Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
(review)
Patrick Dove
Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 3, Issue 3, 2002, pp. 585-600 (Article)
Access provided by Indiana University Libraries (10 Dec 2013 11:59 GMT)
BOOK REVIEW
Francine Masiello
The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 352 pp.
F
rancine Masiello’s The Art of Transi-
tion: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis offers a broad reflection
on contemporary cultural production in Argentina and Chile, with particu-
lar attention to ways in which literature confronts problems associated with
these two countries’ recent transitions from dictatorships to free market–
based democracies. Masiello’s discussion presupposes that the transitions
of the 1980s perpetuated—and in some respects deepened—the traumatic
wounds suffered by Southern Cone societies in the 1970s under military
dictatorship. Transition is experienced as crisis on at least two counts. On
the one hand, these postdictatorship democracies have failed to pursue
justice for the crimes committed under dictatorship, opting instead for the
pragmatic mode of reconciliation evoked by Chilean president Patricio Ayl-
win’s axiomatic phrase, “justicia en la medida de lo posible.” Memories of
repression and terror thus exist in an antagonistic relation with de facto
and de jure impunity for military criminals. On the other hand, the total
identification of democracy with a neoliberal model during the transition
is seen by many as the ultimate political legitimation of a project initiated
a decade earlier at gunpoint. The enforcement of free-market structural
adjustments during the transition has been viewed as a principle cause of
increasing social fragmentation, as well as the confirmation that previous
generations’ dreams of social justice have been destroyed. For many, the
transition is associated with a profound and sweeping loss of sense, a loss
that casts its shadow on the very possibility of shared meaning.
Masiello’s book should also be read in the context of recent aca-
demic debates about the status of “literature” today. In recent years there
has been an increasing sentiment in Latin Americanist circles that literature
N e p a n t l a : V i e w s f r o m S o u t h 3.3
Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press
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The book is divided into three parts, each of which includes two
chapters. Much of the argumentation is interwoven with glosses on contem-
porary novels, poetry, film, and pop art. In the first part, “Masks,” Masiello
discusses the fate of traditional alliances between intellectuals and popu-
lar sectors during the transition period. Her argument begins, in chapter
1, with a treatment of Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca, then turns to
contemporary cultural debates in the Southern Cone (focusing principally
on Beatriz Sarlo, Néstor Perlongher, and Nelly Richard). In chapter 2,
she discusses the “performative” basis of individual and collective identity,
while suggesting that cultural production plays an ambiguous role in repre-
senting perspectives marginalized during and following dictatorship. The
authors discussed here include César Aira, Diana Bellessi, Diamela Eltit,
Perlongher, and Manuel Puig.
In the second part, “Maps,” Masiello assesses contemporary femi-
nist efforts to form alliances between “North” (principally academics work-
ing in the United States) and “South” (intellectuals and writers working in
Argentina and Chile). Chapter 3 includes discussions of artistic work by
Liliana Porter and Susana Thénon, and of cultural criticism by Norma
Alarcón, Ruth Behar, Lea Fletcher (editor of the journal Feminaria), and
Nelly Richard (editor of Revista de crítica cultural). In chapter 4, Masiello
turns the traditional North/South axis on its side, arguing that a West/East
(or Southern Cone/Asian) link offers new insights into questions of cul-
tural difference and sexuality. The focus of this chapter moves from the
representation of Buenos Aires in a recent Chinese-language film (Happy
Together, 1997) to “Asia” as a topos in contemporary Argentine prose and
poetry.
In the third part, “Markets,” Masiello examines what she calls “the
return of the popular” in contemporary Argentine and Chilean literature, in
contrast to her earlier account of the withering of “the popular” in Southern
Cone academic and political institutions. The principle literary reference
points in chapter 5 are novels by Eltit and Ricardo Piglia. The sixth and final
chapter examines a number of Argentine and Chilean poets (too many, in
fact, to name here) whose work challenges the predominance of use-value
and transparency as cultural signifiers.
