Hoy es Cinco de Mayo, pero dudo que los mexicanos en el estado de Arizona tengan ganas de festejar, ya que la gobernadora del estado acaba de firmar una ley que institucionaliza el racismo. No hay duda que la ley es fundamentalmente racista, ya que depende de criterios raciales para identificar y reprimir una clase de personas de una etnia en particular. Ha habido en Arizona otros casos de represión y hasta de deportación (los famosos secuestros de mineros en Jerome y en Bisby, por ejemplo), pero la codificación legal de lo que antes era llevado a cabo por actores privados (aunque casi siempre con la colaboración o la aprobación tácita del estado) parece ser algo nuevo y diferente.
Me pregunto si está legalización de la discriminación racial (o criminalización de una raza) no tendrá otras causas que no sean el racismo. Es decir, es innegable que SB1070 responde a impulsos racistas y que hasta los patrocinadores de la ley tienen vínculos a grupos supremacistas. Ya Rachel Maddow nos los ha enseñado. Pero no debemos perder de vista que hay factores económicos que están en juego.
La crisis económica que vivimos engendra una radicalización de las medidas de austeridad preferidas por el neoliberalismo. Desde finales de la década del 60, el capitalismo se enfrenta a una crisis de valorización. De esa crisis surgió el neoliberalismo, como respuesta a la necesidad (absoluta, desde la perspectiva de la valorización) de subvencionar los circuitos del capital con fondos pirateados del sector público (así disminuyendo la parte de plusvalía destinada a la reproducción social) y de eliminar las últimas restricciones, tanto al libre movimiento del capital a través de fronteras, como a la especulación, ya que la falta de valorización real tuvo que ser compensada por el crecimiento desmedido del capital ficticio, o sea, el crédito. De ahí las burbujas financieras que ahora son parte de la “naturaleza” de la economía actual.
Por una parte, entonces, la fluidez del capital, cada vez más necesaria, requiere una fluidez de la fuerza de trabajo. No es casual que el número de inmigrantes que cruza nuestra frontera sureña haya aumentado desde el inicio de NAFTA, pacto neoliberal que empobreció aun más a las zonas campesinas de México. Las medidas de seguridad en pos del 11-9 han canalizado el flujo de migrantes en Arizona, que se ha convertido en zona álgida del debate inmigratorio, con la aparición de toda clase de vigilante, patriota e ignorante en el Desierto de Sonora. Pero, por otra parte, el neoliberalismo, con su lema de “siempre privatizar,” va reduciendo servicios públicos en nombre de la eficiencia. En realidad, esos servicios tienen que desaparecer para que las corporaciones puedan seguir recibiendo respiración artificial en forma de subvenciones.
Mientras haya gente necesitada de servicios públicos de salud, transporte, etc., recortar esos servicios parece una medida sumamente cruel. Pero todo cambia si esa gente, o una parte de ella, es “ilegal.” Ahora no es el estado que abandona a unos seres humanos cuyo apoyo laboral fue solicitado por el mismo estado y las empresas asentadas allí, sino que los pobres trabajadores ya son unos parásitos que impiden los recortes (lamentables, pero inevitables según el oráculo mercado) y que empobrecen a los “legítimos” residentes del estado, quitándoles el trabajo, congestionando las calles. O sea, se les atribuye a los inmigrantes toda clase de males, en una réplica americana del antisemitismo. Y en cuanto a los residentes “legítimos,” entre ellos (los indígenas) el desempleo sobrepasa el 50%, en buenos tiempos y malos, y nadie ha reclamado sus derechos.
Así el neoliberalismo, presto siempre a socorrer la valorización capitalista pero nunca a un ser humano, coacciona los sentimientos racistas de los residentes blancos (quienes deben de ponerse al lado de los inmigrantes latinos) para poder dar el coup de grace a partes significativas del sector público que mantiene a flote a todos en esta época de desempleo y sueldos estancados. El cinismo no tiene límites, pero la estrategia es eficaz: contar con que el odio racial trasciende el interés común que todos deben tener en mantener lo social–la salud, la educación, los centros comunitarios, las infraestructuras y hasta la posibilidad de reproducir nuestra existencia en generaciones futuras–frente a lo antisocial, el capital.
This is a slightly modified version of a short talk I gave on March 1, 2010, at the Center for Latin American Studies in Berkeley, California.
Introduction
This paper is an early attempt to show how Ena Lucía Portela’s El pájaro: pincel y tinta china contains formal features grounded in a kind of postmodern subjectivity that begins to emerge in Cuba during the Special Period. My claim is not that the novel represents a clearly defined subjective standpoint unique to 1990s Cuba, but rather that certain aspects of the novel’s form dramatize processes of subjectification rooted in the period’s socioeconomic transformations. My analysis is still very much in its initial stages, and is missing many elements of social history that will be necessary to establish clear connections between the literary form and the social form, but a basic sketch should nonetheless emerge from what until this point has been a collection of notes and partial readings.
Portela
Ena Lucía Portela is typically included among a generation of Cuban writers that began to publish short stories in the early 90s. Dubbed the novísimos by Salvador Redonet, these writers are notable for several reasons. First, there is a consensus, among critics, that they make a formal and thematic break with the previous generation of authors. The novísimos are probably Cuba’s first truly postmodern authors, and their writing exhibits many hallmarks of a Cuban postmodernity. Nanne Timmer attempts to sketch a typology of the 90s Cuban novel, saying “Among those [textual characteristics] the[...] [novísimos and postnovísimos] do share, we can name the ‘negation of the values of the system,’ an interest in the marginal, the eschatological, and the body, and particularly a theme that Cuban critics — surprisingly perhaps — have only rarely elaborated: the theme of subjectivity.” Second, these writers avoid the themes that characterized Cuban fiction during the previous two decades; in other words, abandoning the ideal of the “committed” writer, turning away from socially conscious themes, and reducing the narrative scope from the representation of totalites like the nation, the island, or the revolution, to that of individual experience. Timmer explains that “recent literature saw a shift from the collective to the personal. The crucial question was no longer ‘who are we’ (as in the 60s), but rather ‘who am I.’”
Portela herself is one of the youngest members of the novísimos–she’s sometimes identified as a postnovísima–finishing El pájaro: pincel y tinta china when she was scarcely 25. She writes (and speaks) in a playful, mordant tone, saving her sharpest barbs for those most unfortunate of creatures–literary critics–and for her rivals in el medio. She has written 4 novels, numerous short stories, and a few essays. El pájaro, her first novel, won the prestigious UNEAC, or Cirilo Villaverde, prize, although apparently not without some controversy.
El pájaro
Portela’s first novel is still not widely known, and is hard to find, so I don’t want to assume everyone has read it. I’ll briefly describe its plot and some of its formal features, making use of Timmer’s usefully succinct précis.
“The story is about three characters, Camila, Fabián, and Bibiana, who, unbeknown to the others, all fall in love with a fourth person, Emilio U…As the story progresses, we discover that Emilio U. is the writer of a novel named El pájaro: pincel y tinta china. The main story lines are the relationships [among] the characters and the search for the writer Emilio U., but the most interesting aspect is the way these stories intersect with Emilio U.’s novel. The suspicion of a simple mise en abyme, i.e. that Emilio U. is the writer of the story we are reading, finally cannot be maintained, as the fictitious world his novel is depicting gets confused with the world in which the novel is written.”
