural text, Capital, is not the “first stone” of a new building, that of Proletarian Knowledge. It is not titled A Treaty on Communist Political Economy, but rather describes itself simply as A Critique of Political Economy, a contribution to the general criticism of the “bourgeois world” or of capitalist modernity. Once Sartre presents his definition of “Marxism” as “the irrefutable philosophy of our time,” the consequent question is one that Sartre himself formulates: “Why has then ‘existentialism’ kept its autonomy? Why has not it simply dissolved in Marxism?”16 And his answer is clear: “Marxism,” which can only be a totalization that re-totalizes incessantly, has “stopped.”17 All philosophy is practical, he adds: “[i]ts method is a social and political weapon,”18 and Marxist practice, having submitted to the “blind pragmatism” of

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Stalinist “communism,” has turned its theory into a “voluntarist idealism.”19 Sartre does not perceive that the miseries of what he recognizes as “Marxism” are not due to a problem in speed, to Marxism having recently “stopped.” Rather, for him, it is a question of meaning, of the fact that it has already been quite some time, from the time when Marx distanced himself from his “Marxist” disciples, since it abjured its critical vocation. What this means for existentialism, suggests Sartre, is that it should help “Marxism” get out of its theoretical morass. It should do so by introducing into “Marxism” what existentialism can do better than anything else. This is exploring the concrete dimension, the one unique to events, through the “instances of practical-inert mediation” that connect individuals with their collective entities and with history. Objective conditions determine, without a doubt, the realization of every human act, but those acts are not the product of those conditions; they are always the result of a free human decision. Existentialism can teach “Marxism” that the “lived” dimension of fulfilling or failing to fulfill a project is not a byproduct, but the true substance of historical process. Sartre’s theoretical effort in his attempt to contribute to “Marxism” is extraordinary. The 755 dense pages of his Critique of Dialectical Reason overflow with creativity. They contain countless new concepts and arguments – “praxis and history of scarcity,” “seriality” and the “collective,” “oath” and “group in fusion,” “mediation” and “the practicalinert” – that its author presents through concrete historical examples, as different from each other as the Storming of the Bastille, at one end, and the identification of Flaubert with Madame Bovary, at the other. The effective results of its effort, however, turned out to be marginal, if not null. “Marxism” was right in not wanting to learn about Sartre’s work and allowing only a scant and insubstantial discussion of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. The reason for this is that Sartre’s contribution really was a poisonous gift. For the “Marxism” with which Sartre debates – “Marxism of the Second International” (Karl Korsch) or “Soviet Marxism” (Herbert Marcuse) or “Marxism of Actually Existing Socialism” (Rudolf Bahro) – the class consciousness



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of the proletariat could only consist of the sum of its individual members’ acquiescence to a global historical anti-capitalist project existing in advance, inherited from German SocialDemocrats and then radicalized by Bolshevik-Leninists. This was a project that each one of the proletarians received immediately, insofar as each was one more unique example belonging to the working class within the whole massive reality of modern society. To think, following Sartre’s contribution, that “proletarian class consciousness” could consist in a generalized “engagement” – in the coincidence of innumerable unique individual initiatives among the proletarians, aimed at constructing an anti-capitalist historical project – was something structurally impossible for that form of “Marxism.” It implied its own negation. Accepting such a definition was tantamount to suicide. It was a form of Marxism that conceived of the historical movement of which it was intended to be the theoretical expression not as a real novelty, as the revolutionary event that Marx saw in it, as a rupture of the continuum that would begin, according to Walter Benjamin, by “pulling the emergency brake in the train of history,” but instead only as an improved continuation of the same journey, as a perfected reiteration of the same process, that of the progress of “humanity” or of “productive forces.” The form of “Marxism” that Sartre in 1960 persisted in believing it was still possible to rescue was a theory constitutively incapable of conceiving of the working class’s consciousness as a concrete identifying consciousness. In other words, it was incapable of overcoming its identity as a mass, as something abstract, “re-serializing,” or generated automatically in the process of capitalist factory labor designed in the nineteenth century (as that of the labor unions CGT-Renault or CTM-Luz y Fuerza, for example). It was a doctrine that had to puritanically reject what new times brought along with it: the free, apparently chaotic, constitution of a revolutionary class consciousness based on completely different labor experiences and vital identities from each other, but all of them distant from and rebellious against the uniformizing tutelage of the factory world. Surprised by the ’68 student movement, in which the free play of revolutionary affirmation already appeared, that form

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of “Marxism” did not know what to do but to condemn it as “petty-bourgeois.” Sartre then had to respond: What I have to reproach all those who insulted the students with is not having seen that they expressed a new claim, that of sovereignty. In democracy, all men must be sovereign, that is, be able to decide what they do, not alone, each in their corner, but together.20

He completed this claim when interviewing one of the student leaders: What is interesting about your action is that it puts the imagination in power. … You have a much richer imagination than that of your elders, as the phrases written on the walls of the Sorbonne prove. Something has come out of you that surprises, that upsets, that rejects everything that has made our society what it is now. I call that an extension of the field of possibilities. Do not give up on it.21

There is, without a doubt, a different form of Marxism, which could have been enriched by Sartre’s contribution. This is the Marxism that had begun to be formulated much earlier, in the 1920s, based upon the first catastrophe of the twentieth century and the discovery of a “mature Marx” (that of Capital), different from the canonical one, and which could be read in light of a younger version of Marx (that of the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts). It is the form of Marxism that had been sketched in György Lukács’s book History and Class Consciousness, and that, by 1933, when National Socialist barbarism came to close modern history, struggled just to reach the streets. It was a form of Marxism descending from the philosophical realm of writers like Ernst Bloch, Karl Korsch, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Walter Benjamin. It is, however, a form of Marxism that was left for the future, that in post-war France was practically unknown and therefore could not even think of competing against canonical “Marxism,” either as a “method” or as a “regulatory idea” of the political activity and “communist” organization of workers. In presenting his idea of “Marxism” as “the knowledge of our time,” Sartre was referring to a configuration of public



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opinion that properly corresponded to the “moment of liberation” in Europe, after World War II and the defeat of Nazism, and especially in the 1960s. This was a set of expectations and ideas, of concerns and myths, that have an opposite presence in our days, and therefore seem distant from us; they emphasize the disparity that exists between the situation lived in those years and the one today. These ideas were lived as if they were the beginning of what really – we now know – was the final episode of that era that Lukács called “the era of the actuality of the revolution.” The student revolt, which began to be prepared in those years in Berlin and culminated in “Paris: May ’68,” was based on two certainties that Sartre’s existentialism had decisively helped to form. The first was that, beneath the absurd policies of the “communist parties,” the proletarian revolution was on the march and unstoppable. The second was that the political action of the citizens in the streets and squares of their cities, guided by words and by reason, could adopt that proletarian project and transform society in a radical and democratic way. Only twenty years later it would be clear that the figure of the nineteenth-century factory worker, from which “Marxism” had built the proletarian identity, had been replaced in reality by a very different, much more differentiated and complex figure. Moreover, it became clear that the brilliant speeches by the youth who called for “imagination to take power” resonated in an agora that was already being dismantled by a different capitalist society. This was one in which consensus was built elsewhere and in other ways, thereby emptying the content and importance of the political stage. Distant and difficult to decipher for today’s youth, Sartre’s polemic relationship with “Marxism” nonetheless allows them to recognize in our days the hidden virulence of an entire order of problems that the last decades have accustomed us to consider as non-existent or already solved. It allows them to ask questions of pure SartreanMarxist quality, such as: is history really, as the mass media constantly try to make us believe, something already determined by previous circumstances? Is the progress of capitalist modernity a destiny within which we were born and inevitably will also die? Is the devastation of the natural and the human that comes with progress and that we see

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advance without obstacles unstoppable? Is it all about, for whoever can, finding a “comfortable niche” while this process ends? Are not, precisely, acceptance and opportunism – attitudes that the human being, as a free being, can substitute for their opposites – the fundamental features of this devastation?

9 Where is “the Left” Now?

Do you know, dear Sonia, that the beginning of spring in the organic world, that is, the awakening to life, begins now, in early January, without waiting for the calendar to turn to spring? Rosa Luxemburg, Letters from Prison1

A The topographic opposition between right and left, an opposition representative of two conflicting political tendencies, comes from the first epoch of the French Revolution, that of the Convention Nationale (1789). Then, it served to distinguish the moderates, or “Girondins,” who preferred to sit in the lower part of the room, to the right of the assembly presidents, and the radicals, the “Montagnards” or “Jacobins,” who were located instead up and to the left. The political distinction between moderates (right) and radicals (left) gradually acquired a temporal and historical meaning as it became interpreted in regard to the notion of progress brought on by Enlightenment thinking. Being “on the left” began to be defined as the position that favors the natural inclination of social institutions to

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perfect themselves, to increasingly adapt to a social life capable of guaranteeing freedom, equality, and fraternity for all human beings. The position of being “on the right” began to be defined as the one that refuses to recognize this natural tendency and that, on the contrary, defends the traditional form of social institutions as a guarantee of civilized life, which it sees as threatened precisely by the utopian quest of those aforementioned revolutionary ideals. To be “on the left” then began to mean “being progressive,” while being “on the right” began to mean “being reactionary,” “conservative,” or even “retrograde.” The political distinction between right and left culminated in the era of the French Revolution when, in the mid-1790s, Babeuf and Maréchal led the “Conspiracy of the Equals” and argued that “freedom” and “fraternity” – two of the three revolutionary ideals – could only be achieved if the third one, “equality,” was guaranteed, especially for the lower class, that of the sans-culottes, who had been the true protagonists of the “tiers-état” (bourgeoisie) revolution of 1789. Guaranteeing this equality, they concluded, implied entering a second epoch of the French Revolution, a more radical epoch, in which the revolutionary process had to pursue the socialization of property. In this way, “the left” became the position of those who defended the radicalization of the revolutionary process. Between it and “the right,” or the counter-revolutionary position, a “center” position appeared, one adopted by the bourgeoisie, who were satisfied with the conquests achieved by liberalizing the economy.

B By “leftist” we can understand a supra-partisan current of public opinion within the stage of modern democratic politics. It expresses a special tendency of political activity: one that strives to complete or to perfect the institutional transformations reached in modern society as a result of the French Revolution. It is a political current aimed at reaching the following goals:



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a. That the “invisible hand of the market” not be obliged to submit itself to the needs of the accumulation of capital, insofar as these needs are alien to the social will and their satisfaction benefits only a particular class of citizens: the owners of the means of production. These are needs that are automatically imposed on the market only when it is not institutionally protected against itself, given its own tendency to become absolute, that is, to promote the proletarianization of private owners, to reduce their ownership to that of their simple commodity labor-power. b. That political “liberalism” be radicalized, that is, that it ensure real freedom for citizens through a socialist determination or definition of “economic liberalism.” This means, first, prohibiting the private monopoly of property over the means of production of general social interest (land, water, energy, communication, etc.). Second, given the existence of a communal patrimony that belongs to all, this means providing social insurance against citizens’ misery (unemployment and abandonment), against a situation that condemns them to confuse their destiny with that of the only “commodity” they have left: their own bodies. c. That the actually existing politics, or “civil society politics,” become a true “politics of the republic.” This means that politics, as the supra-structure of economic life that it is today, as the governmental activity of community members divided into bourgeois and private owners, ceases to be such. It ceases to be held hostage by the gravity of capitalist wealth and becomes a free and autonomous sphere of social life, carried out by members of the community as citizens interested exclusively in its general or public affairs.

C The left, as a tendency of political activity within the modern state, characterizes the political actions in each concrete situation more than the organizational apparatus of a given

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group. A political party cannot be “leftist,” it can only be referred to as “left-wing” insofar as its political activity coincides with that tendency. The history of the left is not that of groups or organizations called “left-wing,” but the history of leftist politics. The establishment of the gulag in the USSR, for example, was a political measure to protect the accumulation of state capital, taken by a state entity that claimed to be “leftist” but that was obviously at the antipode of the left. Only when a group or organization maintains a whole coherent set of leftist policies can it say that it is on the political left. There are historical moments in which the left comes out in a series of different left-wing actions, in different ways in each case, as for example in the 1920s in Germany, when there was at least one “social democratic left” and one “communist left.” But there are other moments, such as the current one seems to be, in which we can say that the left is reluctant to come out in any series of actions of any established political organization.

D The left is only one of the ways in which “deep” modern life resists and rebels against the capitalist mode of actually existing modernity. It is the path of radical opposition that opens a gap in the social process of state-national organizing by taking advantage of the moment in which this process, which must encourage the population to acquiesce to the historical destiny imposed by the capitalist class, in fact asserts this acquiescence through establishing a “democratic” political field of action and a stage of “free” public opinion in which all dissent from that destiny is systematically taken to the realm of the absurd. For this reason, the anticapitalism inherent in the leftist political position always has, as a first condition of its manifestation, the ungrateful task – which really is not achievable in times of “normality” – of shaking off the absurd appearance it spontaneously has in the “common sense” of the population. However, apart from this political path chosen by the left in resistance and rebellion against capitalist modernity, we should also consider other paths that go in the same direction.



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These are paths that, either connected to or separated from this one, directly affirm themselves in their practical relationship to the means of production and consumption – in technoscience and in art, for example – when they are “re-functionalized” in a revolutionary sense and put to “work” in a creative way to contravene the rule of automatism imposed by capitalist modernity.

10 Meditations on the Baroque

Alonso Quijano and the Indians These are the sparks of rebellion that, ignited by the great creative fervor of our baroque, are fueled in their purity by the breath of the true American forest. José Lezama Lima1

Almost exactly a hundred years ago, in his work entitled The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, Miguel de Unamuno2 undertook a task that was somewhere between prophetic and literary. Going against the grain of time, he set off to re-enchant and re-mythicize the social life of Spain, which he perceived as being steeped in an attitude of the most dull and opaque pragmatism, of hostile judgment on every metaphysical discovery, of enmity to myth, of unique affirmation of the “disenchantment” that, as described by Max Weber, pertains to the modern world, and of insistence upon the “scientificist” discourse initiated in the Enlightenment and embedded in nineteenth-century positivism. The central figure around which Unamuno intended to build this re-mythicization of the Hispanic world is that of Don Quixote and, especially, around his most distinctive feature, his peculiar madness. For Unamuno, the madness of Alonso Quijano, the Good, is not a psychological fact



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that originates from outside his character – from outside of his body, or from an imbalance of “humors” – but a madness that, like Hamlet’s, “follows a method” or “results from itself.” Alonso Quijano’s “loss of sense” or “madness” occurs by his own choice. It is he who decides to become Don Quixote, and does so following a whole complex strategy of survival. Alonso Quijano cannot bear what his contemporary Spaniards are doing to Spain. He does not agree (as neither does Shakespeare with the England of his time) with the pragmatic and commodity-based logic that is beginning to rise in Spain above the buried ruins of a previous age, one in which the affirmation of humanity was as an unqualified feat in the face of death. He resists the emergence of a Spain whose patron saint would be – according to Unamuno – his own niece, Antonia Quijana, the paragon of sanity and realism, manipulator of priests, barbers, and scholars, and enemy of poetry. This is a figure that, later, in the twentieth century, frightened by the communist threat, would cry out to General Franco for help. Don Quixote’s, that is, Alonso Quijano’s madness, is for Unamuno the result of Quijano’s resistance to the disappearance of a heroic version of Spain, one that had been inspired by the “tragic sense of life” – a Spain that was open to the world and adventure. Alonso Quijano’s “madness” manifests in the construction of an imaginary reality, designed according to the world described in and coded by chivalric literature. Its entire purpose is putting on stage or theatricalizing the real world, the one belonging to his niece, to the priest, to bachelor Carrasco – the real world that surrounds and overwhelms him and whose essence consists, according to Unamuno, of denying the deep reality of Spain, which was a heroic and tragic reality. If Alonso Quijano embarks on this theatricalization, it is because the reality of this “realist” world is painful and unbearable to him, and because only in this way – transforming, de-realizing, and transcending reality into a representation, staging it as a different reality – does the world become again redeemable and livable for him. Alonso Quijano becomes Don Quixote not to flee or to escape reality, but on the contrary to “free it from the spell” that makes it unrecognizable and detestable. The point is not to deny reality, but to remake and revive it, to “undo the

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injustice” done to it every time that it is reduced to the dying reality of Antonia Quijana’s world. This presentation aims to show that one can establish a particular homology between the behavior devised by Cervantes for his character Don Quixote, on the one hand, and a social behavior that is anything but fictitious and that begins in a certain sector of practical life in the Americas during the early seventeenth century, on the other hand. The key to recognizing this homology – and the whole set of suggestions and associations that it carries – is “the baroque,” understood as that “spirit of a historical epoch” and of a “geographic dimension” characteristic of the Mediterranean world in the seventeenth century. This has been deeply and widely studied, at least in its particular manifestation as an artistic and literary reality. Practically all attempts to describe baroque art emphasize, as a defining and distinctive feature, not only a simple “ornamentalism,” but an “ornamentalism” that expresses a profound “theatricality.” When the question arises about what is specific to the decorative-theatrical nature of baroque art – since there are, of course, other non-baroque decorations (such as in Mudéjar art) – I think it is convenient to remember an affirmation that appears in Theodor Adorno’s “Paralipomena” in Aesthetic Theory. The statement is as follows: To point out that the baroque is decorative does not say everything about it. It is decorazione assoluta; as if it had emancipated itself from every purpose … and developed its own law of form. It ceases to decorate anything and is, on the contrary, nothing but decoration.3

Adorno points toward the paradox enclosed in baroque decoration. It is a decoration that emancipates itself from the central element in the work of art, from its essential core, at whose service it must be. Yet, simultaneously, it remains a decoration, a servant, an aid to that center. Without becoming a different or independent work within the basic work, it remains tied to it, as a subtle but radical transformation of it, as a completely different proposal from what it seems at first sight. It only differs from a simple decoration,



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meaning a non-absolute or non-baroque decoration, in the manner that it offers its service, in its mode of performance: an exaggerated way of serving that reshapes the recipient of the service. The absolute manner in which the essential element is decorated when dealing with a baroque work of art is a manner that does not tend to annihilate it, but only to surpass it. It does not deny or destroy it, rather only transcends it. That which affirms and develops its own formal, autonomous law, from within the very core of the central law of the work of art, consists of nothing else than this peculiar mode of decoration, of preparing the essential element to appear in a better way for contemplation. The free-flowing folds that Bernini sculpts, as a seemingly innocent gesture, in the habit worn by the central figure in his famous Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (and later does so in an even more elaborate manner in his Beata Ludovica), introduce into his representation of the mystical experience found in these artworks a sub-coding that allows one to discover, underneath their ascetic narrowness, the sensory, corporeal, or worldly aspect of this experience. Thus, without leaving aside the Christian motif, the Cornaro Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria della Vitoria, where this set of sculptures can be seen, is surreptitiously transfigured into a place of pagan and even anti-Christian aestheticization of life. However, as stated above, the ornamentality of the baroque work of art is only the most obvious aspect of a different trait that characterizes it most decisively. Adorno’s assertion that the baroque is an absolute decoration should be rewritten or paraphrased to mention not only its decorative character, but its absolute theatricality. The statement should then be: To point out that the baroque is decorative does not say everything about it. It is messinscena assoluta [absolute staging], as if it had emancipated itself from every theatrical purpose (that of imitating the world) and created an autonomous world. It ceases to set anything on stage (as an imitation of the world); on the contrary, it is nothing but staging.

