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MARXISM AND MELODRAMA
The Double Intrigue
What the bourgeoisie and proletariat, middle class and lumpenproletariat look for throughout the length and breadth of the culture industry, and find without knowing it, or without needing to know it, is a systematic understanding of society unified and transfigured by melodrama.
Carlos Monsiváis, Mexican Postcards
Any discussion of Los errores (The Errors), the sixth and last novel by José Revueltas (if we except El apando, a short narrative whose generic nature remains unstable but which in any case hardly qualifies as a novel), published in 1964, must take as its point of departure the structural tension between its two storylines: that of the social outcasts and lumpen, with its prostitutes, pimps, small criminals, and circus artists; and that of the Communist Party, with its militant workers, its cadres, and its ideologues, as well as its typical class enemies, such as the usurer or the fascist police.1 In itself, the contrast between these two sides of the story already carries great potential for melodrama, and in fact the entire novel breathes the feuilleton-like atmosphere of the genre, mixing elements of farce, the comedy of errors, the morality tale, and the popular theater. But we should avoid any premature judgment as to the exact value of these melodramatic elements within the context of Revueltas’s literary work or political thought, since they fulfill various functions all at once.
On one hand, there can be no doubt that the sheer persistence of the criminal underworld—the inframundo or bajo mundo—left to its own devices far removed from the high-sounding debates among leaders and intellectuals of the Party, serves the effect of brutally unmasking the latter’s hypocrisy, not to say its utter historical inexistence in Mexico, as Revueltas had discussed it two years earlier in his Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza (Essay on a Headless Proletariat). In this sense, we might say that, for the Mexican author, there will not exist a genuine communist party unless it finally includes those members of the underworld whom orthodox Marxism had always excluded under the denigrating term of “lumpenproletariat.”2 In spite of their enormous curiosity for the genre of melodrama, especially the work of Eugène Sue, about whom they write several eloquent pages in The Holy Family, Marx and Engels only rarely show a comparable appreciation for the group of marginals that typically are the genre’s protagonists. “Marx and Engels do not spare their invectives with respect to the latter,” Ernesto Laclau comments, referring to the lumpenproletariat, in his recent book On Populist Reason, before he recalls how Marx speaks in this regard of “the scum of society,” whereas Engels uses even stronger language: “This rabble is absolutely brazen . . . Every leader of the workers who uses these scoundrels as guards or relies on them for support proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement.”3 And yet, with the help of Peter Stallybrass, Laclau goes on to demonstrate how, even in Marx’s perspective, the lumpenproletariat appears after all as a key reference for the articulation—this time contingent and hegemonic, not deterministic, in nature—of any and all emancipatory politics. This perspective is further confirmed in Revueltas’s Los errores.
Precisely insofar as it lacks any stable social inscription, the lumpen constitutes something like an ideal term of heterogeneity from which to articulate a political identity without essentialisms. This is how Frantz Fanon understood it, long after Marx, in a fragment from The Wretched of the Earth in which he would appear to offer an anticipation of the whole gallery of characters that populate the pages of Los errores:
The lumpenproletariat, once it is constituted, brings all its forces to endanger the “security” of the town, and is the sign of the irrevocable decay, the gangrene ever present at the heart of colonial domination. So the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, and the petty criminals . . . throw themselves into the struggle like stout working men. These classless idlers will by militant and decisive action discover the path that leads to nationhood . . . The prostitutes too, and the maids who are paid two pounds a month . . . all who turn in circles between suicide and madness, will recover their balance, once more go forward and march proudly in the great procession of the awakened nation.4
In Los errores, of course, we are a far cry from such an awakening of the lumpenproletariat to the solution of its troubles. The worlds of misery and of communist militancy do not really meet in this novel, except in crime and the repression of crime. Even so, it would seem as if this entire underworld, by its sheer physical presence, were loudly proclaiming the void of a duty, like the task of an ethical or moral revision of really existing communist politics. The party, the narrator seems to tell us through all the classless characters gathered in his text, should also include the latter as the true motor of history, far from the preachings about history as the “objective” history of the class struggle, according to the hefty manuals from the Soviet Academy.
The gesture of converting the lumpen, by way of the genre conventions of melodrama, into an integral part of the world as presented in Los errores would thus have to be read as a denunciation of communist politics—a criticism no less ferocious or peremptory for belonging to the space of fiction—that is intimately tied to Revueltas’s political activism. Historically, moreover, melodrama has always been the genre of preference for the staging of this formless mass of poor people, beggars, and prostitutes. To be more precise, one of the interpretive keys to understand the success of melodrama, not just as a literary genre but as a cultural matrix in a much broader sense as well, depends on the possibility that, through this genre or matrix, the so-called populace or scum succeed in incorporating themselves into a people, and the people in turn may embody itself as the—modern, urban and, as we will see, post-revolutionary—masses:
The stubborn persistence of the melodrama genre long after the conditions of its genesis have disappeared and its capacity to adapt to different technological formats cannot be explained simply in terms of commercial or ideological manipulations. One must continually pose anew the question of the cultural matrix of melodrama, for only with an analysis of the cultural conditions can we explain how melodrama mediates between the folkloric culture of the country fairs and the urban-popular culture of the spectacle, the emerging mass culture. This is a mediation which, on the level of narrative forms, moves ahead through serial novels in newspapers, to the shows of the music hall and to cinema. And as we move from film to radio theatre and then to the telenovela, the history of the modes of narrating and organizing the mise-en-scène of mass culture is, in large part, a history of melodrama.5
The story of Los errores obviously traverses many of these scenes and, due to its heightened theatricality, its comical effects, and its moral polarizations, it resembles nothing more than the old feuilleton or the contemporary farce. The novel takes advantage of the whole structural matrix of melodrama so as to re-launch the dream of a social revolution that would really subsume the rabble and mass of all those who, from the most ruinous lumpen to the disenchanted intellectual, do not count in the eyes of the high command of the Party.