I’ll return to this idea of an imperfect mise en abyme, but now let me point to some of the narrative’s formal features. The narrative perspective is constantly shifting, often with no warning or transition. The reader is constantly forced to decide which of these three characters is providing the standpoint. More rarely, the novel shifts into a metanarrative mode, either from an omniscient perspective or from the less reliable viewpoint of Emilio U. In fact, there are really two Emilios: the novel’s purported author and the one who appears as another character. The novel places heavy demands on the reader; it’s extremely disorienting. Sometimes whole passages–chapters even–only make sense in retrospective, when the identity of the narrator finally emerges from the shimmering, kaleidoscopic interplay of perspectives. The novel is often cited as a paradigmatic example of the kind of de-centered, fragmented and self-aware writing that emerges among this generation of authors. Some see the text as corrosive, a “negation of the great values of the system.”
The Cuban Postmodern
At least some of the features of special period narrative can be tied, more or less directly, to the crisis of the 90s. Thematically, we see the emergence of a variety of urban underworlds where crime, prostitution, and the daily struggle for subsistence make up the immediate reality. We see a kind of reduction of existence to quotidian concerns about food and security which can no longer be guaranteed by the State. We witness the practical failure of the collective project and the emergence of a dog-eat-dog, salvage economy. Timmer, when describing Portela and her contemporaries, notes the disappearance of the nation as an explicit referent. In other words, being Cuban, even when the topic of cubanía appears in the novísimos’ texts, it no longer seems tied to a shared destiny or political project.
Timmer, for instance, does a good job connecting social changes in Cuba with formal changes in literature. She ties the appearance of the novísimos and their postmodern novels to a shift in thinking about subjectivity. No longer preoccupied with collective identity, writers now focus on the individual, but find that this individual is an unstable, fragmented (in a word, postmodern) subject.
The End of the hombre nuevo
I would extrapolate this somewhat further and make the claim that this is a manifestation of an epistemological collapse, one perhaps best expressed in Reina María Rodríguez’s poem, “Al menos así lo veía a contraluz.”
“era a finales de siglo y no había escapatoria. / la cúpula había caído, la utopía / de una bóveda inmensa sujeta a mi cabeza, / había caído”
The ideal of the hombre nuevo, embodied in Che Guevara and disseminated through his images, has crumbled, leaving behind individuals who must either attempt to reconstruct an identify from the broken shards of the socialist project or forsake the ruins and face the equally painful dilemma of exile.
It needs to be emphasized that the hombre nuevo remained a kind of institutionalized and normative subjectivity that was both masculine and heterosexual. In the 90s, I would argue, this masculine subject enters its crisis phase. Movies like Strawberry and Chocolate attempt to upgrade the hombre nuevo for the times by allowing him to indulge his literary sensibilities and even have gay friends.
But this movie, along with Waiting List, which attempts to revive a fading collectivism, are fighting a rearguard action as events overtake the hombre nuevo and replace him with figures like jineteros and pingueros, cocotaxi drivers and hotel service workers.
It should also be noted that the 90s mark the crisis of what might be considered the female counterpart of the hombre nuevo. The Cuban Women’s Federation, or FMC, although it would describe its mission in somewhat different terms, for years promoted an essentially second-wave feminist project, fighting for women’s right to equal work opportunities and pay, and attempting to combat a partriarchal system that enforces a second-shift. Movies like Retrato de Teresa (1979) dramatize this struggle, depicting a noble, hard-working woman (portrayed by Daisy Granados) whose lazy husband expects her to be home at certain hours, to do all the cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, etc.  The movie displays this situation as a conflict, not just between Teresa and her husband, but between the revolutionary project and the retrograde machista attitudes still held by many Cuban men. The revolution demands that everyone work to maximum capacity (Teresa works a full shift in a factory, then works additional hours designing costumes for a kind of cultural competition among factory shifts). Teresa’s ability to optimally contribute to the revolution is compromised by her husband’s laziness.
But in the 90s we see what I call the “Death of Teresa.” The FMC reaches unprecedented levels of unpopularity among women, who view it as too closely imbricated in Cuba’s still mostly male political ruling class. In other words, women’s issues were always subordinated to the supposedly more central problems of class conflict, national underdevelopment, etc. More importantly, though, the FMC was perceived to have failed at its core mission: the betterment of women’s living and working conditions. Not only had it failed to address problems like domestic violence and AIDS, it had failed to reduce women’s household labor. In fact, as the State withdrew social services during the crisis of the 90s, women were forced to pick up the slack, absorbing the domestic work that could no longer be outsourced.
The female characters in Portela’s novel are quite unlike Teresa. Bibiana lacks both intelligence and depth; in fact, she’s little more than the superficial objectification of a very typical kind of female beauty. Camila is an abject figure who Fabián exploits for sex and domestic labor.
The Failure of the Male Author
The male characters in El pájaro receive no better treatment. Fabián is violent and abusive; Dr. Schilling is patriarchal and tyrannical; Emilio U. is a kind of bemused, failed demiurge, unable to reconcile his own creation to himself.
To return to the figure I mentioned before, that of the truncated mise en abyme, I’d like to suggest that this has to do with the failure of the male author to close the charmed circle of his own narrative. Unlike novels like Unamuno’s Niebla, El pájaro doesn’t simply dramatize the dialogue between the author and his creation. Instead, it completely confuses the narration and its characters with the supposedly extradiegetic reality of Emilio U. The novel gestures at the mise en abyme, but there are too many contaminations. That is, Emilio U. himself remains within the infinite regress.
The Dionysian aspects of the novel: its gender-bending and shapeshifting characters, the fragmented and elusive thread of its narrative, its ludic interplay of citations–say, the juxtaposition of Rousseau with Rayuela and the Second Declaration of Havana–all these finally elude the rational intentions of the male author. In a few, isolated apostrophes in which the narrator addresses the reader, the novel interpellates this reader as feminine. On at least one occasion, this direct form of address includes the bracketed possibility of a male reader, but this appears as an afterthought, as a parenthetical (o) denoting masculine grammatical gender. It’s as if the novel were conscious that its formal dramatization of the male author’s failure is also at the same time the failure of the masculine reader, who is forced to accede to the demands of this open, contaminated narrative, to accept the impossibility of the male-for-himself qua formal device.
I think all this should be read against the context of the underrepresentation of women authors in Cuban literature, in which between 1959-1984 nearly 200 novels were published by men. In comparison, women published 12, many of which were not really novels but testimonios, memoirs and other supposedly “feminine” genres.
In the Special Period though, despite the vastly reduced number of published works, there is something of an explosion of female authors. Some have speculated that this is because Cuba’s young male writers left in larger numbers during the balseros exodus that began in 1989. Whatever the case may be, it seems clear that the 90s brought greater opportunities for women to publish.
Portela herself is sensitive to the fact that she is treated as a novelty in ways that a male writer would not be. For example, when critics mention her erudition and the fact that she avoids local themes and color, she enumerates a long list of Cubans (Martí, Casal, Carpentier, Lezama Lima, Abilio Estévez) whose work incorporates non-Cuban, cosmopolitan elements, and points out that nobody asked (or asks, in the case of Estévez) these men why they include so many references to so-called universal culture. As far as women authors go, she says, the more ignorant they are (or pretend to be), the more successful they are. In an interview, she states:
“[M]ientras más borrica, desinformada y ñame sea la fulaneja en cuestión, mejor, pues así queda más cuqui, más sexy, más femenina.”