The theatricality inherent in the baroque work of art would then be a specifically different kind of theatricality, an absolute theatricality, because its function as a servant to real

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life, which corresponds to the stage as such, has undergone a decisive transformation. Indeed, in the space delimited by the stage, an event has occurred that unfolds autonomously from the central event; yet it does so parasitically, within it, alongside it. It is a different event that is an altogether alternative version of the same event. In baroque art, all artworks – including even architectural works, which are made of long-lasting materials – have the formal consistency of ephemeral art. Baroque artworks are works whose effect on the receiver must be imposed through an immediate and fleeting strike, through a psychological shock. This introductory experience is that of a paradox, that is, of a crisis of perception. The absolute character of ornamental-theatricality – which, as Adorno claims, distinguishes the baroque work of art – becomes manifest in this profound, yet ephemeral, initial disturbance of the receiver’s psychological balance. For example, which of the two worlds, equally perceived as factual by Segismundo, in Life is a Dream by Calderón de la Barca, is the real world and which one is the dream world? Is the real world the one experienced from the tower or the one experienced in the king’s court? The disturbing conviction that in their ambivalence both worlds are equally real, says Baltasar Gracián, making explicit Calderón de la Barca’s idea, is the first insight of a peculiarly baroque wisdom. For baroque art, it is important to emphasize the theatrical, the act of staging, in all kinds of representations, including even those that do not directly need a stage, such as poetic aestheticization. This is because the absolute staging that it intends to achieve is based on the notion that all artists inherently play the role of theatrical performers, of actors. In essence, painters or poets are also theatrical performers, only their work, the result of their act of representation, is spatially and temporally separated from its performance and “survives” it. What is it, then, in regard to baroque art, that makes theatricality, which is present in all artistic works, an absolute theatricality, an absolute staging? The answer to this question is perhaps found in Don Quixote’s unique “melancholic strategy to transcend life.” For him, the imaginary character of a poetically transfigured world – of a world staged with



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the help of chivalric novels – has become, as a lifeworld, a thousand times more necessary and justified than the realworld empire of Philip II, a world ruled by the exchange of gold and sustained by the presence of armed forces. The absolute staging is that in which the purpose of representation – delivering to the real world an imaginary double of itself – is achieved in such a way that it develops its own need, to establish an autonomous “formal law,” capable of altering the representation of the mythical world in daily life to the point of transforming it into a different version of itself. By discovering its own legitimacy, a necessity or “naturalness,” in something so ungrounded, so contingent and even improvised, as a staged world, absolute theatricality attempts to reverse things, to approach the legitimacy of the real world as a questionable legitimacy. It discovers that this world is also essentially theatrical or staged, that it is also ultimately contingent and arbitrary. More than by realizing a “creative copy” of European art or embellishing any imported style, the baroque first appeared and developed initially, in the Americas, as the lower and marginal classes of mestizo cities constructed a social ethos of their own during the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries. The baroque developed in the Americas as the effective legitimacy of daily life implied a transgression against the legitimacy consecrated by the Spanish Crown. This was a curious transgression that, while being radical, did not intend to contest Spanish rule. Based on an informal economic world whose informality took advantage of the formal economy’s narrow limits, the baroque appeared in the Americas first as a strategy for survival, as a method of life spontaneously invented by that one-tenth of the indigenous population that was able to survive its sixteenth-century extermination and that had not been expelled to inhospitable regions. Once the great indigenous civilizations in the Americas had been erased from history, and given the probability that the Conquest, being almost already completely neglected by the Spanish Crown after the sixteenth century, would end up falling apart into a state of barbarism, of absence of civiliz­ ation, the population of Indians that had been integrated as

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servants or lived marginal lives in the colonial city carried out a civilizational feat of the highest order. By the end of the sixteenth century, the first Castilian poet born in Mexico, Francisco de Terrazas, reproached New Spain: Spain: to us a harsh stepmother you have been, a mild and loving mother to the stranger. On him you lavish all your treasures dear, with us you only share your cares and danger. Ungrateful Fatherland, Adieu! With your adopted sons live long and well, while we, consumed by unrelenting spite, departing one by one, from this sad world take flight.4

The reason was that by the end of the century of the Conquest, the Spaniards born in the Americas, the Creoles, felt rejected by Spain. The Spanish treasure fleet and naval convoys with military escort had begun to diminish in volume and frequency; Europe’s interest in American silver had begun to fall; the umbilical cord that united European Europe with American Europe became thinner, depriving the latter of indispensable civilizational nutrients and threatening to leave it adrift. Rescuing social life from the threat of barbarism that came along with Spain’s rejection and abandonment, which haunted not only the Creoles but the entire population of the so-called “New World,” had become a matter of survival. And it was precisely the indigenous part of the population, the descendants of those defeated and subjected during the Spanish Conquest, who spontaneously undertook in practice, without elaborating any plans or projects, the task of reconstructing civilized life in the Americas, which prevented the new civilization imposed by the conquerors from withering. To do so, and facing the manifest impossibility of reconstructing their ancient worlds – so rich and complex, but at the same time so fragile – they re-actualized the greatest resource in the history of human civilization, which is the activity of cultural mestizaje, and thus established what would be the first identifiable commitment of those who would later recognize themselves as Latin Americans. They carried out, not a transfer or prolongation



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of European – Spanish – civilization in the Americas, but a whole repetition or re-creation of it. The urban Indians, uprooted from their original communities, who had come to work in building temples, convents, streets, and mansions, and who had settled in the cities as employees, craftsmen, servants, and unskilled workers, let what remained of their ancient civilizational code after the cataclysm of the Conquest be devoured by the civilizational code of the victorious Europeans. In other words, as the ways of their ancestors became increasingly blurred and distant, the Indians that were indispensable to the existence of the new cities allowed the European mode of sub-coding and particularizing the elemental symbolization in which humanity builds itself by constructing a cosmos within chaos. This is to say: they let the European language – their way of speaking the unspeakable, of giving name and meaning to the elements of the cosmos – be established over their own original languages. But the most important and surprising aspect of all this is that it was the indigenous people themselves who assumed agency or subjectness in the execution of this process. This process was carried out in such a way that what was being reconstructed turned out to be something completely different from the model that it was trying to reconstruct. From it emerged a Western European civilization reworked at the very core of its code precisely by the surviving remnants of that indigenous civilizational code that the former civilization had to assimilate in order to be revived. Playfully pretending to be Europeans, not copying European things or uses, but imitating the European mode of being, pretending to be European themselves, that is, repeating or “staging” the European, the assimilated Indians mounted a very peculiar representation of the European. It was a representation or imitation that at a certain moment, amazingly, ceased to be such and became a reality or new original. This was the very moment when the already-transformed Indians realized that it was a representation they could no longer suspend or entirely stop, and from which, therefore, they could no longer exit. It was an “absolute staging” that had transformed the theater where it was taking place, and exchanged the reality of the audience with that of the actors.

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In carrying out this “absolute staging,” this baroque representation, the Indians who made mestizos of the Europeans while also making mestizos of themselves came to join all those human beings who intended at that time to build for themselves a properly modern identity on the basis of the capitalist version of modernity. And it came to join specifically one of those attempts to build a modern identity that appeared at the end of the fifteenth century in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula, which we know as the “baroque ethos.” In effect, the indigenous acceptance of a foreign civilizational form – an acceptance that would not only transform but also reshape it – followed the same peculiar baroque strategy adopted by certain other societies of the same era for internalizing capitalist modernity, which imposed upon them the sacrifice of the natural form of life – and of the use-values of its world – for the sake of the accumulation of capitalist wealth. Just as the baroque version of the modern human accepted this sacrifice by turning it into a second-degree vindication of concrete life and its goods, so did American mestizos accept a sacrifice of their own: in sacrificing their ancient civilizational form by building a new civilization, they too found a means of vindicating their past. Unlike Alonso Quijano’s staging of himself as Don Quixote, which he commits when he imaginatively transfigures the historical misery of his world in order to survive in it, the urban American Indians’ staging of a dream world – of that European world, so strange to them, yet also capable of saving them from their misery – does not come to an end. They do not awaken from their dream; they do not return to “good sense”; they do not “fall into the abyss of reason” or “die at the sanity of life,” as Unamuno says that Alonso Quijano does when renouncing Don Quixote on the day of his death. The urban Indians do not return from the other reproduced, represented world, but remain there and sink further into it, slowly transforming it into their real world. This dream world is, moreover, a representation within which the “Creole Spaniards” were born, with all the “splendors and miseries” of the colonial world, which were manifested so richly, acutely, and exquisitely in its art and literature, and within which we, the Latin Americans of today, after so many centuries, still find ourselves.



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Like Don Quixote’s “madness,” the staging elaborated by the Indians was and continues to be, according to Adorno’s definition of the baroque, an “absolute staging.” The Latin American world, floating up in the air, or, in other words, contingent and without foundation in any “natural” or ancestral identity, and improvised by those Indians defeated and subject to life in the cities of Mesoamerica and the Andes since the beginning of the seventeenth century, is a fully modern world; it was born with capitalist modernity and developed within one of its modalities. The identity affirmed in the Latin American world is an identity that vindicates mestizaje as the universal and concrete mode of human existence. It gathers and multiplies every possible identity, as long as, in defending its commitment to self-affirmation, it does not set as a condition of its own culture a closure to other foreign commitments, a rejection – a hostile or simply blind denial – of other different identities.

Guadalupanismo and the baroque ethos in the Americas Historians of daily life, distrustful of documents and happy to decipher traces, increasingly prefer an indexical history because, again and again, they encounter a far-from-innocent discrepancy between what an era says it is and what it actually is, between what it formally intends to do and what it actually does, even if it does so informally. No one doubts, for example, that economic and political life in modern states is a profane life in which the validity of the supernatural, miraculous, or sacred, if it has not been expelled, or eliminated completely, has been systematically neutralized or put in parentheses. Only certain indications of a particular fetishism led Marx in the nineteenth century to reveal the central function of the supernatural or miraculous in economic life and the deeply religious character (not in the archaic but in the modern sense) of capitalist society. When Pope John Paul II exclaimed in one of his many visits to Mexico, “Mexico, semper fidelis,” he did nothing but reiterate an “official” truth a thousand times evident: the religion of the Mexican people is the Catholic, Apostolic, and

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Roman religion. Its dogmas of faith, doctrine, rituals, and ecclesiastical organization have an unquestionable validity and vitality in Mexico, despite certain alarming statistical data that shows these factors currently somewhat diminishing. However, it is enough to approach the daily religious practices of Mexican Catholic believers to distinguish not only a discrepancy but an often abysmal distance between what is formally considered as Mexican Catholicism – that which the Pope welcomed – and the Catholicism practiced informally but effectively by Mexican believers. This is, furthermore, clear when considering the celebration that takes place at the Tepeyac Basilica, the Virgin of Guadalupe’s sanctuary, every year on December 12. As has been said many times, Mexican Catholicism is a special kind of Catholicism, a Catholicism that is not only “Marian” but “Guadalupan.” And, if one looks carefully, it is essential to add that the “Guadalupan” quality of this Catholicism does not seem to bring only a superficial, idiosyncratic, and therefore harmless alteration of dominant Catholicism. It seems to consist not only of a peculiar use of the orthodox Catholic code that, despite certain divergences, fundamentally leaves it intact. On the contrary, it seems to consist of a use of this code that implies the introduction of strong features of a substantial and radical – though also reprehensible – form of “idolatry.” This brings with it the configuration of an alternative Catholicism “that does not dare to say its name” (or that, for its own sake, does not want to say it). *** Guadalupan Catholicism is an overly Marian Catholicism that carries such a peculiar form of idolatry at its core. The practice of the Marian cult implies, in fact, a negation of the monotheistic synthesis in the dogma of the Holy Trinity, of the One and Triune God. This is a synthesis it accepts only in a formal or non-internalized way. What it really accepts in its place is in the order of a multipolar pantheon: Mary is a godly figure, as is Jesus Christ, as is God the Father and the Holy Ghost, and as are so many other major and minor



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saints. It is a “polytheistic” constellation of changing configuration according to places and times of worship. On the cusp or in the depths of the abstract or incorporeal supernatural sphere, so high or far away that it is practically unreachable – and that it therefore only “counts” on earth in the last instance, in cataclysmic situations – is God the Father, accompanied by the Holy Ghost. On a central plane, in a concrete intermediate position, is the Savior, Jesus Christ. On the lowest plane, or the one closest to mortals, which in the formal hierarchy is the least supernatural – although, informally, it really is the most decisive because it is in effective touch with human beings – there is Mary, the “mother of God” and also “Our Mother.” In the midst and in direct contact with human beings, there unfolds the whole constellation of major and minor saints, of blessed and exemplary souls, endowed with a concrete supernatural quality. With their limited power, these figures fulfill the function of angels, as they listen to people’s urgent requests for miraculous help and process the most important ones of them toward higher, more subtle and impenetrable levels. The Christian heaven or pantheon is significantly re-centered in Marian Catholicism. The determining figure, meaning the dominant one, has become the Virgin Mary, even if this is not in absolute terms like God the Father, but at least in “exceptional” terms. She stands as the central goddess for the duration of an indefinite “juncture,” which ultimately results in a permanent state; Mary is the “Empress of Heaven, daughter of the Eternal Father.” The purpose of my intervention in this colloquium is to argue that the baroque identity, which a large part of the Latin American population has assumed over a considerable period of its history, and has been manifest not only in its magnificent works of art and literature, but above all in its linguistic uses and in its forms of daily life and politics, has its origin in the sixteenth century, in a form of behavior spontaneously invented by the Indians who survived in the new cities, after their parents were defeated in the American Conquest by Iberian Europe. This form of behavior originated mainly in Mexico and Peru, and then consolidated and spread throughout the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

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In further detail, I would like to insist on the idea that this baroque form of behavior – which has Malintzin, Cortes’s translator, as a precursor – first appeared in a clearly distinguishable manner in that particular exaggeration of the Marian Catholic cult found specifically in the Guadalupanismo of mestizo Indians and of Mexican Creoles since the sixteenth century. *** Understandably, the discussion around Guadalupan religiosity has led both within and outside of Mexico to an immense production of books and articles, to a copious bibliography that can increasingly fill more shelves, even entire libraries. I would like to address here only two of these texts, the first and the up-until-now last of the most important ones in this already immeasurable literature. I am referring, of course, to the Nican Mopohua, by the sixteenthcentury Indian Antonio Valeriano, and to Destierro de sombras [Exile of Shadows], by the twentieth-century Creole Edmundo O’Gorman. The first piece of Guadalupan literature is the brief and delicate account of the Virgin Mary’s appearance to the macehual Indian Juan Diego. This text, known as the Nican Mopohua (Here it is Told), was written in 1556, as is now widely recognized, by Antonio Valeriano, an educated Indian – although he was not a pilli or of noble birth – in the famous Colegio de Tlatelolco. Valeriano was also an outstanding disciple of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, author of the great General History of the Things of New Spain.5 Following Miguel León-Portilla,6 we can say that the Nican Mopohua presents something like four chapters. The initial chapter recounts the first apparition of the Virgin Mary to Juan Diego and reproduces the first dialogue between the two, in which she makes him her messenger to communicate to the religious authorities her desire to have a sanctuary on the Tepeyac Hill. It also tells of his failure in his first approach to Zumárraga, the “ruler of the priests.” The following chapter refers to Juan Diego’s second encounter with the Virgin where he communicates his failure, which he attributes to his own



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humbleness, and asks her to send in his place someone of worth and distinction. Instead, the Virgin insists that her will is for him – a humble Indian, and not anyone of higher rank – to be her ambassador and orders him to return to the bishop. The third chapter tells the second encounter of Juan Diego with Bishop Zumárraga and of his demand for proof of the Virgin’s appearance and volition. It also reproduces the third exchange between the Virgin and Juan Diego, whom she comforts by healing his seriously ill uncle, and then sends back to San Francisco, carrying a mantle full of impossible flowers as proof of her miraculous nature. The last chapter narrates the fulfillment of the Virgin’s order “and what happens then in the palace of the bishop: the final dialogues and an event described as an ending, the wonder of the image of the Virgin, left by the flowers on Juan Diego’s mantle.”7 There are many admirable and interesting aspects and details of Valeriano’s beautiful text, but out of all of them I would just like to draw attention to the following four. First, there is the Virgin Mary’s seemingly “capricious” desire to appear precisely where Tonantzin’s place of worship had previously been, and to insist that it be there, “at the top of the little Tepeyac Hill,” where her sanctuary be built – her “little temple,” as she calls it. Second, there is her emphatically significant decision to appear to a macehual Indian, Juan Diego, a poor and simple believer, newly converted to Christianity, and to choose him as her messenger, and not a “known, revered, honored” member of the indigenous nobility, Christianized for convenience. There is no lack of people of rank among my servants, among my messengers, whom I can entrust to take my breath, my word. But it is very necessary (precise in every point) that you go, that through your mediation be fulfilled (that thanks to you be realized) my desire, my will.8

Third, we have the Virgin’s description of herself as a “compassionate mother” of natives and Spaniards, “of all the men who live together in this land,” as consoler of the afflicted (consolatrix afflictorum), benefactor, and righter of wrongs (virgo potens).