On the other hand, however, we also ought not to forget that Revueltas himself, in Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza, refers to the small-time leaders of the Mexican Communist Party as “lumpenproletarian” in a purely condescending way, speaking of the “crisis of the split” that began toward the end of 1961, “again provoked, against independent opinions, by the national leadership of the PCM, made up of the same lumpenproletarian political gangsters that ejected us from the PCM in that monstrous usurpation of party sovereignty (fake delegates, nonexistent representations, hidden documents and so on and so forth) that was the 13th National Convention.”6 This sarcastic mention suggests that Revueltas, with regard to the lumpenproletariat, is perhaps not so distant from the denigrating orthodoxy of Marx and Engels. In Los errores, furthermore, the narrator refers ironically to the populism hidden behind the rhetorical invocation of the lumpen on behalf of one of his characters, the party boss Patricio Robles: “On certain occasions, he liked to use certain lumpenproletarian phrases common among pool players and gamblers, in the belief that this would give his words a nuance, a touch reminiscent of his origin as the man of the people that he had been.”7 Thus, we also cannot exclude the possibility that a similar motivation, albeit ironically, may determine the use of certain phrasings and invocations of the lumpenproletariat on the part of Revueltas.
In any case, we should underscore the fact that the strong melodramatic overtones of Los errores derive not only from the structural contrast between the two storylines of the novel, with all that this contrast entails in terms of the critique of the notion of the party, but also from the internal development of each one of these stories. This is, after all, the true lesson of the Marxist notion of uneven development for someone like Althusser as well: “The whole history of Marxist theory and practice confirms this point. Marxist theory and practice do not only approach unevenness as the external effect of the interaction of different existing social formations, but also within each social formation,” as we may read in For Marx. “And within each social formation, Marxist theory and practice do not only approach unevenness in the form of simple exteriority (the reciprocal action of infrastructure and superstructure), but in a form organically internal to each instance of the social totality, to each contradiction.”8
The New Life
He thought about his savings, about using all of them, without sparing a cent, in order to construct that new life—unexpected, miraculous, finally the peace and quiet—that they would live together, Mario Cobián and she, as husband and wife.
José Revueltas, Los errores
The two worlds that only precariously cohabit in Los errores are in similar ways marked by an internal disjunction. It is this disjunction that really defines the text’s melodramatic nature. What is at stake, therefore, is not so much the history or the social function of the genre so much as its formal structure: a dual, or Manichaean structure, which tends to oppose good and evil, justice and injustice, ethics and corruption, in a pseudodialectical opposition—an opposition that is dialectical only in appearance. This is because the notions of good, justice, and salvation, due to the extreme dualism in which they are portrayed, do not genuinely enter into contradiction with the otherwise no less patent realities of evil, injustice, and exploitation. In the final analysis, there is no true contradiction, only the projection of good conscience onto real conditions of existence. This projection continues to depend on old ideological elements, such as religion, which have nothing in common, really, with the life of the underworld in the name of which melodrama speaks. “In this sense, melodrama is a foreign consciousness as a veneer on a real condition,” Althusser writes in a brilliant discussion of Brecht and Bertolazzi’s theatre. “The dialectic of melodramatic consciousness is only possible at this price: this consciousness must be borrowed from outside (from the world of alibis, sublimations, and lies of bourgeois morality), and it must still be lived as the consciousness of a condition (that of the poor underworld) even though this condition is radically foreign to the consciousness.”9 Several features considered typical of melodrama, such as the rhetorical excess of moralizing polarities, can best be explained if we start from the disjuncture that serves as their structural base.
Within the first storyline, that of the underworld, the disjuncture expresses itself above all through the desire for a “new life”—that is to say, a total break with everything that defines the present of the subjects in question. Though the same holds true for several other characters, this desire for an absolute break is particularly clear in the case of the couple made up of Mario Cobián (“El Muñeco”) and Lucrecia (“Luque”). Mario, especially, dreams obsessively of “that new life that he proposed to lead, of that break with himself, with his past, with the whole inferno”;10 he wants to be somebody, dreaming that “for once that I am going to make it big in my life,”11 and above all, he wants to stop being El Muñeco. Concretely, the dream of a new life, so typical of any melodrama, is translated in Los errores into the ideal of a perfect, almost sacred love. For Mario, this would mean getting Luque out of prostitution, cutting all ties to the past in order finally to take the leap toward a completely new existence:
This new existence was so extraordinary, it meant so much for both of them, that Mario would offer it to her, well-rounded, clean, and finished in all its details, similar to a true blessing fallen out of the sky, so that Lucrecia might embark upon it without the slightest obstacle, easy-going, natural, grateful, like something that had to be in this way and not in any other way.12
The vocabulary, as is often the case in melodrama, is borrowed from religion, or from what Marx and Engels, in their discussion of Eugène Sue in The Holy Family, had called “theological morality.”13 This can easily be understood insofar as, with the exception of suicide or the dream of ending it all—also quite common between Mario and Lucrecia—only the beyond of a pure and sacred ideal can be adequate to the desire to leave behind, once and for all, the world of injustice below. “Lucrecia was sacred, a sacred and pure ideal,” Mario thinks: “Lucrecia was sacred, sacred, sacred. The new life.”14 And later: “For sure she will never ever leave me, once she knows how happy we’ll be with the new life I’m going to give her.”15 Once again, the melodramatic nature of such wishes depends on the fact that what is being sought is a degree of purity that is such that, in comparison, the real world can deliver only a series of disillusionments and deceptions. Meanwhile, however, the real conditions of existence remain intact precisely because they do not enter into a process of genuine transformation. Rather, the melodramatic structure of the desire for the new life only increases the false contrast between the dream of purity, on one hand, and the world of misery, on the other.
