[Laughlorien]

In State of Grace
Ideology, Capitalism, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

In A Terrible Beauty: A History of the People and Ideas That Shaped the Modern Mind (2000, 761), Peter Watson concludes that the chief intellectual effort of non-Western cultures in the twentieth century has been coming to terms with modernity, or, “learning how to cope with or respond to Western ways and Western patterns of thought, chiefly democracy and science.”

Unsettling as it may be, his opinion should not be dismissed as mere ethnocentric babble. It would serve little purpose to denounce yet again (as Watson himself does) the persistence of such phenomena as ethnocentrism or an unjust world order. For what matters is to understand that the promise of management itself—that of “progress” as a necessary effect inscribed in the structure of the modern—rests on an error.

The error is twofold: first, it consists of a series of theoretical assertions that are central to post-Kantian conceptions of history and happen to have been influential in recent years in neo-Kantian, neo-Hegelian, or Marxist forms. These assertions are based on the view that human action is inherently “purposive.” “Purposive human action” is in turn related to the operation of final causes in history. I will call this set of assertions “a transcendental philosophy of history” and will object to it on the grounds that “final causalism” is fundamentally incoherent.

Second, the error of the promise of management is based on a set of ideological beliefs about the operation of modern (Western) practices and discourses of knowledge (Watson's “democracy” and “science”) in non-Western societies. I refer to the notion that the acquisition of Western patterns of knowledge by non-Western peoples (e.g., literacy) is inherently [End Page 15] progressive. This belief fails to acknowledge that there is a relationship between literacy as a global design (the secular religion of the civilizing mission) and the process of colonial spatial differentiation initiated in the sixteenth century (the early global period), which is being reproduced today on a planetary scale.

Misrecognition of the uses of literacy in reproducing colonial difference and colonial power results from a failure to consider knowledge production and circulation within the frame of transnational capitalist production and the rising of a transnational capitalist class. Latin American dependency theory has long insisted that this class was a critical element in the shaping of modern (Western) nation-states and markets; it has also argued that the extraction of non-Western wealth and knowledge was key to the development of Western centrality in the world-system. Locally produced knowledge, once severed from global politics and economics, is taken to derive its meaning from an imaginary relationship with the purposive experience of humanity, a view that erases class relationship and colonial difference from the equation.

Following Sylvia Scribner (1986), I call this ideological displacement “literacy as state-of-grace.” I argue that the relation thus described is in fact a transferential relationship of the individual (the local peoples producing knowledge) toward a material cosmopolis (the global state-market), which provides the latter with an ideological foundation of its own.

Thus, the topic of this essay is the ideological foundation of the global state-market, as it is inscribed in an account of knowledge production that blinds us to the political and economic differentiation at work in the formation and transformation of the modern/colonial world-system.

On the Sex of Angels

1

Literacy is an ideological apparatus in Louis Althusser's (1994 [1970], 100–140) sense. That is, it is a state apparatus in the sense that it is a function of state power and political struggle, for it contributes to the reproduction of modern/colonial relations of production.

Literacy accomplishes this by hailing individuals as state-subjects through institutional practices and rituals. This means that literacy has the function of transforming concrete individuals into subjects by inserting them into practices governed by its rituals, so that they “recognize” the existing state of affairs, their subjection to it, and the good that comes from its functioning, all by themselves. [End Page 16]

This situation thus acquires an “objective” character: a certain set of political and economic relations originated somewhere else (trade relations originated in modern/colonial differentiation) becomes an order, a form of sovereignty or rule; a self-legitimated (global) state-form. In other words, trade relations only become hegemonic, achieving the form of the state, when they appear as culture.

2

As an ideological apparatus, then, literacy may be understood as a set of mechanisms or procedures that “in order to be operative,” to “seize hold of” the individual, always already presuppose the massive presence of the state. That is, the transferential relationship of the individual toward state power, or in Althusser's (1994 [1970], 13) terms, “towards the ideological big Other in whom the interpellation originates.”

The civilizing apparatus that became operational in the sixteenth century is aimed at (re)making the “particular” world of the colonized in the image of the “universal” world of the colonizer under the auspices of capitalism. Colonial management through literacy is fundamentally concerned with the use and ownership of (colonized) space, including the shaping of such a space (both material and cultural) into a new, more encompassing, totality.

