Julian Bourg’s talk, “Of Partisans and Paranoid Experts: How We Came to Think About Terrorism,” was part of boundary 2’s recent conference on The Militarization of Knowledge at the University of Pittsburgh. Bourg is an Associate Professor of History and Associate Dean of the Core at Boston College.
Author: boundary2
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David Simpson: Terror Talk and Political Management
David Simpson’s talk, “Terror Talk and Political Management” was part of boundary 2’s recent conference on The Militarization of Knowledge at the University of Pittsburgh.
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"Still Ahead Somehow:" Paul Amar’s The Security Archipelago
A Review of Paul Amar’s The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013).
By Neel Ahuja
One of the most widely reported news stories of the 2011 revolution in Egypt involved sexual assaults and other physical attacks on women in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, where mass protests led to the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak. Paul Amar’s singular book The Security Archipelago explores, among other topics, the Egyptian military council’s attempt to burnish its own authority to “rescue the nation” and its “dignity” by constructing the Arab Spring uprising as a destructive site of violence and moral degradation (3). Mirroring the racialized discourse of international news media who invoked animal metaphors to represent dissent at Tahrir as an articulation of pathological urban violence and frenzy (203), the counter-revolutionary campaign allowed the military to arrest and incarcerate protesters by associating them with demeaned markers of class status and sexuality.
For Amar, this conjunction of moralizing statism and the militarization of social life is indicative of a particular governmental form he calls “human security,” a set of transnational juridical, political, economic, and police practices and discourses that become especially legible in sites of urban crisis and struggle. Amar names four interlocking logics that constitute human security: evangelical humanitarianism, police paramilitarism, juridical personalism, and workerist empowerment (7). He unveils these logics by constructing a dense analysis of security politics linking the megacities of Cairo and Rio de Janiero.
The chapters explore crisis moments that reveal connections between the militarization of police, the development of urban planning and development policy, tourism, the management of labor processes, and racialized and gendered struggles over rights and citizenship. Such connections arise in crises around public protest, attempts by municipal and national authorities to market heritage (in the form of Islamic heritage architecture or samba music) to tourists, coalitions between labor and evangelical Christian groups to combat trafficking and corruption, the attempts of 9/11 plotter Muhammad Atta to develop a theory of Islamic urban planning, and the policing of city space during major international development meetings. These wide-ranging case studies ground the book’s critical security analysis in sites of struggle, making important contributions to the understanding of the spread of urban violence and progressive social policy in Brazil and the rise of left-right coalitions in Islamic urban planning and revolutionary uprisings in Egypt.
Throughout the book, public contestation over the permissible limits of urban sexuality emerges as a key factor inciting securitization. It serves as a marker of cultural tradition, a policed indicator of urban space and capital networking, and a marker of political dissent. For Amar, the new subjects of security “are portrayed as victimized by trafficking, prostituted by ‘cultures of globalization,’ sexually harassed by ‘street’ forms of predatory masculinity, or ‘debauched’ by liberal values” (15). In this way, the “human” at the heart of “human security” is a figure rendered precarious by the public articulation of sexuality with processes of economic and social change.
If this method of transnational scholarship showcases the unique strengths of Amar’s interdisciplinary training, Portuguese and Arabic language skills, and past work as a development specialist, it brilliantly articulates a set of connections between the cities of Rio and Cairo evident in their parallel experiences of neoliberal economic policies, redevelopment, militarization of policing, NGO intervention, and rise as significant “semiperipheral” or “first-third-world” metropoles. In contrast to racialized international relations and conflict studies scholarship that fails continually to break from the mythologies of the clash of civilizations, Amar’s book offers a fascinating analysis of how religious politics, policing, and workerist humanisms interface in the urban crises of two megacities whose representation if often overwritten by stereotyped descriptions of either oriental despotism (Cairo) or tropicalist transgression (Rio).
These cities, in fact, share geographic, economic, and political connections that justify what Amar describes as an archipelagic method: “The practices, norms, and institutional products of [human security] struggles have… traveled across an archipelago, a metaphorical island chain, of what the private security industry calls ‘hotspots’–enclaves of panic and laboratories of control–the most hypervisible of which have emerged in Global South megacities” (15-16). The security archipelago is also a formation that includes but transcends the state; it is “parastatal” and reflects the ways in which states in the Global South, NGO activists, and state attempts to humanize security interventions have produced a set of governmentalities that attempt to incorporate and govern public challenges to austerity politics and militarism.
As such, Amar’s book offers a two-pronged challenge to dominant theories of neoliberalism. First, it clarifies that although many of the wealthy countries still battle over a politics of austerity, the so-called Washington Consensus combining financial deregulation, privatization, and reduction of trade barriers no longer holds sway internationally or even in its spaces of origin. Indeed, Amar claims that even the Beijing Consensus — the turn since the 1990s to a strong state hand in development investment combined with the controlled growth of highly regulated markets — is being supplanted by the parastatal form of the human security regime. Second, this line of thought requires for Amar a methodological shift. Amar claims, “we can envision an end to the term neoliberalism as an overburdened and overextended interpretive lens for scholars” given “the demise, in certain locations and circuits, of a hegemonic set of market-identified subjects, locations, and ideologies of politics” (236). The Security Archipelago offers an alternative to theories of globalization that privilege imperial states as the primary forces governing the production of transnational power dynamics. Without making the common move of romanticizing a static vision of either locality or indigeneity in the conceptualization of resistance to globalization, Amar locates in the semiperiphery a crossroads between the forces of national development and transnational capital. It is in this crossroads where resistances to the violence of austerity are parlayed into new security regimes in the name of the very human endangered by capitalism’s market authoritarianism.
It is notable that the analysis of sexuality, with its attendant moral incitements to security, largely drops out of Amar’s concluding analysis of the debates on the end of neoliberalism. He does mention sexuality when proclaiming a shift from a consuming subject to a worker in the postneoliberal transition: “postneoliberal work centers more on the fashioning of moralization, care, humanization, viable sexualities, and territories that can be occupied. And the worker can see production as the collective work of vigilance and purification, which all too often is embedded through paramilitarization and enforcement practices” (243). While the book expertly reveals the emphasis on emergent forms of moral labor and securitizing care in the public regulation of sexuality, it also documents that moral crises and policing around the sexuality of samba, for example, are layered by the nexus of gentrification, private redevelopment, and transnational tourism that commonly attract the label neoliberalism. This point does not directly undermine Amar’s argument but suggests that further discussion of sexuality’s relation to human security regimes might engender an analytic revision of the notion of postneoliberal transition. The public articulation of sexuality as the site of urban securitization might rather reveal the regeneration of intersecting consumption forms and affective labors of logics of marketization and securitization that are divided geographically but dynamically interrelated.
The fact that Amar’s book raises this problem reveals the significance of the study for moving forward scholarship on sexuality, security, and globality — as individual objects of study and intertwined ones. As scholars focusing, for example, on homonationalist marriage practices in the global north continue to use the analytic frame of neoliberalism, Amar’s study might press for how the moral articulation of the marriage imperative exerts a securitizing force that transcends market logics. Similarly, Amar’s focus on both sexuality and the semiperiphery offer significant geographic and methodological disruptions to the literatures on neoliberalism, the rise of East Asian financial capital, and crisis theory. His unique method challenges interdisciplinary social theorizing to grapple with the archipelagic nature of contemporary forces of social precarity and securitization.
Neel Ahuja is associate professor of postcolonial studies in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC. He is the author the forthcoming Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species (Duke UP).
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Etienne Balibar: In War
At Open Democracy, b2 contributor Etienne Balibar charts a path forward for Europe after last week’s attacks in Paris.
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b2 Conference: The Militarization of Knowledge
On November 13 and 14, 2015, boundary 2 will host a conference at the University of Pittsburgh on The Militarization of Knowledge. This unique event will bring together distinguished scholars from a variety of disciplines. Click here to watch a livestream.
Our talks will take place at the following times, all Eastern Standard Time.
FRIDAY, 11/13/15
2pm – Operationalizing Basic Research and Scholarship: A System-of-Systems Approach for the Military Application of Knowledge, Carey Balaban, Professor, Departments of Otolaryngology, Neurobiology, Communication Science & Disorders, and Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh, Director of Center for National Preparedness
3:30pm – Terror, Talk, and Political Management, David Simpson, Distinguished Professor of English, UC Davis
SATURDAY, 11/14/15
9:30am – Of Partisans and Paranoid Experts: How We Came to Think about Terrorism, Julian Bourg, Associate Professor of History, Boston College
11am – The Representation of Atrocity, Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University
1:15pm – The Militarization of Language, David Golumbia, Associate Professor of English, Virginia Commonwealth University
2:45pm – Military Aesthetics: Technology, Experience, and Late Modern War, Anders Engberg-Pedersen, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Southern Denmark
4pm – Summary Discussion, led by Jonathan Arac, Mellon Professor of English and Director, Humanities Center, University of Pittsburgh, and Anthony Bogues, Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory, Professor of Africana Studies, Brown University; Director, Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice
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How We Think About Technology (Without Thinking About Politics)
a review of N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago, 2012)
by R. Joshua Scannell~
In How We Think, N Katherine Hayles addresses a number of increasingly urgent problems facing both the humanities in general and scholars of digital culture in particular. In keeping with the research interests she has explored at least since 2002’s Writing Machines (MIT Press), Hayles examines the intersection of digital technologies and humanities practice to argue that contemporary transformations in the orientation of the University (and elsewhere) are attributable to shifts that ubiquitous digital culture have engendered in embodied cognition. She calls this process of mutual evolution between the computer and the human technogenesis (a term that is mostly widely associated with the work of Bernard Stiegler, although Hayles’s theories often aim in a different direction from Stiegler’s). Hayles argues that technogenesis is the basis for the reorientation of the academy, including students, away from established humanistic practices like close reading. Put another way, not only have we become posthuman (as Hayles discusses in her landmark 1999 University of Chicago Press book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics), but our brains have begun to evolve to think with computers specifically and digital media generally. Rather than a rearguard eulogy for the humanities that was, Hayles advocates for an opening of the humanities to digital dromology; she sees the Digital Humanities as a particularly fertile ground from which to reimagine the humanities generally.