Freedom and Automatism
This is where I stand—how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance.
Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ
The desire to “succeed” or “make it big” (dar un golpe) in life can also be read as a pathetic, well-nigh existentialist search for an authentic “act” of freedom. This theme of the act, as we will see in detail below, is actually a constant concern of the later Revueltas.16 In Los errores, though, we can already begin to perceive to what extent the logic of the act encloses an insuperable paradox. On one hand, it is certainly true that a genuine act, if accomplished, would be proof of the human capacity for autonomy. Thus, Mario discovers with an “abyssal and sweet delirium” that he can be somebody, do something, become the “only true but invisible protagonist” of his own history, “in the same way that a magician brings incredible and marvelous things out of nowhere”—something which would seem to constitute a true moment of existential revelation: “A nebulous discovery of his own person: I have done something, me, the one who finds himself here, between the old boxes of the attic.”17 On the other hand, each genuine act seems to bring the individual to a point where it is not he or she but the objective course of things that decides in his or her stead. In this way, the human being, far from giving evidence of autonomy by acting independently, rather becomes a kind of automaton at the mercy of a plan or an order beyond its will.
To decide and to let another decide for oneself, in this sense, would be two sides of the same coin. In the case of Mario, the discovery of “being somebody” in the sovereign act is barely distinguishable from the suspicion, equal parts voluptuous and delirious, of being “handed over” or “surrendered” to a chain of events beyond his control: “This is how events occurred, the anesthesia provided by a sovereign act, foreign and distant, the world, life, which linked him up with their chains without belonging to him, and which sunk their teeth in his flesh that nevertheless was his flesh, his hand, the hand of Mario Cobián.”18 What the subject feels at this point of exchange between act and necessity is the happiness of belonging to a cause greater than him- or herself. This is the pleasure of deciding as a way of letting oneself be decided, so crucial for the good functioning of all ideological interpellation: “The voluptuousness of not belonging to oneself, of being handed over, of not responding for oneself, of letting oneself be led from one side to the other, who knows whereto.”19 Here, as in a Möbius strip, the most sovereign activity, when it continues long enough in the same direction, all of a sudden turns into the highest degree of automated passivity. Revueltas’s novel, among many other achievements, also represents an impeccable narrative investigation into the logic of such paradoxes surrounding the act, freedom, and the objective destiny of things.
Various characters in Los errores on both sides of the intrigue indeed seem to be going through similar moments of crisis, between the anxiety and the pleasure of knowing themselves to be ruled by a destiny that is beyond their individual will. “Elena,” the ex-circus artist (whose nickname is a pun on el enano, “dwarf,” as a homonym for Elena-no, “not Elena”), for example, yearns to exercise his freedom and break completely with his boss and supposed friend “El Muñeco.” Locked up in a tiny suitcase, lying in wait for the right silence in order to jump out and rob the moneylender don Victorino’s shop, he momentarily suffers from delusions of grandeur and imagines himself capable of anything and everything: “But today he would not allow Mario Cobián to take advantage of him in any way. El Suavecito was not going to allow himself to be mocked. He decided to complete the first part of the theft. The moment to act had come: and it was up to him, to Elena. It was his moment.”20 Thus, the moment of absolute freedom arrives:
The dwarf felt the full sensation of a happy, unlimited freedom, which he could express in whatever way he wanted, shouting out loud. So he did: a scratchy, ululating, savage scream, like a drunk Mexican. Absolute, aggressive, untainted freedom . . . Nothing less than that, absolute freedom . . . [all this] was his own determination, free and sovereign, the imposition of his own destiny over things, and not the other way around.21
“Elena,” at the same time that he feels himself capable of being “the absolute author of his deeds and their irrefutable judge,” also experiences the uncannily painful and pleasant feeling of becoming an automaton under the yoke of some other—whether this other is fate or “El Muñeco”; but this sensation is actually indistinguishable from that other, “incomparably terrifying” one, which produces in him “a naked pleasure, without skin, without instruments: the sensation of infinity,” leading to the “paroxysm of a form of happiness both mad and atrocious.”22 What happens precisely is that the fascination with the act—with getting his moment—coincides with the desire for abandonment—for forming part of a plan larger than himself.
Thus, the dwarf feels “an unspeakable contact” with the mandate emanating from the other, “to the point of emptying himself out completely in the void, without being aware of anything.”23 It is by purely and simply obeying orders that the desire of the subject reveals itself to be a desire of and for the other, a desire to which he submits himself as “an abandoned puppet.”24 Instead of being the agile acrobat of his own freedom, this ex-circus artist discovers that he is merely the docile automaton of a destiny that on all sides exceeds and controls him. And something similar happens not only to “La Magnífica”—“Why did she feel pushed liked an automaton to say exactly that which she had promised to keep quiet about?”25—but also, in anticipation of the second storyline, to the linotypist who, at the time of setting the manifesto of the Central Strike Committee (Comité Central de Huelga) “seemed like a somnambulant puppet that was being handled by someone from afar with the precision of a chess-player.”26 In all these cases, the act defines the linkage between an individual and the plane of the supra-individual, in a constitutive oscillation between freedom and automatism, between blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, between one’s own will and the impersonal chain of inevitability.