The novel, then, challenges masculine literary dominance. Its very existence contests the primacy of male authors in Cuba’s domestic book industry, its style challenges traditional conceptions of what constitutes masculine and feminine literature, and its form questions the ability of the male author to dominate the genre and the material.
Interestingly enough, though, Portela doesn’t advance anything resembling a vindication of a more “feminine” form of writing, much less a feminist subjective standpoint. Her novel seems to erase the gender binary altogether, just as it erases the distinction between the textual and extratextual.
If I had to represent the novel with a geometric figure, I would choose the Möbius loop. The story ends with Camila, la sacerdotisa, in something approximating a Delphic trance, wondering if her story was a fable invented by Fabián, who has by now mysteriously disappeared.
So we have a situation in which the supposed author of the tale, Emilio U. is problematized by the contaminations between the story’s characters and his own life, and in which another possible author of Camila’s story has vanished, leaving her there, at the end, as a character in search of of an author, still seeking the elusive primary narrator, Emilio U. The story thus eats its own tail (tale) and what previously seemed like two distinct dimensions or narrative frames turn out to be indistinguishable, once the loop is completed.
We end with the androgynous Camila and her search for Emilio U. as the embodiment of the text’s ambiguity: a novel whose narrative content destroys its own frames of reference, yet remains driven inexorably onward by the telos of its no-longer-present form.
After much delay, I’ve read Christopher Arthur’s The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital. I have a lot of good things to say about the book, and I consider it, along with Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination, to be among the best supplementary readings to Marx’s Capital and Grundrisse. For pedagogical purposes, it might even have some advantages over Postone’s work. Appreciative gestures aside, I’ll briefly point out what I see as a fundamental flaw in the logical development of Arthur’s New Dialectic. It concerns his interpretation of abstract labor.
Arthur considers the question of why living labor and not, say, machine-power, contains the secret to valorization. “Why is ‘labouring’ different from ‘machining’?” (53). Arthur, correctly to my mind, challenges the “obvious” answer to the question, namely, that labor posits its own ends, by pointing out that labor’s ends are co-opted by capital, according to whose logic the ends (use values) become merely means to value as end in itself. In this respect, the extent to which labor-power differs from machine-power becomes unclear. In his attempt to answer this question, Arthur goes on to describe the peculiar nature of labor-power qua commodity: it’s not a commodity at all in the sense that wages are not tied, in the last instance, to its value. In other words, labor-power, unlike the commodity, does not instantiate value, i.e. socially necessary labor-time. Since the “value” of labor-power is not determined by it’s conditions of production, but instead by “class struggle in the context of the historically given level of ‘subsistence’” (53), Arthur concludes that labor is “a use value which is itself inherently at odds with its social determination as a moment of capital” (Ibid.). Here is where we must begin some important hair-splitting.
Arthur goes on to claim that “capital can constitute itself only in a contradictory way, through employing an agent that resists its use for alien purposes” (Ibid.). However true this may be for laborers themselves, it’s unclear that labor really confronts capital as its alien “other.” Slaves, for instance, resist their “use for alien purposes,” often in a more forceful and direct way than wage laborers do, when the latter resist at all. It is well known that societies based on slave labor are not capitalist, not value-producing societies, so coercion itself (described by Arthur as a “bending of the will” somehow different than the breaking of the will), however prevalent in the objective relations between labor and capital, cannot be at the heart of value production. This is a subtle point, because coercion does exist. Perhaps it’s better to simply state that the compulsion exerted by capital doesn’t consist exclusively in the labor–capital relation. Rather, it’s an objective, social compulsion that affects the laboring and capitalist classes alike. Even as he concurs with Marx’s claim that the subject of production is capital itself, Arthur balks, as do most Marxists, at the full implications of this claim.
As I’ve tried to show, in his effort to distinguish living labor from machine power, Arthur falls back onto the idea that he began to dispute: that labor’s essence lies in a teleological positing of will. Arthur must assert capital’s ability to usurp the agency of workers, but can’t bring himself to make the claim that this agency is rendered entirely null. The point that must be made, and held fast to, is that in the valorization process subjective intentions are irrelevant; “they do this without being aware of it” (Marx). In his zeal to endow labor with agency, Arthur is forced to assert a kind of “residual ‘subjectivity’” or “definite recalcitrance to being ‘exploited’.” The problem with asserting this vestigial subjectivity is that labor is always already subjectivity subsumed. Only by not working does the worker avoid her agency being co-opted by capital. In describing this recalcitrance that he must insist upon in order to continue asserting that the proletariat is capital’s gravedigger, Arthur claims that labor productivity is always contestable and therefore incalculable in advance. This seems to contradict Marx: the rate of exploitation is precisely calculable. Indeed, the capitalist depends upon his ability to calculate it. While it is true that workers can contest the rate of exploitation through stoppage, strikes, etc., in reality these instances of class struggle represent the emergence of “natural laws of the modern mode of production” (Marx). That is, there is a certain dynamic equilibrium between the rate of exploitation and the cost of the worker’s reconstitution as such, viz. as labor-power. More importantly, none of labor’s intransigence alters the basic reality of commodity-producing society: that people are compelled to sell their multifarious productive activities, rendered commensurable and quantifiable by an abstraction called labor-time, in order to obtain vital necessities. All historical attempts to overcome this reality via the “dictatorship of the proletariat” have failed. Objections to this categorical denial of workers’ ability to shake off the chains of capital will no doubt point to Marx’s own labor activism. But what may have still seemed (or even been) possible in the 19th century is arguably no longer possible today, given capital’s own historical development. To deny this development is to ignore the visible mutations of commodity-producing society and to also deny the possible for capital to generate its own internal historical dynamic.
This lapse into traditional, labor-centric Marxism, with its need to affirm proletarian subjectivity, is quite curious, given that Arthur himself gives a lucid exposition of capital qua Hegelian absolute, or Universal Subject. This seems related to Arthur’s vision of capital as a systemic dialectic. Arthur describes a systemic dialectic as purely logical, as opposed to a historical dialectic in which causality takes pride of place. In other words, Arthur views capital as a synchronic totality.
The system comprises a set of categories expressing the forms and relations embedded within the totality, its ‘moments’. Since all ‘moments’ of the whole exist synchronically all movement must pertain to their reciprocal support and development. While this motion implies that moments become effective successively, the movement winds back into itself to form a circuit of reproduction of these moments by each other. (64)
As a purely systemic dialectic, capital is self-contained and self-perpetuating. Insofar as contradictions appear, they are eventually resolved as opposing ‘moments’ of the total movement. Capital is understood here as a kind of perpetual-motion machine, whose stoppage would require outside intervention; to overthrow it requires an alien (not immanent) agent to overthrow it. Hence the insistence that labor is alien to capital, when in reality labor is posited by capital as its other, in which case labor’s otherness isn’t the same as the sort of alienness that would allow its messianic appearance as deus ex machina. Even to the extent that Marx himself viewed proletarian labor as the gravedigger of capital, he saw it as having been generated by capital itself, not as an outside force. Arthur wants labor to exist both inside and outside capital, as both a moment of the systemic totality and external other.
Arthur’s systemic dialectic presents us with the spiral form of value in motion, grounded in a historically indeterminate, ungrounded labor. The hypnotic movement of his purely systematic dialectic rotates in place on the axis of eternal labor, creating the impression that if only labor would refuse to be incorporated into value production that all would be well. But this is not a matter of refusal; labor cannot be decoupled from value. As Arthur himself states, capital (value in motion) is the subject of this dialectical movement. “In capitalist commodity production there is an inversion of subject and object in that the real subject of the process is capital” (47). Capital posits labor as its presupposition and negative ground. The “negation of the negation” cannot arise from any subjective negation on the part of workers as workers, since they have been posited as such by capital. Rather, the negation of the negation must entail the abolition of labor.