Hayles is an exceptional scholar, and while her theory of technogenesis is not particularly novel, she articulates it with a clarity and elegance that are welcome and useful in a field that is often cluttered with good ideas, unintelligibly argued. Her close engagement with work across a range of disciplines – from Hegelian philosophy of mind (Catherine Malabou) to theories of semiosis and new media (Lev Manovich) to experimental literary production – grounds an argument about the necessity of transmedial engagement in an effective praxis. Moreover, she ably shifts generic gears over the course of a relatively short manuscript, moving from quasi-ethnographic engagement with University administrators, to media archaeology a la Friedrich Kittler, to contemporary literary theory, with grace. Her critique of the humanities that is, therefore, doubles as a praxis: she is actually producing the discipline-flouting work that she calls on her colleagues to pursue.
The debate about the death and/or future of the humanities is weather worn, but Hayles’s theory of technogenesis as a platform for engaging in it is a welcome change. For Hayles, the technogenetic argument centers on temporality, and the multiple temporalities embedded in computer processing and human experience. She envisions this relation as cybernetic, in which computer and human are integrated as a system through the feedback loops of their coemergent temporalities. So, computers speed up human responses, which lag behind innovations, which prompt beta test cycles at quicker rates, which demand humans to behave affectively, nonconsciously. The recursive relationship between human duration and machine temporality effectively mutates both. Humanities professors might complain that their students cannot read “closely” like they used to, but for Hayles this is a fault of those disciplines to imagine methods in step with technological changes. Instead of digital media making us “dumber” by reducing our attention spans, as Nicholas Carr argues, Hayles claims that the movement towards what she calls “hyper reading” is an ontological and biological fact of embodied cognition in the age of digital media. If “how we think” were posed as a question, the answer would be: bodily, quickly, cursorily, affectively, non-consciously.
Hayles argues that this doesn’t imply an eliminative teleology of human capacity, but rather an opportunity to think through novel, expansive interventions into this cyborg loop. We may be thinking (and feeling, and experiencing) differently than we used to, but this remains a fact of human existence. Digital media has shifted the ontics of our technogenetic reality, but it has not fundamentally altered its ontology. Morphological biology, in fact, entails ontological stability. To be human, and to think like one, is to be with machines, and to think with them. The kids, in other words, are all right.
This sort of quasi-Derridean or Stieglerian Hegelianism is obviously not uncommon in media theory. As Hayles deploys it, this disposition provides a powerful framework for thinking through the relationship of humans and machines without ontological reductivism on either end. Moreover, she engages this theory in a resolutely material fashion, evading the enervating tendency of many theorists in the humanities to reduce actually existing material processes to metaphor and semiosis. Her engagement with Malabou’s work on brain plasticity is particularly useful here. Malabou has argued that the choice facing the intellectual in the age of contemporary capitalism is between plasticity and self-fashioning. Plasticity is a quintessential demand of contemporary capitalism, whereas self-fashioning opens up radical possibilities for intervention. The distinction between these two potentialities, however, is unclear – and therefore demands an ideological commitment to the latter. Hayles is right to point out that this dialectic insufficiently accounts for the myriad ways in which we are engaged with media, and are in fact produced, bodily, by it.
But while Hayles’ critique is compelling, the responses she posits may be less so. Against what she sees as Malabou’s snide rejection of the potential of media, she argues
It is precisely because contemporary technogenesis posits a strong connection between ongoing dynamic adaptation of technics and humans that multiple points of intervention open up. These include making new media…adapting present media to subversive ends…using digital media to reenvision academic practices, environments and strategies…and crafting reflexive representations of media self fashionings…that call attention to their own status as media, in the process raising our awareness of both the possibilities and dangers of such self-fashioning. (83)
With the exception of the ambiguous labor done by the word “subversive,” this reads like a catalog of demands made by administrators seeking to offload ever-greater numbers of students into MOOCs. This is unfortunately indicative of what is, throughout the book, a basic failure to engage with the political economics of “digital media and contemporary technogenesis.” Not every book must explicitly be political, and there is little more ponderous than the obligatory, token consideration of “the political” that so many media scholars feel compelled to make. And yet, this is a text that claims to explain “how” “we” “think” under post-industrial, cognitive capitalism, and so the lack of this engagement cannot help but show.
Universities across the country are collapsing due to lack of funding, students are practically reduced to debt bondage to cope with the costs of a desperately near-compulsory higher education that fails to deliver economic promises, “disruptive” deployment of digital media has conjured teratic corporate behemoths that all presume to “make the world a better place” on the backs of extraordinarily exploited workforces. There is no way for an account of the relationship between the human and the digital in this capitalist context not to be political. Given the general failure of the book to take these issues seriously, it is unsurprising that two of Hayles’ central suggestions for addressing the crisis in the humanities are 1) to use voluntary, hobbyist labor to do the intensive research that will serve as the data pool for digital humanities scholars and 2) to increasingly develop University partnerships with major digital conglomerates like Google.
This reads like a cost-cutting administrator’s fever dream because, in the chapter in which Hayles promulgates novel (one might say “disruptive”) ideas for how best to move the humanities forward, she only speaks to administrators. There is no consideration of labor in this call for the reformation of the humanities. Given the enormous amount of writing that has been done on affective capitalism (Clough 2008), digital labor (Scholz 2012), emotional labor (Van Kleaf 2015), and so many other iterations of exploitation under digital capitalism, it boggles the mind a bit to see an embrace of the Mechanical Turk as a model for the future university.
While it may be true that humanities education is in crisis – that it lacks funding, that its methods don’t connect with students, that it increasingly must justify its existence on economic grounds – it is unclear that any of these aspects of the crisis are attributable to a lack of engagement with the potentials of digital media, or the recognition that humans are evolving with our computers. All of these crises are just as plausibly attributable to what, among many others, Chandra Mohanty identified ten years ago as the emergence of the corporate university, and the concomitant transformation of the mission of the university from one of fostering democratic discourse to one of maximizing capital (Mohanty 2003). In other words, we might as easily attribute the crisis to the tightening command that contemporary capitalist institutions have over the logic of the university.
Humanities departments are underfunded precisely because they cannot – almost by definition – justify their existence on monetary grounds. When students are not only acculturated, but are compelled by financial realities and debt, to understand the university as a credentialing institution capable of guaranteeing certain baseline waged occupations – then it is no surprise that they are uninterested in “close reading” of texts. Or, rather, it might be true that students’ “hyperreading” is a consequence of their cognitive evolution with machines. But it is also just as plausibly a consequence of the fact that students often are working full time jobs while taking on full time (or more) course loads. They do not have the time or inclination to read long, difficult texts closely. They do not have the time or inclination because of the consolidating paradigm around what labor, and particularly their labor, is worth. Why pay for a researcher when you can get a hobbyist to do it for free? Why pay for a humanities line when Google and Wikipedia can deliver everything an institution might need to know?
In a political economy in which Amazon’s reduction of human employees to algorithmically-managed meat wagons is increasingly diagrammatic and “innovative” in industries from service to criminal justice to education, the proposals Hayles is making to ensure the future of the university seem more fifth columnary that emancipatory.
This stance also evacuates much-needed context from what are otherwise thoroughly interesting, well-crafted arguments. This is particularly true of How We Think’s engagement with Lev Manovich’s claims regarding narrative and database. Speaking reductively, in The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001), Manovich argued that under there are two major communicative forms: narrative and database. Narrative, in his telling, is more or less linear, and dependent on human agency to be sensible. Novels and films, despite many modernist efforts to subvert this, tend toward narrative. The database, as opposed to the narrative, arranges information according to patterns, and does not depend on a diachronic point-to-point communicative flow to be intelligible. Rather, the database exists in multiple temporalities, with the accumulation of data for rhizomatic recall of seemingly unrelated information producing improbable patterns of knowledge production. Historically, he argues, narrative has dominated. But with the increasing digitization of cultural output, the database will more and more replace narrative.
Manovich’s dichotomy of media has been both influential and roundly criticized (not least by Manovich himself in Software Takes Command, Bloomsbury 2013) Hayles convincingly takes it to task for being reductive and instituting a teleology of cultural forms that isn’t borne out by cultural practice. Narrative, obviously, hasn’t gone anywhere. Hayles extends this critique by considering the distinctive ways space and time are mobilized by database and narrative formations. Databases, she argues, depend on interoperability between different software platforms that need to access the stored information. In the case of geographical information services and global positioning services, this interoperability depends on some sort of universal standard against which all information can be measured. Thus, Cartesian space and time are inevitably inserted into database logics, depriving them of the capacity for liveliness. That is to say that the need to standardize the units that measure space and time in machine-readable databases imposes a conceptual grid on the world that is creatively limiting. Narrative, on the other hand, does not depend on interoperability, and therefore does not have an absolute referent against which it must make itself intelligible. Given this, it is capable of complex and variegated temporalities not available to databases. Databases, she concludes, can only operate within spatial parameters, while narrative can represent time in different, more creative ways.
As an expansion and corrective to Manovich, this argument is compelling. Displacing his teleology and infusing it with a critique of the spatio-temporal work of database technologies and their organization of cultural knowledge is crucial. Hayles bases her claim on a detailed and fascinating comparison between the coding requirements of relational databanks and object-oriented databanks. But, somewhat surprisingly, she takes these different programming language models and metonymizes them as social realities. Temporality in the construction of objects transmutes into temporality as a philosophical category. It’s unclear how this leap holds without an attendant sociopolitical critique. But it is impossible to talk about the cultural logic of computation without talking about the social context in which this computation emerges. In other words, it is absolutely true that the “spatializing” techniques of coders (like clustering) render data points as spatial within the context of the data bank. But it is not an immediately logical leap to then claim that therefore databases as a cultural form are spatial and not temporal.
Further, in the context of contemporary data science, Hayles’s claims about interoperability are at least somewhat puzzling. Interoperability and standardized referents might be a theoretical necessity for databases to be useful, but the ever-inflating markets around “big data,” data analytics, insights, overcoming data siloing, edge computing, etc, demonstrate quite categorically that interoperability-in-general is not only non-existent, but is productively non-existent. That is to say, there are enormous industries that have developed precisely around efforts to synthesize information generated and stored across non-interoperable datasets. Moreover, data analytics companies provide insights almost entirely based on their capacity to track improbably data patterns and resonances across unlikely temporalities.
Far from a Cartesian world of absolute space and time, contemporary data science is a quite posthuman enterprise in committing machine learning to stretch, bend and strobe space and time in order to generate the possibility of bankable information. This is both theoretically true in the sense of setting algorithms to work sorting, sifting and analyzing truly incomprehensible amounts of data and materially true in the sense of the massive amount of capital and labor that is invested in building, powering, cooling, staffing and securing data centers. Moreover, the amount of data “in the cloud” has become so massive that analytics companies have quite literally reterritorialized information– particularly trades specializing in high frequency trading, which practice “co- location,” locating data centers geographically closer the sites from which they will be accessed in order to maximize processing speed.