Mario’s example once again offers the best summary of the paradoxes of the act:
Mario felt that the earth was slipping away from under his feet. Why did things take this absurd and arbitrary turn, as in a grotesque nightmare? The plan did not unfold in conformity with what he had foreseen, it took paths of its own, invented resources, linked distant events, anticipated situations, even though it was not really different from the plan itself. To the contrary, materials and things that belonged to him, that were included in him in order to become realized, took on a destiny and chose an occasion on their own account, appearing in a new light, as in an enchanted mirror in which they looked at themselves as they had always wanted to see themselves and not in the way they were at the point defined by that personal human will. Mario could not have these thoughts or considerations for himself, but he guessed behind everything the existence of a deceitful and sly move, not devised by anyone in particular, but of which he made himself the victim—God knows why, or moved by whom?27
Here Mario in effect appears to be “the Puppet” (El Muñeco) in a false setup, a nightmarish and absurd plan that is also at the same time secretly attractive. The plan that he seeks to accomplish is simultaneously an enchanting mirror in which he recognizes himself not as he is, but as he would like to appear. We might also say that the mirror returns to him an image—an imaginary identity—of his self in the analytical sense of the term, his ideal ego rather than his ego ideal. This is why abandoning himself to the plan, with all its incomprehensible whims included, turns out to be so delirious and painfully sweet. The most objective elements, a destiny woven from strange and alien forces, at the same time seem to communicate with the most intimate materials of the subjective realm, the innermost drives of one’s own being. Thus, we can feel ourselves to be free and authentic in the midst of the most complete alienation.
Politics and Affectivity
Here, incidentally, we come upon one of the most striking aspects of Los errores. The whole point is to unravel the affective and corporeal burden that constitutes the material base without which no power could inscribe itself in a lasting way at the heart of the subject. In my view, the most outstanding passages in Revueltas’s novel, stylistically speaking, are those devoted to tracing the ubiquitous circulation of rage, hatred, and resentment as the indispensable anchoring points that mark the subordination of a body to power, violence and exploitation—an exploitation which, in this way, turns out to be a kind of self-exploitation, or a servitude that is at least in part voluntary.
“Where there is oppression, there is resistance,” people used to say at the time of Los errores, in an allusion to a famous dictum from Mao Zedong. In fact, what a novel like this one suggests is that, unless we capture where power—through affectivity and the subject’s psychic and libidinal economy—inscribes itself onto the body, we also will fail to activate the mainspring of effective resistance. This vast lesson, which Revueltas appears to distribute throughout the didactic parts of nearly all his narrative oeuvre, constitutes at the same time the premise of theoretical investigations on the part of contemporary figures. For instance, in “La izquierda sin sujeto” (“The Left Without a Subject”), a programmatic essay from 1966 published in the important Argentine journal La rosa blindada and reprinted in the Cuban journal Pensamiento crítico, the slightly younger Rozitchner laments precisely the inability of the orthodox Left to think through the subjective aspect of politics other than in terms of a purely negative or ideological supposition that we would be dealing with the “merely” subjective. “I hold that without subjective modification, without the elaboration of truth in the total situation in which the human subject participates, there exists no objective revolution,” writes Rozitchner. Later, he adds:
If the transition from the bourgeoisie to the revolution appears as a necessity that emerges from within the capitalist regime itself, then this rational necessity must be read by grasping those sensible human elements therein that are also necessary and made it possible, and that both dogmatism and left-wing opportunism abstract as unnecessary: they read the rationality of the process all the while leaving out, as irrational, that which they are not capable of assuming or modifying: the subject itself, they themselves.28
Revueltas, by contrast, submerges all his characters precisely in this sensible and affective zone that makes alienation possible as self-alienation.
Los errores, in this sense, presents among other things a detailed physiology and psychic economy of power. The novel uncovers the affective life of resentment, rage, jubilation, and melancholy in whose web the human being remains trapped, quite literally, qua subject. “Affect,” in other words, is not here a mere synonym for emotion but rather the name for the residue in the body left behind by the inscription of an individual in an incorporeal, social, or political process, which articulates both power and resistance. Affect would be the mark of a subjectivization, the trace of the passage of a subject through a process of fidelity to a truth or its betrayal. Thus, to give but one example, the text reveals to us “the opaque drunkenness of a searching and artificial rage, similar to the little dosages of a narcotic that lightens the presence of things by making them innocent and faraway,” a rage which nonetheless can also and at the same time open up a place for a new sense of justice, beyond the misery that provokes so much rabid despair: “A rage which immediately becomes honest—after inflicting the first whiplash—and full of a muffled and passionate justice.”29 Revueltas possesses a relentless, painfully eloquent and lucid honesty in uncovering the most recondite and perverse hideouts where power latches onto affectivity.
The affects that most insidiously circulate through the universe of Revueltas’s narrative—rage, fear, and hatred, not to mention the desperate yearning for justice—all serve to link the individual to a supra-individual ideological cause. Don Victorino, the moneylender about to fall prey to an attempted robbery on behalf of the communists, considers that such a linkage offers a point of commonality that he shares not only with his accomplices in the Anticommunist Mexican League, such as Nazario Villegas, but also with his most feared class enemies, among whom we find one of his own employees, the communist infiltrator Olegario Chávez. The following sentence also offers us a good sample of Revueltas’s quite unique and inimitable style—for who else, aside from Martí, can sustain for over a dozen lines a single sentence without losing its dialectical cadence and fluency?