Labor relates to capital as a moment of the totality, not as its extrinsic other. The really outré idea (Postone’s) is that labor itself has historical specificity. This implies several things. First, as Postone explains, the overthrow of capital will not entail labor’s realization but rather its abolition. Second, if labor is specific to capital, then it cannot be transhistoricized as the “metabolic interaction between man and nature” (Marx) or understood as the primary motor of History. As Marx scholar N. Pepperell points out in a recent blog post, the historical emergence of capital has less to do with the intrinsic laws of the commodity form than with a monstrous convergence of factors immanent to European feudalism. This “Devil’s dialectic,” which is no dialectic at all in either the historical or systemic sense, set capital in motion. Likewise, one must look to factors immanent to capitalism (e.g. capital’s drive towards greater efficiency and productivity, which leads to the increasing obsolescence of it’s own labor-substance) to grasp both the possibility for transcending commodity-producing society and for glimpsing the outlines of what might follow.
Given the current economic crisis (which may be terminal) and the very real possibility of social breakdown, it is dangerous to continue to treat the problem of overcoming capital as if it were simply a matter of will. If building a better society is understood primarily as a voluntarist enterprise, it seems just as likely that society will slowly devolve into a Hobbesian realm inhabited by Nietzschean survivalists as that anything better will emerge. Anselm Jappe considers this very thing in an essay in Revue Lignes. Readers of French should take a look.
A tumultuous Fall term at California’s universities promises to give way to a new year of struggle in which tensions and divisions will only increase. There are as many ways to describe this conflict as there are students, but its basic contours are shaped by an economic system that demands a continuous and ever-increasing input of work and that, in return, concedes ever fewer tangible benefits, which can often only be wrested from the swirling vortex of value-accumulation via credit, obtained at the cost of…future work. The university student has, at least for the past two decades, faced a basic and worsening dilemma: given her dismal economic prospects, now and in the future, she must choose between working now for a pittance or deferring her labor to some later date that might offer her minimally better odds at a living wage, but at the cost of massive debt accumulation that will likely negate whatever salarial advantage her degree grants her. This situation has become increasingly worse of late, as rising costs (of living and tuition) far outstrip incremental gains in wages. Upon graduating from high school (if lucky enough, wealthy enough, or white enough to do so), young adults are faced with a miserable choice between seeking their fortune in a diminished labor market or obtaining an advanced credential that may qualify them for a more privileged sector of the same narrow and impoverished market where they must scramble frantically to auction off their ‘skills.’ Those who have chosen the latter option and walked through the doors of the casino of higher education (many pay, few win) face odds that steepen with every passing minute. Tuition and fees spiral ever higher; time-to-degree increases apace. Debt accumulates and the pressure to get ‘the job’ mounts. Most students work nearly full time to pay the bills while in school. As the anonymously-written “Communiqué from an Absent Future” aptly states: “We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow. And the jobs we work toward are the jobs we already have.”
It is in this desperate context of debt, study, work, and uncertainty about the future that fee increases and salary cuts impact the students of California and the world. Every fee increase elicits a number of possible responses that can ultimately be reduced to two basic options: acquiescence or resistance. In some cases, out of inability or refusal to pay, students must abandon their studies and continue their resistance or submission to domination beyond the confines of the university. These comments are addressed to the students who remain.
Students face an uncomfortable choice: they can submit to the fee increases (which never stop increasing) or they can resist them. The reason this choice is uncomfortable is that it isn’t the kind of simple choice we are used to. It’s not a neat binary: McCain or Obama, ‘for here’ or ‘to go,’ Engineering or Psychology. It requires more than pressing a button on a Facebook poll or filling in a Scantron bubble. This is because the choice is not presented as a choice at all. The budget cuts and mismanagement, with their accompanying fee hikes and program eliminations are not presented as one option among several; they are presented as the way things are. Student input in these decisions is limited to a symbolic vote by the UC student regent, who recently demonstrated his courage by refusing to vote either for or against the 32% fee increase. The rest of us don’t have the luxury of abstention, however. We can either passively assent, or we can resist.
Resistance requires action, but this takes many forms, in part (and happily) because no ‘official’ channel of opposition exists. Sure, there are occasional polls whence easily manipulable statistics are derived, public fora which are open to five minutes of politely-worded questions from persons designated in advance, not to mention the ever-present possibility of sending a little email off to the spam folder of your state legislator. The belief that any of these ‘democratic’ processes has any influence on those who decide to raise fees and eliminate jobs is part of the logic of the spectacle, according to which ‘democracy’ is the free selection of preordained options. The university administration, in whom something like a class consciousness can be seen at work, is unified in presenting these false avenues as the only legitimate form of dissent. Protests are quickly denounced as criminal, destructive, and even as terrorism. The administration makes varied (sometimes clumsy, sometimes ingenious) attempts to divide students, even to the point of claiming that they arrest protestors out of a duty to protect the majority of students who are not protesting. That a majority of students are not protesting is certainly true enough, and perhaps regrettable, but it’s unclear why they need administrative protection. Have protestors attacked other students? Or is the administration protecting students’ right to pay an additional 32% in fees?
Only students’ passivity meets the criteria of authorized ‘dissent.’ Only students’ passivity allows the administration to appear benevolent. Every protest action has been met with police presence, persecution or arrests. Only action reveals clearly the lines between students, workers, and those who support them, and the apparatchiki who maintain the status quo with intimidation and force. Only action demonstrates the difference between students who resist and students who resist doing so out of fear, apathy or secret solidarity with the system. There are many who refuse to leave the roulette table lest they lose their chance at winning. But the ball on the wheel is, in fact, a bullet in the cylinder, and for every winner there is a loser. For every college graduate who obtains the golden parachute there is another who succumbs to debt, and there are many more who never make it through the casino doors. Those who cling to student life, refusing to rebel against it and what it represents, are often the most vociferous in their denunciation of the protestors. The protests, loud and indecorous, clash with the sensibilities of those who prefer to be lulled by the easy, false choices of the game, whose ludic nature has long since faded into a dull, compulsory and endless series of selections: red or black, hit or stay, call or fold. Make no mistake, these students’ passivity masks their hostility toward those who refuse to play the game any longer. The same students who now troll internet message boards to insult the protesters–many of whom, despite being portrayed by idiots as spoiled children, have made huge personal sacrifices to fight the callous dicta of administrators and lawmakers–are the same ones who will, in future confrontations, attack their fellow students alongside police. Students in the movement should harbor no illusions about the goodwill of those who claim to be part of the ‘silent majority,’ nor should they underestimate their unpopularity among anti-intellectuals who despise students merely for being what they themselves are not.
My statements here are intended as a call to action. This call is not coercive–from each, according to his (or her) ability. Our personal, economic, and physical situations are as diverse as we are. (I would not recommend, for instance, that an AB 540 student engage in civil disobedience or other actions which could provoke arrest.) Everyone has something to contribute, however. But this call is an injunction; it requires action or its opposite; it requires one to choose a side.