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Fourth, there is her decision to miraculously portray herself as an image in Juan Diego’s mantle, having as witness the new Franciscan bishop, Juan de Zumárraga. And he held out his white mantle, in which there were the flowers. And just as all the different precious flowers, like those from Castile, fell to the ground, there in his mantle was left the sign: there appeared the precious image of the perfectly virgin Holy Mary, Mother of God, just as she is now found, where she shelters herself, in her precious little house, in her little temple, in Tepeyácac, called Guadalupe.9

Among all the details of the story, it is worth highlighting the metaphorical burden that is clearly implied in the mention of the summit of Tepeyac Hill – the place of the Virgin’s apparition – as a very special land, where “flowers, like those from Castile,” despite being foreign, are capable of blooming out of season, where something European – as the metaphor would suggest – despite all inconveniences, can be reborn in its entirety. Twenty years after the fall of Tenochtitlán, says O’Gorman, the indigenous people had renewed “in all their idolatrous splendor, the ancient custom of their regular pilgrimage from distant lands to the hill of Tepeyac.”10 However, this was a pilgrimage that they did not do any more, as before, to venerate Tonantzin, but to venerate the Virgin Mary instead. What had happened? The indigenous people had been converted or had converted themselves to Christianity – to a Christianity that they pretended to practice in an orthodox way but that could not hide the survival of different “idolatrous” elements. Pure, authentic, or orthodox Christianity was incompatible with the Indians’ real life both in the city and in the countryside. Adopting Christianity implied, paradoxically, being rejected immediately by it, condemned to eternal suffering as punishment for their inability to practice it properly. In fact, that form of real life was for them unlivable without recurring to any technical element of their own, without cultivating ancestral customs and practices even at a low level, without insisting on a minimum of their own identity. To insist on any of these elements, in turn, amounted



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to recalcitrant fidelity to “idolatry” and thus carried with it mortal sin. However, to overcome this dramatic dilemma, for them to get rid of that minimum identity, to become pure Christians, implied something like a “replacement of the soul,” a fact that could only be achieved by passing through a transitory state of “emptiness of the soul,” by a kind of death. It implied ceasing to be human, to being incapacitated enough not to even be able to freely accept and adopt Christianity. For the Indians, to become Christian (which was a condition of their physical survival) did not mean to disappear or die as an American and be replaced by the copy of a European, but to be able to become European without ceasing to be American. This involved turning themselves into Spaniards and carrying out a structural transformation of that same Christianity that circumstances compelled them to internalize. They had to re-create Christianity by making it a version of itself capable of accepting them as human beings that, although defeated and subjugated, could concretely identify themselves with their defeat. They had to remake it as a kind of Christianity that positively integrated their obligatory religious self-negation. For this reason, it can be said that the Christianity of the newly converted macehual Indians was called to actualize itself as an emphatically Marian Christianity. It had to leave intact, in the deepest and most distant plane in Heaven, the One and Triune God in the orthodox scheme of the Catholic myth – whose power would easily expel them to hell. It had to be a kind of Christianity whose religiosity remained on a lower celestial plane, absorbing all its faith and ritual observance. This more accessible celestial plane presupposed the first and more esoteric plane, but it relativized it so that certain mortal sins – which, above all, included the one of fidelity to a minimum of non-Western identity – could be disguised or “put in parentheses” in the balance of the Last Judgment. It is on this closer and less demanding celestial plane or sphere that the Virgin Mary reigns. It is difficult to find a clearer example of baroque behavior extending across Latin American societies since the seventeenth century than this one: an alteration of Christian

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religiosity carried out by Guadalupan Indians in sixteenthcentury Mexico. Indeed, we can locate – following traces left behind by Theodor W. Adorno – the essence of the baroque in the “absolute theatricality” of a representation, in the character of those representations of the world that dramatize it with such force that its virtual “reality” or imaginary validity becomes comparable to its “real” reality or objective validity. And we can do so by considering not only the works of art recognized as baroque, in which “absolute theatricality” is evident, but also the baroque behavior that extended from the South across Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century – the so-called period of “Counter-Reformation.” The earthly life of the human being, defined by the established order – Christianity – as an ascent to salvation, as a life endowed with positive meaning, has been lived by many Christians skeptical of the modern age in a baroque manner. Forced by their circumstances, they have lived life as if it were in fact what their definition of it says. They live a representation of that life on the theatrum mundi, only, in doing so, they live it so deeply that they turn it into an “absolute representation” within which a different and autonomous sense of life emerges. Before the indigenous people of the Americas who had integrated into the city life of the Iberian conquerors started in the seventeenth century to reconstruct, in their own manner, European civilization (a spontaneous and informal project in which they engaged American Spaniards), by the sixteenth century they had already re-functionalized European-ness through baroque behavior. They had reinvented Catholic Christianity by transferring it to a representation or an “absolute staging,” that of Guadalupan Catholicism, which allowed them to lose themselves while at the same time also closing the door on the possibility of returning to any form of orthodox and pure Catholicism of “real life.” In the seventeenth century, the Jesuit theologians gathered by David Brading in his edition of Siete sermones guadalupanos [Seven Guadalupan Sermons]11 took this theological commotion initiated in practice by the macehuales for themselves and led it to delirious extremes. In 1531, both accepting and at the same time exceeding Fray Juan of



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Zumárraga’s evangelization project, they replaced certain elements of worship of their ancient gods with certain elements of worship of the peculiar Christian gods that had been rebuilt. It is not necessary to praise or embellish the magnitude and importance of the historical fact at stake in the mestizaje of human identities favored by the baroque ethos, which developed in the practical life of lower and marginal classes of American cities during colonial times, and of which Guadalupanism is an early and clear example. The modern quality of civilized life would be unthinkable without that act of emancipation from identitarian interpenetration started then by American Indians. A great accomplishment made by Edmundo O’Gorman – the most original and acute historian of the origins of Guadalupanism – was recognizing the occurrence of this historic novum in the Americas after the Iberian Conquest. This is an event that, as he acknowledges, “came to enrich the stage of universal history” with the introduction of a “new modality” of human being, of a modern humanity with its own historical subject.12 If there is any error in his historical account, it lies in the location and identification that he makes of the bearer of that new historical subjectness. According to O’Gorman, it is found in the figure of the “Creole from New Spain.” In my opinion, he is mistaken in identifying him as the historical figure in which this new subjectness was found: he mistakes it for that figure of which it is only a reflection, for the original figure. O’Gorman recognizes it in the historical identity of the American Spaniard and not in that which it was in reality, in the identity of the selfSpanishized American [del americano auto-españolizado]: that of the Indians who survived the catastrophe of the Conquest and, by practicing an identitarian form of mestizaje, knew how to remake themselves in the midst of the Spanish city. It is the new “historical” identity of these mestizo Indians that, mimicking the historical identity of the Spanish Americans, gave rise to the figure of the “Creole,” to that “new Adam” that Professor O’Gorman prefers to place in their stead. O’Gorman focuses his attention on how the Spaniards manipulated, in multiple different ways, the indigenous

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population’s recent Christian faith; he disregards, however, their faith as such. He does not see in it, in this “incipient indigenous Guadalupanismo,” as he calls it,13 any subjectual exercise on behalf of the indigenous people, any agential act performed on their part. He only considers it as material for an act of manipulation, of which, of course, only the Spaniards, in their nascent Creole version, could have been the subjects. The indigenous population’s faith served as material, first, for the different evangelizing orders interested in a massive and hasty Christianization, as exemplified by Fray Zumárraga (1531); then, twenty-five years later, as material for the Creole Spanish bishops, as exemplified by Archbishop Montúfar (1556), in his conspiracy to unify the Mexican Church and to, by the way, also keep the tithes for himself. *** By the beginning of the seventeenth century, as Serge Gruzinski observes,14 “idolatry” was not an object of major concern for the Spanish authorities. It did not need to be, because the urban Indians, who were the population they were in contact with and that interested them, did not present any resistance directly opposed to Catholic religiosity. The degree of “idolatry” visible in their Catholicism did not exceed the level that was usual in Mediterranean Catholic communities, which had been present there as a result of pagan resistance to Christianization. We should also bear in mind, however, that the Indians’ resistance to Christianization in the sixteenth century was not only direct or open – as in the case of the “lineage idols” or tlapialli, the tonalli (introductory baptism), or the ticitl or shamans. It was not only a resistance aimed at counterConquest or at mestizaje by absorption of the Other, the European, but it was also an indirect or hidden resistance, aimed at “trans-Conquest” or at mestizaje by infiltration of the European Other. This resistance, which protects one’s own identity by distilling it and injecting it into the identity accepted as valid, is that which we find in the indigenous creation of Guadalupanism. A resistance, a “deaf rebelliousness,” as



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O’Gorman calls it, which he himself diminishes, however, by interpreting it only as the result of the “powerful incentive” that was the “feeling of prejudice” that indigenous people experienced “when they were excluded from the practices and the religious pomp of the Spaniards, in which they wished to participate.”15 *** In 1556, Fray Francisco de Bustamante delivered a sermon, which caused great scandal both in the audience and the city, against the growing, according to him, idolatrous devotion to the image of Guadalupe in Tepeyac, where she was “worshiped as if she were God,” both by natives and Spaniards, such as the famous Spanish “stockbreeder” whom she had miraculously healed. Archbishop Montúfar took advantage of this scandal to promote the “Information of 1556,” whose advocate, Juan de Salazar, concluded with the consideration that it was best to censor Bustamante. And, this was not because Guadalupan devotion, which had already significantly spread, was growing disproportionately and relentlessly, but because it could be useful against open, pre-Christian idolatry, which Salazar euphemistically referred to as “excesses that people committed before the Mother of God was venerated in Tepeyac.” Bustamante shared with Sahagún the justified suspicion that there was a conspiracy planned by the Indians. According to Sahagún, Mary should not have been called Tonantzin (“our mother”) – the goddess who, together with Totahtzin, (“our father”), integrates the supreme double god Ometéotl. Rather, she should have been called Teotl Inantzin (“mother of God”). More malicious than for Zumárraga (in 1531), for Sahagún (in 1576), the Guadalupan cult really tried to “palliate idolatry beneath this mistaken name for Tonantzin.” For Bishop Montúfar, however, the only thing that devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe did was to steer the Indians’ religiosity on the right path (of orthodoxy), to “Christianize them.” Although it is also possible that he perceived that this effect of Guadalupan devotion was accompanied by another: it “Indianized” Christianity and invited it to “Creolize” itself.

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Indeed, as Gabriel Zaid writes, it can be said that if in all this “there was conspiracy, it was on behalf of the Indians.”16 They were the ones who propagated the “wonders wrought by an unknown image usurping the title of the ancient and venerated Spanish Guadalupe,” as O’Gorman says.17 But theirs was a curious “conspiracy”; it was practical, not confabulated, and not concocted to appropriate an image, but to concede a goddess in order to create a new one. They stole and appropriated the name and reputation of the Spanish Virgin, but simultaneously alienated in exchange their own goddess, Tonantzin. They did not intend to turn the Spanish Virgin of Guadalupe into the mask of an undying Mexican Tonantzin; they tried to remake the Virgin of Guadalupe with the death of Tonantzin, to have a goddess re-create or revitalize herself by devouring another and absorbing her supernatural energy. It was in that same year of 1556, and surely in connection with the strategy conceived by the archbishop Fray Alonso Montúfar – one going against the interest of Franciscan evangelizers – of “Creolizing” the new Indian-mestizo worship of the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe, that the indigenous author Antonio Valeriano wrote, in tecpilahtolli or high language, the Nican Mopohua. Valeriano did not think, as his teacher did, that this was a simple return to idolatry. He saw the Guadalupan cult as a resource that could be at the service of a new and very special Catholic “orthodoxy.” When writing the narrative of the Virgin Mary’s apparition, he intended to formalize and “tidy up” a process of mestizaje of religious forms that the macehual Indians had used since 1531, when they awarded a miraculous origin to the image that they, together with the evangelist Fray Juan de Zumárraga, saw portrayed on Juan Diego’s mantle – an image that, despite containing hallucinating sketches of colors and figures, was only the casual product of the flowers carried and crushed in the mantle. This image, it is also worth noting, is not the one we know now, since – as O’Gorman shows – the latter, also from 1556, appeared after Juan Diego’s mantle was taken from its shelter and exhibited in the chapel, and the Indian Marcos attempted to repaint the original perhaps on the same cloth or to copy it on another substitute canvas, corrected it and



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enhanced it, and adhered to the Spanish descriptions of the image of Guadalupe. Only due to his master’s resistance in 1567 and the threat of “bending the branch too far” in defense of the new cult, Valeriano withdrew from his project, leaving it for later and for others to realize. He left it, more specifically, to the bachelor Miguel Sánchez in 1648, with his Imagen de la Virgen María, madre de Dios de Guadalupe [Image of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God from Guadalupe], and the chaplain of the Sanctuary, Luis Lasso de la Vega, editor of the Nican Mopohua in 1649. In the Nican Mopohua, two equally baroque projects coincided, both seeking to confront a moment of ontological identity crisis: the basic project carried out by the Indians, who had been orphaned after the annihilation of their world, and the mirror project carried out by Spaniards, who had been expelled from theirs. Therefore it can well be said that, paradoxically, “the first Creole” was precisely an Indian, Antonio Valeriano. This is a “strange contradiction,” which O’Gorman himself explicitly recognizes,18 but which, in his Creole unilateralism, he cannot explain.

11 The Mexican ’68 and its City

We are all undesirables!1 To understand what happened in the 1960s in Europe and culminated in Paris, in “May ’68,” it is important to take into account a determining factor in the history of that continent: the “Americanization” of its modernity, a phenomenon that had been happening since the beginning of the twentieth century. Yet it was only after the catastrophe of fascism and World War II, with the economic recovery being financed by the United States, that it could finally manifest itself in an open and direct, even folkloric way (with jeans, chewing gum, and everything else). In the post-war period and starting with the European Recovery Plan (the Marshall Plan), Europe entered into a process of reconstruction in which it restored, through substantial rebuilding, its schemes for self-understanding, its scales and priorities, its tastes and values. All this was carried out under the decisive influence in its social and formal life of the uses and customs that came to it from the United States. The European version of modernization was considered by Europeans themselves as a perhaps admirable but unsuccessful attempt that had ended without fully completing its task. Europeans recognized that their civilizational proposal had lost the strength it had a century earlier,



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weakened precisely under the weight of those identitarian and institutional instruments that it developed to exercise it: that they themselves had lost their originality in their creation of cultural forms. An unconditional admiration was then imposed on them by their “liberators” – the overseas Europeans – to whom they attributed virtues of all kinds, all of which were condensed in the “American spirit,” which they perceived primarily and fundamentally as a “practical spirit.” Europeans looked toward themselves and found themselves obstructed by their own past. They considered themselves to be excessively formal, too demanding in certain conditions of production and consumption, which in light of the pragmatism of the “American way of life” turned out to be totally dispensable, even ridiculous. In the 1950s, “World War III,” which had begun before World War II ended, had already adopted the deceptive appearance of a “peaceful” or “Cold War.” The American and European economies were apparently reconfigured as “peace-time economies,” after having operated for several years as “war-time economies.” The entire industrial system was reconstituted to start a new great cycle of growth on the technical foundation that had been developed by the war industry. The Marshall Plan came to finance this transformation in the European economy, especially in Germany, and allowed something unknown until then to happen: something like a sustainable level of underemployment of the whole regional workforce. This level of underemployment was subsidized of course by the European and US exploitation of the rest of the world, which was carried out thanks to the technological advantages of their industrial and technical-scientific apparatus. Intimately connected with this cooperative effort in relaunching the economy, something important yet infrequently recognized was exported from the United States to Europe. This was a very peculiar invention, a civilizational device unknown until then in the history of European modernity. In the 1950s and 1960s, first in the United States and then in Europe – and later in the rest of the “Western world” – an entire age group within the set of categories that were traditionally recognized in individual life was introduced: the age of “adolescence” or “adolescent youth.” In modern Europe

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(in contrast to medieval Europe) nothing such as a proper and specifically juvenile age had ever existed before. This was a civilizational innovation introduced by “American” modernity in the post-war period of the twentieth century. It was an innovation that went beyond the traditional productivist idea that prevailed in European modernity, according to which the years of youth should be years of rapid transition, a period of vertiginous initiation. The young man was treated like a child who has grown too much and who has to quickly become an adult. He had to leave his status of “provided for” as soon as possible and move on to that of “provider.” Youth had always existed, of course, but not by itself, rather as a mode of being in some way as hybrid and unnecessary, even anomalous: a legendary mode of being characteristic only of the nobility. It was in the 1950s and 1960s that this other idea arose, according to which youth had to be accepted and recognized as a specific age in the life of every single human being. During a period of five or six years, without being a “grown-up” child or an “immature” adult, the human being was called simply “young.” It was a civilizational device that was introduced, not to emancipate the youth, but to put it at the service of a task specially designed for it. Indeed, bourgeois society recognized the specificity of this period of life by situating it in regard to certain ethical-psychological traits: irreverence, iconoclasm, radical innovation; that attitude, as is often said, of the “revolutionary that we all are when we are twenty years old, but that we stop being when life forces us to settle down.” If young people are revolutionaries it is because they are young, and that revolutionary-youthful character is a highly valuable trait because, after all, everything that once was revolution, rebellion, contestation, and iconoclasm can easily and quickly become a purifying rational innovation, useful for maintaining and strengthening the continuity of established social life. The irreverence that characterizes young people is an expression of their freedom. Young people are uncompromising, ludic beings, who do not have to think twice about their actions since they have no ties, no special considerations of respect for whatever may pose an obstacle to their



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purposes; they can freely launch themselves to achieve them. And it was precisely this irreverence that could be useful for the progress of bourgeois society. In this brief stage of transition, the youth could develop its “revolutionary” characteristics, which is a positive means for updating social customs and which can serve to encourage progress in an Enlightenment sense. Bourgeois society invented the age of youth to have an instrument to use in the century-old process of enlightened modernization, the struggle against darkness, against the survival of the past and the traditions that impeded progress with their irrationality. Youth became both an instrument and a protagonist in this struggle against darkness. It was interpreted as the carrier of the Enlightenment, of war against all those old and cumbersome forms that hindered the free deployment of bourgeois life, especially in Europe. For Europe, which, thanks to the power of the United States, had just been rid of its dysfunctional member, Nazi Germany, this new advance in the path of the Enlightenment also meant receiving and interiorizing the specifically “American” modality of modernity, that modality of unfettered progressivism, unrestrained practicalism, and pragmatic egalitarianism. It was about advancing in the process of “disenchanting” the world, that which Max Weber spoke of: in other words, of eliminating the remaining traits of magical life, of everything for which the human being invoked or resorted to extra-human or supernatural intervention. Everything that still held the world as “enchanted” had to be eliminated, and young Europeans, “American”-style innovators, were in charge of fulfilling this task. The decade of the 1960s should have been the years that belonged to this “youth,” but the calculations failed: it never did. The decade of the 1960s in Europe was the time of the “rebels without a cause.” First, in Berlin, in 1967, and a year later, in 1968, in Paris, an uncalculated phenomenon took place in Europe that did not seem natural in regard to the ideal process set up for invented youth to serve as an instrument of progress in the reconsolidation of modern society in its established form. These young people who

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had been provided for, who did not yet need to work, who could devote their time to study for several years without any pressure, who had everything at home and money in their pockets, who could enjoy life; these young people who had no reason to rebel … then rebelled. Flashes emerged of a collective youth that says “no!” to its parents and to the society that supports it and that plans to include it in its project of capitalist progress. Now, what was the intimate core of this rebellious youth that appeared in the second half of the 1960s in Europe? Why did these young people, who did not have a reason to rebel, do so during those years? Were they really “rebels without a cause”? They rebelled, first of all, because they perceived that this tolerance from their parents, from bourgeois society, to allow them to live their lives freely was nothing other than a kind of “repressive tolerance.” This was the way that Herbert Marcuse, one of the most important thinkers of the Frankfurt School, who survived Nazism in California, thought about it. Young people perceived that, in fact, beneath this benevolent tolerance there was a principle of repression. Society allowed them to live as “young people,” but did so with a “second intention”: it was preparing them to be “integrated into the system.” It was using that freedom for its own purposes, and these purposed consisted of, as Luchino Visconti portrayed in Lampedusa’s The Leopard, “changing everything so that everything remains the same.” The youth experienced this society as practicing this “leopardism”: as leading them to become “executioners of their own sacrifice.” They felt immolated by their parents, who had treated them so well because they were turning them into destroyers of themselves, of their own youth, of their freedom: into traitors to this freedom that supposedly characterized them. That perception that the youth, while being tolerated, was also being repressed, instrumentalized for purposes that had nothing to do with what they could discover in their freedom, served as a background for the rebellion of young Europeans. Separately, let us not forget that the youth of the 1960s were the children of veterans of World War II, of those soldiers who ended up not believing themselves to be the heroes they once claimed to be, because they hid a bad



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conscience. They knew that their role in the war was not as brave or as clean as the official story told it. They had the feeling that somehow, when they were not repressing other people, they were at least passive collaborators with the Nazi regime they apparently fought against. The bad conscience visible in the attitude of these parents – the parents of the youth that took to the streets in Berlin or Paris – contributed to making the intentions of bourgeois society seem at least suspicious to them. In Berlin, the youth that perceived the betrayal and self-repression to which their own parents were inducing them articulated their perception in consideration of certain theorems that came from the Marxist theorists of the 1920s and 1930s and from certain survivors of the Nazi massacre, like Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse. In Paris, the great theoretical figure that fulfilled this function was Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher of freedom. Sartre stated that the fundamental element in a human being is precisely his ability to assume the determinations of the world within which he must exist, to base his own existence on them, always choosing between incompatible options. The human being is determined on all sides, but he is free in the sense that he is capable of assuming those determinations and of making decisions in reference to them. This was the idea that guided the experience that these young people had of certain determinations that weighed on them and that oriented them toward self-sacrifice. Sartre further affirmed that freedom can only be such if it is affirmed as freedom for solidarity, as freedom “engaged” with concrete life, with others, with the emancipation of society. Sartre, a great traitor to the bourgeoisie, guided the youth and gave them words to formulate that perception of what their parents did with them, that basic suspicion that they were being used for ends that contradicted freedom. This is why the youth also felt great admiration for all those events, human beings, and places in the world, especially in the Third World, in which they observed that this freedom, which they identified with, was manifesting itself or taking place. China, Cuba, and especially Vietnam were the countries in which for them that freedom could be seen in action.