To clarify this point I would like to draw on the work of John S. Howard (1998) from an Althusserian perspective. Howard argues that under the impetus of capitalism other ways of being are reformulated in the hierarchies of commodity production and reintegrated into a totality that normalizes all ways of being by appealing to the “self-evident and a priori condition of rationality and history” (113). I argue that the allegedly “purposive” character of human action is, in the case of modern/colonial global ordering, the condition referred to by Howard.

To put it in Althusser's (1994 [1970], 122) terms, individuals “in state-of-grace” deal with a totality that has “no history,” for it is taken to be an “obvious” state of affairs. This means that, insofar as the individuals are concerned, their being subjects to and subjects of such a totality is self-evident, a primary obviousness. Like all obviousness, the obviousness that you and I are subjects, that is, members of the cosmopolis insofar as we are able to enter universal conversation and trade through literacy and knowledge production, is an ideological effect. I contend that this ideological obviousness accounts for the “acquired objectivity” and global character of the late state-market. [End Page 17]

Within this more encompassing totality all ways of being become the whole because they are thought (indeed, they think themselves)1 to contain the elemental quality of the totality (i.e., humanity) within its own constitutive part. As Howard (1998, 112) puts it, “each piece is organically reconciled to the ruling order that regulates the entirety.”

As a whole, the global state-market attempts to reunify “partial” or “local” life-worlds (ways of life, modes of being) by subjecting them, through ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) such as literacy as state-of-grace, to the identity process of Western democratization (according to Western patterns of law) and Western knowledge.

Literacy operates at a global level, the level of the capitalist world market. Under capitalism, law and knowledge are commodities, and as such they are reformulated in the hierarchies of commodity production: local forms of law and knowledge remain identical until value is differentiated in terms of the world market. Some will be considered less valuable, being left behind in the hierarchy, while others, placed ahead in the hierarchy, become the standard of value itself. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos (1998, 350) would say, they are relocated: being local phenomena, they become successfully globalized. Globalized forms of law and knowledge are thus treated as valuable in themselves, as universals.

As they are invested with the universal quality of value by this process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, modern law and knowledge become a fetish. Thus, for instance, the signifiers “democracy” and “science” in Watson's proposition belong to a discursive order in which modern Western products are always already taken as universal standards of value, as inherently “progressive.” Being in possession of them means being ahead, “progress” and hierarchy being considered internal to and a necessary effect of the structure of the modern, based on commodified law and science. So it is assumed that once “backward” peoples “learn how to cope” with such a structure, they will necessarily progress in the hierarchy.

3

To sum up, the discourse termed here “literacy as state-of-grace” links the appeal to final causalism as a philosophy of history to the urgencies of colonization. Indeed, the argument underlying this essay is that the belief in the purposive character of human action and the operation of final causes in history lends legitimacy to the colonizing enterprise—the wholesale (com)modification, overcoming, and/or eradication of existing social structures and their replacement with rational (Western) new ones—by [End Page 18] making “progress” internal to and a necessary effect of a particular arrangement of knowledge and power.

A further clarification is in order. Terms such as globalization, hegemony, or empire correspond to a vocabulary that is central to partial attempts at explaining the phenomena I have just described. They are partial insofar as they seem unable to connect the transcendental philosophy of history and human action, which underlies the promise of progress through knowledge, to the vast ideological and material operations, often plain coercion, involved in the process of global colonization.

In this article I move toward making such a connection. In doing so I join the efforts of a group of Latin American scholars trying to better our understanding of current world trends. Their aim is to construct a notion of “totality” that would allow us to explain contemporary subjectivity in relation to the transformations linking the market, the system of knowledge production, technology, the rising forms of extractive neocolonialism, and the social agents responding (by adaptation or resistance) to such transformations.

These scholars draw on insights of 1970s dissident thought, in particular dependency theory. These are:

the centrality of the role played by a transnational capitalist class;
the mapping of North-South relations in a context in which other more complex interactions (extractive neocolonialism, real subsumption of society by the state, intensification of worldwide relations, commodification of knowledge) occur at many levels;
a revised notion of “modernity,” based on arguments opposing the necessitist character of progress and the Eurocentric mapping of world history, common to some debates in philosophy (Enrique Dussel's liberation philosophy) and the social sciences (Aníbal Quijano's development sociology).

I share their criticism of the more normative character of some propositions advanced in these debates, many of which stem from a metatheoretical commitment to demonstrating that the structures and processes that we find in concrete totalities (e.g., the work of scientific communities, groups, or peoples) are not only explicable but necessary under some abstract description of the structure of the modern.