Data science functions much like financial derivatives do (Martin 2015). Value in the present is hedged against the probable future spatiotemporal organization of software and material infrastructures capable of rendering a possibly profitable bundling of information in the immediate future. That may not be narrative, but it is certainly temporal. It is a temporality spurred by the queer fluxes of capital.
All of which circles back to the title of the book. Hayles sets out to explain How We Think. A scholar with such an impeccable track record for pathbreaking analyses of the relationship of the human to technology is setting a high bar for herself with such a goal. In an era in which (in no small part due to her work) it is increasingly unclear who we are, what thinking is or how it happens, it may be an impossible bar to meet. Hayles does an admirable job of trying to inject new paradigms into a narrow academic debate about the future of the humanities. Ultimately, however, there is more resting on the question than the book can account for, not least the livelihoods and futures of her current and future colleagues.
_____R Joshua Scannell is a PhD candidate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. His current research looks at the political economic relations between predictive policing programs and urban informatics systems in New York City. He is the author of Cities: Unauthorized Resistance and Uncertain Sovereignty in the Urban World (Paradigm/Routledge, 2012).
Back to the essay
_____Patricia T. Clough. 2008. “The Affective Turn.” Theory Culture and Society 25(1) 1-22
N. Katherine Hayles. 2002. Writing Machines. Cambridge: MIT Press
N. Katherine Hayles. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Catherine Malabou. 2008. What Should We Do with Our Brain? New York: Fordham University Press
Lev Manovich. 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lev Manovich. 2009. Software Takes Command. London: Bloomsbury
Randy Martin. 2015. Knowledge LTD: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative. Philadelphia: Temple University Press
Chandra Mohanty. 2003. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Trebor Scholz, ed. 2012. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge
Bernard Stiegler. 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press
Kara Van Cleaf. 2015. “Of Woman Born to Mommy Blogged: The Journey from the Personal as Political to the Personal as Commodity.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 43(3/4) 247-265
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The Ground Beneath the Screens
a review of Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and The Anthrobscene (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)
by Zachary Loeb~
Despite the aura of ethereality that clings to the Internet, today’s technologies have not shed their material aspects. Digging into the materiality of such devices does much to trouble the adoring declarations of “The Internet Is the Answer.” What is unearthed by digging is the ecological and human destruction involved in the creation of the devices on which the Internet depends—a destruction that Jussi Parikka considers an obscenity at the core of contemporary media.
Parikka’s tale begins deep below the Earth’s surface in deposits of a host of different minerals that are integral to the variety of devices without which you could not be reading these words on a screen. This story encompasses the labor conditions in which these minerals are extracted and eventually turned into finished devices, it tells of satellites, undersea cables, massive server farms, and it includes a dark premonition of the return to the Earth which will occur following the death (possibly a premature death due to planned obsolescence) of the screen at which you are currently looking.
In a connected duo of new books, The Anthrobscene (referenced below as A) and A Geology of Media (referenced below as GM), media scholar Parikka wrestles with the materiality of the digital. Parikka examines the pathways by which planetary elements become technology, while considering the transformations entailed in the anthropocene, and artistic attempts to render all of this understandable. Drawing upon thinkers ranging from Lewis Mumford to Donna Haraway and from the Situationists to Siegfried Zielinski – Parikka constructs a way of approaching media that emphasizes that it is born of the Earth, borne upon the Earth, and fated eventually to return to its place of origin. Parikka’s work demands that materiality be taken seriously not only by those who study media but also by all of those who interact with media – it is a demand that the anthropocene must be made visible.
Time is an important character in both The Anthrobscene and A Geology of Media for it provides the context in which one can understand the long history of the planet as well as the scale of the years required for media to truly decompose. Parikka argues that materiality needs to be considered beyond a simple focus upon machines and infrastructure, but instead should take into account “the idea of the earth, light, air, and time as media” (GM 3). Geology is harnessed as a method of ripping open the black box of technology and analyzing what the components inside are made of – copper, lithium, coltan, and so forth. The engagement with geological materiality is key for understanding the environmental implications of media, both in terms of the technologies currently in circulation and in terms of predicting the devices that will emerge in the coming years. Too often the planet is given short shrift in considerations of the technical, but “it is the earth that provides for media and enables it”, it is “the affordances of its geophysical reality that make technical media happen” (GM 13). Drawing upon Mumford’s writings about “paleotechnics” and “neotechnics” (concepts which Mumford had himself adapted from the work of Patrick Geddes), Parikka emphasizes that both the age of coal (paleotechnics) and the age of electricity (neotechnics) are “grounded in the wider mobilization of the materiality of the earth” (GM 15). Indeed, electric power is often still quite reliant upon the extraction and burning of coal.
More than just a pithy neologism, Parikka introduces the term “anthrobscene” to highlight the ecological violence inherent in “the massive changes human practices, technologies, and existence have brought across the ecological board” (GM 16-17) shifts that often go under the more morally vague title of “the anthropocene.” For Parikka, “the addition of the obscene is self-explanatory when one starts to consider the unsustainable, politically dubious, and ethically suspicious practices that maintain technological culture and its corporate networks” (A 6). Like a curse word beeped out by television censors, much of the obscenity of the anthropocene goes unheard even as governments and corporations compete with ever greater élan for the privilege of pillaging portions of the planet – Parikka seeks to reinscribe the obscenity.
The world of high tech media still relies upon the extraction of metals from the earth and, as Parikka shows, a significant portion of the minerals mined today are destined to become part of media technologies. Therefore, in contemplating geology and media it can be fruitful to approach media using Zielinski’s notion of “deep time” wherein “durations become a theoretical strategy of resistance against the linear progress myths that impose a limited context for understanding technological change” (GM 37, A 23). Deploying the notion of “deep time” demonstrates the ways in which a “metallic materiality links the earth to the media technological” while also emphasizing the temporality “linked to the nonhuman earth times of decay and renewal” (GM 44, A 30). Thus, the concept of “deep time” can be particularly useful in thinking through the nonhuman scales of time involved in media, such as the centuries required for e-waste to decompose.
Whereas “deep time” provides insight into media’s temporal quality, “psychogeophysics” presents a method for thinking through the spatial. “Psychogeophysics” is a variation of the Situationist idea of “the psychogeographical,” but where the Situationists focused upon the exploration of the urban environment, “psychogeophysics” (which appeared as a concept in a manifesto in Mute magazine) moves beyond the urban sphere to contemplate the oblate spheroid that is the planet. What the “geophysical twist brings is a stronger nonhuman element that is nonetheless aware of the current forms of exploitation but takes a strategic point of view on the nonorganic too” (GM 64). Whereas an emphasis on the urban winds up privileging the world built by humans, the shift brought by “psychogeophysics” allows people to bear witness to “a cartography of architecture of the technological that is embedded in the geophysical” (GM 79).
The material aspects of media technology consist of many areas where visibility has broken down. In many cases this is suggestive of an almost willful disregard (ignoring exploitative mining and labor conditions as well as the harm caused by e-waste), but in still other cases it is reflective of the minute scales that materiality can assume (such as metallic dust that dangerously fills workers’ lungs after they shine iPad cases). The devices that are surrounded by an optimistic aura in some nations, thus obtain this sheen at the literal expense of others: “the residue of the utopian promise is registered in the soft tissue of a globally distributed cheap labor force” (GM 89). Indeed, those who fawn with religious adoration over the newest high-tech gizmo may simply be demonstrating that nobody they know personally will be sickened in assembling it, or be poisoned by it when it becomes e-waste. An emphasis on geology and materiality, as Parikka demonstrates, shows that the era of digital capitalism contains many echoes of the exploitation characteristic of bygone periods – appropriation of resources, despoiling of the environment, mistreatment of workers, exportation of waste, these tragedies have never ceased.
Digital media is excellent at creating a futuristic veneer of “smart” devices and immaterial sounding aspects such as “the cloud,” and yet a material analysis demonstrates the validity of the old adage “the more things change the more they stay the same.” Despite efforts to “green” digital technology, “computer culture never really left the fossil (fuel) age anyway” (GM 111). But beyond relying on fossil fuels for energy, these devices can themselves be considered as fossils-to-be as they go to rest in dumps wherein they slowly degrade, so that “we can now ask what sort of fossil layer is defined by the technical media condition…our future fossils layers are piling up slowly but steadily as an emblem of an apocalypse in slow motion” (GM 119). We may not be surrounded by dinosaurs and trilobites, but the digital media that we encounter are tomorrow’s fossils – which may be quite mysterious and confounding to those who, thousands of years hence, dig them up. Businesses that make and sell digital media thrive on a sense of time that consists of planned obsolescence, regular updates, and new products, but to take responsibility for the materiality of these devices requires that “notions of temporality must escape any human-obsessed vocabulary and enter into a closer proximity with the fossil” (GM 135). It requires a woebegone recognition that our technological detritus may be present on the planet long after humanity has vanished.
The living dead that lurch alongside humanity today are not the zombies of popular entertainment, but the undead media devices that provide the screens for consuming such distractions. Already fossils, bound to be disposed of long before they stop working, it is vital “to be able to remember that media never dies, but remains as toxic residue,” and thus “we should be able to repurpose and reuse solutions in new ways, as circuit bending and hardware hacking practices imply” (A 41). We live with these zombies, we live among them, and even when we attempt to pack them off to unseen graveyards they survive under the surface. A Geology of Media is thus “a call for further materialization of media not only as media but as that bit which it consists of: the list of the geophysical elements that give us digital culture” (GM 139).
It is not simply that “machines themselves contain a planet” (GM 139) but that the very materiality of the planet is becoming riddled with a layer of fossilized machines.
* * *
The image of the world conjured up by Parikka in A Geology of Media and The Anthrobscene is far from comforting – after all, Parikka’s preference for talking about “the anthrobscene” does much to set a funereal tone. Nevertheless, these two books by Parikka do much to demonstrate that “obscene” may be a very fair word to use when discussing today’s digital media. By emphasizing the materiality of media, Parikka avoids the thorny discussions of the benefits and shortfalls of various platforms to instead pose a more challenging ethical puzzle: even if a given social media platform can be used for ethical ends, to what extent is this irrevocably tainted by the materiality of the device used to access these platforms? It is a dark assessment which Parikka describes without much in the way of optimistic varnish, as he describes the anthropocene (on the first page of The Anthrobscene) as “a concept that also marks the various violations of environmental and human life in corporate practices and technological culture that are ensuring that there won’t be much of humans in the future scene of life” (A 1).