If he had felt capable of kneeling down before Nazario—don Victorino thought, precisely because of the secret generosity of his impulse, without fear that he would interpret it as abject behavior, it was so that a gesture of such desperate eloquence would make him understand, all of a sudden, the way in which he, don Victorino, appreciated the situation not only with respect to his own person but also, above all, insofar as in this person, in his concrete and individual destiny, there lay condensed the logic, the reason, the justice—and also the tribulations and impiety—of the cause for which both of them fought, a condensation whose discovery (barely ten minutes before, when don Victorino began to measure the magnitude of the threat represented by Olegario Chávez by his side as a communist spy) was a kind of common patrimony, an appalling common responsibility, that both had to grasp and share in everything new, radical, and unusual that it would require from their lives.30
Something in Olegario Chávez, for this same reason, ends up seeming curiously seductive to don Victorino. Despite the hatred each of them feels for the other, both men ultimately operate in identical ways, devoting their lives to a cause in which they simultaneously recognize their most profound and personal vocation. Thus, still according to don Victorino,
The communists had signaled him and nobody else, in the same way in which Judas had chosen Jesus; in the same way in which Judas had destined Jesus, inevitably, to bear witness. Both had ended up being entwined and sentenced from the beginning by the same destiny and the same fear, the fear that overcomes those who know themselves in a way to be in possession of the truth: of both sides of the truth. Above all, this is what Olegario was to don Victorino: the presence in which he contemplated himself, the inexorable and hoped-for justification of his life, of his history, of his form of being the way he was and of the reason for that vital, superhuman, and impious violence, out of spite for the mediocrity, pettiness and hatred in the midst of which he had always had to live, solitary, strong, and disdainful.31
The communist traitor, in this sense, plays a fundamental role in the psychic economy of his archenemy, the proto-fascist usurer don Victorino:
Olegario Chávez plays next to him, from the point of view of the communist plans, a very special role of transcendence . . . quite the opposite of a vulgar spy or provocateur. Neither his conduct, nor the fundamental traits of his character, displayed the slightest deceitfulness: he was frank, straightforward to the point of insolence and rudeness, if one wanted, but by no means deceitful, by no means was he a type who would play with marked cards. His tactic of open, frank, and frontal attack, for this very reason, revealed the truly singular perspective of his goals.32
Above all, what we begin to glimpse in this impeccable narrative exposition is the way in which a certain dogmatism, on the part of communists no less than of their class enemies, nurtures itself with the full spectrum of human affectivity. With this critique of the subjective logic of dogmatism and authoritarianism, however, we already find ourselves at the center of the second intrigue in Revueltas’s novel.
Rethinking the Twentieth Century
The nineteenth century announced, dreamed, and promised; the twentieth century declared it would make man, here and now.
Alain Badiou, The Century
The twentieth century did not exist. Humanity made a huge leap into the void from the theoretical presuppositions of the nineteenth century, through the failure of the twentieth century, to the dark beginning of the twenty-first century in August of 1945, with the atomic explosions of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
José Revueltas, Dialéctica de la conciencia
Aside from its melodramatic plot line pitting the lumpenproletariat of prostitutes and pimps against the fascistoid anticommunists, Los errores in a second and parallel story presents a narrativized judgment regarding the dogmatic excesses of Stalinism and its nefarious effects in the rest of the world, including in the Mexican Communist Party. In this sense, the novel participates in a much larger self-evaluation of the twentieth century, in which we could also include Alain Badiou’s The Century or, closer to Revueltas’s home, parts of Bolívar Echeverría’s Vuelta de siglo.33 In fact, Badiou once commented to me that he had planned originally to include a chapter on Mexico in The Century. I am not sure what events (texts, artworks, political sequences) would have been summoned in this chapter, which for better or for worse remained in the drawer of good intentions. What I do know is that Los errores had already asked, forty years earlier, some of the same questions that drive Badiou’s project in The Century. In particular, Revueltas’s novel gives us important insights into the potential destiny of a whole jargon of finitude when it is combined with an antitotalitarian, antidogmatic, left-wing revisionism. A central place in this combination is reserved, as we will see, for our human capacity for error—our human finitude—reconceived as the essential truth in Hegel’s dialectic.
Revueltas, like Bertold Brecht in his play The Decision, to whom Badiou devotes a chapter in The Century, is concerned above all with the interpretation that history has in store for the great events in the international expansion and perversion of communism. Its main problem is addressed in an odd parenthesis, in which the narrator for once seems indistinguishable from the author’s own voice:
(One cannot escape the necessity of a free and heterodox reflection about the meaning of the “Moscow trials” and the place they occupy in the definition of our age, of our twentieth century, because we true communists—whether members of the party or not—are shouldering the terrible, overwhelming task of being the ones who bring history face to face with the disjunctive of having to decide whether this age, this perplexing century, will be designated as the century of the Moscow trials or as the century of the October revolution.)34
Revueltas leaves us no clear verdict in this regard. Was the twentieth century criminal or revolutionary? The disjunctive remains open throughout Los errores, since there is also no single character capable of occupying the organizing center of consciousness that we might attribute to its author. Critics such as Christopher Domínguez Michael, after expressing their dismay at Revueltas’s “far-fetched and immoral” hypothesis regarding the Moscow trials, are quick to add how much they lament the fact that Revueltas could have suggested some kind of dialectical justification of sacrifice and terror: “Revueltas takes the liberties of a novelist with regard to history and, in his enthusiasm for the Hegelian triads, he converts Bukharin’s tortured mind into a precise and chilling dialectical synthesis.”35 In reality, the text is far more ambiguous; and it even stages this ambiguity itself by providing several characters with a split conscience.