Solidarity is a fragile thing among students, especially in a university system as diverse as California’s. There are many divisive forces at work, besides those created by admins and cops. There are serious doctrinal differences among the protesters, as is to be expected of a movement that includes Marxists, anarchists, liberals, conservatives, queers, European Americans and students of color. No doubt some of these divisions will become permanent; in a fluid situation today’s friend may be tomorrow’s enemy. These fractures don’t mean, necessarily, the failure of the movement. Any movement worthy of the name contains internal tensions. In the end, though, the basic division will remain–between those who internalize oppression, forcing themselves to live within this form of society and to study in an increasingly corporate university, and those who refuse to acquiesce to this damaged life.
In the immortal words of Geddy Lee, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
Towards the end of summer I stumbled upon a gem of a book. Kepa Artaraz’ Cuba and Western Intellectuals since 1959 documents the reciprocal—often symbiotic—relationship between the Cuban Revolution and the loosely-knit New Left formations that arose in Britain, France and the United States during the late 50s and early 60s. Artaraz outlines a broad, yet coherent view of the New Left as a movement characterized by its rejection of traditional communist parties, too invested in the Soviet Union and its Stalinist orthodoxy, and by its identification of Third-World nationalist and “anti-imperialist” movements as the locus of revolutionary, anticapitalist struggle. Cuba, as the leading example of anti-imperialist nationalism, came to occupy a central, defining position in the New Left’s conception of the Third World. Likewise, the figure of Ernesto “Che” Guevera became synonymous with the notion of the “committed intellectual,” another key concept of the New Left. “Thus, the New Left can be understood to be a metaphor for a form of committed intellectual that belonged to the 1960s, whereas Cuba acted as a specific example of the Third World—a concept crucial to the definition of the New Left” (57).
The documental work that traces this reciprocity of influence is too rich and detailed to summarize here. Two examples, however, are worth mentioning: that of Sartre and the evolution of his understanding of the intellectual, and that of the Cuban journal Pensamiento Crítico, whose pages illustrate the considerable influence the international New Left had on Cuban theorists in the Revolution’s early years.
Artaraz glosses several New Left theories of the intellectual, citing thinkers like Gramsci, Marcuse, and Althusser. Sartre, however, occupies a key position among these thinkers, not least because he maintained close ties to Cuba. Artaraz reveals that Sartre’s attempt to maintain the individual freedom of the intellectual while simultaneously asserting the possibility for the latter’s solidarity with the masses, or universal class, was ultimately acknowledged to be a failure. In the wake of May 68, Sartre took an increasingly anti-intellectual position as he came to believe that the classical intellectual was inherently elitist and incapable of committment to the masses. “From this moment on,” says Artaraz, “the road was open to a denial of one’s own intellectuality” (157). This trajectory from a position of intellectual solidarity with the revolutionary class (however defined) to one of overt disidentification with anything that reeked of elitist or academic erudition, finds its parallel in the events that unfolded during the first decade of revolution in Cuba.
During the exuberant years after the fall of Batista, artistic avant-gardes thought of themselves as the cultural and aesthetic counterpart of the revolutionary avant-garde; groups like Carlos Franqui and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Lunes de Revolución sought to transform art as radically as Castro, Guevara, and assorted barbudos were transforming society and politics. The euphoria of what the artists supposed was unlimited intellectual freedom was soon replaced by growing apprehension as functionaries in Cuba’s nascent state cultural apparatus began to proscribe works as “counter-revolutionary.” The banning of the documentary P.M., the closure of Lunes, and Castro’s famous “Words to the Intellectuals” led, finally, to the outright oppression of dissident artists and intellectuals culminating in the international scandal of the Padilla affair, with its grand spectacle of intellectual self-hatred and self-censure. By this time (1968), Cuba was nearing its rapprochement with the Soviet Union, patching up relations that had soured in the fallout from the October Missile Crisis.
As Artaraz summarizes, “[n]owhere was the transition from a Sartrean model of intellectual to a Marxist one more evident than in Cuba. The Cuban example exemplified a move from the first few years of the Revolution, dominated intellectually by a self-appointed group of young writers in Lunes de Revolución who radicalized at the same pace as the Revolution itself, to one that secured ideological control in the hands of the Party” (167). This movement, exemplified by Sartre’s theoretical shift and by the fossilization of the Cuban cultural sphere in the 60s, can also be seen in the fate of the journal Pensamiento Crítico, which Artaraz outlines admirably well.
Pensamiento Crítico (1967-71) was a publication of the University of Havana’s Philosophy Department, which was then dominated by a group of young scholars who had emerged from the Raúl Cepera Bonilla School of Revolutionary Instruction, formed in the early 60s to prepare lecturers in Marxism. Artaraz explains that these scholars had a “particular affinity with the European New Left” (39). The Department of Philosophy’s initial course offerings on Soviet-style dialectical materialism were soon replaced by a more eclectic “History of Marxist Thought” that included readings from Marx, Lenin, Lukács, Althusser and Sweezy, as well as “third-world” theorists like Frantz Fanon and Andre Gunder Frank. The university philosophers were even able to emerge victorious from an ideological battle with the more dogmatically orthodox Marxists who ran the Schools of Revolutionary Instruction, and who favored Soviet pedagogy over a more historically situated approach to Marxian theory.
In its first years, Pensamiento Crítico maintained an active correspondence with such New Left publications as Partisans, New Left Review, and Monthly Review, to name only the most recognizable. Gradually, though, even this most heterodox of publications was influenced by the growing climate of anti-intellectualism. As early as 1968, calls from the pages of Revolución y cultura to erase the distinction between armed struggle and intellectual struggle were denounced vehemently by many of the same scholars who, from their position in the Department of Philosophy, considered themselves the intellectual vanguard of the Revolution. Even among this group (which included reknowned novelist Jesús Díaz), the same kind of guilty conscience that had plagued Sartre was at work. As Artaraz explains, “as in other historical examples of the relationship between power and intellect, the completeness of the intellectual-guerrilla remained paramount in Cuba where a sense of inferiority was pervasive in this generation as they accepted their secondary role to the ‘real vanguard’ embodied in Castro and Guevara” (172).
[As an aside, I should mention that this kind of deference to “real” revolutionary struggle has characterized much of Latin American studies in the North American academy. Scholars have had a decades-long obsession with testimonio as, supposedly, an anti-literary and authentically popular genre, unmediated by intellectual intervention. Recently, John Beverley has attacked Marxist-influenced theorists like Beatriz Sarlo for a “neo-conservative” preference for theoretical analyses of repression over more visceral, first-person accounts. Such attitudes may have their origins in the demise of the New Left: as a displacement of the anti-intellectual sentiments brought about by its failure to adequately account for solidarity (or lack thereof) between the masses and the intelligentsia, and as a reactionary defense of the “third-world” revolutionary subject that the New Left itself came to abandon.]
In the wake of the death of both Guevara and foquismo and the definitive rift between Western Marxists and the Soviet Union caused by the invasion of Prague, Pensamiento Crítico began to publish fewer and fewer contributions from the international New Left, and eventually reverted to an ortho-Marxist stance. The journal was terminated in 1971 and the Philosophy Department was reformed along lines more compatible with Cuba’s renewed ties to the USSR.
In sum, Artaraz traces the New Left’s trajectory as a rebellion against traditional communist parties and the role of pamphleteer generally assigned to intellectuals in these workerist organs. Heterodox theories of intellectual praxis and non-proletarian revolutionary subjects emerged, only to revert to more traditional, Leninist approaches to political engagement. The really novel contribution of Artaraz’ book is to show, quite clearly, how the Cuban experience informed the trajectory of the New Left. As Cuba itself moved to a more orthodox, working-class politics, so did the New Left.