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The European youth had immense admiration for what happened in these liberation struggles in the Third World. This admiration was further guided by Sartre’s idea that these struggles were connected with their own individual life experience. There was, then, this double connection between their own experience and the internationalist recognition that outside Berlin or Paris it was possible to detect another kind of freedom, different from the one put to use as a mere instrument of capitalist progress. *** This is how young Europeans began a “revolution” that apparently “had no cause.” This “revolution” was ludic, no doubt, because they did not experience the terrible reasons that the nineteenth-century proletarians had for rising up and initiating the communist revolutionary movement. The young Europeans were moved by more subtle, more imperceptible reasons, which concerned the most fundamental aspects of the human condition and its freedom from work. They translated these reasons into a ludic, freely creative spirit, pointing to goals that the workers’ movement could not address given the historical conditions of their fight. They wanted to introduce a moment of irresponsibility, of play, of gratuitous invention in the process of world revolution. This was a process that, in the pseudo-revolutionary perspective of the Third International, of the communist parties, and of that “Marxist” tradition that was expressly unauthorized by Marx himself, had to be a serious, gray, and disciplined process, similar to the industrial process used by capital, very little up for games and experiments. The young people of the European ’68 tried to transfer this youthful playfulness to the workers’ movement; they tried in some way to carry out a recreational revolution that would import to Europe the revolutionary freshness that they perceived as the true revolution of their time, which for them was that of the Third World. In the mid-1960s, the youth was at a crossroads, about to decide if they were going to integrate themselves into bourgeois life or not. This was the topic of personal



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conversations. The destiny of all young people was at stake. They asked themselves: “What am I going to do, what is my life going to be like in the coming years, if I want to stay connected with the revolutionary events of all those social, economic and political forces that are at stake?” This was the crossroads, the moment of decision for a youth that had not yet been integrated and that refused to pass on to the adulthood that was prepared for them. At that time, in the mid-1960s, the possibility of being or not being integrated into bourgeois society seemed to be at stake in the existence of every young person. For the youth, integrating themselves into the workforce, as requested by their parents, implied entering and collaborating in the process of the capitalist rearrangement of European modernity. It implied recognizing that the capitalist system was detestable, not for just being unjust, but also old: that what was necessary was to update the capitalist system, to improve it. If one integrated oneself and undertook a “long march” through the institutions, one was bringing new blood into the reformed capitalist system. But first and foremost, “integrating oneself” implied accepting and adopting the main lesson and heritage of World War II in the political dimension of social life. And this lesson or inheritance consisted in preemptively abstaining from any of those political issues whose questioning could lead societies and Western democracies to terrible experiences such as the recent war. This was an abstention that amounted to a fundamental self-limitation or self-censorship from politics and which was postulated as an untouchable dogma. It was an unquestionable principle that came to institutionalize the alienating substitution that in fact makes capital the real subject acting underneath “popular sovereignty.” The sovereignty of democratic states was thus defined by a limit not difficult to distinguish: a limit that deprived it of authority to decide on major political issues, such as the change of economic regime or production. Western European modern democracy made its self-limitation official in the post-war period. There were certain problems that did not fall within its competence. It was not authorized, for example, to decide either “yes” or “no” on the revolution. It was an abstention (and also

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an expression of obedience and poverty) from sovereign democracy, which was justified by the lesson left by World War II: to consider certain radical problems ineluctably leads to totalitarianism, be it a right-wing totalitarianism like fascism and Nazism, or a left-wing totalitarianism such as Stalinist “communism.” The best way to avoid falling into the danger of totalitarianism was to abstain from entering into this issue. The modern capitalist state is untouchable; the capitalist mode of production is something natural, which cannot even be submitted for consideration, which cannot be discussed in any parliament. No one can question or bring into question the mode of production of a society. This is not the job of the people. It is not a matter of the demos; it is above the republic. The new modern republic has inevitably to adopt this self-diminishment. The rebellion of the youth of ’68 in Europe had a foundation. They perceived this self-limitation of democratic sovereignty, of the scope of political life. They realized that this self-limitation mutilated everything through which they could exercise their freedom, mutilated freedom in general. They realized that this abstention, in favor of apoliticality, was the best proof of capitalist alienation, and they rebelled against it. They went out into the streets and squares of what should have been modern democracy to actualize, through the festiveness of discourse, of political language, a dimension of the political that had been closed by European bourgeois society, remodeled in an “American” style. This self-limitation of Western democracy was perceived – especially in Berlin, by Rudi Dutschke, in 1967, and in Paris, by the speakers of the Mutualité, in 1968 – as a phenomenon of self-censorship and decadence of political discourse, and was combated as such. Political discourse was self-censored from the beginning: it cannot, nor should it, think or say certain things. Rational reflection on public affairs, on res publica, was being limited and repressed, and the student rebellion of the late 1960s came to disobey this self-limitation and self-repression. And this was perhaps the most important aspect of that student movement: its capacity to fight against the current, to disobey this self-limitation of Western democratic politics and this self-censorship in political discourse that had been imposed for half a century.



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The youth did something they should not have done, that nobody should do. They resumed political discourse and took pleasure in the use of the most forbidden concept, the most censored word: the concept and the word “revolution.” The youth of ’68 had the word “revolution” in their mouths. They used that term for all purposes, which was precisely the one that should not have been pronounced, because, as experience showed, it led to totalitarianism, to the denial of democracy, not to mention, as its ultimate consequences, to war and destruction. The youth movement of ’68 contested – perhaps already too late – this self-limitation of political life that, under the name of the “reconstruction of democracy,” contemporary society has been suffering from ever since. The youth of ’68 dreamed that the revolutionary position they adopted would turn into action. For each of these young people, the playfulness of their protests expressed that desire. They knew that their attitude was a revolutionary “pose,” that in their mouths the meaning of the word “revolution” did not have the foundation of a social force capable of sustaining it. They knew that it was just a gesture, but they used it, because they believed or dreamed that this gesture could be transfigured into action. In my opinion, this type of concern is what was at stake at the deepest political and cultural level of the youth movement of the 1960s in Europe. *** I would not like to end this talk without also commenting on what happened during that short period of the Mexican ’68, which covered two months and a week, from July 26 to October 2. The rebellion of Mexican youth that then took place undoubtedly connects with that of their contemporaries in Berlin, Paris, and California; it belonged to the movement of rebels seemingly without a cause. But it differed from them by a decisive fact: the Mexican rebellion took place within an authoritarian state. The power of the movement of ’68 outside of Mexico was more symbolic than real; in Mexico it was more real than symbolic. This is due to the fact that in a state like the Mexican one during the six years

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of Díaz Ordaz’s presidency, when institutions had their entire legitimacy at stake in the greater or lesser negotiating or “political” capacity of the president, even the most minor acts of disobedience could acquire a relatively high power. And the Mexican student movement was not properly an act of minor disobedience. Its power was real, and so its forceful oppression had to be real as well. What the ’68 movement tried to do in that short period of time was to force the Mexican government to respect and reaffirm its self-representation as a democratic state. The student movement dared to ask the government for answers in regard to events that had just happened, such as el bazucazo, an army attack against the door of a public high school on the street of San Ildefonso. It asked for proof that the government did not in fact, as it affirmed before public opinion, identify with that repression, and that it was indeed a democratic government. It tried to force the state to confirm its democratic self-representation or, if it failed to do so, at least to unmask itself as being an oligarchic and repressive state. According to the movement, the state had to respond to this demand: either it ratified itself as an anti-democratic state or it provided clear signs and indications that its democratic claims did have some substance. But the government saw things differently. In a circumstance of exception [circunstancia de excepción], the state could very well appear as a savior and act repressively toward the outside, toward the foreign manipulators who “agitated” the Mexican youth, and also appear firmly democratic toward the inside, toward its society and the self-presentation events that it was preparing, such as hosting the 1968 Olympic games. What in Europe was a severe and brutal scolding of the youth, in Mexico was a blood-filled repression and annihilation: on October 2, in this very same public square, the Plaza de Tlatelolco. What could be festive and symbolic in the First World had to turn out tragically serious and real in the Third World. This was the big difference between what happened in the 1960s in Europe and what happened here. The conditions were different. In Europe, the state had a lot of room for action; not here. Here the state was under pressure for its lack of legitimacy, lost in its own contradictions, so the challenge that young people in Mexico directed



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toward the state became much more dangerous than the one young Europeans directed toward it. *** I would like to make two points that may help explain why the Mexican student movement was a movement that belonged to Mexico City as such – that it belonged and was original to it, at a time when it had not yet been replaced by the Federal District. The movement of ’68 was not just a student movement. As we know from so many narrative accounts and documents, it was a movement ignited by the population of Mexico City. It was a student movement and also a citizen movement, in the sense that it is only conceivable as belonging to the population that was committed to what happened to its city, Mexico City. The city felt itself involved in what young people were doing; it perceived that there was some relationship, if perhaps not very clear or very precise, of deep affinity between its own dreams, desires, or even resentments and longings for revenge, and what young people were doing. The movement of ’68 took place in a city that was severely affected by the governmental measures of the previous decade. Mexico City citizens felt aggrieved, hurt by those measures. Their wounds were there, still acting in the depths of people’s behavior, even though the citizens were not able to express themselves openly, or formulate them in words, in projects, or in political platforms. This explains the popularity immediately reached by the ’68 student movement in Mexico City. It was a movement that finally came to challenge the government’s behavior, which had mistreated its citizens. At the end of the 1950s – with intentions similar to those that Haussmann had in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, which were to eliminate the possible sites of resistance within popular neighborhoods and to destroy them, to open up large modern avenues instead – Ernesto P. Uruchurtu, the city’s mayor, ordered the construction of an extension to the great Paseo de la Reforma, sweeping in its path the most

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popular area in downtown Mexico City in the Guerrero neighborhood. This urbanistic measure was forcibly imposed on one of the most populated and most characteristic neighborhoods of the city (a neighborhood that was essential in reproducing the city’s identity as Mexico’s greatest city during the first half of the twentieth century), as it was crudely wiped off the map in compliance with a governmental dictum. In its place remains that area, inhospitable up to the present, where the extension to the Paseo de la Reforma is located. A large, anonymous conglomerate of housing projects was built there, ultra-modern but absolutely unrelated to the urban and architectural tradition of Mexico City. It was in these new residential buildings, which surrounded the Plaza de las Tres Culturas and were established as symbols of American modernity in Mexico, that the tragic end of the student movement later took place. Since then, Mexico City has been disarticulated. A process of urban decomposition, of disorganization of the city, began when its inhabitants, without knowing what had happened, found a void in the place of one of their most significant points of reference. This malaise that citizens experienced in their everyday life, a state of unexpressed grievance, was going to become visible later, when students went out onto the streets and citizens recognized them as speaking for them, as unexpectedly saying what they wanted to say too. Earlier yet, however, though still in the 1950s, another major offense had been perpetrated in Mexico City by its government. Something had happened that for the university students of today, so many decades later, seems a positive thing. Yet in its time, it was referred to ironically, even with sarcasm, by someone who was persona non grata for the movement of ’68, by the chronicler of the city, Salvador Novo, when he described the construction of Ciudad Universitaria as the creation of “the red zone of culture.” Downtown Mexico City suffered a strong affront when intellectual activity was removed from it. The intimate connection that existed between intellectual life and that of society as a whole in downtown Mexico City suffered a definite blow when, as if cut with a scalpel, the former was transferred to and concentrated in the Ciudad Universitaria



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campus, and the latter was culturally abandoned, left to being manipulated by TV. A rupture appeared between the city and its high culture, its “intellectuality.” Downtown Mexico City’s intellectual and cultural nerve was extirpated and congregated in a separate place: Ciudad Universitaria. Beneath the pride of having built such a fabulous architectural entity as is Ciudad Universitaria, Mexico City’s inhabitants had the feeling that some deception was there at work. The idea of a​​ “university campus” belongs to the civilizational project of “American modernity” and appeared here as part of President Alemán’s regime, which equated “progress” with “Americanization.” According to this view, intellectual activity needs to be isolated and concentrated in order to be truly productive; it needs to escape from any connection with the rest of concrete daily city life. Only in this way can it have the free space needed to focus exclusively on the tasks of research and production of knowledge applicable to capitalist production. All connection with the rest of society is noisy, hinders the efficiency of intellectual activity. Therefore, in Mexico City, it was important that there be a campus, a separate area, or, in other words, a “concentration camp” of intellectual activity. The idea of ​​a university campus was something that never existed in the history of Latin America, something that does not match the identity that was traditionally cultivated in its culture and that is not centered on capitalist productivism. Perhaps this is why it is an idea that has worked here in a “flawed” way. The Ciudad Universitaria campus never became what it should have been: an American-style campus. Instead, it is a campus that became increasing Mexican, little by little, over time, until it largely restored its relationship with the city, which surrounds it and feeds it in many ways. The student movement came to touch the feeling of grievance that the Mexico City population had toward the Mexican government at a deep level. For this reason, when it saw its youth go out in revolt and return to the place that belongs to them, to the political center of the city, it could reconnect with them, accept them, and support them. I want to add a few final words about the function that is often attributed to the movement of ’68 as a precursor or

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catalyst of the so-called “democratization of Mexico” in the era of neoliberalism. Some intellectuals organize the data from the movement of ’68 in Mexico in such a way that it seems like the first step of what they “optimistically” want to see as the process of the “reconstruction” of democracy that has allegedly been taking place in Mexico over recent decades. I think that this idea should be called into question. Rather than a preview of the democratic development of the Mexican state, which turns out to be hard to verify, the movement of ’68, given the real failure of its project at the hands of the repressive forces of an authoritarian state, seems to show a much less promising aspect of the fate of modern democracy, not only in Mexico but in general. Very generally, the historical function of the ’68 movement across the world seems to have been to unleash a definitive reaffirmation of a peculiar update in the modern capitalist state: the end to the kind of democracy that had been in power since the time of the French Revolution. With this revolution, the bourgeois revolution, a certain way of “doing politics” had begun in modern history, which lasted with difficulties, given its internal contradictions, until World War I. It was a way of doing politics that, after World War II, when trying to purge itself of these contradictions, entered into a process of self-closure that persists today, with moments of exceptional resistance such as the youth rebellion in the 1960s. There was, then, a very radical change in what it meant to “do politics” in the history of the Western democratic state. The new way of doing it did not imply an improvement of bourgeois democracy, but rather the opposite. It was a rather negative change. If, beyond an act of resistance to this decay, we want to see ’68 as a moment of beginning, as a start, or initiation, it is possible to do so, not in relation to new ways of doing the same bourgeois politics, but in relation to other ways of doing politics that utopically exceed the bourgeois horizon. Since the French Revolution there has existed a politics of ideas, in which rational discourse had a leading role. It was in political discourse that there was a rational confrontation between proposals for managing public affairs. The presence of reason, of discourse, was fundamental to modern politics.



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The importance that ideas aimed at guiding the fate of a republic had – or at least seemed to have – was essential to modern politics. Without ideas, without discourse, there was no politics. It was a politics based on discourse, on rational reflection. In its place, starting from the post-war period and the triumph of “American modernity,” something completely different imposed itself on the stage of Western political life, something that we could call the emergence of a “direct democracy” in “civil society.” A capitalist oligarchic dictatorship emerged by tacit consensus, a “civil society” dominated by corporations or agglomerations of capitalists with exceptional power within the process of capital accumulation. This was a “direct democracy of the great capitalists” who believed they could get rid of the traditional appeal to an autonomous “political supra-structure,” which previously seemed indispensable. Democracy would no longer rationally discuss in public different proposals for the fate of the republic, but instead capitalist schemes on how to solve social problems would be imposed directly, without going through a process of political reflection, of rational discourse, as an acid test. In other words, this was a “democracy” without demos or agora and cleansed of its central concept, that of revolution. The decline of rational political discourse as the axis of modern democratic politics began in the 1920s and 1930s with the democratic rise to power of fascism. It manifested in the political recomposition guided by the United States in the post-war period. And it would have advanced quietly until its fall in 1989 and the implosion of “real socialism” if the youth movement of the 1960s had not broken that tranquility and made evident the oligarchic and repressive (totalitarian) character of “Western” politics. In fact, the democratic guidelines drawn by the French Revolution of 1789 have now almost completely disappeared. The margin for states to make democratic decisions has been restricted to include only minor issues in comparison to the matter of a revolutionary situation or a “state of exception” [“estado de excepción”], which should be its main content. Instead, capital, through the “living” or “belligerent forces” of civil society, that is, the most powerful

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bourgeois individuals, imposes its “will” on society without having to consult with it or discuss issues other than those related to how to best “implement” its “will.” As has been seen increasingly in recent decades, the force of ideas in politics is null. Politicians no longer need ideas; they do not require political discourse. Politicians negotiate, plain and simple. Today the way of doing politics is far behind that which was inaugurated in the French Revolution. The year 1968 was the last moment in which political discourse shone as it had before, in which it said what had to be said. The last political word was pronounced in ’68. Afterward, replaced by the word-image of mass media commercials, which more efficiently interpret the “will” of capital, politics carried on without addressing anything decisive and became a game of negotiation for particular interests. In current politics, that which shone so much in ’68 – political discourse as such – is now useless.