Thus, we find examples of an analysis of the problem in terms of the corrupting nature of power with regard to historical truth. This is the case of Olegario:
The Moscow trials in this sense—Olegario had told himself from that moment on—present an entirely new problem for the conscience of communists: the problems of power and historical truth split off and grow apart, to the point where they become opposed and violently exclude one another in the arena of open struggle. Meanwhile, the historical truth, in the margin of power, becomes invalidated, without support, and without any recourse other than the power of truth, in opposition to everything the truth of power represents in terms of compulsive force, repressive instruments, propaganda means, and so on. This is when one must uncover and demonstrate in any way possible the fact that power has entered into a process of decomposition that will end up poisoning and corrupting society as a whole.36
Other arguments leave open the possibility that it may still be too early at this point in the history of the twentieth century to judge the situation in the USSR. That humanity, being still too alienated, or else—metaphysically speaking—being merely mortal, cannot exclude the future vindication of sacrifice. Precisely to the extent to which truth must inscribe itself concretely in the time and space of a specific situation, there exists no absolute vantage point from where it may be judged once and for all:
It certainly must be repeated: truth is concrete in time and in space. It must be kept quiet or said in conformity with strict relations but never, for any concept or reason whatsoever, outside of these relations. We must see the facts with the desolate and intrepid courage of human beings, for this is why we are communists. The lapses, the injustices, and even the crimes that our cause has incurred are crimes, injustices, and lapses that our cause commits—no matter how pure and untouched by evil we conceive it to be—when it becomes a concrete truth for the human beings of an alienated age and time. It is the mutilated and preformed men of our time, men themselves, and among them the best, who become assassins by virtue of carrying in their hands the burning flame of that other concrete but more real—or in any case the only real—truth that is in fact transmissible. They will also be punished, of course, they will be punished even after their death. But in the meantime, history—and this is the case, whether we want or not, in an objective way—does not permit us to talk or denounce everything all the time: man does not find himself at the height that would allow him to resist the disenchantment of himself, let us put it that way, by the radical self-critique with which he would finally humanize himself.37
Finally, there seems in fact to come a moment for the justification of a heroic and sacrificial outlook on history:
In light of this affirmation, nothing could appear for instance more impressive, more wrenchingly tremendous and beautiful, than the unprecedented sacrifice of the men who were sentenced to death in the Moscow trials, in their condition as victims consciously put on display to cover their names with ignominy, apparently an incomprehensible sacrifice, but for which it will be difficult to find even an approximate comparison in any other of the highest moments of human heroism from the past. Tomorrow history will vindicate these heroes, in spite of the errors, vacillations and weaknesses of their lives; these human beings who were able and knew how to accept the defaming stigma before the whole world, whose names are Bukharin, Piatakov, Rykov, Krestinski, Ter-Vaganyan, Smirnov, Sokolnikov, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Muralov, and so many others.38
All these interpretations, however, are not mutually exclusive, nor do they present a black-and-white picture of the ideological debate surrounding the Moscow trials. They sometimes invade the mind of a single character, dividing his inner sense with a terrifying uncertainty. This is the case of the communist intellectual Jacobo Ponce, who is on the verge of being expelled from the PCM—not unlike what happened, repeatedly, to Revueltas:
The other part of his self, the other part of his atrociously divided spirit, replied to him: no, these concrete truths are only small and isolated lies in the process of a general reality that will continue its course, despite and above everything. The miseries, dirty tricks, and crimes of Stalin and his cohorts will be seen by tomorrow’s communist society as an obscure and sinister disease of humanity from our time, from the tormented and delirious twentieth century that, all in all, will have been the century of the greatest and most inconceivable historical premonitions of humanity.39
From such ruminations, with their mixture of sinister premonition and sublime heroism, it is difficult to draw the simplistic conclusion that history, understood dialectically, would justify every possible means in the name of the communist end—or in the name of Stalin, as some of Revueltas’s detractors argue. Moreover, only a melodramatic imagination would define communism as a cause that is “pure and untouched by evil,” to speak the language of Los errores, but this does not mean that we should move to the opposite extreme of the ideological spectrum so as to interpret evil as the profound truth of all militancy, which is the surest way to refute beforehand any future for the communist project.
In the final analysis, as in the quoted fragment above that seems to have given the novel its title, everything revolves around the status of errors: Is there or is there not sublation of the errors (mistakes, crimes, infamies) committed by history, in the sense of a dialectical Aufhebung? For those who reproach Revueltas for his blind confidence in the Hegelian dialectic, it would seem that the sheer idea of finding some sense or relevance in such errors only aggravates their criminal nature to the point of the abomination of justifying terror and totalitarianism. The problem with this indignant rejection of the possibility of sublating error, however, is that it leads to a position outside or beyond the history of communism. It interprets the errors as a definitive refutation of communism as such, in order henceforth to assert the cause of post-communism, or even anti-communism pure and simple. The Moscow trials, in this sense, play a role comparable to that of the Gulag, as described for the West by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, by leading to a defense of democratic liberalism as the only remedy against the repetition of radical Evil—that is, against the threat of so-called “totalitarianism,” with its twin faces of Nazism and communism: Hitler and Stalin.
For Revueltas, as for someone like Badiou, the task consists in thinking the crimes from within the politics of communism, and not the other way around—not so as to ratify the facts with the stamp of historical inevitability, but so as to formulate an immanent critique that at the same time would avoid the simple abandonment of communism as such. “I would not want you to take these somewhat bitter reflections as yet more grist to the mill of the feeble moralizing that typifies the contemporary critique of absolute politics or ‘totalitarianism,’” warns Badiou in his own Hegelian reading of the function of violence and semblance in the Moscow trials: “I am undertaking the exegesis of a singularity and of the greatness that belongs to it, even if the other side of this greatness, when grasped in terms of its conception of the real, encompasses acts of extraordinary violence.”40 What seems to be happening today, however, is a tendency to interrupt or, worse, to foreclose in anticipation any radical emancipatory project in the name of a new moral imperative—key to the “ethical turn” that globally defines the contemporary age from the 1980s onward, including within the so-called Left—which obliges us above all, if not exclusively, to avoid the repetition of the crime.
Beautiful Souls
Morality is impotence in action.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family
With Los errores, Revueltas may have become the unwitting accomplice of contemporary nihilism, which consists precisely in defining the Good only negatively by way of the need to avoid Evil. “Evil is that from which the Good is derived, not the other way round,” as Badiou writes in his diagnosis of the ethical turn. “Nietzsche demonstrated very neatly that humanity prefers to will nothingness rather than to will nothing at all. I will reserve the name nihilism for this will to nothingness, which is like a counterpart of blind necessity.”41 In particular, there are two aspects of the debate regarding dogmatism in Los errores that run the risk of contributing to this complicity: the theme of the ethical role attributed to the party and the metaphysical, or more properly post-metaphysical, speculation about “man” or “humanity” (el hombre) as an erroneous being. Both of these themes obviously are presented in the hope of serving as possible correctives to the reigning dogmatism of Stalinism, but they could easily bring the reader to the point of adopting an ideological position that lies at the opposite extreme of the one its author upheld until his death just over thirty years ago.