And yet both books manage to avoid the pitfall of simply coming across as wallowing in doom. Parikka is not pining for a primal pastoral fantasy, but is instead seeking to provide new theoretical tools with which his readers can attempt to think through the materiality of media. Here, Parikka’s emphasis on the way that digital technology is still heavily reliant upon mining and fossil fuels acts as an important counter to gee-whiz futurism. Similarly Parikka’s mobilization of the notion of “deep time” and fossils acts as an important contribution to thinking through the lifecycles of digital media. Dwelling on the undeath of a smartphone slowly decaying in an e-waste dump over centuries is less about evoking a fearful horror than it is about making clear the horribleness of technological waste. The discussion of “deep time” seems like it can function as a sort of geological brake on accelerationist thinking, by emphasizing that no matter how fast humans go, the planet has its own sense of temporality. Throughout these two slim books, Parikka draws upon a variety of cultural works to strengthen his argument: ranging from the earth-pillaging mad scientist of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger, to the Coal Fired Computers of Yokokoji-Harwood (YoHa), to Molleindustria’s smartphone game “Phone Story” which plays out on a smartphone’s screen the tangles of extraction, assembly, and disposal that are as much a part of the smartphone’s story as whatever uses for which the final device is eventually used. Cultural and artistic works, when they intend to, may be able to draw attention to the obscenity of the anthropocene.
The Anthrobscene and A Geology of Media are complementary texts, but one need not read both in order to understand the other. As part of the University of Minnesota Press’s “Forerunners” series, The Anthrobscene is a small book (in terms of page count and physical size) which moves at a brisk pace, in some ways it functions as a sort of greatest hits version of A Geology of Media – containing many of the essential high points, but lacking some of the elements that ultimately make A Geology of Media a satisfying and challenging book. Yet the duo of books work wonderfully together as The Anthrobscene acts as a sort of primer – that a reader of both books will detect many similarities between the two is not a major detraction, for these books tell a story that often goes unheard today.
Those looking for neat solutions to the anthropocene’s quagmire will not find them in either of these books – and as these texts are primarily aimed at an academic audience this is not particularly surprising. These books are not caught up in offering hope – be it false or genuine. At the close of A Geology of Media when Parikka discusses the need “to repurpose and reuse solutions in new ways, as circuit bending and hardware hacking practices imply” (A 41) – this does not appear as a perfect panacea but as way of possibly adjusting. Parikka is correct in emphasizing the ways in which the extractive regimes that characterized the paleotechnic continue on in the neotechnic era, and this is a point which Mumford himself made regarding the way that the various “technic” eras do not represent clean breaks from each other. As Mumford put it, “the new machines followed, not their own pattern, but the pattern laid down by previous economic and technical structures” (Mumford 2010, 236) – in other words, just as Parikka explains, the paleotechnic survives well into the neotechnic. The reason this is worth mentioning is not to challenge Parikka, but to highlight that the “neotechnic” is not meant as a characterization of a utopian technical epoch that has parted ways with the exploitation that had characterized the preceding period. For Mumford the need was to move beyond the anthropocentrism of the neotechnic period and move towards what he called (in The Culture of Cities) the “biotechnic” a period wherein “technology itself will be oriented toward the culture of life” (Mumford 1938, 495). Granted, as Mumford’s later work and as these books by Parikka make clear – instead of arriving at the “biotechnic” what we might get is instead the anthrobscene. And reading these books by Parikka makes it clear that one could not characterize the anthrobscene as being “oriented toward the culture of life” – indeed, it may be exactly the opposite. Or, to stick with Mumford a bit longer, it may be that the anthrobscene is the result of the triumph of “authoritarian technics” over “democratic” ones. Nevertheless, the true dirge like element of Parikka’s books is that they raise the possibility that it may well be too late to shift paths – that the neotechnic was perhaps just a coat of fresh paint applied to hide the rusting edifice of paleotechnics.
A Geology of Media and The Anthrobscene are conceptual toolkits, they provide the reader with the drills and shovels they need to dig into the materiality of digital media. But what these books make clear is that along with the pickaxe and the archeologist’s brush, if one is going to dig into the materiality of media one also needs a gasmask if one is to endure the noxious fumes. Ultimately, what Parikka shows is that the Situationist inspired graffiti of May 1968 “beneath the streets – the beach” needs to be rewritten in the anthrobscene.
Perhaps a fitting variation for today would read: “beneath the streets – the graveyard.”
_____Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, infrastructure and e-waste, as well as the intersection of library science with the STS field. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck. He is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.
Back to the essay
_____Works Cited
Mumford, Lewis. 2010. Technics and Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mumford, Lewis. 1938. The Culture of Cities. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
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De América Latina a Abya Yala. Una reseña de Latinoamericanismo después del 9/11
Una reseña de Latinoamericanismo después del 9/11
Click here for English text/ Clic aqui para leer en ingles
Emilio del Valle Escalante (Maya k’iche’, iximulew)
Luego de los ataques del 11 de septiembre en suelo norteamericano en el 2001, los estado-nación latinoamericanos se unieron a George W. Bush en sus consignas de negar a “grupos terroristas la capacidad de operar en el Hemisferio.”1 A través de la Organización de Estados Americanos Bush indicaba que “Esta familia Americana permanece unida” (Youngers, 151). Sin embargo, en lugar de cultivar el inmenso apoyo continental, la administración Bush dio su espalda a los estados latinoamericanos e inició su “batalla contra el terrorismo” en el medio oriente (particularmente Irak), batalla que encendió un largo y divisivo conflicto cuyas consecuencias se sienten hasta hoy día, ahora con la emergencia del Estado Islámico de Iraq y Siria (ISIS en sus siglas anglosajonas). El distanciamiento de Estados Unidos de Latinoamérica, algunos han argumentado, resultó en la emergencia de políticas izquierdistas que a través de la democracia paulatinamente han tomado control del estado-nación, un fenómeno que es hoy conocido como “Marea rosada.” En efecto, luego del 11 de septiembre del 2001, presenciamos el establecimiento de los gobiernos del fallecido Hugo Chávez en Venezuela, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva en Brasil, Evo Morales en Bolivia, Rafael Correa en Ecuador, Cristina Fernández en Argentina, y Daniel Ortega en Nicaragua, gobiernos que muestran una transición de economías capitalistas neoliberales a proyectos orientados hacia un “renovado” socialismo.
Tomando este contexto como punto de partida, Latinamericanism after 9/11 o Latinoamericanismo después del 9/11 de John Beverley explora la importancia de los gobiernos de la Marea rosada para los Estudios Latinoamericanos, argumentando que estos gobiernos de orientación izquierdista abren “una nueva, e imprevista serie de posibilidades y determinaciones.”2 Con su apuesta en el socialismo, estos gobiernos marcan el declive del Consenso de Washington y un alejamiento de las políticas e influencia estadounidense en la región. Beverley ve estos procesos políticos como desdoblando una necesaria confrontación entre América Latina y los Estados Unidos que provee una oportunidad para redefinir y asegurar la “fuerza ideológica y geopolítica” del Latinoamericanismo (Beverley, 7). El libro incluye una introducción y siete capítulos donde Beverley desarrolla discusiones y debates con varios sectores de la intelectualidad latinoamericanista a modo de re-examinar, conciliar, trascender y establecer un marco crítico “pos-subalternista” que, por un lado, valide al estado-nación como un lugar de lucha, y por el otro, articule un “nuevo” Latinoamericanismo que en su compromiso político con los movimientos sociales pueda potencialmente materializar cambios políticos y sociales (Beverley, 15).
En los capítulos “Latinoamericanismo después del 9/11” y “Entre Ariel y Calibán,” Beverley hace un mapeo de los debates entre Latinoamericanistas que claman hablar desde América Latina y aquellos que hablan y se ubican fuera de sus entornos geopolíticos. En estos capítulos, Beverley desarrolla una crítica a intelectuales neo-arielistas como Mabel Moraña, Hugo Achugar y Nelly Richard quienes proponen un posicionamiento crítico que en lugar de adherirse a las nuevas políticas y demandas de los movimientos sociales, parecen más interesados en articular una forma de crítica que valora formas culturales cosmopolitas y la autoridad del intelectual criollo-mestizo como portador del conocimiento y la memoria histórica.3 Los argumentos de los neo-arielistas contra los Latinoamericanistas en Estados Unidos, según Beverley, tienen tres componentes: 1) los estudios latinoamericanos en Estados Unidos se concentran en cuestiones de las políticas de la identidad y el multiculturalismo, discusiones que están siendo “trasladadas” a América Latina y no representan adecuadamente las historias diversas y formaciones culturales en la región; 2) Los estudios latinoamericanos anglosajones disminuyen el papel militante de los intelectuales latinoamericanos en suelo latinoamericano y al hacerlo, subalternizan las contribuciones de pensadores que operan en y desde Latinoamérica; 3) los aparatos teóricos como los estudios subalternos y poscoloniales en el “Norte” contribuyen a disminuir la habilidad de los latinoamericanistas que hablan desde América Latina a implementar sus propios proyectos de identidad y desarrollo a nivel nacional o regional (Beverley, 62-63).
Beverley indica que al construir un argumento que sitúa América Latina contra los latinoamericanistas en Estados Unidos y otras partes del mundo, los neo-arielistas ofrecen una respuesta inadecuada a la hegemónica cultural y económica anglosajona. Al reclamar que se habla “desde” América Latina, estos intelectuales no solo pasan por alto la orientalización que opera dentro del circuito de la ciudad letrada latinoamericana, sino que también reafirman su propio autoridad cultural y política, así como la de la literatura y la crítica cultural. Con esta propuesta, este sector intelectual también reafirma su propio origen criollo-mestizo europeo y su estatus de clase media alta burguesa, el cual articula una posición discursiva incapaz de producir un “atractivo nacional-popular” (Beverley, 20) A contrapelo de este posicionamiento, Beverley propone un “nuevo” Latinoamericanismo que recupere el “espacio de la des-jerarquización cedido al mercado y el neoliberalismo,” y “capaz de que, a la vez, inspire y se nutra de las nuevas formas de práctica política y social que emergen desde abajo” (Beverley, 22-23). Este proyecto requiere reconocer la naturaleza multiétnica y multinacional de América Latina, las demandas de los movimientos sociales y las poblaciones amenazadas por la globalización y el neoliberalismo en la región, las formas de territorialidad que van más allá del estado-nación (por ej. los Hispanos en Estados Unidos), las luchas contra el machismo, racismo, la homofobia, así como las luchas por la igualdad de género de las mujeres y las minorías sexuales . Dado que todas estas demandas y luchas son constitutivas de América Latina, es ahora el momento—Beverley sugiere—de desarrollar aproximaciones críticas que den cuenta e incorporen las demandas de estos sectores a modo de afirmar el desarrollo de un proyecto civilizatorio propio en la región; un proyecto civilizatorio “capaz de confrontar la hegemonía estadounidense y expresar un futuro alternativo para los pueblos de las Américas” (Beverley, 18).