David Booth (1989, 114) argues that this general formula covers two variants: the type of necessity entailed by the insistence that the salient [End Page 19] features of concrete totalities can be derived or “read off” from a more abstract totality (e.g., a ruled-governed system), and another that involves a system teleology or functionalism.

Booth's criticism proves valuable when directed against the normativism and system teleology of certain notions dear to Latin American theorizing in the 1970s, chief among them, the notion of contradiction. However, he fails to acknowledge the extent to which the necessitist character attributed to such abstract totalities stems from a pervasive notion about the operation of (final) causes of processes' progressive destination in reality. “Contradiction,” for instance, usually implies a teleological necessity that guarantees in advance the sublation of the contradiction in a third instance: a higher, more neutral, unity.

This implies a teleological account of the world, one in which the definitive impulse does not come from metaphysical entities but from man's cognitive power to give purpose and order, to manage and control the world, by reestablishing the equilibrium of its conflicting principles in a third instance. Take, for example, antagonistic sexual positions: the alleged third instance is expressed in this case by the term angel, as Slavoj Zizek (1999, 24) has observed; that is why, Zizek affirms ironically, “the question of the sex of angels is absolutely crucial for a materialist analysis.”

His point is that the idea of a third “higher” and “neutral” position is ideological and thus calls for a supplement. This supplement is provided by the consideration of the concrete existence of an ideological totality. “Contradiction,” for instance, is supplemented by “overdetermination,” insofar as the latter designates the undecidable complex totality that is the mode of existence of contradiction. Similarly, “‘woman' stands for the aspect of concrete existence and ‘man' for the empty-ambiguous universality” (Zizek 1999, 25), the former functioning as the encompassing ground that accounts for the universality of man. Insofar as this is so, there is no need for the neutral or higher medium expressed by terms such as humanity or angel.

The implication is that final causes that transcend the process (teleology) are not needed in order to explain an actual state of affairs. For it is the process of differentiation itself (its immanent or efficient causes) that accounts for the emergence of the hegemonic or universal character of an otherwise empty totality. Drawing on this insight I argue that the supposedly universal “purposive character of humanity” functions precisely as a kind of third “neutral” or “higher” level. As such, it points toward an empty totality (Western “ways” or patterns of activity) whose universality [End Page 20] emerges from, and is accounted for by, the moment of specific difference (non-Western ways).

In other words, the presentation of teleological necessity as an a priori condition of rationality and history (as a feature of humanity) involves the “primordial repression” of an antagonism (between Western and non-Western ways) that is real. The “repressed reality” of such an antagonism is the basis of a critique of our immediate experience of the “objectivity” of the world order as “ideological”; indeed, as the ideology of neocolonial management.

At this point, my argument can be understood as an account of the persistence of false positions and the repetition of old fallacies about the structure of the modern. I acknowledge that most researchers today would accept that diffusionism, teleology, legalism, and the conflation of knowledge and the known are largely mistaken; but no one has accounted for the persistence of these errors. To do so one must pay attention, first, to the operations that have shaped not only structures and institutions but also the way people experience life and construct themselves (politically) as subjects. It seems to me that in postmodernity this aspect of the analysis, the relationship between structures, institutions, and the construction of subjectivity in a purely political space (that of a transnational body of regulations and institutions) is gaining momentum. Second, one must be attentive to the basis of our pervasive belief in the unlimited character of man's purposive action, in the set of assertions that I termed above “a transcendental philosophy of history.”

The Making of an Error:
Transcendentalism and the Philosophy of History

1

The position advanced in previous paragraphs is indebted to the critiques of the disembodied and foundationalist character of predominant perspectives in modern political ontotheology. Chief among these perspectives is one I term “manifest destiny” nihilism: the idea that there is a world out there (Nature) devoid of any significance, and that it is the cognitive destiny of man to provide that world with meaning (the “one story” referred to by Peter Watson), thus giving rise to a better, enhanced, more autonomous “second” nature. This view implies (1) that the world is ready-at-hand, existing only insofar as it is fit for human instrumentalization and consumption, and (2) that all knowledge (including knowledge about the world) is self-knowledge. Both implications are untenable. As I have [End Page 21] already suggested, this is mere anthropomorphism-cum-ontology. It entails a conflation of knowledge and the known, at times associated with the radical constructivism and culturalist stance of postmodernism.

