In Infrapolitical Literature: Hispanism and the Border Alberto
Moreiras touches upon the concept of haunting many times, especially in
relation to thought, literature, and otherness.
Early in his discussion, haunting is briefly connected with hospitality: “Whatever
arises is new, yet thought must welcome it.
Haunting is the condition of all hospitality, or hospitality is the
condition of haunting” (185). In this
way, the otherness of the world is what visits, or perhaps intrudes upon,
thought or consciousness. Haunting
shares a relationship with hospitality in that it is always both within and
outside its host. What haunts is always
incorporated and yet othered, set apart.
Perhaps there is a fruitful connection to both Derek Attridge and
Jacques Derrida in this discussion of hospitality. In The Singularity of Literature,
Attridge describes how the “dominant mode of mechanical reading can be modified
or interrupted by a somewhat different relation to the work. Not all works will have something to offer to
a reader’s openness to alterity, of course, but when one does, mechanical and
instrumental interpretation is complicated by what we may term readerly
hospitality, a readiness to have one’s purposes reshaped by the work to which
one is responding” (80). Attridge’s
conception of “readerly hospitality” is more specific than Moreiras in that it
describes the hospitality of the reader, the host, to the otherness of
fiction. Moreiras seems to be applying this hospitality to encounters with otherness that exceed the literary and extend to the political, historical, infrapolitical, etc.. In Of Hospitality, Derrida writes that “absolute hospitality” is something
that is “graciously offered beyond debt and economy, offered to the other, a
hospitality invented for the singularity of the new arrival, of the unexpected
visitor” (83). This “absolute
hospitality” that Derrida describes as being “invented” is also an important
element of this puzzle—which not only informs Attridge’s notion of singularity
in literature, but also speaks to Moreiras’s concept of hospitality and
haunting. If we are to believe that haunting
is the condition of all hospitality and that hospitality is the condition of
haunting, which Moreiras posits, then there must be some kind of inherent
singularity, inventiveness, that is born of this relationship. There also must exist a kind of graciousness or offering, which when applied to more political contexts may become increasingly problematic.
Latin America in Theory
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Ethics and the Political
This week’s readings were as interesting as they were
challenging. I really enjoyed Moreiras on the thriller genre as ethical. The
idea that a crime against another person is a suspension of ethics and that the
thriller is an ethical response is interesting. Today at lunch Moreiras spoke a
bit about the difference between radical evil and diabolical evil, in which
radical evil is self interested, and diabolical evil is to hurt another person-
which plays out in his discussion of the thriller as an ethical reaction, and
his idea that moralism protects autonomy and not heteronomy. I’m not positive
what he meant by every perspective through structural articulation is already
an ethical perspective- I think this relates to the extraliterary within the literary?
I was also interested in the way Moreiras writes about the ethical and the political.
In his articles, the ethical undoes or deconstructs? the political and vice
versa- the political undoes the ethical.
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Crime in Fiction and the Secret of the World
Several themes struck me as I read this weeks essays on
infrapolitics (or “lo impolítico” for Espósito), such as the idea of literature
being anti-moral as it to disavow itself from any opportunism - a narrative
that self-exposes without an ulterior motive – explored in what Moreiras calls
“a non-moralist betrayal of war” contained within Comrac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. But perhaps most
enlightening was this idea that within the genre of crime fiction in Mexico
lies not only the unveiling of the secret behind a murder but a secret within
that secret: “the secret of the world,” an unfathomable secret that surpasses
national boundaries. Moreiras’ exploration of the murders in Ciudad Juárez both
as novelized by Roberto Bolaños and in reality expresses the paradoxical
interaction between the necessity for a political reaction to the suspension of
the ethical and the “ethical need to interrupt the suspension of the political”
(173) – the infrapolitical quality of Mexican thrillers. I was also intrigued by
the connection Moreiras makes between literary nationalism and subalternity and
sacrifice and how this particular genre abandons that idea and steps out of the
national and into the secret of the world concealed within narratives of
murder. That this universal extrapolation contained within the genre of
investigation literature, of that anti-moralist complex interplay of ethics and
politics, might also hold the key to literature’s not-quite-ethical inpolitical role, a “need for
antimoralist revelation,” points to an indefinable but essential function of
fiction not only in Latin America but beyond.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Posthegemony: Class Themes
I had not encountered theories of posthegemony, and was
enthusiastic (delighted?) to read other (contemporary) articulations of the
political and of the way power functions. It was also interesting to continue
the theme of difference and sameness which came up in Los Planetas, but from an
entirely different theoretical framework. The readings this week actually spoke
to a number of themes which have run through the class this semester: the
limits of social intelligibility and the disruption to the social order
(hegemony) that these representable forces create (even if hegemony excludes
them- through the act of excluding that which does not fit is reaffirmed; also Williams
on the unifying image today being the exhaustion of unifying images; as well as
the idea of inheritance which we have circled around in class (as he states-
our inheritance is the exhaustion of modernity it is also what creates
subjectivity if I am reading him correctly), as well as memory. According to
Williams, hegemony is active forgetting it is the repression and exclusion of heterogeneity. He uses the language of the specter
and haunting to address that which does not fit the hegemonic model. He also
spoke to Gabrielle Basterra’s lecture on the ethics of the radical other, addressing
the exposure of hegemonic to radical alterity- an outside which signals a
different way to think, and the other thought within thought- the heterogeneous,
disruptive, interruptive remainder to and within hegemonic reflection (149).