Artaraz’ book illustrates a certain dilemma that exists for leftist intellectuals: how to speak approvingly of the New Left’s opposition to Soviet authoritarianism while simultaneously affirming (albeit tacitly) the return to the worker-centered revolutionary politics that underpinned the whole Soviet project? Artaraz, like many others, looks to recent developments in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America for inspiration. Despite the failure of third-world revolutionary movements and their attendant intellectuels engagés (which, according to Artaraz, “could not have possibly been otherwise” [173]), Latin America, at least, is still looked to as the site of alter-globalization and new proletarian formations. Fernando Ignacio Leiva’s Latin American Neostructuralism gives the lie to this kind of wishful thinking, showing how neostructuralism’s preferability to neoliberal regimes of accumulation depends largely on a discursive erasure of its own coercive violence.
Finally, an understanding of the New Left’s identification with the kind of warrior–intellectual synthesis embodied by Guevara qua third-world revolutionary as an alternative to workerist party politics leaves out the fact that Guevara’s politics, too, were labor-centric. A reading of El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba makes it clear that, for Guevara, social transformation would be catalyzed by work based on moral incentives. Although the New Left distanced itself from party-driven politics, it could never sufficiently distance itself from an understanding of the revolutionary subject as an identity-based (and, ultimately, class-based) grouping. To replace the Third World as the privileged site of emancipatory struggle with, say, the Global South, or the industrial proletariat with service laborers or other non-traditional (domestic or sex) workers, simply misses the point: that the New Left distanced itself from traditional working-class parties, not only to break with Stalinism, but because workerist politics had entered a very real crisis. Since the 60s, if not earlier, organized labor has ceased to be a viable counterweight to capital, even in appearance. What Artaraz describes as the New Left’s reversion to a labor-centric anticapitalism coincided with its decline as a political force. I would argue that what is needed now is not a theory of emancipatory praxis in which labor and third-world marginality somehow coincide. In other words, if we are to revive anything from the 60s, it shouldn’t be the New Left or the belief in the inherently revolutionary character of Latin America. Rather, we might benefit from an examination of a central figure (and one not typically thought of as part of the New Left) in one of the most tumultuous events of that decade, Guy Debord. Likewise, it now seems appropriate to ask whether (abstract) labor can emancipate us from the social bondage it perpetuates.
In a now-familiar series of events, the collapse of the housing finance bubble in 2008 led to what is generally considered the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
In California, the recession has meant drastic losses in both state revenue (based primarily on personal income and sales taxes) and local revenue (based partially on property and other taxes). Some municipalities, which have a greater ability to raise user fees or surcharges to partially compensate for the loss of tax revenue, have been able to adjust to the economic downturn better than the state itself, whose tax provisions require voters’ approval in order to be altered. The inflexibility of the state’s tax code and its excessive reliance on personal income tax (due to cuts in property taxes implemented in 1978) have combined to make California extremely vulnerable to a recession.
One of the myths perpetuated by media is that California is a ‘welfare state’ with high taxes and that its budget crisis was precipitated by excessive government spending on education and social services. In fact, California’s personal income tax is below average for industrial states, its per-pupil spending for K-12 education is 47th in the country, funding for the University of California system has decreased by 40% since 1990, and uninsured children are being dropped from state health programs.
Much political hay has been made of California’s budget crisis. The state’s economic problems are not unique, however. They have only been exposed somewhat earlier than in other places, due to the state’s tax structure and legislative gridlock. As the world’s seventh-largest economy goes, so goes the nation.
In reality, California’s problems stem from a much broader trend. Since the late 60s, the global economy has undergone massive transformations, often subsumed under labels like globalization, deindustrialization, or post-Fordism. One interpretation of these transformations is that they respond to an underlying crisis of value, in which the efficiency of productive labor has developed to the point that the profitability of commodity production in general can no longer be sustained. Whatever the case may be, the global economy has grown increasingly dependent on speculative bubbles to create the illusion of growth. As the events of the past year have shown, this sort of fictional economic expansion does not lend itself to stability.
The University of California’s response to the current crisis has largely mirrored that of governments around the world, with an important difference. States can disguise the nature of their ‘stimulus packages’ by printing money or promissory notes to increase cash flow to moribund financial institutions. The real impact of these stimuli is thus deferred, and will appear sometime in the future in the form of higher taxes or runaway inflation. Unlike national governments, a university cannot set monetary policy and must simply adjust to the crisis by firing employees, slashing wages, cutting programs, and raising fees. Just as the UC system has inherited California’s budget crisis, it inherits many of its methods of dealing with decreased revenue.
The University of California has other revenue streams. A direct result of the state of California’s disinvestment in its public universities has been the privatization of higher education. Some campuses, especially the medical centers, receive considerable funding from industry. But corporate funding is no substitute for California’s commitment to providing quality post-secondary education to its residents. It favors certain disciplines (it’s hard to imagine Raytheon funding Berkeley’s English Department) and cannot hope to offset the decline in state support. Likewise, astronomical fee increases for students cannot prevent the inevitable decline in educational quality. Universities in dystopian, neoliberal Texas are already salivating at the thought of attracting top-notch faculty otherwise destined for UC. If the trend of privatization continues, the University of California will be public in name only.
The University of California Office of the President, in concert with the Regents and Governor Schwarzenegger, instead of attempting to reverse these damaging trends, have tried to accelerate them. By portraying a crisis that has been decades in the making and is the result of a policy of progressive defunding of California’s institutions of higher learning as an emergency, the board of Regents granted President Yudof ‘emergency powers’ to impose cuts without normal oversight procedures. UC faculty are now mobilizing against these administrative maneuvers which pay lip service to the ideal of shared governance while laying bare their fundamental fiction. With what remains of their illusory autonomy, professors are beginning to resist privatization, which has gone a bridge too far.
http://ucfacultywalkout.com/
Graduate students, under union protection and not directly affected by the imposed furloughs, are nevertheless organizing in support of the faculty walkout, scheduled for 24 September. We have already begun to see our funding move upstream to administrative units to protect the vested interests of managers in a process that employs accounting arcana to cloak the looting. We have seen the MENE, TEKEL, PERES appear before us as President Yudof promises to perpetuate budget cuts beyond the current academic year. We are forming a coalition, composed of students, faculty, and both union and non-union workers, to oppose the UC crisis administration. This coalition transcends mere class and labor interests and seeks to draw attention to the gaping abyss between economic pragmatism and the needs and desires of people. We must exhibit absolute intransigence in the face of the budgetary logic of the crisis managers.
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Davis Grads: There will be an assembly in Voorhies 126, Monday 9/14 @ 6p
We write because we’re concerned about the destructive cuts that the UC administration has begun to implement in response to declining state funding. Our experience of these cuts is various, as their application is diffuse. Some of us have lost teaching positions, or face steep pay cuts; some of us have lost fellowships; some of us are simply uncertain, and worry we too may soon face like losses; some of us see the wolves at the door. We all share concerns about what this means for our future prospects. The threat to our livelihoods—along with the livelihoods of undergraduates, faculty and staff—is equally real for all of us.
In this threat we face a crisis both real and artificial: real in that the severe recession and the regressive California tax structure has meant an $813 million drop in state funding; artificial in the sense that furloughs and layoffs for faculty and staff, as well as increases to undergraduate tuition and fee hikes—all mandated by UCOP and the Board of Regents—vastly exceed the $813 million shortfall. This is the case even as undisclosed and unrestricted funds remain allocated to revenue-generating wings of the university. The issues are many and complex, but depend upon a principal confusion: The state fiscal crisis and the “state of emergency” declared for UC are not one and the same.