Though by no means encyclopedic, Masiello’s book addresses a
broad range of recent cultural production and criticism. The discussion is
free-flowing and tends to emphasize breadth over in-depth investigation
of any particular text. At times a closer attention to textual analysis and
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own hold on the real by converting all of its others into brand names
available for purchase.
While noting the risks involved in any project that calls for the
institutional recognition of difference, Masiello chooses to emphasize the
affirmative or emancipatory potential of such a practice. Gender-based iden-
tity politics, she suggests, promises more than an affirmation of identities
previously negated by the dominant political order. It intervenes in what
are ostensibly consolidated discursive fields (for example, the apparently
seamless state of political consensus in Chile and—until very recently—
Argentina concerning what constitutes “democracy”) and seeks to jar and
shake loose previously calcified signifiers. In this specific sense, Masiello’s
argument is not far removed from subaltern-studies projects from which
she seeks to distance herself. Her gender-based identity politics does not
simply provide a catchall for myriad negated identities; it also seeks to
appropriate negation itself in order to mark the limits of “identity” in its
essentialist and reifying mode. In order to expose the ideological basis of the
view of the market as a “spontaneous” or “natural” order—or to call atten-
tion to the fact that, contrary to neoliberal dogma, a state of “adjustment”
must always be carried out in order for the market to function as such—it
is not sufficient to muster alternative identities previously subjected to ex-
clusion. That which presents itself in “synchronic” terms as antithesis to
the market will only strengthen the market in the long run. What must
finally be exposed to critique, then, is the difference itself between the mar-
ket and the state, between brand name and identity. While Masiello does
not specifically say as much, I would maintain that her argument neces-
sarily points in this direction. As I suggested earlier, her intervention in
contemporary cultural debates is based on the claim that literary aesthetics
can in a certain sense bring about a redemption of the transition. Liter-
ature would restitute the loss of sense suffered by a social totality that has
increasingly been reduced to the calculative terms of its individual parts. It
would reveal its ethical content by leading us from absolute particularity
(including asphyxiating experiences of domination, alienation, self-interest,
etc.) to the threshold of community. Accordingly, postmodern theoretical
celebrations of “the fragment”—and there are in fact multiple senses of
“fragmentation” to be dealt with here—must be paralleled by a renewed
drive toward totalization, consistent with what Masiello calls a “constant
longing for completion” (13).6 The aesthetic would thus participate in two
complementary movements: first, it would effect a disintegration of the
dominant image of the whole, which has become a rigid, calcified edifice
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negative concept such as “subversion” could save itself from the abyssal
(non)ground of translation.
Translation thus points to the possibility of failure that haunts any
institutional project, whether statist or revolutionary, conservative or radi-
cal. Indeed, for Piglia, it is from a condition of originary “incompleteness”
(which is not a lack of some normative or determinate quality that could
later be added), illuminated by translation, that the idea of totality takes
shape.7 The irreducible incalculability that accompanies translation, and
which cannot itself be determined or accounted for in advance, is precisely
of the structure of reading and its remainder, or what is necessarily left over
in any act of interpretation. This remainder is the future of reading itself:
without interpretive excess and the possibility of equivocation it enforces,
there could be no reading and no interpretation, only rote memorization
and recitation (a similar aporia could easily be detailed for “communica-
tion”).
This limit, which Piglia’s text calls the “errancy” of translation,
would present problems for Masiello’s claim that literary aesthetics can “re-
deem” the transition by providing a bridge to community and democratic
politics. While there can be no subversion in literature prior to a particu-
lar act of reading, reading cannot itself become the ground of subversion.
Masiello wants translation to exemplify the subvertible kernel in all in-
stitutional and dominant discourses: that is, to mark this limit in a way
that could be repeated, learned, and hence guaranteed. Like redemption,
however, subversion may well be of the order of this “errant” futurity that
cannot be programmed in advance. Similarly, my objection to Masiello’s
use of the aesthetic as counterhegemonic and alliance-building concept is
not simply that societies or coalitions inevitably fall apart, but rather that
the origin of any such configuration is necessarily incommensurable with
and unpresentable within the totality it produces. And thus the sense of any
totality, the “glue” that holds the group together, cannot be extracted from
its finite condition, from the group’s inability to fully become One. There
can be no experience of community without the concurrent experience of
its limit, the impossibility of communion.
