Читать книгу Lope de Aguirre, Hugo Chávez, and the Latin American Left - Alfredo Ignacio Poggi - Страница 9

Habermas identifies the “linguistic turn” as another twentieth-century intellectual event that broke with Western tradition. Although various thinkers since antiquity have addressed the topic of language, in the mid-twentieth century, language was problematized and became arguably the most relevant topic of investigation in the humanities. The different disciplines⁠—such as philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, literary criticism, psychology, and others⁠—devoted themselves to the study of language no longer as a means of transmitting pure ideas or a hidden reality, but as the constitution of thought itself. Theorists such as Saussure converted the “universal” Kantian categories of human reason, which filter and organize sensory experiences, into linguistic categories that make sense only in their interrelationships with each other within the same language system. Habermas describes this shift as a transition from a philosophy of consciousness to one of language.^[10]

From this starting point, Saussure constructed a theory for the analysis of a universal human structure based on language; many prestigious intellectuals, such as Levi-Strauss, followed him in this task.^[11] However, with their work, the structuralists also undermined one of the most solid foundations of the modern project, pure consciousness, and hence prepared the way for deconstruction. The poststructuralists realized that these linguistic structures were artificial, finite, and relative creations and that they pervaded all dimensions of human thought and life, from economic, political, and cultural structures to psychological and biological ones.

The study of reality thus became a textual analysis, interpreting relationships of meaning as they emerged in diverse articulations of reality and doing so with varying degrees of power at all social levels. Power, here, is understood not only as the might of governments but as belonging, too, to any conception of the world that can marginalize some social groups and legitimize others. Of course, this theoretical proposal is not uniformly accepted and has generated extensive debate. Nevertheless, literary and cultural studies gained an impressive distinction among the humanities, since the analysis of texts was transformed from a merely aesthetic matter into a critical component of social thought. One of the most fruitful intellectual results of this movement has been postcolonial theory.

Although empires have been present since the beginning of human history, the originality of postcolonial studies that emerged in the 1980s consists in the fact that they work at a discursive level. For a postcolonial thinker, colonialism and imperialism do not come to an end once political independence has been attained, but permeate our conceptions of the world and maintain a concrete influence on daily decisions and relationships. In fact, in the 1980s, direct political imperialisms were actually in decline, and the majority of the Asian and African colonies had achieved their independence; yet it would be false to say that colonial and imperialist mindsets have not persisted in all involved cultures, even today.

Edward Said describes this change of perspective in the following way:

Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and peoples require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination.^[12]

For postcolonial studies, and following post-structuralist proposals, Eurocentric and imperialist conceptions can be located in historical texts. These studies reveal how the idea of the superiority of the white European over the primitive and exotic non-Western person survives in contemporary culture with its powerful discursive mechanisms, and it has its genesis in the modern civilizational and imperialist project.

If it were possible to determine a point of departure for the postcolonial approach, it would be the publication of Edward Said’s book Orientalism in 1978. Said uses the discursive analytical method of Michel Foucault to unveil in historical texts the presence of orientalism, that is, Western concepts and practices about the Middle East and non-European people in general. For Said, the texts associated with orientalism “can create not only knowledge but also the very reality that they appear to describe.”^[13] In those exotic and primitive descriptions of the Middle East by Europeans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a new reality defined by uneven relationships of power took shape. Said shares most post-structuralists’ belief that it is impossible to escape this textual reality: “It is not the thesis of this book to suggest that there is such a thing as a real or true Orient ( . . . ) On the contrary, I have been arguing that ‘the Orient’ is itself a constituted entity.”^[14]

Scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha^[15] joined their work to Said’s postcolonial analysis, revealing the imperialist discourses that impregnated people’s conceptions of the world not only in colonizing Europe but also in the colonized societies themselves. Several prestigious Latin American thinkers also participated in the postcolonial debate, although they had, in fact, essentially been doing so since the 1960s and 70s, in the form of Marxist and world-system theoretical analysis. One of the most recognized and influential of these thinkers is Enrique Dussel, who uses the categories of Karl Marx and Emanuel Levinas to unveil the history of exploitation in Latin America by European empires and the permanence of colonialism today.