Responses to questions from the audience – The reasons that moved Mexican students were different from those that moved European students. The European students had an attitude of rebellion against their parents and against the destiny that their parents had assigned to them. It was fundamentally a movement of contestation, limited in its political consequences, and therefore of “symbolic” or ludic reach, against a type of bourgeois society that was leading young people to betray themselves. In Mexico, however, there was an imposing political background that did not allow that ludic moment experienced in Europe. Here there was also, without a doubt, a playful moment and a struggle against parents as private officers of social repression, but the problem immediately became something much more serious. In Mexico, young people detected a series of lies spun by the state that for many decades had exercised a kind of totalitarianism, a soft totalitarianism, if you will, but ultimately a totalitarianism, which insisted, nevertheless, on presenting itself as a democracy. This hypocrisy was unbearable for the youth, so they posed a challenge to the government: to recognize that it pertained to a totalitarian state, founded



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on violently repressing the unhappy oppressed, or to show that what it insisted so much on when it presented itself as a democracy was true. Now, this process was nourished not only by the dilemma that each young European vitally experienced: whether or not to integrate themselves into the recomposition of the bourgeois state. Here, it fed directly on a political issue that was so essential that it mattered to the population as a whole and led young people to commit themselves to the deep discontent experienced in Mexico City. The students could not get away from this commitment; they began to represent Mexican society as a whole. The student movement was connected to the city’s population through meaningful channels, not in programmatic terms. There was no such thing as an elaborate political program that the Mexican population might have appropriated. Rather there was this other connection that I tried to approach in some way by talking about the wrong that Mexico City citizens had suffered at the hands of the government. Somehow the students were there in the streets to care for the wronged, and they could not betray that task. That is why they had to go to the furthest extreme, until the government showed that it was still a totalitarian regime despite its democratic pretensions and that it was based – as it still is today – on systematically violating popular rights. *** – The Mexican ’68 was not a movement of a rejected youth, that is, of a youth that did not find a place in the national education sector, but of students who were studying, of a youth that in some way and to a certain extent was privileged, if compared with what they experience today. The current situation is very different from that of [Paris] ’68. The Mexican population that might need higher-level education has grown a lot and is very poorly prepared, but it is there and demands to have this educational service. For a quarter of a century education in Mexico has been systematically neglected. There is a regression, a regression of the educational apparatus of the Mexican nation. And twenty-five years are a

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lot. Those who began to be educated at the beginning of this period are already mature today and have experienced this terrible process of lumpenization of Mexican education. This has been a process in which national education has radically decomposed, and, from what we can tell, one that will continue, and is going to worsen during this administration. Only the problem of agriculture is comparable with that of education in Mexico. And this is a situation that has no way of expressing itself among students because those who are in need of education are systematically removed from the university. This is why today’s situation is much direr than the one at that time. Today’s population of young people is scattered and does not get to come together and express itself because the youth do not even have the opportunity to enter institutional educational classrooms … There is a large mass of young people who can only see the future as a catastrophe to come, and this situation is unbearable. *** – The movement of ’68 raised the idea that politics, as it was supposed to be in the era of European modernity, no longer exists. In other words, the idea that all those instances in which, according to the press and television, public opinion discusses and decides on the future of the Mexican nation are instances that appear to have a power that they do not truly have. This system, in which apparently the people are exercising their sovereignty, is not true. The movement of ’68 raised the idea that exercising the political would have to be reconfigured in a completely different way, alien to what we know as “politics.” The task that someone effectively interested in political life might undertake far exceeds what is offered by the world of “politics.” Politics ceased to be such because it is no longer based on reflective discourse, on a confrontation between proposals from society itself. Rather it is now only a reflection of what the “living forces” of civil society define on their own. ***



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– I do not think that the ’68 movement has contributed to the construction of the party system or of any single one of the parties in particular. I believe that the great contribution of the Mexican ’68 to politics is in the attitude of rebellion that it inaugurated, and that in our days turns against the established dogma – a dogma respected today across the whole world – according to which a society cannot be modern if it is not capitalist. Is a modern and, at the same time, non-capitalist society possible? This is perhaps what the youth of ’68 pointed to, leaping over the period of the so-called “reconstruction of democracy” in Mexico. And the ability to say “no!” to the system as a whole, to not fit into the capitalist destiny of modernity, is a current possibility. The lesson from ’68 is that it is possible to say “no!” in resistance, even when everything implies that not saying “yes” is madness.

12 Mexican Modernity and Anti-Modernity

[Castilian Spanish] should be extended and made unique and universal in the same domains, for it belongs to monarchs and conquerors, in order to facilitate management and spiritual nourishment to the natives, so that these can be understood by superiors, learn love for the conquering nation, exile idolatry, civilize themselves for relations and commerce … Charles III, King of Spain1

For today’s civil society – and especially for its “living forces” or more powerful forces – modernity deserves a positive valuation in comparison with other modes of civilized life. This society’s prevalent and internalized idea of modernity is one that was formulated during the century of the Enlightenment. According to this formulation, modernity consists of a way of organizing the whole of human life, as guided by what is known as the progress of productive forces and by the technique sustained in the new “mathematizing” science of knowledge. It must be added, however, that civil society’s adoption of modernity does not take place on neutral ground, empty of civilized life. On the contrary, it takes place in a world that is already civilized: a world that if not foreign, for being non-Western, is simply pre-modern or “underdeveloped” in comparison to that introduced by



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modernity. For civil society, adopting modernity thus always implies also adopting a combative attitude against what non-Western and pre-modern civilizations seem to have in common compared with modernity. In other words, it means adopting a combative attitude against obscurantism, against trust in “enchanted” productive forces and technics, permeated with magic, reluctant toward the scientific-mathematical explanation of the universe and society. Affirming modernity thereby includes a permanent struggle to “disenchant” the world. It would be relatively easy to identify in Latin America and particularly Mexico today those economic, social, and political forces that promote and those that reject that modernity. Obviously, modernity would be represented by the promoters of capitalist economic and technical develop­ment as well as of the political institutional structure built around it, while anti-modernity would be represented, not so much by extreme cultivators of Catholic identity (Guadalupan in the case of Mexico), but mainly by all those who challenge that capitalist economic and technical development, be it in the name of unattainable utopian goals, such as the so-called leftists, or in the name of desperate, crypto- or quasi-religious solutions, like the populists. However, the task of identifying those forces and fields that are favorable and those that are hesitant toward modernity so clearly is too simple to be accurate. Doing so runs from the start into serious difficulties, of which we should be warned. First, many facts about the devastating effects that such development has on social life and on its natural foundation lead us to question the congruence or fidelity of the “modernity” promoted today by the “living forces” of civil society to that project of modern civilized life that was formulated by the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and that the French Revolution intended to put into practice. Neither freedom nor equality, much less fraternity, currently characterizes social life in the modern world. The nation-state, that public entity that the political liberalism of modern enlightened society thought was necessary to restrain the excesses of economic liberalism for the good of the republic, is currently in the process of being dismantled. At the same time, the high levels of civil society propose no

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other political entity capable of containing the absurd and unrestrained advance of economic neoliberalism. For those who still believe in seeing the world reorganized in the light of reason for the benefit of all human beings in the future, this goal of enlightened modernity seems increasingly further away and harder to reach. Second, this same will to question the modern enlightened character of actually existing modernity becomes more radical in many cases and reaches as far as to doubt whether the enlightened definition of modernity is right or not. Indeed, it argues: is not the undeniable failure of actually existing modernity to modernize the world due to the fact that it is itself an anti-modernity? Enlightened modernity, which would be the ideal version of actually existing modernity, recognizes the first “obstacle to human happiness” in the human subordination to superhuman magical forces, which “enchant” the world while also consecrating unhappiness, due to its blind trust in archaic myth. However, as the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment indicate, in making this recognition, enlightened modernity fails to realize that the main superhuman force that enchants the world in its own way is not that of cosmogonic order, but is itself modern. It is the god of historically victorious modernity, the value of capitalist commodities valorizing itself, automatically, in the middle of the process of reproduction of social wealth. Enlightened modernity fails to notice that the reason with which it pretends to overcome myth is itself a myth, a discursive device built to explain and at the same time to deceive. Third, as a consequence of the previous points, certain features recognized by contemporary civil society as characteristically anti-modern can be interpreted the opposite way. Interestingly, they can be recognized as pro-modern characteristics, as forms of resistance either against a version of modernity that should be enlightened, as it pretends to be, but is not, or against a version of modernity that despite still being truly enlightened, precisely because it is so, does not manage to notice everything that is at stake in the profound process of modernizing human civilization. Indeed, if – as its critics affirm – what actually existing modernity does is replace the archaic god with a modern god, one magical force



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with another; if its discourse does nothing more than replace the openly fantastic myth of archaic times with another myth, only instead crypto-fantastic, apparently rational and experimental; if, in other words, actually existing modernity betrays the profound project of modernity to build a human cosmos in which the superhuman is not instrumentalized as a justification for injustice; if this is the case, then many of the attitudes, behaviors, and social movements that distrust it, and that disbelieve the strategic convenience of the sacrifices demanded of pre-modern or alter-modern human life forms and of the planet’s ecological system, could have a sense and function indirectly pro-modern, affirmative of the essence of modernity. Warned of the difficulties that come with identifying what may be modern and what may be anti-modern in Mexico, it is convenient to explore these two poles of opposition or counter-position in a little more detail. This is what I will try to do next. In my opinion, modernity should be understood as a very long-term civilizational project that established radically new relations between the human world and nature and between the collective individual and the singular individual, all this on the basis of a “neo-technic revolution” of productive forces that started at the beginning of the second millennium. A project that, through a tortuous process, full of contradictions and conflicts, came to replace, with the perspectives of abundance and emancipation that it opened, the ancestral or archaic civilizational projects, which were based on the scarcity of nature and the need for repressive institutions. The term “modernity,” however, also brings with it an adjective that it seems to be unable to be rid of: the adjective “capitalist.” Indeed, modernity should be understood not only as the essence of the modern project of relocating the human being in nature and of radically recomposing his identity, but, rather, as that same essence, yet in the way in which was realized in concrete history: in other words, as it was materialized, incarnated, or embodied by the real economic and social forces that recognized it and promoted it when it was barely visible as a possibility. As a real historical project, modernity was permanently qualified as capitalist because it was precisely the search for capitalist profit in the

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market – the profit made by buying low and selling high – that led capitalists to perceive in the incipient “neo-technic revolution” of modernity a means or instrument to increase productivity and thereby achieve an extraordinary profit. Modernity was discovered by capitalism, which fostered it, formed it in its own image and likeness, and created with it a type of human being historically unknown until then. This casual historical coincidence between a potentiality, modernity, and a realistic path for its realization, capitalism, is the reason why modernity in general seems condemned to always be what actually existing modernity has been until now, that is, a capitalist modernity. At the extreme opposite end, at the pole of anti-modernity, what is remarkable is that this pole is necessarily multiple. As is understandable, there may be many reasons to have an attitude adverse to the civilizational project of capitalist or actually existing modernity. There may be several reasons for reluctance toward the modernization of social life that is still going on in our times. Three can be mentioned, schematically. The results of capitalist modernity’s manipulation of neo-technics may be so precarious and so counterproductive in certain areas of the social body, in certain strata and in certain regions, that those who have experienced them, who suffer from them – and truly, those who do so are not few – cannot understand why this new technique should be preferable to the magical technique that traditionally governed processes of reproduction of social wealth. The miraculous effect that results from the use of supernatural gods and forces remains for them more effective and trustworthy than the calculable effect of using the modern technique. Modernity only comes to disrupt their traditional world, but it is not capable of either improving or replacing it. This is the first reason, the most radical and general, for resistance and even hostility to established modernity. The anti-modernity of “the marvelous real” is actualized and strengthened by modernity, although it must be specified that it does so upon a modernity that is unable to fully manifest itself, given the capitalist form that restricts and distorts it. The second group of attitudes contrary to capitalist modernity is less radical but no less effective than the first. These are attitudes that are not directed against it as such,



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but against the kind of human being that it promotes in practical life as the ideally modern human being. This type of human person is configured around a certain behavioral strategy, a “peculiar ethos,” that induces the singular individual to be “realist” and internalize the demands of the self-valorization of capitalist value as if they were his natural demands, to define his identity based on productivist self-repressive behavior. However, the history of the modernization of Europe was a difficult history, which led it on a path of making substantial compromises with other civilizational projects, either pre-modern or alter-modern, that were already there; it led other configurating ethe, opposed to the one imposed by it, to propose other types of personalities that diverged from the ideal type. Without ceasing to be functional for the capitalist character of modernity, these are types of modern human persons that have come from behavioral strategies alternative to that of the realist ethos. To mention them, even if just in passing, we can say that the three most historically decisive have been shaped around three different ethe: the “baroque ethos,” the “neoclassical or enlightened ethos,” and the “romantic ethos.” Accepting the capitalist character of the modern world does not mean, for them, identifying fully, without any distance, with the impulse of value to self-valorize: the ideal model of a person fostered by that world. For example, living in established modernity is something for which the baroque ethos prepares the modern human being in open opposition to the realist ethos. According to the baroque ethos, living in established modernity, far from supposing the assumption of the will to self-valorize capitalist value, may imply bearing with it and surviving the devastation of the social-natural nucleus of life that this valorization brings with it. In other words, it means surviving capitalism by fleeing or escaping from the devastation of the qualitative core of life to a theatricalization of it, a performance capable of inverting the sense of that devastation and of rescuing that core, if not in reality, at least in the plane of the imaginary. In truth, the anti-modernity of the baroque, as well as the anti-modernity of the other two mentioned ethe, is directed against the realist ethos and the type of person that capitalist modernity subtly imposes as an essential part of its civilizational project.

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The third source of current anti-modern attitudes comes from the proposal made by a modern, yet not capitalist, civilizational project that began to be specified and put into practice in the mid-nineteenth century in the communist movement of the proletarians or European industrial workers. The modern capitalist society – or “bourgeois society” as Marx and Engels call it in The Communist Manifesto of 1848 – put the new technique at the service of capitalist value and the self-valorization that it achieves through the use of “modern slavery,” that is, through expropriating a surplusvalue from the mass of salaried workers. By continuing to do so, by encouraging in this biased, deforming, and impoverishing way the actualization and development of the new technique, modern society condemns itself to never being able to radically explore the possibilities opened by modernity in essential terms; it condemns itself to be a pseudo-modernity. The communist movement is anti-modern in the sense of being contrary to established modernity, in the name of the unprecedented possibilities of modernity. The third source of anti-modernity is thus found in the permanence and renewal, barely perceptible on the stage of contemporary politics, of this radical movement to challenge the capitalist mode of production. To speak, in our days, of modernity and anti-modernity in Mexico and Latin America implies, as we can see, entering into a topic full of ins and outs, of complications of all kinds. It is a topic that has been addressed for centuries by a large number of authors – many of them excellent writers; for example, to mention three of the most recent, Octavio Paz and our two interlocutors in this colloquium, Carlos Monsiváis and Roger Bartra. This is the theme known as “the two Mexicos.” It is a theme that can be traced back to the seventeenth century, the first in which the history of the Americas acquired its own dynamic and ceased to be a simple appendix to Peninsular Spain’s history. What is the identity of the Mexican? Is it that of the Creole or indigenized Spaniard [español aindiado], or is it that of the mestizo or Spanishized native [indio españolizado]? Many denominations have had this pair of “enemy brothers” cohabiting in the same Mexico. There has been talk of



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a “deep Mexico” underneath modern Mexico, one rural, the other urban; of a religious Mexico, in resistance to a secular Mexico, the one conservative and Guadalupan, the other liberal and scientific, the one traditionalist, the other progressive. There has been talk, in short, of a “wild Mexico” [Mexico bronco] always threatening the civilized Mexico, the one “populist,” the other “democratic” – as one now would say. It is well known that, not only in Mexico and Latin America, but in all the societies of the world, the process of modernization has as its first result the splitting up of the society in which it develops. As a result of its presence, the social fabric is torn in two, a traditionalist part and a modernized part, so collective identity then duplicates. The modernized part stands out from the traditionalist part, before coming back to subdue it. The modernized part is located first in certain levels of the general labor process and in certain regions of the territory, in the professionalized occupations and in the city space, before moving forward, to complete its dominance over the remaining levels of social life and over the village regions and peasants, who are usually the most faithful to tradition. Catastrophic proof of how traumatic this duplication of social identity can be and of this attempt to recompose it in modern terms can be found in German history. The origin of the so-called National Socialist revolution of 1933 in Germany lies largely in the resentment of a traditionalist, oppressed, peasant Germany, which felt threatened by the progressivism of a newly re-modernized Germany with imperial vocation, an urban and cosmopolitan, capitalist and social democratic Germany, which was already preparing to take over everything. Without that conflict between modernity and anti-modernity, Hitler’s suicide adventure would not have had as many followers. In Mexico, the modernization process was as long as in Germany, but more complex and less explosive. It began at the time of the first proof of existence of capitalist modernity, together with the appearance of an open challenge toward the medieval world and its political manifestation as the first modern national state, the Spanish imperial state of Isabella I. But after this first and traumatic shock of modernization,

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which gave rise to the baroque and Jesuit Mexico of the seventeenth century, it went through others, such as the shock of Enlightened Despotism or of the construction of the Republic in the nineteenth century, up to the shock of economic national modernization, and the last, that of neoliberal globalization. This long history of actually existing modernity in Mexico has affected Mexican social identity, not only by duplicating it, but at least by quadrupling it. Indeed, approaching with greater subtlety and differentiation the theme of the “split personality” of current Mexican society, we can discover that it is not only “two Mexicos” that are in conflict with each other within Mexico itself: that of modernity and that of anti-modernity, the progressive and the conservative one. But, really, this is a case of “multiple personality,” of four Mexicos confronting each other within Mexico: the Mexico of modernity and the Mexico of three different types of anti-modernity: first, the “deep Mexico” or that of civilizational anti-modernity; second, the baroque Mexico or that of anti-realist anti-modernity; and third, the rebellious Mexico or that of anti-capitalist anti-modernity. The Mexico of established modernity or capitalist modernity – which became an “American” capitalist modernity throughout the twentieth century – is the country in which civil society, dominated by its economically more powerful and “dynamic” members, has been working for twenty-five years. It is a post-nationalist Mexico that believes itself capable of taking advantage of its position in capitalist economic globalization only if it follows the demands of neoliberal economic policy, if it opens its means of production to transnational monopolies and cleans and straightens the institutional structures of the republic, which, after the ravages of corruption and abuses of seventy years of a quasi-monopolistic and quasi-despotic political regime, have become unrecognizable. (This political regime acquired its legitimacy from coming to the rescue of the country from the ungovernability and the “state vacuum” it was in after the uprisings led by Villa and Zapata at the beginning of the twentieth century.) It is a Mexico already alien to traditional and popular customs and practices, and open to the transformation of them in the direction of the “American way of life.” It is a Mexico that is sure of its ability to subdue, as



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it were, by fair means, by the practical demonstration of its superiority, the other Mexicos, with which it cohabits and whose realization it hinders. “Deep Mexico” is not only the Mexico of minorities, of the many indigenous peoples who survive in Mexican territory and who maintain a tenuous relationship with civil society, without finding a place within it. It is also the “Guadalupan” or profoundly Catholic Mexico, which still dominates large sectors of civil society. Apparently isolated, indigenous Mexico, with the self-sufficiency of its magical technique, weighs from the outside but with undeniable strength on the lowest strata of civil society. It is a Mexico whose days, in the face of progress in the capitalist technification of life, are numbered: its multiplicity of languages and ​​ systems of uses and customs is not integrated into the totalizing and uniformizing architecture of capitalist modernity. It is a Mexico that fights against established modernity with its simple presence. Guadalupan Mexico is a spare Mexico [México de recambio], which revitalizes itself from and feeds on all the moments and “zones of failure” in modern Mexico, which are not exactly scarce. Its confidence in the supernatural forces of the Christian pantheon is one of the most serious obstacles to those who wish to suppress it. Baroque Mexico is an entity of a purely ethical order that does not necessarily fall into a system of uses and customs and that consists of a peculiar strategy of behavior to which the Mexican population and other Latin American regions have resorted and continue to resort with an overwhelming frequency. This is a strategy aimed at replacing sincere devotion to the morality demanded by the “spirit of capitalism” with a theatricalization of it. It is a strategy capable of imaginatively reversing the sacrificial sense of productive activity, a sense demanded by that morality, and transforming it into a joyful or enjoyable sense. Baroque Mexico lies beneath the Mexico of established modernity, systematically sabotaging and undermining it, making a mockery of the “realism” that leads it to confuse the quantitative success of capitalism with a qualitative fullness that capitalism is unable to reach. Finally, the rebellious Mexico, or the Mexico of anticapitalist anti-modernity, is the one composed of all those Mexicans who perceive that it is not the defects of modern

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life that make life unlivable, but modern life itself in the way it is carried out, and that resists or rebels, be it in private or in public, against that way of life. It is a Mexico that sometimes has a diffuse and imperceptible presence, and at other times a concentrated and threatening one. It is a Mexico that is antimodern because actually existing modernity is a capitalist modernity, but is also pro-modern because it intends to liberate modernity from the capitalist destiny that has been imposed on it up to now. As is understandable, there is a tendency for each of these different Mexicos to locate itself in certain strata of the labor process and in certain regions of the territory that are most favorable to it. To mention quickly, in an overtly sketchy and general fashion: the “modern Mexico” prefers to be located in the world of business and communication services, and in the north of the country; the “deep Mexico” in traditional agriculture, and in the southern states; the baroque Mexico in the “political,” bureaucratic, and intellectual functions, and in the central region; and the “rebellious” Mexico is the only one that can be found in any activity and throughout the national territory. However, much more interesting than this tendency of the various Mexicos to disperse is an opposite and more powerful necessity for them to meet in the same activity and in the same place. What really prevails in Mexico is a forced coexistence among the four Mexicos, which leads them to interact with each other and to enter into very peculiar combinations with each other. To try to distinguish them, isolate them descriptively, and ponder the changing functions they acquire within the whole thus becomes an extremely difficult task. To prove it, it is enough to mention a case whose theoretical treatment presents a challenge of the highest degree of difficulty: the case of the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party]. As a political entity that dominated a long period of the Mexican twentieth century, inside it we can distinguish the presence of the Mexico of capitalist modernization, which claims to affirm itself as a state around civil society’s will to accumulate capital. But we also notice a romantic nationalist corrective, both liberal and Guadalupan, to that first Mexico that, in order to modernize itself, was willing to lose its traditional identity. We can also locate baroque Mexico, which resists



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and plays around to the degree of corrupting the discipline demanded by modernity. And we finally recognize the revolutionary Mexico that plans to rebuild itself in socialist terms. Yet from distinguishing this multiple presence in the political entity of the PRI, to finding the way in which it has been articulated internally in different social and political instances across the many different decades of its life and its survival, there is a very great distance. To cover this distance is a task that remains. I finish my presentation here, in this colloquium, and I hope that, as much differentiation and classification as there is in it, it does not contribute to obscuring the theme of modernity and anti-modernity in Mexico, but rather to clarifying it.