En el capítulo tercero, “La persistencia de la Nación,” Beverley ofrece una crítica de Imperio (2001) de Michael Hardt y Antonio Negri. Puesto que Hardt y Negri argumentan que vivimos en una especie de Imperio Romano donde no hay “centro” y/o “periferia”, Beverley se pregunta: ¿Quién en el mundo de hoy representa entonces una lógica de resistencia que puede derribar al imperio y proponer alternativas a su lógica? La crítica de Beverley se concentra en la idea de la “multitud” propuesta por los autores. Con esta idea, Hardt y Negri sugieren que la multitud es la “multifacética, hidra de las siete cabezas, o sujeto hibrido colectivo constituido por la globalización y la deterritorializacion cultural” (Beverley, 26-27) Para Beverley, sin embargo, la multitud no es sino una nueva forma de nombrar al proletario como un sujeto hibrido o heterogéneo universal que margina las demandas específicas—muchas veces nacionalistas—del subalterno. Por ejemplo, los movimientos sociales evocados por Hardt y Negri, como los Zapatistas en Chiapas, o el Intifada en Palestina, se caracterizan precisamente por usar políticas identitarias y la necesidad de cambiar la naturaleza misma del estado-nación. Hardt y Negri quieren imaginar—según Beverley—una forma de “política que vaya más allá de los límites de la nación y las formas de representación política y cultural tradicionalmente asociadas a la idea de hegemonía” (Beverley, 27-28)
En el cuarto capítulo, “Deconstrucción y latinoamericanismo,” Beverley se concentra en The Exhaustion of Difference [El agotamiento de la diferencia] de Alberto Moreiras el cual es interpretado como una “nueva” forma de latinoamericanismo que se vale de la deconstrucción como aparato teórico capaz de renovar “si no a la izquierda en el sentido tradicional, ciertamente una política emancipadora en un nuevo orden global emergente;” Moreiras, según Beverley, se preocupa con las políticas del conocimiento relacionadas con la representación de la cultura latinoamericana, y busca “poner en crisis y radicalizar el espacio ideológico y conceptual de los estudios culturales latinoamericanos” (Beverley 44-45). Dado que Moreiras depende de la apropiación y privilegio de ciertos conocimientos (usualmente cosmopolita, o barroco), al igual que los neo-arielistas, termina resignificando la autoridad del intelectual dado que no interroga su propio posicionamiento crítico privilegiado. Moreiras tampoco cuestiona otras formas de conocimiento subalterno que quedan fuera de la mirada del latinoamericanismo latinoamericano por el que aboga. En este sentido, Moreiras articula un espacio crítico y teórico cosmopolita “que es en sí mismo producido por y realimenta la lógica de la globalización” (Beverley 54).
En capítulo quinto, “El giro neoconservador,” Beverley percibe que de la mano con la re-emergencia de la izquierda como una fuerza política luego del 11 de septiembre, también surge una tendencia crítica dentro de la izquierda latinoamericana que “se está definiendo a sí misma, o está convirtiéndose en ‘conservadora’ en asuntos culturales, pero ‘liberal’ en asuntos políticos y económicos” (Beverley, 91). Esta tendencia crítica, similar al neo-arielismo y la deconstrucción, está representada por una clase burguesa medio-alta, usualmente con una educación universitaria, y esencialmente de raza blanca y/o criollo-ladino/mestiza. Estos críticos, representados por el trabajo de Mario Roberto Morales, Mabel Moraña y Beatriz Sarlo, buscan recuperar “el espacio hegemónico y hermenéutico hegemónico” con sus respectivas críticas al movimiento Maya en Guatemala, el campo de la crítica literaria latinoamericana en contra de los estudios subalternos y poscoloniales como alternativas teóricas, y el género del testimonio (Beverley, 91). En sus respectivas discusiones, estos críticos despliegan cierta incomodidad con el multiculturalismo y las políticas de la identidad cultural, las cuales son vistas como fetichizando y orientalizando su objeto de estudio subalterno. Estos autores hablan “en nombre de la autoridad de la literatura con el propósito de descalificar los esfuerzos de sujetos indígenas y subalternos a inscribirse ellos mismos en la historia” (Beverley, 83) De estas lecturas, Beverley concluye que el giro neoconservador en América Latina se distingue por 1) un rechazo a la autoridad de la voz y experiencia subalterna, y una insatisfacción extrema al o escepticismo sobre el multiculturalismo o la interculturalidad y políticas identitarias; 2) una defensa a la autoridad del crítico-escritor como portador del conocimiento; 3) una reafirmación de la identidad criollo-mestiza; 4) su fracaso a reconocer la persistencia del racismo y las jerarquías de género en América Latina; 5) expresar su “objeción a los proyectos de las luchas armadas revolucionarias de los años 60 y 70, y más bien a favor de una izquierda más razonada y cautelosa,” y 6) una “reteritorialización de las disciplinas académicas—particularmente el campo de la crítica literaria y cultural” (Beverley, 89). La preocupación de Beverley es que este grupo “tiene el potencial de dividir innecesariamente a la nueva izquierda latinoamericana e impedir la fuerza hegemónica con la que está surgiendo a nivel nacional y continental” (Beverley, 91).
En “Más allá del paradigma de la desilusión,” Beverley discute el tema de la lucha armada en América Latina. El capítulo argumenta que las narrativas actuales de las rebeliones armadas en la región, como Utopía desarmada de Jorge Castañeda, ofrecen una visión negativa de la insurgencia dado que están “más inclinadas a ver en donde fallamos en lugar de ver donde estuvimos bien” (Beverley, 109) . Estas perspectivas negativas despliegan un “paradigma de desilusión” donde la crítica, retrospectivamente, habla de la insurgencia armada como una “equivocación” o un error, o como movimientos “mal concebidos” y románticos, compuestos de jóvenes inmaduros, “destinados a fracasar”, “propensos a la desproporción, irresponsables y con una anarquía moral” (Beverley, 98-99). A pesar de que con la derrota de muchos de estos movimientos revolucionarios formas previas de capitalismo fueron “reestablecidas” (ahora bajo las banderas del “neoliberalismo” y la “globalización”), ver las luchas armadas de forma negativa oblitera el hecho de que estos movimientos sirvieron de piso a las corrientes políticas de resistencia y al activismo social actuales (por ej. el EZLN u otras movilizaciones de carácter étnico en América Latina). En este sentido, los movimientos sociales actuales confrontan desafíos muy similares a los de los movimientos de los años sesenta: ¿cómo “transformar el estado y empezar a trasformar la sociedad desde el estado” (Beverley, 108). Además, “mucha gente involucrada en los gobiernos de la marea rosada o en los movimientos que los llevaron al poder, apostaron sus esfuerzos e ideales políticos en el periodo de la lucha armada” (Beverley, 98) La “experiencia de la lucha armada en América Latina, incluyendo Cuba—Beverley argumenta—siguió la dirección de la democracia, e introdujo en la política un nuevo espíritu de esperanza para el cambio social que no había estado presente en la región desde los años treinta, y con ello, nuevas posibilidades de participación política directa” (Beverley, 105).
Beverley cierra su libro con, “El subalterno y el estado”, abogando por la necesidad de un paradigma “pos-subalternista.” Es decir, una perspectiva teórica que en su aproximación crítica al estado nación revele su deuda a los estudios subalternos, pero que a la vez, los desplace. Beverley encuentra por lo menos dos limitaciones con los estudios subalternos. Primero, que éstos conceptualizan al subalterno fuera y constitutivamente opuesto al estado y la modernidad dado que estas instituciones han sido el resultado del colonialismo. Segundo, los estudios subalternos imaginan a la sociedad civil completamente independiente del estado nación. Lo que los gobiernos de la marea rosada han mostrado, sin embargo, es que el subalterno y el estado pueden ser compatibles. Beverley indica que “El Chavismo fue precisamente el resultado de la cristalización de una variedad de movimientos sociales operando en Venezuela durante la emergencia del Caracazo como nuevo bloque político” (Beverley, 114). De forma similar, el éxito del Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) en Bolivia fue resultado de movimientos sociales de incidencia indígena que exitosamente modificaron las relaciones económicas y establecieron un liderazgo “predominantemente indígena” (Beverley, 109) En este sentido, los gobiernos de la marea rosada, según Beverley, nos permiten imaginar un estado que puede incorporar “las demandas, valores, experiencias de los sectores subalternos-populares (lo que requiere un proceso de articulación hegemónica preliminar y de un bloque político nuevo capaz de interpelar al estado), y que a su vez, desde el estado, pueda rehacer la sociedad bajo modelos económicos que distribuyan mejor la riqueza, igualitario y culturalmente diverso (es decir, el cómo la hegemonía puede ser construida desde el estado)” (Beverley 115-116).
Mientras que encuentro relevancia en la crítica que Beverley hace al neo-arielismo y deconstrucción, su evaluación de la lucha armada, la importancia del estado-nación y las políticas de la identidad en un “mundo globalizado,” y su llamado a desarrollar un proyecto político que se asocie con los movimientos sociales, encuentro también algunas limitaciones en sus argumentos. Quiero subrayar tales limitaciones en lo que sigue.
Como podemos ver, la crítica de Beverley se concentra en cómo el Latinoamericanismo ha fracasado en sus esfuerzos de reconocer e incorporar las demandas de los movimientos sociales y las poblaciones amenazadas por la globalización y el neoliberalismo. Sin embargo, si la idea es incorporar en los espacios hegemónicos—dominados por la inteligencia latinoamericanista de clase media alta, usualmente con una educación universitaria, y esencialmente de raza blanca y criollo-mestiza—las “demandas, valores, experiencias de los sectores subalterno-populares,” ¿hasta qué punto Beverley no es también cómplice en prevenir “los esfuerzos de sujetos indígenas y subalternos a inscribirse ellos mismos en la historia” (Beverley, 83)?