Revueltas, on one hand, lets Jacobo Ponce, the character nearest to his own heart as an intellectual, devote most of his energy to the task of an ethical reflection about the party’s authority. “The party as an ethical notion”—such is the topic of Jacobo’s classes, against the orthodoxy of the party as the vanguard of the proletariat: “The party as a superior moral notion, not only in its role as political instrument but also as human consciousness, as the reappropriation of consciousness.”42 Thus, beyond the desire for reappropriation, or perhaps thanks to this desire, the critique of dogmatic reason already entails the temptation of a curious sense of moral superiority.
At the end of the novel, in the “Blind Knot” that serves as its epilogue, Ismael reaches the same conclusion as Jacobo: “The conclusion to be derived from this, if we introduce into our study of the problem the concepts of a humanist ethics, the concepts that stem from an ethical development of Marxism, can only be the most overwhelming and terrible conclusion, especially considering the parties that come into power.”43 The conclusion in question holds that the exercise of dogmatism on behalf of the “leading brains” of the communist movement, in Mexico as much as elsewhere in the world, with its “consoling tautology” that “the party is the party,” in reality involves “the most absolute ethical nihilism, the negation of all ethics, ciphered in the concept: to us everything is permitted.”44
If, on the other hand, “thought and practice . . . are identified as twin brothers in metaphysics and in dogma,” then it is understandable that Jacobo, in addition to an ethical inflection of the party, would also propose a philosophico-anthropological reflection about “man as erroneous being.”45 This reflection is part of the “essay” in which Jacobo has invested “close to three months of conscientious and patient labor,” no doubt similar to the labor it would take Revueltas a few years later to write his own unfinished and posthumous essay, Dialéctica de la conciencia. Jacobo reads from this text, which again is worth quoting at length so as to get a taste of the sheer syntactical complexity of the dialectical sentence:
Man is an erroneous being—he began to read with his eyes, in silence; a being that never finishes by establishing itself anywhere; therein lies precisely his revolutionary and tragic, unpacifiable condition. He does not aspire to realize himself to another degree—and this is to say, in this he finds his supreme realization—to another degree—he repeated to himself—beyond what can have the thickness of a hair, that is, this space that for eternal eternity, and without their being a power capable of remedying this, will leave uncovered the maximum coincidence of the concept with the conceived, of the idea with its object: to reduce the error to a hair’s breadth thus constitutes, at the most, the highest victory that he can obtain; nothing and nobody will be able to grant him exactitude. However, the space occupied in space and in time, in the cosmos, by the thickness of a hair, is an abyss without measure, more profound, more extensive, more tangible, less reduced, though perhaps more solitary, than the galaxy to which belongs the planet where this strange and hallucinating consciousness lives that we human beings are.46
What Jacobo proposes in this “essay” can be read as a new metaphysics—or rather an anti-metaphysics—of error and equivocity, against dogma and exactitude. Indeed, if the identity of being and thinking defines the basic premise of all metaphysical dogmatism, then human conscience or consciousness (conciencia in Spanish meaning both) can avoid dogmatism only by accepting an infinitesimal distance, or minimal gap, between the concept and the thing conceived.
We could say that Revueltas in Los errores accepts the need for a revision of the Hegelian dialectic in ways that are similar to what Adorno, around the same time, proposed with his “negative dialectics,” according to which no concept ever completely covers its content without leaving behind some leftover, or remnant of nonidentity: “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy.”47 Or, to use the almost perfectly comparable words of Badiou: “To begin with, a dialectical mode of thinking will be recognized by its conflict with representation. A thinking of this type pinpoints some unrepresentable point in its midst, which reveals that one touches upon the real.”48 Much of Revueltas’s intellectual work as a novelist and a theorist during the 1960s and 1970s is devoted to such a reformulation of the dialectic, as the conception of the non-conceptual or the representation of the unrepresentable.
In the case of Los errores, however, it is not difficult to guess where the ethics of the party and the metaphysics of error will end up. Both arguments could in fact be invoked—not without taking on airs of moral superiority—in order to stop, interrupt, or prohibit any attempt to organize politics, as well as any project of approaching the truth of consciousness. Not only would all organizational matters then be displaced onto moral issues, which could be framed in terms of honesty and betrayal, or good and evil, but, what is more, this could even lead to a position for which the knowledge of our finitude—that is, our essential nature as “erroneous beings”—would always be morally superior and theoretically more radical that any given action, which in comparison cannot but appear “dogmatic,” “totalitarian,” “voluntaristic,” and so on. In full melodramatic mode, we would end up with the attitude of the “beautiful soul” from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:
It lacks the power to externalize itself, the power to make itself into a Thing, and to endure [mere] being. It lives in dread of besmirching the splendour of its inner being by action and an existence; and, in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world, and persists in its self-willed impotence to renounce its self which is reduced to the extreme of ultimate abstraction, and to give itself a substantial existence, or to transform its thought into being and put its trust in the absolute difference [between thought and being]. The hollow object which it has produced for itself now fills it, therefore, with a sense of emptiness. Its activity is a yearning which merely loses itself as consciousness becomes an object devoid of substance, and, rising above this loss, and falling back on itself, finds itself only as a lost soul. In this transparent purity of its moments, an unhappy, so-called “beautiful soul,” its light dies away with it, and it vanishes like a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thin air.49
This road toward the transparent beauty of good unhappy conscience based on the wisdom of our essential finitude, now openly post-communist if not actually anticommunist, may very well have been prefigured, unbeknownst to the author, in the double proposal of a humanist ethics of the party and a metaphysics of irreducible error. The history of the 1970s and 1980s, with its peremptory declarations of the “end of ideology,” the “death” of Marxism, or the “ethical turn,” would end up confirming the extent to which the defense of liberal democracy, with its absolute rejection of communism-as-totalitarianism, also adopted some of the features of this same “beautiful soul” who at least knows that its inactivity protects it from the Evil incurred by anyone intent upon imposing, here and now, some Good.