Such an aporetic thought of the constitutive impossibility of total-
ity sets the tone for Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (1985) notion of
hegemony, in which one particular discourse or perspective is able to present
itself as the universal signifier that confers significance on all other perspec-
tives or signifiers, converting them from isolated particularities, locked in
antagonistic battles with the dominant discourse, into a unified signifying
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chain. For example, let us imagine the contemporary academic and cultural
field described by Masiello. To begin with, various critical perspectives or
discourses, including analyses based on “class,” “race,” “sexuality,” and so
on, today find themselves condemned to fighting losing battles with the
dominant structure of the market. In order to ensure its academic survival,
a particular discourse (for instance, a Marxist perspective) must present it-
self as one “choice” or “brand name” among many, and hence relinquish
any hope of gaining a truly critical distance from the market. In the midst
of these particular antagonisms, let us imagine that one discourse, “gender
studies,” emerges with the promise to emancipate all other particularities
from these fatal dependencies. “Gender” appears as the new ascendent uni-
versal with whose imminent triumph all other mere particulars will now
cast their lots. The novelty of Laclau and Mouffe’s model is twofold. First,
the universalizing operation known as hegemony is experienced by these
myriad particular discourses not as the domination of the one over the
many, but rather as a product of true consensus: each particular must be
able to find itself and its potential freedom in the universal (through analy-
sis of gender difference, the class struggle will once again become apparent,
etc.). But at the same time, this movement from particular to universal is
necessarily marked by radical contingency. There is nothing essential about
“gender” that would justify the universal role it plays in such a scheme,
and there is likewise no necessary reason why some other signifier could
not come to occupy this position at some point in the future. And thus, like
any other signifier, “gender” must necessarily fail to suture and account
for the social field in its entirety. Some excess or remainder will always
emerge to disrupt the seamless appearance of universality. Thus, to de-
scribe hegemony as a development whereby we “momentarily reach pure
presence [and] a communitarian fullness is achieved” (92) is only to tell half
the story. But the inability or failure of the universal to accomplish pure
self-presence or communion is not simply an isolated, negative feature of
the hegemonic process: on the contrary, this always excessive failure is its
condition of possibility and its only chance. In the absence of some possible
gap, some excess or remainder of the suturing process, there could be no
wiggle room through which a particular could constitute itself—however
contingently—as a universal. Without the excess that the universal inscribes
on the present, there could be no hegemonic process and hence no politics
at all.
What relation does literature assume to this signifying limit? Does
it turn away from the limit? Does it seek to repair its fissures? Or does it
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on the contrary seek in this limit what may in fact be its greatest resource?
How we approach these questions may be of vital importance, especially
if we wish to avoid living out Jameson’s account of postmodernity as total
colonization of the real. I mentioned earlier that the notion of the frag-
mentary in fact creates an unstable juxtaposition of multiple contexts and
connotations in Masiello’s argument. For instance, in addition to the social
fragmentation that neoliberal policies are seen to intensify, there is also a
long-standing aesthetic tradition of the fragment with which writers such
as Puig, Eltit, and Piglia are engaged. But what if the conjunction of these
two discrete manifestations of the fragmentary today itself gives birth to
another form of fragmentation, which we could call the fragmentation of
the aesthetic? It is perhaps this third form of fragmentation that emerges
most decisively in the work of Eltit, Piglia, and Marcelo Cohen (to name
three authors mentioned by Masiello), as a counterfoundational language
or tone that destroys its own literary illusion of presence and plenitude.