Notes

Foreword 1 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” New German Critique, 32 (Spring–Summer 1984), 151–71. 2 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Madrid: Alianza, 1992), 29. 3 Bolívar Echeverría, “Modernidad y capitalismo (15 Tesis),” in Las ilusiones de la modernidad (Mexico City: UNAM/El equilibrista, 1995), 150. 4 Echeverría, “Modernidad y capitalismo (15 Tesis),” 146, 154. 5 Bolívar Echeverría, “El ethos barroco,” in La modernidad de lo barroco (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 2014), 40.

Introduction The author wishes to remark upon the importance that the seminar “Modernity: Versions and Dimensions” had in the production of the texts gathered in this book. Without this space for reflection, generously opened by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and its authorities, such as Dean José Narro and General Secretary Enrique del Val, the public questioning of issues apparently remote from the immediate urgencies of life, such as those that are addressed here, would be extremely difficult, if not impossible.



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Chapter 1  A Definition of Modernity This is a transcript of the author’s exposition in the first session of the seminar “Modernity: Versions and Dimensions,” February 7, 2005; in Contrahistorias, 11 (August 2008). 1 [RF: Translation mine from the author’s translation into Spanish of the original text in German. The standard English translation of the same text is: “This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale – that is, in the spirit of technology. But because the lust for profit of the ruling class sought satisfaction through it, technology betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath.” (“One-Way Street,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 486–7.)]

Chapter 2  “Technological Rent” and the “Devaluation” of Nature This text is from a lecture delivered by the author at the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University on December 4, 1998. [RF: Original text in English was translated into Spanish by Vianey Ramírez and Luis Arizmendi and appears in Mundo Siglo XXI: Revista del Centro de Investigaciones Económicas, Administrativas y Sociales del Instituto Politécnico Nacional, 2 (Mexico City: Fall 2005). The present text is a translation of this Spanish text.] 1 Karl Marx, Capital. Vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1981), 772.

Chapter 3  Meanings of Enlightenment This paper was published in Sophia: Revista de filosofía, 1 (2007); and Contrahistorias: La otra mirada de Clío, 9 (2007). 1 Baltasar Gracián y Morales, The Critick, trans. Paul Rycaut (London: Printed by T. N. for Henry Brume at the Gun in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1681).

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2 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 2. 3 Walter Benjamin, Tesis sobre la historia y otros fragmentos, trans. Bolívar Echeverría (Mexico City: Contrahistorias, 2005), 22. [RF: Translation mine.] 4 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xiv. 5 “Enlightenment is mankind’s exit from its self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2013). 6 “To start in itself a series of autonomous events; that is the freedom of the intelligible character, which creates for itself an empirical character.” Immanuel Kant, “Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten,” in Werkausgabe VI, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1977), 83. [RF: Translation mine from author’s translation of the original text in German into Spanish.] 7 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1993), 24. 8 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 10. 9 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 153. 10 Max Horkheimer, “The Authoritarian State,” (Telos), Spring 1973: 3–20. 11 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 172. 12 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 22. 13 And they do so with polemical intent, against a certain tendency in classical German philology to see Homer as the initiator of enlightened rationalism and imagine the pre-Homeric times, or the times of archaic mythology, as times of harmony with nature through the telluric gods. The anti-rationalist ideology of National Socialism, with which that philology sympathized, proposed to return to those pre-rationalist times by purging the political-racial elements (“Judeo-Bolsheviks”) that had supposedly introduced enlightened rationalism into the heart of the German people. 14 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 30. 15 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 45. 16 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 115. 17 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 11. 18 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 12. 19 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 21. 20 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 11. 21 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 43.



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Chapter 4  Images of “Whiteness” This chapter was published in Diego Lizarazo (ed.), Sociedades icónicas: Historia, ideología y cultura en la imagen (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2007). 1 Paul Celan, “Death Fugue,” in Paul Celan: Selections, ed. Pierre Joris, trans. Jerome Rothenberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 47. 2 Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 123. 3 On the multiplicity of the historical ethos of capitalist modernity, which includes, in addition to the realist, three others – the “romantic,” the “(neo-)classic,” and the “baroque” – see Bolívar Echeverría, “Modernidad y capitalismo,” in Las ilusiones de la modernidad (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México-El Equilibrista, 1995). 4 A contrasting, or counter-modern, image of that which is incompatible with “whiteness” is found in a character in the novel El último encuentro, by Sándor Márai, in a “humanity determined by the tropics”: “You have to know that all Englishmen who have spent time in the tropics are suspects in their own country. They are worthy of admiration and recognition, but they are also suspects. In their secret files, the word ‘tropic’ surely appears as if it said ‘syphilis’ or ‘espionage.’ They are suspicious even if they have maintained the habit of playing golf or tennis, even though they have been drinking whiskey, even though they have appeared at the governor’s parties, dressed in tuxedos or with a uniform full of decorations: they are all suspects. Simply for having lived in the tropics. Simply for having survived that terrible and impossible-to-assimilate infection that also has its attractions, like any mortal danger. The tropics is a disease. Tropical diseases are cured over time, but the tropics never.” (Barcelona: Salamandra, ​​1999), 74–5. [RF: Translation mine.] 5 A fundamentalist regression in modern capitalist identification does not always imply a return to the demand for racial whiteness, as in the first half of the twentieth century in Europe; it can also be perfectly fulfilled in the return to the demand of an identitarian or “cultural” whiteness, manifest in “uses and customs,” or even in a worldview [Weltanschauung], as happened already in the twentieth century, described by Samuel Huntington as a “clash of civilizations.”

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6 In contrast, the systematic genocidal action against the Jewish people of Eastern Europe, which began with the war against Bolshevism and the conquest of “vital space” or Lebensraum (see Elem Klimov’s film, Come and See, 1985), was an action that had to be hidden from the people. This action’s “radicality,” far from expressing a “revolutionary idealism,” demonstrated such crudely pragmatic cynicism that even the most fanatical nationalists found it difficult to share. 7 The Nazi state’s own tendency was directed toward the repression of social aesthetic creativity. Individuals should not create, but only receive messages from a political entity that has been “selfaestheticized” and that requires them as spectators, willing to empathize with and participate in it. The Gesamtkunstwerk proposed by Richard Wagner, the “total work of art” of the Nazi state, its “aestheticization” of politics (of which Walter Benjamin speaks in his famous essay on the work of art), consisted exclusively in the detailed and grandiloquent daily staging of the popular supra-classist unit, in the permanent spectacle of recovering the Heimat (homeland), with which each and every one of the Volksgenossen were induced to identify themselves. Every work of art was in principle suspect because it implied unmasking the demagogic intentions behind this aesthetic imposition. We should note that the Nazi state was not the only one to aestheticize politics in such a terrorist manner. The “Soviet” state of Russia did the same. The almost total repression of the formal revolution in “modern art” – without being identified, as it was in the Nazi state, with the Jewish enemy – was accompanied by programmatic art in service of an imaginary “socialist revolution.” Official art proposed an ideal of the human figure also obedient to the consecrated image of “whiteness” – hence the great similarity between many visual works in Nazism and “Socialism” – only its fundamentalism was not based on self-sacrifice for the sake of war; instead it had other more “Stakhanovite” purposes proposed by “Socialist Realism”: those of self-sacrifice for the sake of conquering the future. 8 “Die bildende Kunst unserer Tage hat zurückgefunden zur klassischer Einfachheit und Natürlichkeit und damit zum Wahren und Schönen.” K. L. Tank, “Deutsche Plastik unserer Zeit,” in Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, ed. Reinhard MüllerMehlis (Munich: Heyne, 1976), 109. [RF: Translation mine from author’s translation to Spanish of the original text in German.]



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Chapter 5 “American” Modernity: Keys to its Understanding 1 Amerika, an unfinished novel, is now published with the title that its author originally wanted to give it: Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared). Franz Kafka, Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Penguin, 2007), 108. 2 See the “Notes on the ‘natural form’,” pp. 70–3. 3 As a re-creation of Catholic European modernity, Latin American modernity, which constantly returns in its history to the baroque ethos of modernity, is especially adept at suffering/ living through the process of capitalist subsumption without militantly participating in it. 4 See “Images of ‘Whiteness’,” pp. 38–51. 5 See Bolívar Echeverría, “Modernidad y capitalismo,” in Las ilusiones de la modernidad, (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México-El Equilibrista, 1995). 6 All elements of the instrumental field and of the labor process corresponding to the Industrial Revolution are planned and designed not according to the principle of “now it is easier to produce the same goods with less effort,” but according to the one of “now it is easier to produce more goods with the same effort.” Having been extended from the industrial shipyards and the abstract productivist disposition in machinery and labor “choreography,” this principle would later guide the nineteenthcentury urban revolution, including changes in the working-class neighborhoods and their tenements [Mietskaserne], as well as in the public and transport services (the trains that Mussolini dreamed of, arriving and departing at the exact time stipulated in schedules). 7 There is no shortage of examples of European intellectuals reacting ecstatically to seeing nights transformed into days in Las Vegas or in nightclubs in Los Angeles, or being shocked by finding freezing indoor temperatures in Miami or tropical backwaters in Chicago malls. 8 The stages of “Americanism” rising to its present hubris still contained an element that challenged the treachery perpetrated against “contingent naturalness” by the modern forms of the European Belle Époque and of the “discontent in culture” (Sigmund Freud), forms penetrated by the self-sufficiency and arrogance of imperialist national states. Floating freely in the air of innocent “artificiality,” unconcerned with the burden of

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Notes to pages 68–69

a seemingly dispensable “naturalness,” the modern “(North) American” human enjoyed the use-value discovered in the capitalist telos with a naivety that only during the time of the Vietnam War finally became unexplainable. A lot of the most fascinating aspects of “North American” lifestyles, including their literature and music, come from their spontaneous commitment to a quid pro quo that confuses “artificiality” (a distortion from within, given its belonging to the necessity of capitalism) with the continuity of human “naturalness.” 9 “Bien que, pour un observateur superficiel, l’automobile et le bolchevisme paraissent avoir l’un avec l’autre des rapports assez difficiles à découvrir, je suis convaincu – et ceci n’est pas le moins du monde un paradoxe – qu’il n’existe pas, aux États-Unis, contre le microbe bolchevik, de remède plus efficace que l’automobile. On peut affirmer, sans crainte d’être démenti par les faits, que ceci tuera cela, ou plutôt que ceci met le pays complètement à l’abri de cela. L’automobile constitue le vaccin par excellence qui immunise le pays tout entier. Tout possesseur d’une voiture devient, ipso facto, un ennemi déclaré et agissant du bolchevisme. Et non seulement tout possesseur present, mais encore tout possesseur futur, c’est-à-dire presque tout le monde, attendu que tout le monde ici est en état de réaliser son rêve et d’acheter pour deux ou trois centaines de dollars cette petite mécanique trépidante qui lui confère aussitôt la liberté des mouvements, la maîtrise de la route, qui le rend, à certains égards, l’égal d’un Vanderbilt ou d’un Rockefeller.” Raymond Recouly, L’Illustration, September 30, 1922. [RF: Translation mine from author’s translation into Spanish of the original text in French.] 10 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the capitalist economy entered into a process of redefining and recomposing its very bases for exploiting the labor force. This was a process that led it to generalize the category of salaried work, which had been traditionally reserved to manual labor. This process also led it to abandon the segmentation and concentration of the workforce into closed preserves, which were granted to the multiple national state-owned enterprises of capital. For this reason, the capitalist economy had to adopt other global mechanisms for extracting surplus-value, which themselves undermined the sustainability of these preserves. Capital began to circumvent its need to unfold into “many capitals” (Roman Roskolsky). Its accumulation seemed to be fulfilled without the requirement of going through a



Notes to pages 69–74

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process of competition between many states supported by different national proletariats within a free and neutral world market. The legitimacy of modern European-type national states seemed to vanish. The exacerbation of nationalism in the first half of the twentieth century, in Germany, Russia, Japan, and the United States, turned out to be not a sign of nation-state pseudo-subjects acting as incarnations of the historical economic subjectness of capital, but precisely a sign of its opposite, of their obsolescence, and of a last desperate and violent resistance to accept it. 11 If there is anything worthy of praise in European capitalist modernity, it is precisely its failure to fulfill the orthodox task of negating the “natural form” of social life. This failure led to a process of self-denial, which took place through the French Revolution, and from which only lately, by “Americanizing” itself, has European capitalist modernity begun to recover. 12 The term “natural form” does not refer to a “substance” or “human nature” of metaphysical quality, which the “form of value” is “sinning against.” Neither does it refer to an attempt to anchor the human to the normativity of Nature, with respect to which the “form of value” is artificial and lacking in foundation. It refers exclusively to the fact that the human, being essentially “artificial,” non-natural, or, in other words, contingent, or self-founded, must always construct its forms in an act of “transcendence of the Other” or of “trans-naturalization.” This is an act that makes proto-forms found in nature – having been “determinedly denied” – into human forms, even though they still remain in them as their substance. This act of “trans-naturalization” – not the quality of “naturalness” – is what constitutes current human forms. Even after millennia of civilized historical accumulation that makes them seem arbitrary, and however elaborate and fabricated they may be (forms in other forms of other forms … ), there is a subtle, almost imperceptible nexus with the archaic acts of trans-naturalization that founded the basic forms and multiple ways of being human and the elemental symbols of the multiple “natural languages.”

Chapter 6  From Academia to Bohemia and Beyond 1 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and

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Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings; Volume 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 135. 2 Friedrich Tomberg, Mimesis der Praxis und abstrakte Kunst (Neuwied, Berlin: Luchterhand, 1968), 7. [RF: Translation mine from the author’s translation into Spanish of the original text in German.] 3 Only when the “actuality of the revolution” was repressed in Europe and the “culture industry,” with its commodity competition, had altered the taste and promoted an anti-avantgarde enjoyment of the avant-garde proposal, spreading a “progressive” extension of the traditional notion of similarity between model and representation, was this type of work able to return from its ostracism and receive commercial acceptance, sometimes monstrously exaggerated. 4 Here is a terminological note about the expressions “modern art” and “avant-garde art.” Both are obviously inadequate, despite having been coined by the revolutionary artists themselves. The first mentions as “modern” something that is defined precisely by its “alter-modernity,” by the distance with respect to a modernity that already exists, even if it distances itself in a profoundly anti-modern way. The second proposes a chronogrammatic ordering of military strategy – first the avant-garde, then the bulk of the troops, and finally the rearguard – for something that is precisely a disorganized effervescence of new art proposals, where this arrangement lacks all sense and where the front row may even include frankly restorative proposals of old art, such as that by the group of painters in the Vienna Secession, for example. 5 Recognition of the essential importance of festive existence has come mainly from French sociology and classical philology. Some indispensable names: Émile Durkheim, Johan Huizinga, Roger Caillois, Georges Bataille, Carl Jung, Károly Kerényi, Mikhail Bakhtin, Mircea Eliade, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and, currently, Josef Pieper, Odo Marquard, Michael Maurer, and others. 6 Sketches that were made in the heat of shared, intimate, and ephemeral artistic activity were then traded some time later as if they were works closed in themselves and radiating an “aura.” However, this was no longer an archaic but a modern “aura,” an “aesthetic magic” that the artist endowed with genius, the homo sacer of these “unbelieving times,” had put in them. These became works that reserved their magic for those who could buy them.



Notes to pages 83–86

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7 In partying, the de-realization of the everyday world starts from the individual subject, singular or collective. It is he who moves into a fictitious scenario that supervenes on and transfigures routine space-time. In art, however, the aesthetic de-realization of this world emerges from the practical object, insofar as it has been converted into a mimetic repetition – now as a “reproduction” or “re-presentation” – of the festive object. 8 The difference between the first and the second mimesis is a difference between two modes of “onto-phany” (“truth”) that are interrelated but undoubtedly different: one religious and the other artistic. Martin Heidegger failed to recognize this difference in his famous example of the Greek temple, explained in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” The temple as a site of dwelling and the temple as an imaginary spatial circumscription, created in and by ceremonial mimesis, are two buildings that can exist superimposed, confused with one another, but not necessarily so. One thing is the ceremonial baldachin of a (nomadic) Jewish community and the other is the artistic baldachin crafted by Bernini in the Basilica of St Peter (sedentary par excellence). One has in itself the seed of the other, without needing it. The latter, although having the former as an antecedent, can exist without it. 9 According to David Lewis-Williams’s “shamanistic” interpretation of the San people’s cave paintings (South Africa), the shaman-painter, already “in his right mind,” expresses on the grotto’s walls what he saw while hallucinating during the festive ceremony. At the party, and under the effects of drugs, a window opens up to the Other (as chaos). The painter portrays what he has seen through that window. Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams, The Shamans of Prehistory (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998). 10 Before the revolution of “modern” (and Freudian, avant la lettre) art, Karl Marx expressed the idea that childhood is definitive, until another, stronger “childhood” comes to overpower it, and that if the Greek prototype of beauty continues “to afford us artistic pleasure” and has a charm that seems “unattainable” and “eternal,” it is because the time has not yet come when the unique and unrepeatable conditions on which it was founded are overcome by others of similar scope but “stronger” and of a different order. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1993), 111.