If manifest destiny nihilism is so untenable, why should Latin American scholars bother about postmodernism? In short, because of postmodernity. As Michael Stanford (1998, 54) argues, “the importance of postmodernism is not that it is all true, but that some of it could become true if we do not take action to prevent it.” What needs to be prevented in postmodernity is the pervasiveness of manifest destiny nihilism as global biopolitics. Fueled by late capitalism's renewed relationship with external and internal forms of extractive neocolonialism, this brand of nihilism pushes even further the ideology of an anthropocentric conception of the world already present in the belief that human action is purposive. This kind of nihilism is justified as well by the supposed realization of a “manifest destiny” in the West (Fukuyama's “end of history”). This is accomplished by introducing the promise of a definitive autonomy of human intellect with respect to nature (so dear to “computer revolution” discourse and late cyberpunk cinema)2 that is completely analogous to that of the final liberation of capitalist production from its dependence on labor force (thus fulfilling mankind's “destiny”).

In an interesting attempt to counter this trend, recent Latin American scholarship has argued that the role of nature in late capitalism should be reconsidered. This view implies, as Fernando Coronil (1998, ix–xii) has observed, a “materialist turn” in philosophy, social studies, and cultural studies in Latin America. Epistemologically, it favors the reintroduction of Nature in our analyses of intellectual and practical labor (i.e., the production of knowledge). Politically, it argues that Nature stands as the absolute limit to the promise of technological transcendence, the assimilation of all forms of life, and the endless accumulation of capital (Dussel 1998).

2

The “purposiveness” of human action is related to mankind's cognitive ability to find or imprint on Nature a lawful order, a set of limits. According to the transcendental philosophy of history, given certain limits or possibilities, cognitive in nature, the world has to be the way it is. Thus, this philosophy understands history and reality as the realization of such a set of possibilities. It follows that if one were able to identify these possibilities one would able to explain (i.e., objectively describe) the course of events; more important, one could state its necessity (its normative character), that [End Page 22] is, one could prescribe it. In the language of this secular philosophy of history, “possibilities” are ideal structures or speculative entities in the sense that they transcend historical processes themselves for they constitute the end and the law of the process.

This point about history, already advanced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophers, is a causal one: it refers to the operation of final causes or “purposes” in history, a notion that has been challenged by contemporary approaches in the philosophy and history of science (see Bhaskar 1994). According to this perspective it is because of its (somewhat hidden) purposiveness that mankind's history has a meaning, an order, and an end. Mankind has the power to establish that order, and thus realize its true possibilities. Kant used the term autonomy, central in modern ethics and politics, in relation to such a legislative power. Significantly, he argued that the power to become autonomous stems from the very same cognitive principle that allows us to come up with scientific propositions—that is, with reason in the form of judgment. Notice that in making this argument Kant was establishing an internal connection between pure knowledge and practical power in our capacity to pass judgment, that is, in our ability to assimilate every case (every concrete totality) as an instance of the universal rule of Reason (an abstract totality). Production of pure knowledge (science) and the ability to pass judgment (rule of law) equals or at least prepares for autonomy, as well as for practical autonomy.

According to this principle, those peoples who produce a certain kind of knowledge translated into certain forms of (division of) labor (science and jurisprudence) are better prepared for exercising their power to be autonomous, thus fulfilling mankind's true purpose; and those who do not produce such knowledge are not. They are left behind.

This distinction introduces a division of the world's peoples that can be deconstructed, following Walter Mignolo (2000, 107–11), as a true “geopolitics of knowledge.” Interestingly, this kind of geopolitics is not immediately related to racism or ethnocentrism (in fact it appears to be far removed from them). It is an “enlightened” division of the world in that it stems from a secular teleology and the acceptance of mankind's transcendence over nature via our ability to pass judgment (that is, producing theoretical [scientific] and practical [normative] knowledge).

Having objected to this transcendental teleology (“literacy as state-of-grace” and “manifest destiny nihilism”) on the grounds that it is an ideological construct, I have suggested that the functioning of such an apparatus gives the global state-form its ideological foundation. Now I [End Page 23] will turn to the transferential relation between the individual subject to “literacy as state-of-grace” and the global state-form in order to argue that this relation accounts for the way in which the local works for the global (contrary to common belief).

Literacy and Cosmopolis as State-of-Grace

1

Scenes for a documentary:

First image: Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari announces to the Mexican people the fulfillment of a prophecy: “We have entered the first world.”