These cuts announce an appalling retreat by the administration from the 1960 California Master Plan and its vision of tuition-free education for all Californians. The state of emergency declared by the Regents signals a drastic re-imagining of the mission of the University, under cover of a real economic crisis. The drive to privatize the University of California is an attempt to shift state costs of education and job training directly onto the shoulders of students and their families.
As graduate students, we are curiously positioned in this state of affairs. Currently staff, undergraduates, and faculty bear the brunt of cuts and job losses. It is clear, however, that as departmental budgets are slashed, faculty and lecturers released, staff laid off, and undergraduate tuition increased while enrollments are decreased, the precarious positions we occupy are being made less way-stations for us than permanent realities for everyone in the UC system. As a result graduate students systemwide have begun organizing in concert with faculty, staff, and undergraduate groups, to protest decisions made by the administration in our absence.
They made the crisis—as political as it is economic. We make the University.
Major collective actions are already being planned for the first day of classes: On September 24, UC faculty are planning a systemwide walkout, in solidarity with 12,000 UPTE represented employees who will strike that day. As TAs we can legally honor UPTE’s picket lines by refusing to teach on that day and by joining all workers, including faculty, in their protest actions. Graduate students at UCB and UCSC have already joined together to support this joint faculty and union action.
Never before have staff, undergraduates, graduate students, lecturers and faculty joined ranks to stand for the rights of all to education and decent treatment in the workplace. The crisis we face is already a major moment in the history of the University of California: The only question is what we make of it.
If you want to be involved, but can’t make this meeting, please send an e-mail to tckreiner@ucdavis.edu or jondettman@ucdavis.edu.
Sincerely,
The Organizing Committee
Paper presented April 10, 2008 in Flagstaff, Arizona.
EXTRACT:
“Mi análisis se centra en la relación de Papel picado con el género policial o, más bien, con la estética o el ambiente “noir”, asociado con la variante “hard-boiled” del género. La tesis que sustento tiene dos partes. La primera es que en Papel picado hay una serie de distorciones o desplazamientos de los motivos noirs tradicionales. Digo desplazamiento en el sentido sicológico, siguiendo a Fredric Jameson en este punto. Cito: “[i]t is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative [la narrativa de la lucha de clases], in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history, that the doctrine of a political unconsious finds its function and its necessity” (4). Sin adherirme necesariamente a la lucha de clases como fundamento ontológico para una narrativa histórica, postulo que el texto responde a su momento histórico a través de desplazamientos, distorciones, o fantasías de realización del deseo. La segunda parte de mi tesis es que la distorción de motivos noirs funciona como respuesta a una crisis de género en la que la novela negra busca adaptarse a nuevas circunstancias (la realidad latinoamericana, unas coyunturas socioeconómicas bien distintas de las que vio el nacimiento del género en los 30 o incluso antes si contamos con precursores como Poe) y, también a una crisis política en la que la izquierda busca encontrar una respuesta a la hegemonía neoliberal. La crisis genérica está imbricada en la crisis política, pues la novela negra se caracterizó, desde sus comienzos, por su temática y su compromiso sociales.”
Download “Extrañas formas de colectividad…” as a .pdf document.
Paper presented April 4, 2009 at the University of California, Irvine.
EXTRACT:
Wertkritik focuses its analysis on abstract value as a “real abstraction” that constitutes an end in itself and that generates capital’s overall dynamic. Anticapitalist movements have all failed because they have been unable to alter this dynamic, which would entail truly overcoming the commodity fetish by abolishing abstract value. I won’t go into more detail here, but will only say that, within this critical paradigm, Cuba, along with the former Soviet Bloc, is seen as a manifestation of a global trend within capital. This trend, dominant from the post-war period until the early 70s, can be called “state interventionist capitalism,” the two major variants of which are Keynesianism and “actually existing socialism.”
Download “Canary in a Coal Mine…” as a .pdf document.
El texto que sigue fue parte de una respuesta a una de las preguntas de mi examen de candidatura, en la que se me pidió identificar y analizar el poema “El cisne” de Delmira Agustini, situándolo dentro de la tradición literaria de su época. La falta de referencias exactas remite a las circunstancias del examen.
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“El cisne” de Delmira Agustini se considera un texto subversivo respecto a la tradición modernista en la que la poeta uruguaya buscaba insertarse. Agustini es asociada a veces con Gabriela Mistral, Juana de Ibarbourou y Alfonsina Storni, otras poetas que la crítica ha denominado “postmodernas.” Estas poetas, aunque muy diversas entre sí, comparten las circunstancias de ser mujeres en un mundo poético dominado por los hombres y por no encajar, por ésa y otras razones, ni en el modernismo ni en las vanguardias que vinieron después. Agustini, por ejemplo, aunque es, quizás, la más modernista de las poetas mencionadas, no suele incluirse en el canon modernista, en parte porque era muy joven, incluso con respecto a la llamada segunda generación modernistas. Storni, por su parte, aunque era muy leída, no encontró un espacio propio en el mundo literario argentino porque no se conformó con la estética dominante del momento. En aquel entonce prevalecían las ideas de Girondo, Borges y Ocampo. Borges, con su proclividad vanguardista a hacer declaraciones en contra de otros escritores, describió la poesía de Storni como “chillonería de comadrita” por su sentimentalismo, su tono a veces estridente y sus claras posiciones ideológicas. Afortunadamente, no toda la crítica está de acuerdo con Borges, y algunos críticos han insertado a Storni en una tradición muy importante de literatura femenina contestataria con raíces en el famoso “Hombres necios que acusáis…” de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
Refiriéndome más específicamente a Delmira Agustini, hubo una tendencia muy marcada a representarla como una niña, tanto por su joven edad como por un cierto paternalismo por parte de la crítica. Estoy seguro de que se podría llevar a cabo una rica investigación psicológica de la crítica de la época; la yuxtaposición de la imagen infantilizada de la poeta niña con sus versos muchas veces eróticos de mucho en qué pensar. Hay que reconocer que fue Emir Rodríguez Monegal uno de los primeros en señalar el constante “aniñamiento” de Agustini. Su análisis de la crítica temprana de la poesía de la uruguaya tiene el mérito de aclarar que la imagen de niña no era tan sólo obra de la crítica, sino que también fue cultivada por la poeta misma, como estrategia de enmascaramiento que le permitía enfrentar tanto un mundo que no la aceptaba como una poeta seria como una madre dominante e inestable. Que Rodríguez Monegal la convierte luego en otro tópico modernista, la mujer fatal, o pitonisa, que se escondía tras una fachada infantil, no reduce la importancia de su hallazgo.