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Notes to pages 89–97

Chapter 7  Art and Utopia A version of this essay was published as an introduction to Walter Benjamin, La obra de arte en la época de su reproductibilidad técnica, trans. Andrés E. Weikert (Mexico City: Itaca, 2003). The present version has been revised and corrected by the author. 1 César Vallejo, “Artists Facing Politics,” in Selected Writings of César Vallejo, trans. and ed. Joseph Mulligan (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2015), 173. 2 Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 509. 3 “Benjamin’s intention has its goal in a state of affairs in which the esoteric experience of happiness has become public and universal.” Jürgen Habermas, “Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism: The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin,” New German Critique, 17 (1979), 46. 4 A close examination of the concept of “aura” in Benjamin is found in Josef Furnkäs, “Aura,” in Benjamins Begriffe, ed. Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000). See also Shierry M. Weber, “W. B.: el fetichismo de los objetos, lo moderno y la experiencia de la historia,” in Marx, Reich y Marcuse, ed. Bertell Ollman et al. (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1974), 94ff. 5 Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 199. 6 G.W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, trans. T. M. Knox. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 10. 7 Eva Geulen, The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor after Hegel, trans. James MacFarland (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 19ff. This text acutely examines the presence of the Hegelian idea of ​​the “death of art” in Benjamin’s essay. See also Umberto Eco, “Two Hypotheses about the Death of Art,” in The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 167ff.; and Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Ende der Kunst?” in Das Erbe Europas (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp​​, 1989), 63ff. 8 Brecht speculates about an unknown type of work of art that will probably appear when the market ceases to be the determining instance of the social validity of objects. In the meantime, while



Notes to pages 99–100

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this still does not happen, what is produced and consumed as a commodity instead of the old kind of artwork is something that we could simply call a “thing.” When the consistency of this “thing” vanishes along with the centrally determining quality of the market, there will not be, according to him, even a memory of it in the new work of art that will appear. Already before him, Flaubert (in a letter to Louise Colet) also speculated: “Beauty will come perhaps to become a useless sentiment for humanity, and art will then occupy [opening a space in the quadrivium] an intermediate place between algebra and music.” 9 Nothing could be more wrong, therefore, than Gianni Vattimo’s observation that Benjamin’s text “represents the moment of passage from a utopian and revolutionary meaning for the death of art to a technological one.” Gianni Vattimo, “The Death or Decline of Art,” in The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 55. 10 Thus, for example, Brecht, resistant to any un-enlightened definition of “nature” or “technique,” after reading it, notes in his diary: “a load of mysticism, although his attitude is against mysticism. This is the way the materialist understanding of history is adapted. It is abominable.” Bertolt Brecht, Bertolt Brecht: Journals 1934–1955 (New York: Routledge, 1995), 10. Separately, Theodor W. Adorno, in his letter to Benjamin, dated March 18, 1936 (in Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 129), objects to a certain “anarchism” in his idea of​​ a “democratic” and “distracted art” and accuses him of a romanticism that makes the barbarism they feared taboo, but in reverse, idolizing it if it is of proletarian origin. Adorno confuses the technique only formally subsumed by profanity in avant-garde art with the technique really subsumed by it, which is what Benjamin deals with and which gives foundation to this new type of art that was still to come. Lienhard Wawrzyn, Walter Benjamins Kunsttheorie (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1973), 68. 11 Gershom Scholem, “Walter Benjamin,” in Über Walter Benjamin, ed. Theodor W. Adorno et al. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968) 151–2. [RF: Translation mine from the author’s translation into Spanish of the original text in German.] 12 Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics, 10 13 “The essentially distant is the inapproachable: inapproachability is in fact a primary quality of the ceremonial image.”

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Notes to page 100–106

Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Verso, 1997), 148. 14 Chryssoula Kambas, “Kunstwerk,” in Benjamins Begriffe, 538. 15 Eco, “Two Hypotheses about the Death of Art,” 167ff. 16 Herbert Marcuse, Die Permanenz der Kunst (Munich: Hanser, 1969), 58. [RF: Translation mine from the author’s translation of the original text in German to Spanish.] 17 Werner Fuld, Walter Benjamin zwischen den Stühlen: Eine Biographie (Munich: Hanser, 1979), 253–4. [RF: Translation mine from the author’s translation into Spanish of the original text in German.] 18 The remoteness of this text from the readers whom it would have concerned also has no small amount to do with the fact that it was chosen by Horkheimer to appear first in French, rather than in German, in which it was originally written, as a sign of reciprocity for the lodging that the Librairie Felix Alcan had given to the Institute’s books once they were forced to flee from their original location in Frankfurt as a result of Nazi repression. The French version by Pierre Klossowski is admirable in many aspects, although it tends to soften its political radicality and sometimes simplifies the often convoluted meaning of the text. This was a reworked version by journal editors who had strong disagreements with the author, and in it one can see, as one of Benjamin’s biographers described it, that the censorship exercised by Horkheimer and Adorno “instigated numerous alterations and cuts of entire sections.” Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 156. 19 Burkhardt Lindner, “Technische Reproduzierbarkeit und Kulturindustrie: Benjamins ‘positives Barbarentum’ im Kontext,” in Benjamin im Kontext (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1985), 180ff. 20 Helmut Salzinger, Swinging Benjamin (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1973), 126ff. 21 Benjamin thought of himself as being “the first to dialectically formulate a revolutionary aesthetic.” 22 Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography, trans. Martina Dervis (New York: Verso, 1996), 224.

Chapter 8  Sartre from a Distance 1 Herbert Marcuse, “Existentialismus,” in Kultur und Gesellschaft, 2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965), 49–84. [RF: Translation mine



Notes to pages 108–112

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from the author’s translation into Spanish of the original text in German.] 2 Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, Les écrits de Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 128. [RF: Translation mine from the author’s translation into Spanish of the original text in French.] 3 When reading the transcript, Sartre was first of all annoyed by the attitude he was starting to adopt under the pressure coming from the public during the first part of his presentation, the attitude of someone who says “it’s all slander, we’re really good guys,” which led Boris Vian to jokingly say that the title of the lecture could have been “Existentialism is a Moralism.” Of all his works, this is the only one from which Sartre largely distanced himself. Contat and Rybalka, Les écrits de Sartre, 132. 4 Annie Cohen-Solal, Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life, trans. Anna Cancogni (New York: New Press, 2005). 5 In his “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” Pico della Mirandola writes: “Taking man, therefore, this creature of indeterminate image, He set him in the middle of the world and thus spoke to him: ‘We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own […]. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.’” As the Jesuit Molinists of the seventeenth century said, together with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: the greatest “tactfulness” that God can have in relation to the human being is to leave him alone, abandoned to his free will. 6 Humanism, says Heidegger, “designates, rather, that philosophical interpretation of man which explains and evaluates beings as a whole from the standpoint of, and in relation to, man.” Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 70. 7 “The cult of humanity ends … shut-in upon itself, and – this must be said – in Fascism.” “Existentialism is a Humanism,” trans. Philip Mairet, in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin, 1975), 368. 8 “Existentialism is a Humanism,” 368. 9 The texts on the humanism of the two main “philosophers of existence,” Heidegger and Sartre, are usually published together, and there is plenty of editorial injustice in this: one transcribes

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Notes to pages 113–128

Sartre’s improvisation at the Club Maintenant and the other is a well-thought-out letter, which Heidegger wrote in the calmness of his Black Forest hut. 10 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 263. 11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Sartre and Ultrabolshevism,” trans. Joseph Bien, in The Debate between Sartre and Merleau Ponty, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 430. 12 “Existentialism and Marxism,” in Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 8. 13 “Existentialism and Marxism,” 6. 14 “Existentialism and Marxism,” 4. 15 “Existentialism and Marxism,” 17. 16 “Existentialism and Marxism,” 21. 17 “Existentialism and Marxism,” 21. 18 “Existentialism and Marxism,” 5. 19 “Existentialism and Marxism,” 28. 20 [RF: Translation mine.] 21 [RF: Translation mine.]

Chapter 9  Where is “the Left” Now? This was an intervention by the author in the May 8, 2006, session of the seminar “Modernity: Versions and Dimensions.” It is summarized here. 1 Rosa Luxemburg, Cartas desde la cárcel, trans. Jorge Navarro Pérez (Madrid: Abada, 2017). [RF: Translation mine.]

Chapter 10  Meditations on the Baroque This paper was presented at the “Moving Worlds of the Baroque” Colloquium, University of Toronto, October 2007. [RF: The author uses the term los indios here to refer to the native Latin American population. As is evident throughout the text, the author is also aware of and extensively uses the term indígenas. However, he seems to strategically use the former term as he engages in terminological dialogue with both Spanish and native authors from the time of the Spanish colony. In keeping with the author’s choice, rather than render this difference null, I have translated the former as “Indians” and the latter as “indigenous people.”]



Notes to pages 128–150

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1 José Lezama Lima, La expresión americana (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 106. [RF: Translation mine.] 2 Miguel de Unamuno, Selected Works of Miguel de Unamuno. Vol. 3: Our Lord Don Quixote, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). 3 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert HullotKentor (New York: Continuum, 1997), 204. 4 Francisco de Terrazas, Poesías, ed. Antonio Castro Leal (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1941). [RF: Translated by Benjamin Keen, in The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 90.] 5 The Nican Mopohua was published only in 1649 by Luis Lasso de la Vega. His manuscript is currently kept in the New York Public Library. 6 Miguel León-Portilla, Tonantzin Guadalupe (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), 83. 7 [RF: Translation mine.] 8 [RF: Translation mine.] 9 [RF: Translation mine.] 10 Edmundo O’Gorman, Destierro de sombras (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1986), 139. 11 David Brading, ed., Siete sermones guadalupanos (1709–1765) (Mexico: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México, Condumex, 1994). 12 Edmundo O’Gorman, “Meditaciones sobre el criollismo,” El Día, June 29, 1970. 13 O’Gorman, Destierro de sombras, 60. 14 Serge Gruzinski, La colonisation de l’imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 201. 15 O’Gorman, Destierro de sombras, 148. 16 Gabriel Zaid, “Milagros certificados,” Reforma, October 27, 2002. 17 O’Gorman, Destierro de sombras, 104. 18 O’Gorman, Destierro de sombras, 61.

Chapter 11  The Mexican ’68 and its City This essay was originally a presentation in the series of conferences organized by Centro Cultural Universitario, Tlatelolco, on the fortieth anniversary of the 1968 student movement. 1 “Nous sommes tous ‘indésirables’!” [RF: Translation mine.]

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Note to page 170

Chapter 12  Mexican Modernity and Anti-Modernity This paper was presented at the “Modernity and Anti-Modernity in Mexico” Colloquium, organized by the seminar “Modernity: Versions and Dimensions,” UNAM, August 25 and 26, 2008. 1 Carlos III, “Real cédula … Madrid, 16 de abril de 1770,” in La ilustración y la educación en la Nueva España, ed. Dorothy Tanck de Estrada (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1985), 37–45. [RF: Translation mine.]

Index

academia 78, 88 Adorno, Theodor ix, x, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 66, 107, 131, 132, 137, 144, 182n(1), 184nn, 192n(2), 193n(10), 194n(18) Aesthetic Theory 130, 197n(3) see also Dialectic of Enlightenment Aegeus 8 Africa 52 sculptural figures of art 83 Albiker, Karl 49 alienated subjects 18, 36, 37 alienation 20, 73, 95, 99, 111–12, 114, 148, 157 capitalist, best proof of 158 capitalist mode of production and 115 self 105 social xi Allen, Woody 44 American modernity xvi, 152, 163 capacity to flaunt itself 43

cinema dominated by 99 keys to understanding 52–73, 187–9nn symbols in Mexico 162 triumph of 165 Americanization 43, 52, 58, 62, 64, 67–8, 150, 163, 187–8n(8), 189n(11) Westernization reduced to 53 Andrade, Oswald de viii anti-Judaism 44, 45 Apostolic faith 137–8 art African sculptural figures 83 baroque 130, 132 degenerate 47, 86 ephemeral 132 Nazi 48, 50 utopia and 89–105, 192–4nn see also avant-garde; cinema; music; theatricality Aryan whiteness 44, 47, 49, 50 Asia 52 workers’ armies 43

200 Index avant-garde 47, 50, 74–80, 83, 86–8, 95, 97, 98, 105, 190nn(3–4) emergence of xxiv intellectual ix political revolution and 91 Babeuf, F.–N. 124 Bahro, Rudolf 118–19 Barca, Calderón de la 132 baroque xxiii, 94, 175, 179, 180–1, 185n(3) anti-capitalist expression 46 ethos of xv, xvi, 187n(3) incredible book on 90 meditations on xvi, xxiv, 128–49, 196–7nn shock of modernization which gave rise to 177–8 social consistency of behavior xv Bartra, Roger 176 Baudrillard, Jean 59 Bauhaus 84 Beaufret, Jean 112, 113 Being see Dasein Benjamin, Walter xi, xxiv, 1, 8–9, 10, 17, 18, 27, 74, 76, 85, 89–105, 119, 120, 183n(1 to ch. 1), 184n(3), 186n(7), 189n(1), 192nn(2–4, 7), 193nn(9– 11), 193–4nn(13–14, 17–22) Berlin ix, 121, 153, 155, 156, 158, 159 Olympic stadium 49 Bernini, G. 131, 191n(8) Black Americans 43 blancura xix, xxii, 39, 44 blanquearse 42 blanquitud xix, xxii, 39 Bloch, Ernst ix, 120, 155 Bloch, Marc 8

bohemian world 74–88, 189–91nn Bolshevik-Leninists 119 Bolshevism 47, 68, 90 war against 186n(6) see also Judeo-Bolsheviks Borch, Gerard ter 42 Borromini, Francesco 94 bourgeoisie 4, 6, 7, 25, 76, 109, 125, 152–8, 164–7, 176 contribution to general criticism of 117 counter-revolutionary position adopted by 124 democratic 108 humanistic attitude of 111 intellectual 91 most powerful criticism of x movement that attempted to transform 86 portraits in Flemish painting 42 primacy given to define political affairs 3 see also petty-bourgeoisie Brancusi, C. 83 Braudel, Fernand xii, 8, 11, 14, 55, 63–4 Brazil viii Brecht, Bertolt 84, 95, 192–3n(8), 193n(10) Breker, Arno 48–9, 50 Bustamante, Fray Francisco de 147 California 154, 159 Calvinism 39, 61, 65 capitalism see spirit of capitalism; Western capitalism capitalist accumulation xi, xiv– xv, xxii–xxiii, 17–18, 73 capitalist modernity xvi, 16, 17, 77, 88, 99, 117, 180

Index ability to correspond to ethical request of 39 actualizations manipulated and refunctionalized in 100 American 43, 57, 59, 62, 64, 69, 178 attitudes contrary to 174 civilizational project of 53–4, 55, 174, 175 contravening the rule of automatism imposed by 127 culture industry of 107 different possible “ethe” within 58 dominance of 115 elaborating an extensive critique of xi enlightened fear of 36 essential requirement of way of life demanded by vii ethnic order subordinated to identitarian order imposed by 42 European 69, 189n(11) expansion of 14 first proof of existence of 177 general feature of 64 good functioning of 50 historical figure of 67 humanism pertaining to 111 internalizing 136 kind of art requested by 105 main characteristics of the crisis of 24 modern world born with 137 multiple potential modes of social concretion under xi multiplicity of historical ethos of 185n(3) one of multiple possible forms to confront xv

201

productive apparatus designed in xxii progress of 121 racism constitutive of 39; standard 50–1 realization or actualization of 18 rebellion against 85, 126 totalizing and uniformizing architecture of 179 versions of: communication channels installed between 59; multiple 53 virtues of: community life annihilated by 46; regenerative 47 work of art as programmed by 83 capitalist wealth accumulation of 136 reproduction of 23, 125; consolidating 56; revolution aimed to replace 86–7 Carnegie, Andrew 70 Castilian Spanish 170 Catholicism 94, 95, 108, 137, 143, 148 Guadalupan 138, 144, 171, 179 Marian 138, 139, 140 Mediterranean 146 Mexican 138 see also European modernity Celan, Paul 38, 185n(1) Central Europe xii impulse of capitalism xv–xvi Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 130 Cézanne, Paul 84–5 Charles III, king of Spain 170 China 155 Chirico, Giorgio de 83

202 Index Christianity 11, 14, 15, 48, 54, 56–60, 65, 97, 131, 146 adopting 142, 143 conversion to 141, 142 gods of 114, 145 heaven of 139 Indianized 147 Marian 143 medieval: implosion of 111; obsolescence of 110 orthodox 142 pantheon of 139, 179 pure 142, 143 radical 6 re-creating 143 see also Catholicism; JudeoChristian scriptures; Protestantism cinema 48, 67, 99, 103, 105 emancipation 102 proposed as liberator of vision 84 revolutionary 98 civilizational projects 27, 63, 76, 163, 176 archaic 173 capitalist modernity of 53–4, 55, 174, 175 Cold War 151 Colet, Louise 193n(8) commodification 10, 21, 57 millennial 54 total 45–6 communism 21, 47, 50, 55, 58, 108, 120, 126, 176 absurd policies of parties 121 attempt to transform society through revolution 86–7 changing the mode of production from capitalist one to 88 classical 105 emergence of the project of alternative modernity 79

failure of 88, 102 intellectual 90, 91, 105 leap to 90 Marx’s idea of xii revolution: history of 102; proletarians rising up and initiating 156; Rosa Luxemburg’s theory of x Stalinist 158; blind pragmatism of 117–18 threat of 129 communitarianism 4 concrete identity xxii, 6, 31, 39, 40, 58 attempt to reinvent 110 resisting the destruction of 46 Cord, Jonas 70 Cortes, Hernán 140 Cranach, Lucas 42 Creoles xxiv, 136, 146, 147, 148, 176 rejected by Spain 134 see also O’Gorman; Valeriano Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre) 118 Cuadernos políticos (journal) x Cuba 155 Revolution (1959) ix cultural codes viii Da Vinci, Leonardo 77 Daedalus 7, 8, 11 Dasein 113–14 De Gaulle, Gen. Charles 108 Delacroix, E. 77 Der Anschlag (journal) ix Descartes, René 116 dialectic 27, 31, 81, 87 negative 33 North–South 14 perverse 37 see also Critique of Dialectical Reason

Index Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno) 7, 26–9, 31, 33, 103, 172 dictatorship capitalist 68, 165 mass media 107 oligarchic 165 Diego, Juan 140, 141–2, 148 discontent 11, 12, 167, 187n(8) Duchamp, Marcel 84 Dutschke, Rudi ix, 158 Ecuador ix, vii see also Quito Egyptian hieratism 47–8 Engels, Friedrich 116, 176 England 39, 129 Enlightenment 123, 128, 170 destiny of the West 33–4 meanings of 26–37, 183–4nn new advance in the path of 153 project of modern civilized life formulated by 171 see also Dialectic of Enlightenment ethnicity appearance of North-Western Europeans 41 determinations of community 41 manipulation of facial features 43 racism and xix, 43, 44 subordinated to identitarian order 42 see also whiteness and ethnicity Europe see Central Europe; also under France; Germany; Spain