Second image: That very same day, in the Lacandona jungle, Subcomandante Marcos announces the beginning of the “Fourth World War.”

The contrast serves as a reminder: The angel of global capitalism, passing over the Earth to mark the doors of those who would be spared from the plague, has left many behind.

Being “left behind,” in solitude, has been one of the predominant metaphors used in Latin American writing to describe the region's status in the so-called modern world order. It presupposes that we acquiesce to this state of affairs, that is, first, that we accept the existence of a “world order,” a higher state-like authority, and, second, that we hope that one day we may become its citizens if we are successful in coming to terms with modern Western ways, particularly science and jurisprudence.

I have argued that this belief is ideological. It is the product of the ideological apparatus I call literacy as state-of-grace, which is based upon a spurious philosophy of history that conceives progress to be internal and necessary to the structure of the modern. Indeed, this apparatus accounts for the persistence of the colonial difference in the transformation of the modern world-system.

2

I have followed Walter Mignolo's (1995) insight that a privileged way to understand the persistence of colonial discourses and managerial apparatuses is to focus on the power and functionality of literacy as both sign and vehicle of “civilization.”

In so doing, I contend that literacy is central to the attempt to code (material and cultural) space at the macropolitical level insofar as it allows or disallows for categories of subjectivity: “civilized,” “literate,” [End Page 24] “modern,” or “barbarian,” “savage,” “backward.” Indeed, the introduction of Western patterns of law and knowledge can put an entire population into a “subjected group” that receives its determination from other groups “and is never opened to the finitude of its [own] existence” (Howard 1998, 114).

Put in yet another way, the question posed here is how “property rights” should be considered from a global perspective. Taken beyond its narrower meaning as a principle for judiciary claims, “property” refers here to the use and ownership of space as a power mechanism. I refer to “property rights” in this sense, that is, as the power mechanism of a world order. Thus, we are concerned with how labor power is appropriated, how citizenship is conferred as the key to insertion in the world market, and how land and resources are appropriated. These considerations lead us to explore the construction (through ideology) of several interrelated subject-positions and, via this operation of collective subjectification, to the consolidation of the nation-state system and the cosmopolitical system that I have termed the global state-market or state-form.

3

The conformation of the nation-state system and of nation-state subjects is the main product and agent of globalization. In other words, an abstract political space3 is constituted through which capital can perpetually expand, no longer constrained by politically constituted communities or parceled sovereignty (see Hardt and Negri 2000). This implies the conversion, overcoming, or eradication of constituted communities and the wholesale modification of existing concepts of social action and change.

This is the problem Marx referred to as “primitive accumulation” (in which the concentrated force of the nation-state plays a central role): the destruction of pre- or paracapitalist forms of rule and production. In the contemporary world we keep witnessing violent processes of primitive accumulation, but we also observe new social movements becoming agents of such processes by falling prey to another mistake found in most actual analyses of globalization in the critical social sciences. This is the supposition that the global and the national (or any other analogically “localized” specific communities such as “ethnic peoples,” “women,” or “inclusive communities”) are in conflict.

As Simon Bromley (1999, 284) argues, “this way of thinking has been reinforced by the somewhat paradoxical fact that, while the major social and political theories originating in the Enlightenment were (implicitly [End Page 25] at least) of universal scope and applicability, most actual analysis assumed that societies were nationally bounded.”

Unlike Bromley, I see no paradox. Peripheral nationalism, performatively generated by ideological apparatuses and imposed upon its agents, can be seen as yet another ideological effect of the uses of literacy in a (post)colonial setting. Once ideology erases its links with economic and political structures, it conveys a sense of transcendence so “the literate's individual life derives its meaning and significance from intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual participation in the accumulated creations and knowledge of humankind, made available through the written word” (Scribner 1986, 16; cited in Mignolo 1995, 322).

The point here is that there is no contradiction between “global” and “specific,” but there is overdetermination. This means that the specific is made to work for the global in the sense that concrete processes of specification and subjectification (social, economic, legal, territorial) achieved through different uses of literacy (described as “literacy as adaptation,” and “literacy as power”)4 are transcended in and subsumed by “literacy-as-state-of-grace” (Scribner 1986).

While being interpellated by the ideological apparatus of literacy, individuals become (imaginary) “citizens of the cosmopolis” (no longer of their specific community, republic, or nation). Scribner has not only presented us with three metaphors for the uses of literacy. She has also provided us with a way to understand how the agency of social actors subjected to colonial uses of literacy actually works from specific-community construction toward an imaginary relationship with the cosmopolitical. This relationship is analogous to the transferential relationship between nation-state building and the operation of the world-system under conditions of globalization.