This thought of fragmentation would signal a rupture within the history
of modernity, following which it is no longer possible to reconstitute a so-
cial totality under the guidance of the aesthetic. But this event would not
allow us to think that we have finished with and surpassed the aesthetic
as such. Instead, it would call for persisting amid the ruins of the grand
narratives of modernity—even if literature is never entirely free from the
specter of the Whole, even if it must always be prepared to kill this phan-
tasm once again. I would suggest that Piglia’s notion of “errancy” contains
or invites the thought of just such a fragmentation. If literature can help
us to ask after the limit of the colonization of the real by capital, it is not
necessarily because literature offers a counternarrative or presents itself as
an instrument of calculated subversion: indeed, it is possible that neither
of these strategies could sufficiently separate itself from the logic it would
combat. If literature offers any hope of withstanding the totalizing logic
of Jameson’s formula, it is perhaps because literature “presents” something
that is properly of the order of the unpresentable. As a signifying machine,
literature confronts reading with its inexhaustible excess: with a “pure
potens,” an “unconscious,” a “plus ultra” that is both the chance and the
impossibility of presentation. But in this “presentation” of the impossibility
of presentation, literature also destroys its own illusion of being a whole.
Masiello’s apt warning against blind celebrations of the fragment would be
equally relevant for this third kind of fragmentation. But while literature’s
participation in the shattering of the aesthetic whole does not give cause
for rejoicing and should not fool us into thinking that we have now freed
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Notes
1. David Lloyd and Paul Thomas (1996) offer an incisive discussion of the relation
between literature and the nation-state (and while their study examines this
relation in France, England, and Germany, the structure of their argument
is also helpful for thinking about Latin American nation building). For an
exploration of this paradigm in Latin America, see Moreiras 2001.
2. See Ludmer 1988 and Beverley 1993 for two distinct approaches to the question
of the limits of “literature” as exemplar of national culture. For a sampling
of responses to the perceived decline of “literature” in Latin Americanist
discourse, see the collection of essays on testimonio in Gugelberg 1996.
3. Masiello does not address the fact that no consensus currently exists regarding ei-
ther the epistemological or the political stakes of cultural studies. This silence
would not constitute an omission if Masiello’s attempt to recuperate the value
of the aesthetic did not present itself as an alternative to cultural studies–based
critiques of aestheticism. However, the serious theoretical and methodolog-
ical divisions revealing themselves within the field today would no doubt
require her to modify her somewhat sweeping identification of all attempts
to link cultural studies and/or subaltern studies to Latin Americanist critical
work. For two considerations of the problems attending the relation between
cultural studies and Latin Americanism, see Beverley 1999 and Moreiras
2001. For an example of how “the popular” has suffered a depreciation in
Southern Cone intellectual circles, see the recent work of Beatriz Sarlo.
4. For a discussion of the differences and similarities between state and market in terms
of calculability, see Moreiras 2001, 268–77.
5. On the risks involved in identity politics as a pursuit of recognition by the state, see
Appiah 1994; and Brown 1995.
6. I should distinguish here between at least two different events of fragmentation, or at
least between two distinct manifestations of the same thing. On the one hand,
there is the phenomenon of social fragmentation that is arguably specific to (or
at least realized to an unprecedented degree in) contemporary, “postmodern”
societies. On the other, there is an aesthetics of the fragment which, while
not unrelated to the contemporary theoretical tendencies to which Masiello
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alludes, in fact has a history that extends back to the Romantic theory of the
fragment developed by Friedrich and August Wilhelm von Schlegel.
7. Both Piglia’s and Masiello’s reflections on translation recall Walter Benjamin’s essay
“The Task of the Translator.” In particular, both are influenced by the idea
that translation, rather than aspiring to produce a perfect copy of the origin, in
fact measures itself by what the original is unable to say (or, what amounts to
the same thing, by what it is unable to stop saying). For Benjamin, translation
responds not only to what is said, but more originally to a strange silence that
persists in the original, to a “suffering” that the original undergoes in relation
to its native tongue (“die Wehen des eigenen”: the suffering of one’s own, of
the language one had thought most familiar and proper, but which suddenly
reveals itself to be utterly strange).
References
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Societies and Social Reproduction.” In Multiculturalism: Examining the
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Beverley, John. 1993. Against Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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