Beverley reconoce que el proyecto civilizatorio de América Latina históricamente ha involucrado la supresión y marginalización de “lenguas y formas de pensar y ser” indígenas bajo el supuesto de que la vida y cultura indígena son “inadecuadas” o “atrasadas” (Beverley, 59). Dadas estas suposiciones, “los pueblos indígenas o campesinos o trabajadores o los pobres de la urbe no se identifican con el proyecto” civilizatorio latinoamericano (Beverley, 48). Pero a la vez que Beverley subraya estas limitaciones, no tiene problemas en abogar por un “nuevo latinoamericanismo.” Al hacerlo, rechaza y oblitera algunas de las categorías y alternativas propuestas por los movimientos sociales, en particular, de los intelectuales y activistas indígenas y afro-descendientes.4 Me sorprende, por ejemplo, que Beverley no reflexione o considere la categoría y el proyecto civilizatorio de Abya Yala 5 el cual ha sido propuesto por algunos estudiosos y activistas indígenas desde los años ochenta, y que ha sido teorizado por un ex – estudiante de doctorado del mismo Beverley: el académico y activista kichwa, Armando Muyolema.6 Muyolema desafía la idea de América Latina precisamente porque es y continúa siendo un proyecto constitutivo del etnocentrismo y colonialismo dado que, en la mayor parte, aboga por las aspiraciones de los intelectuales blancos y los criollo-mestizos de origen europeo; es decir, los sectores que el mismo Beverley crítica. Latinoamérica no es meramente un “nombre” o categoría, sino más bien un proyecto geopolítico que encarna y confirma el histórico y perdurable régimen del colonialismo en la región. Los pueblos indígenas sólo podemos ser parte de América Latina si renunciamos a nuestros territorios, idiomas, y especificidades culturales y religiosas. Contrario a este proyecto civilizatorio, Abya Yala, según Muyolema, representa nuestro propio proyecto y lugar de enunciación.
En efecto, para muchos sectores Indígenas y no indígenas, la posibilidad de una “alianza política entre grupos sociales” y la formación de “un nuevo bloque histórico a nivel nacional, continental e internacional” (Beverley, 83) ya no reside tanto en un “nuevo” proyecto Latinoamericano o latinoamericanista sino más bien en Abya Yala. A mi modo de ver, para nosotros, reconocer y abogar por el Latinoamericanismo contribuirá a la afirmación de una lógica colonialista que ignora nuestras necesidades como naciones indígenas: en particular, nuestros continuos esfuerzos de recuperar y defender nuestros territorios, así como restituir nuestras especificidades lingüísticas, culturales y religiosas, esfuerzos que el Latinoamericanismo en todas sus formas, no ha podido entender y atender de forma profunda. Debido a esto, me atrevo a afirmar que los esfuerzos de los movimientos indígenas subalterno-populares están mejor empleados si primero, desarrollamos un bloque indígena a nivel global. Se trata de comprender que tenemos una historia común; reconocer que a partir de los esfuerzos por contrarrestar la opresión y marginalización podemos desarrollar un discurso colectivo que nos acerque como pueblos y naciones indígenas diversas que luchan para trascender los colonialismos externos e internos. Nuestro posicionamiento como sujetos indígenas no solamente permitirá la articulación hegemónica de nuestras demandas, sino que también nos permitirá negociar mejor con los no indígenas en la constitución de modelos nacionales multiculturales e interculturales en base a nuestras propias perspectivas indígenas.
Respecto a la discusión de Beverley a propósito de la marea rosada, no hay ninguna duda que estos gobiernos izquierdistas han traído beneficios económicos y políticos a importantes sectores de la población marginalizada. Sin embargo, ¿Qué hacemos con Michelle Bachelet y su promulgación de la ley “anti-terrorista” creada por Augusto Pinochet en 1984, la cual está siendo empleada para justificar el encarcelamiento de líderes mapuches en la región norte de la Araucanía en Chile? ¿O los esfuerzos de Rafael Correa para cerrar la cede de las oficinas de la Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAI), una organización que inicialmente apoyó la elección presidencial de Correa? (ni mencionar el encarcelamiento y asesinato de varios activistas ambientales y campesinos en la región amazónica del Ecuador). ¿O el cómo la administración de Evo Morales ha invadido territorios indígenas Amazónicos (el llamado programa TIPNIS) para construir carreteras, puentes y sistemas eléctricos para económicamente favorecer a sectores electorales que le han apoyado? A mi modo de ver, lo que los gobiernos de la marea rosada muestran es que si bien por un lado han constituido al estado nación como un punto de lucha que propone el socialismo como alternativa, y en un caso, han establecido un liderazgo que es “predominantemente indígena”, por el otro, éstos también evidencian cómo son capaces de reproducir colonialismo, llegando a ser—tal y como lo sugiere Nicholas Dirks—“tan opresores como los peores regímenes coloniales” (Colonialism and Culture, 15).
Al decir esto, de ninguna manera estoy sugiriendo que nosotros no veamos el estado-nación o la modernidad como espacios de posibilidades políticas. Como Beverley, considero que la nación y sus instituciones hegemónicas son claramente espacios de lucha necesarios que con nuestra participación y crítica eventualmente cambiaran las reglas del juego a favor de un “bloque subalterno-popular”, y la construcción de una “sociedad que sea a la vez igualitaria y diversa” (Beverley, 79). A diferencia de él, sin embargo, no creo que la labor de los movimientos sociales deba ser entendida e interpretada como completa luego de que estos movimientos ocupen el estado. En lugar de esto, pienso que los movimientos sociales y su articulación hegemónica debe seguir siendo la fuerza política que siga redefiniendo y determinando las políticas del estado-nación, y la transformación de la sociedad, cambios que solo pueden ocurrir desde abajo, en lugar que desde arriba.
Emilio del Valle Escalante (Maya k’iche’, iximulew) es profesor asociado de español en la Universidad de Carolina del Norte en Chapel Hill. Es autor de Nacionalismos mayas y desafíos postcoloniales en Guatemala (FLACSO-Guatemala 2008).
NOTAS
1. Coletta Youngers, “Latin America,” in Power Trip: U.S. Unilateralism and Global Strategy After September 11, ed. John Feffer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 151.
2. John Beverley, Latinamericanism after 9/11 (London-Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 7. Todas las traducciones de las citas en inglés son del autor de esta reseña.
3. Arielismo en Latinoamérica se refiere a una clase intelectual a inicios del siglo veinte que desarrollo una postura política y crítica contra la expansión estadounidense luego de la guerra española-norteamericana en 1898. Figuras como el uruguayo José Enrique Rodo evocaron la figura de Ariel de la obra La tempestad de William Shakespeare para sugerir que mientras Latinoamérica encarnaba virtudes nobles, intelectuales, harmoniosas y sensibles, los Estados Unidos representaba materialidad e insensibilidad. Además de Rodo, este grupo incluía al argentino Manuel Baldomero Ugarte y al mexicano José Vasconcelos. 4. Para una discusión sobre las relaciones entre los afro-descendientes y el estado nación en Latinoamérica véase, Agustín Lao-Montes, “Decolonial Moves. Trans-Locating African Diaspora Spaces,” en Cultural Studies. 21:2-3 (March-May 2007): 309-339.
5. Para aquellos que no estén familiarizados con el concepto de Abya Yala, éste emerge hacia finales de los años setenta en Dulenega, o lo que para otros es, San Blas, Panama, territorio de los pueblos Kuna Tule. Abya Yala en el idioma Kuna significa “tierra en plena madurez”. Luego de que los Kuna ganaron una demanda legal para detener la construcción de un centro comercial en su territorio, algunos dirigentes kuna le dijeron a un grupo de periodistas que ellos empleaban el término Abya Yala para referirse al hemisferio occidental, o las Américas en su totalidad. Luego de escuchar esta historia, el líder aymara Takir Mamani sugirió que los Pueblos y organizaciones Indígenas usen el término Abya Yala en sus declaraciones oficiales para referirse al continente “americano.” Desde los años ochenta, muchos activistas indígenas, escritores, y organizaciones han abrazado la sugerencia de Mamani.
6. Véase Armando Muyolema, “De la cuestión indígena a lo indígena como cuestionamiento. Hacia una crítica del latinoamericanismo, el indigenismo y el mestiz(o)aje.” Rodríguez, Ileana, ed. Convergencia de tiempos: estudios subalternos/contextos latinoamericanos estado, cultura, subalternidad (Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001): 327-363. -
From Latin America to Abya Yala: A Review of Latinamericanism after 9/11
A Review of John Beverley’s Latinamericanism after 9/11
Click here for Spanish text/ Clic aqui para leer en español
by Emilio del Valle Escalante (Maya k’iche’, iximulew)
In the wake of the September 11 attacks on U.S. soil in 2001, Latin American nation-states united behind George W. Bush’s policies toward denying “terrorist groups the capacity to operate in this Hemisphere.”1 Through the Organization of American States Bush stated: “This American family stands united” (Youngers, 151). However, instead of nurturing this support, the Bush administration turned its back on Latin America and launched a “war on terror” in the Middle East (particularly Iraq) that ignited a long and divisive conflict whose consequences are still felt today, particularly with the emergence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). U.S. distancing from Latin America, some have argued, led to the emergence of Left-leaning politics that through democracy have taken control of the nation-state, a phenomenon that is known as the Marea rosada or “Pink Tide” politics. Indeed, after September 11, 2001, we see the establishment of the governments of the late Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Cristina Fernández in Argentina, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, governments that mark a transition from neoliberal capitalist economies to “socialist” oriented ones.
Taking this context as a point of departure, John Beverley’s Latinamericanism after 9/11 explores the significance of the Marea rosada governments for Latin American studies, arguing that these Left-leaning governments open up a “new, unforeseen, and unforeseeable series of possibilities and determinations.”2 With their bet on socialism, these governments mark a decline of the Washington Consensus in the region and a shift away from identification with U.S. power. Beverley sees these political processes as unfolding a necessary confrontation between Latin America and the United States that provides an opportunity to redefine and assert Latinamericanism’s “ideological and geopolitical force” (Beverley, 7). The book includes an Introduction and seven chapters where Beverley engages in discussions and debates with various sectors of the Latinamericanist intelligentsia in order to re-examine, conciliate, transcend and establish a new critical “post-subalternist” framework that validates the nation-state as a site of struggle and proposes a “new” Latinamericanism that in its engagement with social movements can potentially lead to political and social change (Beverley, 15).