The lesson to be drawn from the emphasis given to the study of the uses of literacy in (post)colonial settings, as developed by Mignolo and others through the concept of the “geopolitics of knowledge,” is a call for a renewed sense of totalities (in spite of postmodernism). There is a need for a more complex horizon of “totality” that focuses on literacy as an apparatus of capture and relocation of social roles in the (imaginary) global system.

This kind of imaginary cosmopolis (whose “reality” is constituted by a network of legal regulations and statelike institutions) provides capitalism with its actual face: virtual, pure, anonymous, omnipresent (although it is not present at any given place or time; its nonpresence is its omnipresence). Like a ghost, it is not there but it is very real. [End Page 26]

Ziggy Stardust and the Specters of Marx

1

Talk of “ghosts” evokes the imagery used by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (1994) or Terrell Carver in The Post-modern Marx (1999), gestures signaling the character of late capitalism and the spectral condition of justice under globalization.

Beyond metaphors, the point is that in postmodernity, though we claim not to believe in great narratives, we might be living one. We live in literacy as state-of-grace. We live in ideology, our topsy-turvy world of cosmopolitan images and digitally enhanced fantasies, which constitutes an ideology that may be reinforced by our contemporary disillusionment with foundational narratives. This point is related to the problem faced by critical theory today: How do we analyze spectral capitalism (the ideology we live in) and still remain sensitive to the problematic of grounding forms of social criticism? The question can be rephrased in a Zizekian manner: How is it possible, if at all, to reinvent the political under the present conditions of globalization?

To “reinvent the political” means to “open up” the possibilities of political imagination both in theory and in practice. To do so “under the present conditions of globalization” means to take into account that we live in ideology, thus to account for the persistence of modern/colonial power relations and knowledge discourses that function by erasing their links with economic structures and with literacy as power. They do so because their exercise of power dwells, precisely, in their apparent disconnection with economy and politics so that “the global” appears as a specter, a virtual reality that is never fully actualized, thus always deferring itself through successive crises.

There are, in the present conditions, two sources from which it becomes possible to “open up” the political: either (1) by setting up “the local” against “the global,” or (2) by developing a practical critique of global commodification and its cosmopolitical ideology, that is, the idea that all productions and subjectivities derive their meaning from their spiritual relationship with the “universal” purposive experience (cognitive and historical) of mankind.

2

The first of these alternatives arises from the politicization (both in theory and in practice) of a series of specific struggles—related to issues of gender, [End Page 27] race, migration, and decolonization—that have taken place since the end of the 1960s. For many critics, this is the privileged site for political reinvention in our times. Thus Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999, 85) argues:

One of the theaters of that agon [between capitalism and socialism] is global resistance spelled out “as responses to local micro-problems . . . [that] gradually . . . began to relate . . . to macro-policies of economic development and the market economy led linear development agencies and international financial institutions like the World's Bank.” This is the theater where today's “native informants” collectively attempt to make their own history as they act (in the most robust sense of agency) a part they have not chosen, in a script that has as its task to keep them silent and invisible.
Spivak's argument comes largely from the perspective of the “patriarchally defined subaltern woman.” She argues correctly that her labor has been effectively socialized in the new international economic and political order and, thus, that the specificity of her struggle can be set against the macropolicies of international agencies. She also presents the struggle [agon] between capitalism and socialism (via a deconstructive reading of Marx) as a field of differance constituted by an uneven push and pull between rights and responsibilities.

This reference to the theater of today's global resistance as a “field of differance” constituted by responses to local microproblems may be particularly useful to today's project of reinventing the political. Spivak objects to the “end of history” thesis on the grounds that there is an unlimited range of possible instances where the demands of justice are, or should be, evoked. At the same time, her argument retains a sense of antifoundationalism and elaborates on the spectral character of today's global system.

Interestingly, at first sight Spivak's argument seems analogous to Zizek's unfortunately “Eurocentric” conception of the political, according to which—from its Greek inception—politics proper always involves a move from the particular to the universal. Further analysis is needed in order to distinguish the two positions. Indeed, Spivak's idea allows one to analogize that there is a gradual move from responses to “local micro-problems” to “macro-policies of economic development and the market economy led linear development agencies and international financial institutions like the World's Bank”; but Spivak does not imply, in sharp contrast [End Page 28] with Zizek, that such a move can only be made from within the particular tradition of Western science and jurisprudence.