Indeed, in the decades following the publication of Los errores, the roles of ethics and politics seem to have been inverted. When Revueltas, through Jacobo and Ismael, speaks of an “ethics of the party” or an “ethics of Marxism,” ethics is still subordinated to politics, keeping the latter in check. Ethics, in other words, would provide the political process with certain practical maxims for maintaining its consistency. At the same time, there seems to be a suggestion that there exists no ethics outside the concrete thought-practice of a party, league, or group: “There is no ethics in general. There are only—eventually—ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.”50 Such ethical considerations, however, can also become detached from the political processes in question, even to the point of subduing all politics as such. Here, then, we enter the terrain of a moralization of politics that no longer depends specifically on any militant procedure but that instead begins to undermine the sheer possibility of such forms of practice in general. This is because the new categorical imperative and the dominant moral judgment that it enables, whether of respect for the other or of compassion for the victim, teach us that the supreme value of our time consists in avoiding at all costs the production of more sacrificial victims. “Politics is subordinated to ethics, to the single perspective that really matters in this conception of things: the sympathetic and indignant judgement of the spectator of the circumstances,” writes Badiou: “Such is the accusation so often repeated over the last fifteen years: every revolutionary project stigmatized as ‘utopian’ turns, we are told, into totalitarian nightmare. Every will to inscribe an idea of justice or equality turns bad. Every collective will to the Good creates Evil.”51
Revueltas, with his tireless critique of communist dogmatism, may have opened the door for those moralizing discourses that, even in left-wing variations, can barely dissimulate their strong undercurrent of vulgar anticommunism. The challenge he bequeaths to us thus consists in thinking the crimes of communism without converting the inevitability of error into the melodramatic premise for a complex of moral superiority that would deny that anything good might still emerge from Marxism—let alone from Hegelian Marxism.
Hegel’s finitude and its role in the evaluation of Stalinist dogmatism should be revisited from the point of view of this historical outcome. The premise of the irreducibility of error, of the insuperable nature of alienation, and of the necessary inadequacy between concept and being, indeed runs through the entire finitist tradition of reading Hegel. Thus, central to Kojève’s claim that Hegel is the first to attempt a complete atheist and finitist philosophy, we already find the idea that, on the phenomenological and anthropological level, such an attempt requires a view of “man” as an essentially erroneous being for whom being and thinking are never quite adequate to one another, or at least not yet:
Being which is (in the Present) can be “conceived of” or revealed by the Concept. Or, more exactly, Being is conceived of at “each instant” of its being. Or else, again: Being is not only Being, but also Truth—that is, the adequation of the Concept and Being. This is simple. The whole question is to know where error comes from. In order that error be possible, the Concept must be detached from Being and opposed to it. It is Man who does this; and more exactly, Man is the Concept detached from Being; or better yet, he is the act of detaching the Concept from Being. He does so by negating-Negativity—that is, by Action, and it is here that the Future (the Pro-ject) enters in. This detaching is equivalent to an inadequation (the profound meaning of errare humanum est), and it is necessary to negate or act again in order to achieve conformity between the Concept (=Project) and Being (made to conform to the Project by Action). For Man, therefore, the adequation of Being and the Concept is a process (Bewegung), and the truth (Wahrheit) is a result. And only this “result of the process” merits the name of (discursive) “truth,” for only this process is Logos or Discourse.52
The ability of human errors to survive, in fact, is what distinguishes man or the human being from nature, according to Kojève:
If Nature happens to commit an error (the malformation of an animal, for example), it eliminates it immediately (the animal dies, or at least does not propagate). Only the errors committed by man endure indefinitely and are propagated at a distance, thanks to language. And man could be defined as an error that is preserved in existence, an error that endures within reality. Now, since error means disagreement with the real; since what is other than what is, is false, one can also say that the man who errs is a Nothingness that nihilates in Being, or an “ideal” that is present in the real.53
What is more, it is only thanks to, and not in spite of, our essentially human tendency to err that truth is possible. Otherwise, without the possibility of human error, being would be mute facticity. As Kojève adds: “Therefore, there is really a truth only where there has been an error. But error exists really only in the form of human discourse.”54 Or, to use Hegel’s own words from the Encyclopedia, in one of Adorno’s favorite formulations: “Only out of this error does the truth arise. In this fact lies the reconciliation with error and with finitude. Error or other-being, when superseded, is still a necessary dynamic element of truth: for truth can only be where it makes itself its own result.”55
For Kojève, unlike what is the case for Adorno or Revueltas, true wisdom famously will bring about the perfect adequation of being and concept in the figure of the sage at the end of history. This also means that finitude, conscious of itself, passes over into the infinite; any additional act or action, then, is superfluous. By contrast, in the absence of any ultimate reconciliation, it would appear that philosophy or theory survives only in and through error, through the gap between the concept and its object or between representation and the real, a gap that is thus not merely temporary or accidental but constitutive of the possibility of knowing anything at all. And yet, if it is indeed the case that finitude today constitutes a new dogma that—rather than rendering the act superfluous—blocks all action so as to avoid the trappings of radical evil, should we not also invert this conclusion regarding the irreducibility of error by reaffirming the identity of being and thinking in the good old fashion of Parmenides? Perhaps as nowhere else, Revueltas will explore this possibility through his own notion of the profound act, or acto profundo, in “Hegel y yo” (“Hegel and I”). To understand the problem for which this story appears to provide a solution, however, we will first have to consider Revueltas’s most ambitious theoretical work, comparable to the “essay” being written by Jacobo Ponce in Los errores—that is, the unfinished manuscripts and notes for the posthumously published Dialéctica de la conciencia.