In the chapters “Latinamericanism after 9/11” and “Between Ariel and Caliban,” Beverley maps the debates between Latinamericanists who claim to speak from Latin America and those who speak of Latin America outside its geopolitical boundaries. In these chapters, he develops a critique of neo-Arielist intellectuals like Mabel Moraña, Hugo Achugar, and Nelly Richard who propose a critical stance that instead of embracing the new politics and demands of social movements, seem more interested in rearticulating a form of critique that values high culture and the authority of the criollo-mestizo intellectual as a carrier of knowledge and cultural memory.3 Neo-Arielist arguments against Latin Americanists in the U.S., according to Beverley, have three components: 1) Latin American studies from the U.S. concentrate on identity politics and multiculturalism, discussions that have been “transferred” to Latin America and misrepresent diverse histories and social-cultural formations; 2) Latin American Studies occludes the prior engagement by Latin American intellectuals on “native grounds,” and in doing so, they subalternize the contributions of thinkers from Latin America; 3) theoretical frameworks such as Subaltern and Postcolonial Studies from the North contribute to diminish Latin America’s ability to implement its own projects of national or regional identity and development (Beverley, 62-63)
Beverley points out that by constructing an argument that situates Latin America against Latinamericanists in the United States and other parts of the world, neo-Arielists offer an inadequate response to cultural and economic U.S. hegemony. By claiming to speak “from” Latin America, or “on the ground,” these intellectuals not only overlook the orientalization that operates within the Latin American lettered city, but also reassert their own cultural and political authority and that of literature and literary criticism (Beverley, 61). In doing so, they end up reaffirming their own criollo-mestizo European origins and bourgeois or middle class status and articulate a discursive position incapable of producing a “national-popular appeal”(Beverley, 20) Instead, Beverley proposes a new form of Latinamericanism that recovers the “space of cultural dehierarchization ceded to the market and neoliberalism” and is “capable of both inspiring and nourishing itself from new forms of political and social practice from below” (Beverley, 22-23). This would entail recognizing the multiethnic and multinational nature of Latin America, the demands of Latin American social movements and the populations threatened by globalization and neoliberalism, the forms of territoriality that go beyond the nation-state (e.g. Hispanics in the United States), the struggles against male chauvinism, racism, homophobia, and those of women and sexual minorities for gender equality (Beverley, 24). Given that all of these demands and struggles are constitutive of Latin America itself, it is now time, Beverley argues, to develop critical approaches that can incorporate these populations’ demands in order to affirm Latin America as its own civilizational project, “capable of confronting U.S. hegemony and expressing an alternative future for the peoples of the Americas” (Beverley, 18).
In the third chapter, entitled “The Persistence of the Nation,” Beverley offers a critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2001). Since Hardt and Negri argue that we live in a sort of Roman Empire where there is no “center” and/or “periphery,” Beverley asks: who in the world today represents a logic of resistance that can bring down Empire and propose alternatives to its logic? Beverley’s critique concentrates on Hardt and Negri’s idea of the “multitude” by which they mean the “many-faced, hydra-headed, hybrid collective subject conjured up by globalization and cultural deterritorialization” (Beverley, 26-27). For Beverley, however, the multitude is an expanded way of naming the proletariat as a hybrid or heterogeneous and “universal” subject that dismisses the specific demands—many times nationalistic—of the subaltern. For example, the social movements that Hardt and Negri themselves evoke, like the Zapatistas in Chiapas, or the Intifada in Palestine, are characterized by identity politics and the necessity to change the nature of the nation-state. Hardt and Negri want to imagine—Beverley indicates—a form of “politics that would go beyond the limits of both the nation and the forms of political and cultural representation traditionally bound up with the idea of hegemony” (Beverley, 27-28).
In chapter four, “Deconstruction and Latinamericanism,” Beverley concentrates on Alberto Moreiras’s The Exhaustion of Difference which he reads as a “new” form of Latinamericanism that uses deconstruction as a theoretical framework capable of renewing “if not the Left in a traditional sense, then certainly an emancipatory politics to come in the emerging new world order of globalization” (Beverley, 44-45). Moreiras, according to Beverley, is concerned with the politics of knowledge involved in the representation of Latin American culture, and aims “to bring into crisis and radicalize the ideological and conceptual space of Latin American cultural studies” (Beverley, 45). Given that Moreiras depends on the appropriation and privileging of certain kinds of knowledge (usually that of high culture, or the baroque), like the neo-Arielists, he ends up re-signifying the authority of the intellectual, failing to interrogate his own critical position and authority, as well as other forms of subaltern knowledge that fall outside the metropolitan Latinamericanism he proposes. In this sense, Moreiras articulates a critical space of cosmopolitan critical theory “which is itself produced by and feeds back into the logic of globalization” (Beverley, 54).
In “The Neoconservative Turn,” Beverley sees that alongside the re-emergence of the Left as a political force after 9/11, there is also a critical tendency within the Latin American Left that “is characterizing itself, or turning ‘conservative’ in cultural matters but ‘liberal’ in political and economic ones” (Beverley, 91). This critical tendency, similar to neo-Arielism and deconstruction, is represented by a middle- and upper-middle-class, university-educated, and what is essentially a white, Criollo-Ladino/Mestizo intelligentsia that attempts to recapture “the space of cultural and hermeneutic authority” (Beverley, 93). This intellectual class is exemplified by, among others, Mario Roberto Morales, Mabel Moraña and Beatriz Sarlo who develop critiques, respectively, of the Maya movement in Guatemala, the field of Latin American literary criticism against postcolonial and Subaltern studies theoretical frameworks, and testimonio and witness literatures. In their respective discussions, these critics display a strong discomfort with multiculturalism and identity politics, which they see as fetishizing and Orientalizing their subaltern object of study. These authors speak “in the name of the authority of literature to disqualify the effort of indigenous and subaltern subjects to write themselves into history” (Beverley, 83). From these readings, Beverley concludes that the neoconservative turn in Latin America is characterized by 1) a rejection of the authority of the subaltern voice and experience, and an extreme dissatisfaction with or skepticism about multiculturalism or interculturalidad and identity politics; 2) defense of the authority of the writer-critic as the bearer of knowledge; 3) reaffirmation of their criollo-mestizo identity; 4) failure to recognize the persistence of racism and gender hierarchies; 5) expression of a “disavowal of the project of the armed revolutionary struggle of the 1960s and 1970s, in favor of a more considered and cautious Left” , and 6) a “reterritorialization of the academic disciplines—particularly the field of literature and cultural criticism” (Beverley, 89). Beverley’s concern is that this group “has the potential to divide unnecessarily the new Latin American Left and inhibit its emerging hegemonic force at both the national and the continental levels” (Beverley, 91).
In chapter six, “Beyond the Paradigm of Dissolution,” Beverley discusses the question of armed struggle in Latin America. He contends that the accounts of the armed rebellions, such as Jorge Castañeda’s Utopia Unarmed (1994), provide a negative view of insurgency that is “more inclined to see where we went wrong than what we did right” (Beverley, 109). These negative perspectives develop a “paradigm of disillusion” where critics retrospectively speak of armed insurgency as “equivocation,” or romantic, immature, “ill-conceived” movements “doomed to failure,” “prone to excess, error, irresponsibility and moral anarchy”(Beverley, 98-99). Despite the fact that with the defeat of many of these movements, previous forms of capitalist domination were “restored” (now under the banners of “neoliberalism” and “globalization”), to view the armed struggles in these negative terms obliterates the fact that they paved the way to current political and social activism in the present (e.g. EZLN or other ethnic mobilizations in Latin America). In this sense, current social movements confront similar challenges as those of the 1960s: how to “transform the state and begin to transform society from the state” (Beverley, 107). Moreover, “many of the people involved in the governments of the Marea rosada or in the movements that brought them to power, cut their political teeth in the period of the armed struggle” (Beverley, 98). The “experience of armed struggle in Latin America, including Cuba—Beverley argues—went in the direction of democracy, and brought into politics a new spirit of hope for change that had been missing since the 1930s and new possibilities for direct participation” (Beverley, 105.)
Beverley closes his book with “The Subaltern and the State,” arguing for the need of a “post-subaltern” paradigm; that is, a critical perspective that in its critical approach to the nation-state reveals its debt to, but in turn, displaces subaltern critical frameworks. Beverley finds at least two limitations with Subaltern Studies. First, it conceptualizes the subaltern as outside and constitutively opposed to the state and modernity since these institutions have been the result of colonialism. Second, Subaltern Studies imagine civil society as completely independent from the nation-state. What the Marea rosada governments have shown, however, is that the subaltern and the state can be compatible. He indicates that “Chavismo was precisely the result of the crystallization of a variety of social movements operating in Venezuela in the wake of the Caracazo into a new political bloc” (Beverley, 114). Similarly, the success of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia was the result of Indigenous social movements that sought to and successfully modified economic relations and established a leadership that is “predominantly indigenous” (Beverley, 109). In this sense, Marea rosada governments, according to Beverley, allow us to envision a state that can bring “into it demands, values, experiences from the popular-subaltern sectors (which would require a prior process of hegemonic articulation of a new political bloc capable of addressing the state), and how in turn, from the state, society can be remade in a more redistributive, egalitarian, culturally diverse way (how hegemony might be constructed from the state, in other words)” (Beverley, 115-116).
While I find relevance in Beverley’s critique of neo-Arielism and deconstruction, his assessment of the armed struggle, the importance of the nation-state and identity politics in a “globalized world,” and his call for an intellectual political project that engages with social movements, I also find some significant shortcomings in his arguments. Let me address them here.
As we can see, Beverley’s main critique of Latinamericanism has to do with its failure to recognize and incorporate the demands of social movements and the populations threatened by globalization and neoliberalism. However, if the idea is to incorporate into hegemonic institutional spaces—dominated by middle- and upper-middle-class, university-educated, and essentially a white, Criollo-Ladino/Mestizo Latin American intelligentsia—the “demands, values, experiences of the popular-subaltern sectors,” to what extent isn’t Beverley complicit in preventing “the effort of indigenous and subaltern subjects to write themselves into history?”(Beverley, 83).