Like Zizek, Spivak believes that the move from the particular to the universal takes place in some sort of dialogical situation; but hers is no idealized “Greek conversation among friends” (equals). Quite the opposite, the “dialogue” Spivak has in mind is one in which the hegemonic subject's activity is not exhausted by listening to or speaking in the name of the subaltern subject. He or she must actually learn how to talk to the historically tamed subject. In doing so he or she “unlearns” his or her privilege. This is a very different kind of dialogue from Zizek's. Not only does it start by recognizing the asymmetric relationship of those engaged in dialogue, but, more important, not presupposing a shared (cultural or cognitive) background, it begins from what can be termed epistemic difference.5

In asymmetric dialogue both parties are obliged to build up a chain of equivalences without suppressing difference: this entails translation, for hegemons must engage in the business of adapting their words for those lacking knowledge of their tongue. As this involves a sophisticated form of deception, the overall result of conversation is nothing but a global misapprehension, even delusion. Such a delusion becomes constitutive of the identity constructed in the dialogical (postcolonial) process. It can be said that the identities thus achieved are what is lost in translation, bearing in mind that this is not an ontological event but a political one. Politics is (as a result of colonial history) the return of a loss.6

Do not forget that Spivak's subaltern is a woman. This is no coincidence, for what is at stake here is the relationship between translation and identity in a (post)colonial setting. The image that comes to mind is that of Malinche and Hernán Cortés; particularly the role played by the former, perhaps the most vilified character in Latin American history, second only to Christopher Columbus. Malinche's vilification is not unrelated to her being a woman. In fact one wonders if it does not proceed precisely by means of her womanization: as is well-known, her name has come to signify a person who sells (his or) her country to foreign forces for (his or) her own sake, conscious of the value of sleeping with the powerful male commander(s).

To respond to the repression (by means of womanization) of the role played by translation7 in the construction of colonial difference, indeed of our political (post)colonial Latin American identity, we must vindicate Malinche. Such a vindication would assert the constitutive role of gendering in producing colonial spatial differentiation and actual globalized [End Page 29] epistemic differentiation. It is in this fashion that I understand (indeed relocate in/from Latin America) Spivak's intervention. Her inspiration in conceiving the political as a field of differance comes from Derrida's Specters of Marx. I suspect, however, that in Spivak deconstruction goes well beyond itself (at least well beyond its political “failure”). So in what follows I will be doing a reading of sorts: setting Spivak against Derrida.8

In Specters, Derrida argues that in relating today's global capitalism and radical social critique we must recognize that it is not possible to bridge the gap between microproblems and macropolicies by prejudging who the “others” demanding justice will be. The question should always remain open (undecidable). Such an openness would provide us with a basis for developing critiques of unjust social institutions. These analyses would take the form of an endless process of deconstructive deferral in the name of “justice in general” (on this, see Derrida 1994) in order to enact a critique of the systems that maintain the global capitalist economy.

There are many tools here to help us solve our problem. However, in the final analysis Derrida's strategy shares a normative basis for social criticism and the pursuit of justice with the Kantian critical strategies so common in current mainstream social theory. The neo-Kantians' insistence on a regulative ideal that serves as a criterion to judge future actions—the purposive character of action—and Derrida's insistence on an undecidable future as criterion to judge a regulative ideal remain analogous. Both affirm the central role of a normatively founded (finalistic) act of judgment. This is the central facet of the Kantian conception, and stressing the spectral against the ontological, as Derrida does, is no challenge (Mackenzie 1999, 73–79). Derrida's Marxism remains here, at best, “glam” Marxism.

While they accept the act of judgment as epistemologically/ontologically foundational, both Derrida and the neo-Kantians are fooled by the function that law performs in late capitalism: to translate every claim to justice into the language of rights and then submit it to the highest normative instance, that of “justice to come,” a final cause. This ideological displacement of political (subaltern) claims toward the operation of final causes in history obscures the operation of translation as loss and recovery. It results, for instance, in Zizek's dismissal of a politics of reparations leading toward the “unlearning” of Western privilege. It turns the claimant, present or not, into a subject of law subjected to law. It is, like literacy, an ISA.