Tras este descubrimiento, Sylvia Molloy ha podido descifrar un importante intercambio de cartas que Agustini sostuvo con Rubén Darío. Siendo gran admiradora del poeta nicaragüense, Agustini le mandó una carta, no como fan, sino como poeta que luchaba con problemas artísticos. Lo que Agustini buscaba eran consejos de un colega mayor sobre cómo sobreponerse a la angustia de fallar (como todo poeta) en el intento de trasladar los sentimientos a la página escrita. Lo que Darío le mandó como respuesta fue una carta en la que le dijo a Agustini que se tranquilizara, y que contenía la condescendiente aseveración que las mujeres poetas no sabían sentir el peso del genio encima de sus hombros. La segunda carta de Agustini es de tono más ligero, aparentemente inocente, pero contiene una burla del paternalismo de Darío. Agustini se describe a sí misma como una niña; eufórica al recibir la respuesta del Maestro, se había sentado con una muñeca y un dulce para leer la carta en su cama, rodeada de ositos de peluche, o algo así. Esto permite ver que había “cuentas pendientes” entre Darío y Agustini (por lo menos desde la perspectiva de ésta última), lo cual hace posible leer algunos de los poemas posteriores de Agustini a contrapelo de la estética modernista. Trataré de señalar algunos ejemplos de esto en “El cisne.”
En cuanto a su forma y su lenguaje, “El cisne” sigue muchas de las convenciones modernistas. Hay una atención al metro y a la sonoridad o musicalidad de los versos. El cisne es un motivo típico, reincorporado a la poesía moderna por los simbolistas. En la primera estrofa aparece una metáfora compuesta que puede considerarse típica también del simbolismo y que enmarca la lectura del resto del poema: ojo/lago/espejo/página. Esta metáfora asocia el lago con la lectura, la palabra escrita y la autocontemplación o autoexpresión. La siguiente estrofa enlaza la última palabra de la primera para construir la metáfora pensamiento/flor/alma/cisne. Así se establece que el lago/la poesía es donde habita el cisne/el espíritu (utilizo “espíritu” aquí en el sentido alemán–Geist–que puede significar tanto alma como pensamiento o intelecto).
Lo que sigue es una transformación parcial del cisne, que aparece con atributos humanos (“pupilas humanas”, “filtros dos veces humanos”, etc.). Esta humanización del cisne ya subvierte los códigos parnasianos, según los cuales el cisne representaría el ideal puro de la belleza, la poesía o la divinidad (como en el mito de Leda). Luego presenciamos la erotización del cisne, ora con el color rojo, ora con el uso de símbolos fálicos (“pico quemante”). Finalmente, el cisne y la voz poética se copulan en una escena que rompe con las representaciones contemplativas de la escena de Leda y el cisne (como la que escribió Darío). En vez de ser un mero observador pasivo, la voz poética es un sujeto activo que participa del sexo. De cierto modo, también el cisne deja de ser el típico representante de la sexualidad masculina que suele verterse en la hembra, pues ése recibe su color y su substancia del deseo femenino. En el código modernista, las mujeres son siempre pasivas, cuando no medio muertas como las enfermizas mujeres prerrafaelitas. “El cisne” invierte la típica relación binaria macho/hembra, otorgándole el papel activo a la mujer.
Asimismo, es posible leer el poema de una manera que trasciende por completo esa relación binaria. Al final del poema, el cisne y la voz poética quedan claramente demarcados por la diferencia de color (“¡El cisne asusta, de rojo, / y yo, de blanca, doy miedo!). Pero si entendemos el cisne de la forma aludida, como una representación del pensamiento o del espíritu de la poeta, es posible ver el poema como una fantasía autoerótica: el espejo del lago (el poema) refleja el sentimiento de la poeta. En este círculo cerrado la voz poética se autosatisface. Aunque tenga que escribir “al margen del lago claro”, o sea, fuera del canon modernista, la poeta es autosuficiente. De este modo, “El cisne” contrapone el autoeroticismo femenino al voyeurismo masculino preferido por los modernistas y, especialmente, por Darío en su poema sobre Leda.
En uno de sus poemas llamado “Nocturno”, Agustini es aun más explícita sobre su intención de subvertir los códigos modernistas. En ese poema, la voz poética asume la corporalidad de un cisne y rompe violentamente en un típico tableau modernista: el lago cristalino bajo las estrellas. El cisne cruza el lago, manchando su pureza con un rastro de sangre–imputando de nuevo el color rojo al cisne, normalmente níveo–que contamina la puesta en escena tranquila.
El cisne
Pupila azul de mi parque
es el sensitivo espejo
de un lago claro, muy claro!…
Tan claro que a veces creo
que en su cristalina página
se imprime mi pensamiento.
Flor del aire, flor del agua,
alma del lago es un cisne
con dos pupilas humanas,
grave y gentil como un príncipe;
alas lirio, remos rosa…
Pico en fuego, cuello triste
y orgulloso, y la blancura
y la suavidad de un cisne…
El ave cándida y grave
tiene un maléfico encanto;
clavel vestido de lirio,
trasciende a llama y milagro!…
Sus alas blancas me turban
como dos cálidos brazos;
ningunos labios ardieron
como su pico en mis manos;
ninguna testa ha caído
tan lánguida en mi regazo;
ninguna carne tan viva
he padecido o gozado:
viborean en sus venas
filtros dos veces humanos!
Del rubí de la lujuria
su testa está coronada:
y va arrastrando el deseo
en una cauda rosada…
Agua le doy en mis manos
y él parece beber fuego,
y yo parezco ofrecerle
todo el vaso de mi cuerpo…
Y vive tanto en mis sueños,
Y ahonda tanto en mi carne,
que a veces pienso si el cisne
con sus dos alas fugaces,
sus raros ojos humanos
y el rojo pico quemante,
es solo un cosne en mi lago
o es en mi vida un amante…
Al margen del lago claro
yo le interrogo en silencio…
y el silencio es una rosa
sobre su pico de fuego…
Pero en su carne me habla
y yo en mi carne le entiendo.
-A veces ¡toda! soy alma;
y a veces ¡toda! soy cuerpo.-
Hunde el pico en mi regazo
y se queda como muerto…
Y en la cristalina página,
en el sensitivo espejo
del algo que algunas veces
refleja mi pensamiento,
¡el cisne asusta, de rojo,
y yo, de blanca, doy miedo!
Nocturno
Engarzado en la noche el lago de tu alma,
diríase una tela de cristal y de calma
tramada por las grandes arañas del desvelo.
Nata de agua lustral en vaso de alabastros;
espejo de pureza que abrillantas los astros
y reflejas la cima de la Vida en un cielo…
Yo soy el cisne errante de los sangrientos rastros,
voy manchando los lagos y remontando el vuelo.
Paper presented June 19, 2009 at Portland State University.
EXTRACT:
“In an essay written against Thorstein Veblen’s theory of ‘conspicuous consumption,’ Adorno expressed disagreement with Veblen’s characterization of luxury consumption as an unequivocal manifestation of bad faith, because the consumer does, in fact, derive real satisfaction from the object consumed. This negative appraisal of Veblen is based on the insight that the latter’s critique is one-sided— it understands conspicuous consumption only as the use of products which benefits the needs of the system, but not of people. According to Adorno, luxury consumption must also be seen as “the use of parts of the social product which serve not the reproduction of expended labour, directly or indirectly, but of man in so far as he is not entirely under the sway of the utility principle.” The extent to which Adorno’s Kulturkritik itself maintains this double vision vis-à-vis the sphere of consumption, particularly in regards to cultural or aesthetic consumption, is not immediately clear, especially when one considers that Adorno’s theory of the Culture Industry is a relentless attempt to show that the “utility principle” has, in fact, extended its influence into the domain of the useless.
This paper attempts to think through and critique Adorno’s view of consumption as expressed (with Horkheimer) in Dialectic of Enlightenment and other essays related to the Culture Industry. Marx’s theory of consumption as outlined in the Grundrisse and Moishe Postone’s account of the Frankfurt School’s “critical pessimism” serve as points of departure.”
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