One of Dussel’s chief contributions to the postcolonial debate is the assertion that modernity arose in 1492 with the “discovery” of the Americas and the displacement of Europe to the center of the world.^[16] While arbitrarily identifying a “beginning” of modernity⁠—in the rise of nominalism, in the Reformation, in the printing press, in the Renaissance, in Descartes, in the French Revolution, and in the Enlightenment⁠—typically invites endless (and arguably useless) debate, it is worth noticing that each of these proposals tends to highlight a different dimension of the very same “civilizing” project of the West. Yet the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity in all facets of Western society⁠—and, indeed, throughout the world⁠—was a complex one. It is for this reason that many thinkers from different disciplines, such as Charles Taylor in the field of philosophy, have emphasized the multifaceted nature of modernity and the importance of a global perspective.

If we define modernity in terms of certain institutional changes, such as the spread of the modern bureaucratic state, market economies, science, and technology, it is easy to go on nourishing the illusion that modernity is a single process destined to occur everywhere in the same form, ultimately bringing convergence and uniformity to our world. Whereas my foundational hunch is that we have to speak of “multiple modernities”( . . . ), it is very important to set about “provincializing Europe,” in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s pithy phrase. This means that we finally get over seeing modernity as a single process of which Europe is the paradigm, and that we understand the European model as . . . one model among many, a province of the multiform world.^[17]

Postcolonial theorists such as Said, Spivak, and Bhabha analyzed the imperialist constitution of modernity (or modernities) beginning with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the French and English colonizing projects in Asia and Africa. Nonetheless, they omitted three hundred years of European colonization in the Americas. It is difficult to argue that the European powers’ constant exchange of books, resources, and even dynastic rule for more than three centuries did not strongly determine the English and French imperialist projects in Asia and Africa two centuries later. One must attend to the ways in which, with its early expansion of power and territory into the New World, Western Europe was first transformed from a peripheral and backward space to the new center of the planetary economic and political map, and one that sustained its global and hermeneutic prominence with a common theoretical vision.

With Dussel’s contribution, then, Latin American colonial history takes on key importance in our understanding of the constitution of modernity/modernities and of contemporary thought. Colonialism and modernity began their projects at the same time, with the arrival of the Spaniards in the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century, and they were mutually constituted during the following centuries. The European experience in the New World generated the first philosophical debates (such as the Valladolid debate between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda over the rights of indigenous peoples) of the modern imperial project, and provided it with its cultural, economic, and political sustenance. This is why Latin American thinkers look to their own colonial history in order to understand the entirety of the current world system, in order to point out the shadows of early modernity that continue to stretch over the sociopolitical structures of succeeding centuries.

Under these premises, Lope de Aguirre can represent a challenging and controversial prism in the postcolonial debate. First, his revolution could represent the first modern anti-imperial project. According to Galster, Aguirre’s rebellion was the first explicit declaration of separation from a European monarchy in the Americas, an event that anticipated, at least in intention, the independence of the American countries more than two centuries later.^[18] Galster points out that, in addition to this first historical novelty, Aguirre was also the first to preach his hatred of the king in an open forum; and his vitriolic tone is undoubtedly one of the essential elements of his later notoriety.^[19] Aguirre accused Philip II of cruelty and of breaking his word. Aguirre also reproached Carlos V for having used the riches obtained in the territories for his own hegemonic imperatives, while those who had discovered that wealth received nothing.^[20]

Aguirre’s anti-imperial project, and its radicality, thus represented a novelty in nascent modernity in more ways than one. Walter Mignolo recognizes the importance of studying this type of reactionary project as part of the constitution of modernity.^[21] For Mignolo, modernity’s salvationist rhetoric presupposes the oppressive and condemnatory logic of colonialism, which inevitably produces an energy of discontent, distrust, and detachment among those forced to react to imperial violence. This energy is translated into decolonial projects that, in the final analysis, are constitutive of modernity.