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European modernity 52, 54, 58, 68, 151, 168 American modernity and 59, 64 capitalism that sustained 61 capitalist rearrangement of 157 Catholic 56, 187n(3) innovation that went beyond the traditional productivist idea in 152 North 57 Protestant 56, 57 social and historical naturalness in 63 European Recovery Plan see Marshall Plan existentialism xxiv, 117, 118, 121, 195nn(3) humanism in 106–16, 195nn(7–8) Marxism and 196nn(12–19) Eyck, Jan van 42 Fanon, Frantz x Far East 53 fascism 90, 105, 150, 158, 195n(7) barbarism of 27 democratic rise to power of 165 Faustian civilization 27 female beauty 49–50 Flaubert, Gustave 118, 193n(8) Flemish painting 42 Ford, Henry 70 Ford Model T 66 Foucault, Michel 113 Fourier, Charles 105 France 28, 108, 120 collaboration in the Nazi era 109 emancipation cinema (1960s) 102

204 Index see also French Revolution; Paris Franciscan evangelizers 148 Franco, Gen. Francisco 129 Frankfurt 194n(18) Frankfurt School viii, xi one of the most important thinkers of 154 Free University of Berlin ix freedom xvii, 101, 114, 156, 171, 184n(6) adapting to social life capable of guaranteeing 124 aggression against 110 exercise of 87, 112 expression of 152 mutilated 158 purity of 111 reactivated 81 reaffirmed specificity of 84 real 125 realization of 29, 70 renewed exercise of 31 renunciation of 30, 110 seen in action 155 sexual identification 12 used as instrument for totalitarian restraint 18 young people and 152, 154 freedom of action 5–6 freedom of movement 68 Freiburg viii French Revolution (1789) 164–6, 171 Conspiracy of the Equals 124 Convention Nationale 123 Girondins 123 Freud, Sigmund 11, 187n(8), 191n(10) Fuld, Werner 102, 194n(17) Geddes, Patrick 8, 9 German Social-Democrats 119

Germany x, 57, 65, 151, 189n(10) emancipation cinema (1960s) 102 social democrats 119, 126, 177 student movement (’68) ix see also Nazi Germany; also under Berlin; Frankfurt; Freiburg Gestalt 76 Geworfenheit 113, 114 González, Luis 46 Goya, Francisco 77 Gracián y Morales, Baltasar 26, 132, 183n(1 to ch. 3) Greek mythology 7–8, 114 Guadalupanismo 137–49, 171, 177, 179, 180 Hearst, W. R. 70 Hegel, G. W. F. 97, 104, 116, 192nn(6–7), 193n(12) Heidegger, Martin ix, 3, 46, 49, 109, 112–14, 191n(8), 195nn(6, 9), 196n(10) Hispanic philosophy xi Hitler, Adolf 47, 48, 49, 177 Holbein, Hans 42 Hollywood 67, 103 Homer 7, 15, 184n(13) Horkheimer, Max ix, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 66, 91, 107, 120, 184nn, 194n(18) see also Dialectic of Enlightenment human and Other xii, 18, 82 arrogance in regard to 112 interaction between 10 interrelation with 87 new relation between 16 reconciliation between 30–1 humanism xxii, 106–16, 195nn(6–9), 196n(10)

Index undoubtable 69 Iberian Conquest 139, 144, 145 identity xxi, 52, 55, 71, 163, 175, 176 affirming 31, 32–3, 137 alterations of 72 American 64 ancestral 137 baroque 139, 145 Catholic 171 Celtic 57 Christian 57 collective 4, 177 common 109 communal 34, 46 ethical 42 general xvi, 41 Germanic 57 global xxii historical 145 humanist 109 maintained 36 metamorphosis of 33 minimally universal 53 minimum 142–3 ontological 149 oppression and repression of xiv preserving 36–7 preserving cunning weapon for 34 preserving necessity of sacrifice in 35 proletarian 121 Protestant xvi radically recomposing human 173 reproducing 3–4, 35, 162 resistance which protects 146 revolutionary 69 safeguarded 36, 37 sexual 12

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standard 53 substantialized 64 substantiation of 32 traditional xxii, 59, 180 undecided 12 uniform xxii vital 119 white xvi, xxiii, 41 see also concrete identity; modern identity; national identity; natural identity; social identity Ignatius of Loyola 114 Impressionism 75, 76 Indians 137, 142, 196n(to ch. 10) alteration of Christian religiosity by 143–4 assimilated 135 basic project carried out by 149 condition to become Christian 143 conspiracy planned by 147, 148 form of behavior spontaneously invented by 139 integrated as servants 133–4 macehual 140, 141, 148; newly converted 143 massacre of 70 mestizo 140, 145, 148 resistance to Christianization 146 urban 135, 136, 146 individualism 4 individuality collective 4 singular 4; concrete 115 Industrial Revolution 7, 15–16, 187n(6) intellectuals 105–8, 162–4, 180, 187n(7)

206 Index avant-garde ix, 91 bourgeois 91 communist 90 great 108 leftist 90 most renowned viii invisible hand thesis 10, 35, 62, 64, 69, 125 Jackson, Michael 43 Japan 43, 189n(10) Jesus Christ 61, 138, 139 Jetztzeit 85 Jewish Germans 44–7, 90, 105, 186n(7) see also anti-Judaism John Paul II, Pope 137–8 Judeo-Bolsheviks 184n(13) Judeo-Christian scriptures 56 Kafka, Franz 52, 187n(1) Kandinsky, W. 83 Kant, Immanuel 28, 29, 31, 71, 116, 184nn(5–6) Klages, Ludwig 95 Koizumi, Junichiro 43 Korsch, Karl 118, 120 Koyré Alexandre 6–7 labor unions 119 Latin America 52, 134, 136–7, 196n(to ch. 10) baroque identity/behavior 139, 143–4 basic referent for Marxist thought in x modernity xvi, 176, 187n(3) narrative that has prevailed in xi–xii native Latin Americans 196n(to ch. 10); barbarity attributed to viii philosophy in xi political situation ix

social dimensions xvi see also Brazil; Ecuador; Mexico; Peru Latino workers’ armies 43 Left see political left leopardism 154 Les Lettres Françaises (magazine) 108 L’Illustration (Parisian newspaper) 68, 69, 188n(9) Lizarazo, Diego 185n(to ch. 4) Locke, John 116 Loos, Adolf 84 Lukács, György ix, 18, 55, 120, 121 Luxemburg, Rosa x, 90, 123, 196n(1) madness 128–9, 137, 169 Malevich, Kasimir 78, 83–4 Malintzin 140 Malraux, André 102 Marcuse, Herbert ix, 106, 118, 120, 154, 155, 194nn(1, 16) Maréchal, S. 124 Marshall Plan (US 1948) 150 Marx, Karl viii, ix, xii, xiv, 14–18, 20–2, 24, 28, 43, 55, 60, 70n(1), 73, 105, 114–15, 137, 155 works: Capital x, 120, 183n(1 to ch. 2); Communist Manifesto (with Engels) 176; Economic- Philosophical Manuscripts 120; German Ideology (with Engels) 116; Grundrisse 191n(10) Marxism 45, 89, 99, 115, 156 existentialism and 196nn(12–19) radical power of ix

Index Sartre and 116–22 Soviet 118 unorthodox x Mediterranean world 14, 15, 33, 48, 55, 56 capitalism xv Catholic communities 146 characteristics of (seventeenth-century) 130 ideal of female beauty 49–50 modernity 56 Meller, Willy 49 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 116, 196n(11) mestizaje viii, xvi, xxiv, 57, 137, 146, 148 cultural 134 identitarian 145 mestizos viii, 44–5, 56, 133, 136, 140, 145, 148, 176 Mexican ’68 movement 150–69, 197n(to ch. 11) Mexico vii, viii, xxiii, 137–8 behavior that originated mainly in 139 Colegio de Tlatelolco 140 first Castilian poet born in 134 Guadalupan religiosity 140, 144 modernity and anti-modernity 170–81 symbols of American modernity in 162 see also UNAM Mexico City 167 Ciudad Universitaria 162–3 Paseo de la Reforma 161–2 Plaza de las Tres Culturas 162 Plaza de Tlatelolco 160 Tepeyac Hill/Basilica 138, 140, 141, 142, 147 Michelangelo 49, 77

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mimesis 74, 82, 86 ceremonial 191n(8) festive 78, 84, 85 magical-mythical 34 non-ecstatic 93 second-degree 83, 84 self-conscious 84 Minos 7–8 Mirandola, Pico della 111 Modern Enlightenment 35–7, 171, 172 modern identity xxiii, 39, 40 attempts to build 136 condition of whiteness for 41–2 foundation of vii modernity see American modernity; capitalist modernity; European modernity; Mexico, modernity and anti-modernity Monsiváis, Carlos 176 Montúfar, Alonso, Archbishop 146, 147, 148 Mumford, Lewis xii, xviii–xix, 8–10, 182n(2) music 76, 82, 96, 104, 188n(8), 193n(8) absolute 84 rock 67 Musil, Robert 91 myth 27, 36, 69–70, 121, 128, 133 archaic 184n(13); blind trust in 172; openly fantastic 173 Catholic 143 Enlightenment in 34–5 see also Greek mythology national identity 44, 46 eternal 100

208 Index level of identity that corresponds to 40 National Socialism 44, 108, 184n(13) art that belonged to 50 barbarism of 120 revolution (1933) 177 see also Nazi Germany natural form 17, 54, 55, 70–3, 86, 136, 187n(2) capital uses and abuses 67 challenge aimed at transforming 16 compromise between capitalist and 56 different determinations of 39 enjoyment determined by 66 negating 189n(11) sacrifice of 50 submission to value form 65 subordinating 59 subsumption of 57, 62, 69 natural identity 56, 65, 137 anti-dilution strategy to protect 46 forms of resistance presented by xxii naturalness 62, 133, 189n(12) animal 31 artificial 63 contingent 187n(8) seemingly dispensable 188n(8) social and historical 63 wild 30 Nazi Germany/Nazism 44–50, 67, 153, 158, 177 art in 86 counter-revolutionary death rattle of 99 defeat of 121 destruction of Europe by 88 passive collaborators with 155

persecution by 90, 103 possible for the regime to fail 90 racism and whiteness 39 repression in 186n(7), 194n(18) stoppable rise of 105 struggle against 109 survivors of 154, 155 triumphant celebration of 29 see also Jewish Germans Neolithic Revolution 9 Neo-Objectivists 48 neo-technic revolution 10, 16 revolution historical form of civilizatory totalization based on xii neo-technics xiii appearance of 13; challenge launched by 17; ChristianRoman West’s reaction to 15 capitalist accumulation makes use of 17 capitalist modernity’s manipulation of 174 challenge of 14, 16, 17, 18; modernity and 6–13 new unitary principle established by xii organ successfully used to enhance the multiplying factor of 16 peculiar use of 15 possibilities offered by 16 possible response to 18 promoted in a more abstract and universalist way 14 systematically repressing the qualitative aspect of 16 Netherlands 39 New England 65 Nican Mopohua (Guadalupan

Index text) 140, 148, 149, 197n(5) Nietzsche, Friedrich 28, 79 Nordic countries 43 capitalism xv Novo, Salvador 162 Odysseus 7 O’Gorman, Edmundo xxiv, 140, 142, 145–9, 197nn(10–18) Ordaz, Díaz 160 Ordensburg Vogelsang 49 Oriental images 48 “Other” 4, 9, 12, 29, 36, 84, 85 almighty 27, 34 challenge addressed to xiii character of 27 European 146 humanized or domesticated 80 magical behavior imprints a need on 34–5 negation of 21, 37 otherness of nullifying 32–3 otherness of simple threat of 36 potential for new relationship with xiii protagonist role and tendency to discriminate a reassigned symbolic meaning of viii scarcity and reluctance from 71 traditional approach to 2 transcendence of 30, 32, 189n(12) use-value of 72 violence toward 31, 70 window opens up to 191n(9) see also human and Other Otto, Kurt 48

209

Pacuna (journal) ix parasitism xxiii, 46, 97, 116, 117, 132 Paris 90, 91, 155, 156, 159, 161 Club Maintenant 106 Moulin de la Galette 78 Mutualité speakers 158 progressive effervescence of 78 social and political life 107 see also L’Illustration Parisian ’68 movement 107, 121, 150, 153–4, 158, 167 Peru 43, 139 petty-bourgeoisie 45–6, 120 Philip II, king of Spain 133 Picasso, Pablo 83, 86 Plato 114 political left xxiv, 115, 123–7, 171, 196n(to ch. 9) intellectual 90 totalitarian 158 politics xi, 43, 87, 89, 116, 139, 168–9 aestheticization of 105, 186n(7) civil society 125 commitment to 91 contemporary 176 democratic 158; modern 124, 164–5 leftist see political left philosophy entered into 106 religious 29 revolutionary 115; regeneration of 109 romantic ethos and xvi secularization of 4 self-censorship from 157 ways of doing 164, 166 Western 165 Pollock, Jackson 95 Prometheus 7

210 Index Protestant ethic xi, xv, xvi, 38 Protestantism see Calvinism; European modernity; Puritanism; WASP nation Puritanism xvi, 38–41, 46, 56–62, 65 Quito ix racial whiteness vii, xvi, 42 extreme 47 fundamentalist return to 44, 185n(5) impeccable 43 racism vii, xvi, 39, 47 civilizational 42, 44 ethical 44 ethnic xix, 42, 43, 44, 45 identitarian 42 standard, capitalist modernity 50–1 tolerant 42 Rembrandt 77 Renaissance 6, 77, 78, 97, 111 renunciation 7, 30, 35, 110 reproduction of wealth 16, 21, 24, 39 goal repeatedly reached by 73 pre-capitalist 20 see also capitalist wealth; social wealth Rice, Condoleezza 43 Riefenstahl, Leni 48 rigidity principle 48 Rilke, Rainer 85 Rockefeller, J. D. 68, 70, 188n(9) Roman religion 138 Romanticism 77, 94 Rosdolsky, Roman x Rubel, Maximilien x Russia 103, 189n(10) see also Soviet Union

Sade, D. A. F., Marquis de 28 Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de 140, 147 Salazar, Juan de 147 sameness 12, 32 threatened 9 San Francisco 141 sans-culottes 124 Sartre, Jean-Paul ix, x, xxiv, 29, 106–22, 155, 156, 184n(7), 194–6nn(to ch. 8) Schelling, F. W. J. von 29 Scholem, Gershom 99, 192n(2), 193n(11) Schönberg, Arnold 84 self-preservation 31–2, 33–4, 35, 37, 81, 160 semiophagic strategy viii, xiv semiosis 79–80, 86 semiotics 39, 71, 82 sexual polymorphism 12 Smith, Adam 35, 64 see also invisible hand thesis social hierarchy 4 social identity 178 duplication of 177 pagan 55–6 reproducing 3–4 social wealth 22, 38, 60 distribution of 36 entire circulation of xiii production of capitalist organization of 38 production of machinery of xxii–xxiii reaffirming the human origin of 61 reproduction of 56, 172, 174 use-value of 36 socialism 68, 109, 125, 181 actually existing xiii, 118 proper 103 real 165 see also National Socialism

Index Socialist Realism 186n(7) Soviet Union ix, 26, 186n(7) see also Marxism Spain 128, 129, 134, 176 civil war (1930s) 102 see also Cervantes; Charles III; Philip II Spanish Conquest 133, 134, 146 Indians who survived the catastrophe 145 Speer, Albert 47, 48 Spengler, O. 27 spirit of capitalism xv, 38, 43 behavior requested by 39 correspondence between Protestant ethic and xi indispensable proof of obedience to 44 morality demanded by 179 responses to 57 staging 136 absolute 132, 133, 135–6, 144 elaborated 137 Stalin, Joseph 118, 158 Stiegler, Bernard xix Suprematist Manifesto (1915) 78 Symbolists 48 Tatlin, Vladimir 84 technics see Benjamin; Mumford; neo-technics technological change xiii technological rent 61, 183nn(to ch. 3) and devaluation of nature 20–5 Terrazas, Francisco de 134, 197n(4) theatricality 79, 82, 129, 175, 179 absolute 131–2, 133, 144

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decorative 130 ornamental 132 profound 130 see also staging Theseus 7, 8 Third Reich see Nazi Germany Titian 77 Toledo, Alejandro 43 Tonantzin 141, 142, 147, 148 totalitarianism 18, 158, 167 oligarchic and repressive 165 soft 166 Traditionalists 48 trust xvii, xxi, 174 adopting a combative attitude against 171 blind 172 emergence of a practical form of 2 humanist xxii new kind of 3 Tzántzicos (avant-garde intellectual group) ix UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) x, 182(to Introduction) Unamuno, Miguel de ix, 128–9, 136, 197n(2) “Uncle Toms” 43 United States 153, 165, 189n(10) age of adolescence introduced in Europe by 151–2 economic recovery of Europe financed by 150 see also American modernity; Americanization; California; New England University of Berlin ix Uruchurtu, Ernesto P. 161 US modernity see American modernity

212 Index use-values x, 16, 22, 61–6, 71–2, 95, 136, 188n(8) absolute commodification of 21 autonomy of xiv consumption as 76 contradiction between value and xiv cultic 92, 94 logic of 58 multiple 50 offering to commoditycapitalist value 94 production/consumption of 17 public or profane pole of 93 purely aesthetic 97 qualitative consistency of 36 replacement of the natural design of 73 transformation of 24 utopia 19, 124 art and 89–105, 192–4nn (to ch. 7) unattainable goals 171 Valeriano, Antonio 140, 141, 148, 149 Valéry, Paul 92 Vallejo, César 89, 192n(1) value see use-values Van Gogh, Vincent 95 Vanderbilt, C. 68, 188n(9) Veblen, Thorstein 61 Velázquez, D. 77 Vietnam 155, 188n(8) Villa, Francisco “Pancho” 178 Visconti, Luchino 154 Volkswagen 66 Wackerle, Joseph 49 Wagner, Richard 186n(7) WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) nation 62, 67

wealth concrete 61 conferred xv creation of 17–18 earthly 60 natural 9 pre-capitalist 20 qualitative 50 see also capitalist wealth; reproduction of wealth; social wealth Weber, Max xi, xv, 3, 38, 39, 57, 128, 153 Weber, Shierry M. 192n(4) Western capitalism xv Westernization 53 whiteness civilizational 39, 42 disfigurement or distortion of xxiii ethical-anthropological 57 images of xvi, 38–51, 185–6nn, 187n(4) modernity and xi original or pure 44 white skin not a guarantee of vii see also Aryan whiteness; blancura; blanquearse; blanquitud; mestizos; racial whiteness whiteness and ethnicity fanaticism found in pursuing 42–3 features of vii, xxiii, 39 racism and 44, 45 Wolbert, Klaus 48 workaholism 60 World War I 45, 100, 164 World War II 59, 88, 121, 150, 151, 164 children of veterans of 154 lesson and heritage of 157–8

Index young people 151–69 Zaid, Gabriel 148, 197n(16) Zapata, Emiliano 178

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Zelig (movie, 1983) 44 Ziegler, Adolf 47, 48, 49–50 Zumárraga, Juan de, Bishop 140–2, 144–8

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