Exposed Failure
Posthegemony endeavors to "redescribe and reconstruct an image of society that no longer depends on society's own self portrayal" in order to recognize cultural struggles that offer the best likelihood of changing the current exclusionary and unjust structure and order of society (p. xv). Beasley-Murray posits that within the academy we must replace and rethink concepts like consent, ideology, and identity, along the lines of concepts like affect, habit, and multitude.
I am intrigued by the move of this book is making to critique cultural studies and to problematize the false dichotomy between consent and coercion in politics. I find it interesting the role censorship also plays in these processes and Beasley-Murray is interested in exposing the failure of hegemony and why hegemony can't work. Accordingly, posthegemony works "to uncover what has been obscured in these substitutions and to outline the means by which its suppression has been achieved, enforced, naturalized, and legitimated" (p. 63).
In this works that we've read thus far there seems to be a trend in exposing the failure of systems of power and political theories in place. I'm wondering if that's what Latin American theory is defined by; that is; a process of uncovering what is hidden by signs and codes that obscure cultures and societies.
By the way, Jon Beasley-Murray has an entire blog dedicated to posthegemony: http://posthegemony.blogspot.com, just in case anyone wanted to check it out.
I am intrigued by the move of this book is making to critique cultural studies and to problematize the false dichotomy between consent and coercion in politics. I find it interesting the role censorship also plays in these processes and Beasley-Murray is interested in exposing the failure of hegemony and why hegemony can't work. Accordingly, posthegemony works "to uncover what has been obscured in these substitutions and to outline the means by which its suppression has been achieved, enforced, naturalized, and legitimated" (p. 63).
In this works that we've read thus far there seems to be a trend in exposing the failure of systems of power and political theories in place. I'm wondering if that's what Latin American theory is defined by; that is; a process of uncovering what is hidden by signs and codes that obscure cultures and societies.
By the way, Jon Beasley-Murray has an entire blog dedicated to posthegemony: http://posthegemony.blogspot.com, just in case anyone wanted to check it out.
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Construct of Hegemony: Productive or Not?
After reading both Gareth Williams’s The Other Side of
the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America and excerpts
from Jon Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America, I
have noticed important differences in the ways that both writers discuss the
concept of hegemony. While Williams questions
and deconstructs the use of the term hegemony and any kind of hegemonic binary,
Beasley-Murray seems to take Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and run with
it. In the Introduction of his book, Beasley-Murray
defines his use of the words hegemony and posthegemony as follows:
“By ‘hegemony,’ I do not mean mere domination. To say ‘posthegemony’ is not to say that
domination is at an end. Command and
control, exploitation and oppression, still manifestly continue… Nor by
hegemony do I mean the concept in International Relations of a single dominant
world power. It may be that such a power
no longer exists, but this is more a symptom of posthegemony than the main
issue. By hegemony I mean the notion,
derived from the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, that the state maintains its
dominance (and that of social and economic elites) thanks to the consent of
those it dominates. Where it does not
win consent, this theory suggests, the state resorts to coercion. By contrast, in stressing the role of habit
(rather than opinion) I point to processes that involve neither consent nor
coercion” (x)
Here, Beasley-Murray is defining his use of these words and
fleshing out his perspective on hegemony and posthegemony within the context of
Antonio Gramsci’s model. Clearly, these
terms prove to be productive and useful in Beasley-Murray’s discussion—they form
the foundation for his theory in regards to what he terms as “habit” but also
to his opinions on the larger subjects of power, politics, order, society, etc…
In fact Beasley-Murray goes so far as to admit to advancing the concept and term posthegemony on the next page: “I am
not the only person to have advanced a concept of posthegemony, though this
book is the first to define it at such length and in these terms” (xi). This open agenda runs in sharp contrast to
that of Williams, who problematizes the use of the terms and concepts of
hegemony and posthegemony. Over and over
again Williams shows the instances in which political moments in Latin America
cannot be confined to such terms and binary lines of thinking. Williams problematizes not only the use of
these terms, but the entire approach that such analysis would tend to
advance. Especially in the first section
of his book, “Closure,” Williams provides a long catalogue of failed analyses
of Latin American socio-political life in his quest for a viable discourse and
approach to this subject. The question
that I would posit is this: to what extent are these terms helpful and to what
extent are they stifling? Is there a
possible alternative paradigm that is missing from the equation? What would the alternative look like?
Zombieland: Dos Caracoles, the Caracazo and Split Screens
George A. Romero’s Dawn of the
Dead (1978)
What
struck me in Jon Beasly-Murray’s Posthegemony:
Political Theory and Latin America was a juxtaposition I made between the
discussion on habit and how its both complacent and an instrument of hegemony
under Pinochet’s dictatorship yet unpredictably reactionary after Venezuela’s
thirty years of democracy. While the zombiesque shoppers traverse the
neoliberal mall of Dos Caracoles in Santiago, Chile, unable to congregate in
one space and going about their architecturally channeled routine of window
shopping comodification, the multitude rises against higher prices in public
transportation in the Caracazo uprising in 1989 while Hugo Chávez was sleeping.
The effect of posthegemony is almost like an unforeseen metaphorical zombie
apocalypse. Out of the numbing effects of capitalist hegemony rises a
post-ideological subversiveness unaware of its power. Perhaps Venezuela’s
shattered split-screen televisual coup/countercoup 2002 confusion is an augur
of what’s to come in Chile as it distances itself from the Pinochet
dictatorship – one screen, one perspective, is no longer capable of capturing
the complete narrative. Some screens switch to the telenovela in an attempt to
censor, others with the protests thinking they are on the right side of history,
then within 48 hours it all turns around on itself to the point that the media’s
camera does not know where it should be pointing because it is unclear who is
actually in control. Hegemony is no longer possible.
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