As mentioned already, Lope de Aguirre, in addition to proclaiming liberation from the Spanish empire, exercised violent rule among his followers and enemies, causing abuses and murders among native peoples and colonizers alike. These events demonstrate the temptation to tyranny inherent in modern anti-imperial enterprises. Following Jacques Derrida’s lead, Said, Spivak, and Bhabha might respond to the tyrannical dimension of Aguirre’s anti-imperial discourse through an analysis of essentialism. According to this notion, the marañón project buys into an imperial/anti-imperial binary, which seeks fixed identities and excludes the “other”; and it is the fault of this binary that epistemic and physical violence is generated.

In this approach, even anti-imperial sentiments and discourse can be scrutinized. For example, Said reads the novels of Joseph Conrad to find their anti-imperial positions but also to uncover how Conrad’s anti-imperialism reproduced certain assumptions of the imperial episteme. “To the extent that we see Conrad both criticizing and reproducing the imperial ideology of his time,” says Said, “to that extent we can characterize our present attitudes: the project, or the refusal, of the wish to dominate, the capacity to damn, or the energy to comprehend and engage with other societies, traditions, [and] histories.”^[22]

If imperialist knowledge is power and works with binaries, postcolonial research seeks to demonstrate the limitations of such dichotomies and their porousness, even in resistance movements. To avoid fixed and binary essentialisms, postcolonial theorists propose alternative strategies. For example, Homi Bhabha sees in cultural hybridity the possibility of subversion. For Bhabha, there is no immutable and “natural” essence of the Western person and another essence of the “Indian” on which colonized societies can build an argument for resistance. However, colonized groups that adapt to imperial cultures can show the artificiality of colonizing discourses. Terms such as mimicry and hybridity, taken from biology, refer to the ability of weaker animals to adapt in order to avoid the threat of their hunters:

Homi Bhabha’s work is exemplary. . . . His alternative is to deploy concepts like “mimicry,” “hybridity,” and “ambivalence.” If hybridity in practice confounded colonialists, then textually recovering hybridity and celebrating it can confound imperial knowledge, serving to represent the colonized in a manner that escapes the binaries or essentialisms of the imperial episteme. Rather than recovering an authentic subaltern identity and consciousness that is the source of resistance, the task is to illuminate those moments when mimicry and subsequent hybridization undo the colonizers’ authoritative claims. This is destabilization as an effect, and the approach thereby recovers a sort of agency without resorting to essentialized notions of the colonized’s culture or consciousness.^[23]

In this postcolonial perspective, modern anti-imperial rebellions generate violent and tyrannical projects when they seek to reaffirm a fixed identity and exclude everything associated with the dominating agent, thus reproducing the same binary conception imposed by the imperial powers. Yet while the programmatic deconstruction of binaries is persuasive and has theoretical consistency, it does not fully answer every question raised by the tyrannical dimension of some anti-imperial projects. For example, the rebellion of Lope de Aguirre is challenging because it does not depend on a fixed identity or essentialization of the marañones in order to motivate its revolt. Quite the opposite: in Nietzschean terms, Aguirre makes explicit his will to power, his will to recover just payment for the soldiers who had fought in the conquest. Even without an essentialization of their struggle or a fixed identity, the marañones generated systematic violence and oppression just like the imperial one had.

What, then, is the reason behind this movement’s own tyrannical turn, if not the simple consequence of a replication of the essentialist imperial binaries? As mentioned earlier, the richness of this research lies not only in identifying the porosity and artificiality of the anti-imperial/colonizer and liberator/oppressor binaries but also, and perhaps more importantly, in analyzing the elements and mechanisms that perforate these dichotomies and transform them into violent and tyrannical discourses.