Beverley recognizes that the civilizational project of Latin America has historically entailed the suppression and marginalization of Indigenous “languages and ways of thinking and being” (Beverley, 59) on the assumption that Indigenous life and culture are “inadequate” or “backwards.” Because of these assumptions, “Indigenous Peoples or peasants or workers or the urban poor may not identify themselves with the project” (Beverley, 48). But while Beverley underscores these limitations, he does not have a problem advocating for a “new Latinamericanism.” In doing so, he rejects and obliterates some of the categories and alternative projects being proposed by social movements, in particular, those of Indigenous and Afro-descendant intellectuals.4 I am surprised, for instance, that Beverley does not reflect or consider the category and civilizational project of Abya Yala 5 which has been proposed by some Indigenous scholars and activists since the 1980s, and has been theorized by Beverley’s former student, the Kichwa scholar Armando Muyolema.6 Muyolema challenges the idea of Latin America precisely because it is and continues to be constitutive of an ethnocentric and colonialist project that, for the most part, endorses the aspirations of the white, and criollo-mestizo intellectual sectors Beverley criticizes. Latin America is not merely a “name” or category, but rather a geopolitical project that embodies and confirms the historically enduring regime of colonialism in the region. Indigenous Peoples can only be a part of Latin America as long as we give up our lands, languages, and cultural and religious specificities. Contrary to the civilizational project of Latin America, Abya Yala, according to Muyolema, would represent our own civilizational project and locus of political enunciation.
Indeed, for many Indigenous and non-Indigenous sectors, the possibility of “alliance politics between social groups” and the formation of “a new historical block at national, continental, and intercontinental levels” (Beverley, 83) does not lie so much in a “new” Latin American or Latinamericanist project anymore, but rather, in Abya Yala. For us to recognize and endorse the former, in my view, will contribute to affirming a colonialist logic that overlooks our needs as Indigenous Nations: in particular, our continued efforts to recover and defend our territories, and restitute our linguistic, cultural and religious specificities, efforts that Latinamericanism in all of its forms has failed to deeply address and understand. Because of these, I would venture to say that the efforts of subaltern-popular Indigenous rights movements would be better invested in first developing an Indigenous and even global historical block that while it addresses internal and external oppressions also manages to bring us together as diverse Indigenous Nations struggling to overcome external and internal/settler colonialisms. Our positioning as Indigenous subjects will not only allow the hegemonic articulation of our demands, but also negotiate with non-Indigenous others the constitution of multicultural or intercultural national models based on our own Indigenous perspectives.
With regards to Beverley’s discussion of the Marea rosada, there is no doubt that these Left-leaning governments have brought economic and political benefits to important sectors of disenfranchised populations. However, what do we make of Michelle Bachelet’s re-enactment of Augusto Pinochet’s 1984 “anti-terrorist law” which has been used to incarcerate Mapuche activists in the northern region of the Araucania in Chile? Or Rafael Correa’s efforts to shoot down the offices of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), an organization that supported Correa’s presidential election? (Not to mention the incarceration and assassination of several environmental Indigenous activists and peasant leaders in the Amazonian regions of Ecuador). Or the Evo Morales administration invading Amazonian Indigenous territories (the so-called “TIPNIS” affair) to build roads, bridges and electrical power systems to economically favor sectors of his constituency? In my view, what Marea rosada governments show is that while they have constituted the nation-state as a site of struggle that proposes socialism, and in one case, established a leadership that is “predominantly indigenous,” at the same time they demonstrate how they are capable of reproducing colonialism, often becoming—as suggested by Nicholas Dirks—“as repressive as the worst colonial regime.”7
By pointing this out, I am by no means suggesting that we don’t see the nation-state or modernity as sites of political possibilities. Like Beverley, I believe that the nation and its hegemonic institutions are clearly necessary sites of struggle that with our participation and critique will eventually change the rules of the game in favor of a “popular-subaltern block,” and the construction of a “society that is at once egalitarian and diverse” (Beverley, 79). Unlike him, however, I don’t believe that the work of social movements should be understood as complete once their efforts culminate in the occupation of the State. Instead, social movements and their hegemonic articulations should be the guiding force in continuing to redefine the nation-state, and the transformation of society, changes that can only occur from below, instead of above.
Emilio del Valle Escalante (K’iche’ Maya, Iximulew) is an Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He is the author of Maya Nationalisms and Postcolonial Challenges in Guatemala (SAR Press, 2009).
NOTES
1. Coletta Youngers, “Latin America,” in Power Trip: U.S. Unilateralism and Global Strategy After September 11, ed. John Feffer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 151.
2. John Beverley, Latinamericanism after 9/11 (London-Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 7.
3. Arielism in Latin America refers to an intellectual class at the beginning of the twentieth century that developed a political stance and discourse against the United States’ imperial expansionism after the Spanish-American war of 1898. Figures like Uruguayan José Enrique Rodo evoked the figure of Ariel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest to suggest that while Latin America embodied noble, intellectual, harmonious and sensible virtues, the U.S. represented insensible and material ones. Besides Rodo, this group included Argentinian Manuel Baldomero Ugarte and Mexican José Vasconcelos.
4. For a discussion about the relationships between Afro-descendants and the nation state in Latin America, see Agustín Lao-Montes, “Decolonial Moves. Trans-Locating African Diaspora Spaces,” Cultural Studies. 21:2-3 (March-May 2007): 309-339.
5. For those unfamiliar with the term Abya Yala, the concept emerged toward the end of the 1970s in Dulenega, or what, for others, is today San Blas, Panama, a Kuna Tule territory. Abya Yala in the Kuna language means “land in its full maturity.” After the Kuna won a lawsuit to stop the construction of a shopping mall in Dulenega, they told a group of reporters that they employed the term Abya Yala to refer to the Western Hemisphere or the Americas in its totality. After listening to this story, the Bolivian Aymara leader, Takir Mamani suggested that indigenous peoples and indigenous organizations use the term Abya Yala in their official declarations to refer to the American continent. Since the 1980s, many indigenous activists, writers, and organizations have embraced Mamani’s suggestion.
6. See Armando Muyolema’s “De la cuestión indígena a lo indígena como cuestionamiento. Hacia una crítica del latinoamericanismo, el indigenismo y el mestiz(o)aje,” ed. Rodríguez, Ileana, in Convergencia de tiempos: estudios subalternos/contextos latinoamericanos estado, cultura, subalternidad (Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001), 327-363.
7. Nicholas Dirks, Colonialism and Culture, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 15.
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Alexander R. Galloway — From Data to Information
In recent months I’ve been spending time learning Swift. As such, I’ve been thinking a lot about data structures. Swift has a nice spectrum of possible data structures to pick from — something that I’ll have to discuss another day — but what interests me here is the question of data itself. Scholars often treat etymology as a special kind of divination. (And philosophers like Heidegger made a career of it.) But I find the etymology of the word “data” to be particularly elegant and revealing.
Data comes from the Latin dare, meaning to give. But it’s the form that’s most interesting. First of all, it’s in the neuter plural, so it refers to “things.” Second, data is a participle in the perfect passive form. Thus the word means literally “the things having been given.” Or, for short, I like to think of data as “the givens.” French preserves this double meaning nicely by calling data the données. (The French also use the word “data,” although *I believe* this is technically an anglicism imported from technical vocabulary, despite French being much closer to Latin than English.)
Data are the things having been given. Using the language of philosophy, and more specifically of phenomenology, data are the very facts of the givenness of Being. They are knowable and measurable. Data display a facticity; they are “what already exists,” and as such are a determining apparatus. They indicate what is present, what exists. The word data carries certain scientific or empirical undertones. But more important are the phenomenological overtones: data refer to the neutered, generic fact of the things having been given.
Even in this simple arrangement a rudimentary relation holds sway. For implicit in the notion of the facticity of givenness is a relation to givenness. Data are not just a question of the givenness of Being, but are also necessarily illustrative of a relationship back toward a Being that has been given. In short, givenness itself implies a relation. This is one of the fundamental observations of phenomenology.
Even if nothing specific can be said about a given entity x, it is possible to say that, if given, x is something as opposed to nothing, and therefore that x has a relationship to its own givenness as something. X is “as x”; the as-structure is all that is required to demonstrate that x exists in a relation. (By contrast, if x were immanent to itself, it would not be possible to assume relation. But by virtue of being made distinct as something given, givenness implies non-immanence and thus relation.) Such a “something” can be understood in terms of self-similar identity or, as the scientists say, negentropy, a striving to remain the same.
So even as data are defined in terms of their givenness, their non-immanence with the one, they also display a relation with themselves. Through their own self-similarity or relation with themselves, they tend back toward the one (as the most generic instance of the same). The logic of data is therefore a logic of existence and identity: on the one hand, the facticity of data means that they exist, that they ex-sistere, meaning to stand out of or from; on the other hand, the givenness of data as something means that they assume a relationship of identity, as the self-similar “whatever entity” that was given.
The true definition of data, therefore, is not simply “the things having been given.” The definition must conjoin givenness and relation. For this reason, data often go by another name, a name that more suitably describes the implicit imbrication of givenness and relation. The name is information.
Information combines both aspects of data: the root form refers to a relationship (here a relationship of identity as same), while the prefix in refers to the entering into existence of form, the actual givenness of abstract form into real concrete formation.
Heidegger sums it up well with the following observation about the idea: “All metaphysics including its opponent positivism speaks the language of Plato. The basic word of its thinking, that is, of his presentation of the Being of beings, is eidos, idea: the outward appearance in which beings as such show themselves. Outward appearance, however, is a manner of presence.” In other words, outward appearance or idea is not a deviation from presence, or some precondition that produces presence. Idea is precisely coterminous with presence. To understand data as information means to understand data as idea, but not just idea, also a host of related terms: form, class, concept, thought, image, outward appearance, shape, presence, or form-of-appearance.
As Lisa Gitelman has reminded us, there is no such thing as “raw” data, because to enter into presence means to enter into form. An entity “in-form” is not a substantive entity, nor is it an objective one. The in-form is the negentropic transcendental of the situation, be it “material” like the givens or “ideal” like the encoded event. Hence an idea is just as much subject to in-formation as are material objects. An oak tree is in-formation, just as much as a computer file is in-formation.
All of this is simply another way to understand Parmenides’s claim about the primary identity of philosophy: “Thought and being are the same.”
[Contains a modified excerpt from Laruelle: Against the Digital [University of Minnesota Press: 2014], pp. 75-77.]
_____Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books and dozens of articles on digital media and critical theory, including Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (MIT, 2006), Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota, 2006); The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), and most recently Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota, 2014), reviewed here in 2014. Galloway has recently been writing brief notes on media and digital culture and theory at his blog, on which this post first appeared.