Iain Mackenzie (1999, 76) has argued that “by bolstering the Kantian idea that social criticism presupposes normative judgments . . . Derrida fails to see that it is precisely the act of judging the other that is the founding [End Page 30] moment of the tendency toward regulative cosmopolitanism.” His point is that a normatively determined conception of undecidability (Derrida's justice) will always confuse the act of social criticism with the act of normative judgment, so that in the end one will always be forced to cede the terrain of criticism to the cosmopolitan question. That is, to cede the terrain of criticism to ideological notions such as “tolerance” or “multiculturalism,” and to the universalistic pretensions of normative ideologies in law-politics and economics.

Derrida's strategy of setting up the “local” against the “global” fails, therefore, for it appeals to a language of rights and/or normative judgment which ultimately depends on the operation of final causes in history. It actualizes the uses of literacy, and through them, the (post)colonialism of the global. Far from solving these problems, Derrida's conception of justice actually blinds us to the operation of the geopolitics of knowledge (deception/conquista, loss/recovery) in today's world-system.

The Empty Center of Politics

I propose that there is a second way of “opening up” the political under the present conditions of globalization. It starts from Marx's account of the global spread of capitalist society as increasingly transnational, although uneven and conflict-ridden, and involving processes of “primitive accumulation.” Then it moves toward Spivak's relocation of political undecidability in the colonial history of gender formation, thus avoiding the more normative and finalistic nuances that remain in Derrida's reading of Marx.

According to this account, the internal dynamic of the world market was given by modern industry, which could develop fully on the basis of the complete commodification of labor-power, that is, thanks to the resubjectification of native agents, which presupposes the separation of agents from direct means of subsistence and hence their dependence on the market. Externally, the expansion of modern capitalism into its periphery generally demanded what Rosa Luxembourg called “the struggle against the natural economy.” Here we encounter the problematics of uneven and combined development (competitive pressures are transmitted throughout the state-system), neocolonialism, and imperial rule that today are the trademark of postcolonialism, arising from the unification of global politics and the spreading reach of the world market. [End Page 31]

These problematics are taken up and developed by world-systems analysis and dependency theory in agonistic relationship with the endogenous models of change of modernization theory. The critique of endogenous models of change and the focus on the world-system pioneered by Immanuel Wallerstein and Aníbal Quijano, among others, have enhanced our understanding of a historical tendency that is materializing before our very eyes: the coming-of-age of a transnational capitalist structure which is spectral in nature, that is, it has no subject (no “capitalist,” and therefore no “proletarian” as understood by traditional Marxism), no center (therefore no “periphery,” as understood by traditional dependency theory), no political ideology or ethics (either “liberal” or “socialist”), no history (it presents itself as a natural object), and no positive content (be this commodities, products, or even money).

It is in this sense that I mentioned earlier the “acquired objectivity” of world capitalism. “Acquired objectivity” can be accounted for in terms of the continual transferal of agency from its involvement in specific-community building to the construction of an imaginary cosmopolis, via global ISAs such as the law and literacy as state-of-grace (global designing or “planning”) which actualize (in real agents and local histories) the tendency of capitalism to forever expand.

It follows that if we desire to transform this state of affairs we must first resubjectify what appears to us as an alien objectivity. This means to stop the flow of value-creating activity that is redirected from self-valorization to the construction of an abstract cosmopolis. This can be achieved by pragmatically recovering the underside of communication and understanding, which today stand as exemplars for honest flows of information across cultures. This underside has to do with the meaning of translation as loss and recovery, as conscious deception; this (gendered) pragmatics is much needed in order to inform the politics of reparations that can be used as a means to further the “unlearning” of Western privilege by the West. This politics involves playing law and literacy, pragmatically, against late capitalist reterritorialization.

Is There Anybody Out There?

1

Today, neither the nation-state nor the group function organically as they did in the nineteenth century and in the decolonizing nationalist processes of the twentieth. They only serve as apparatuses of capture, coding, decoding, and recoding of the activity of agents that are now treated as merely [End Page 32] another space or value-creative force to be colonized. The result is a process of colonization in which there are only colonies and no colonizer countries as such, since the colonial character of power acquires yet another form, coming, as it does, not from any (organic) nation-state but from global and ideological state apparatuses.

The term self-colonization (borrowed from Zizek) might very well provide a better description of the actual relationship between the nation/state-form and the universe of capital in the era of global capitalism. I think examining (from a postcolonial perspective) the action of global ISAs can illuminate this turn toward the self-referential character of capitalism (where every agent is set to colonize him- or herself). It may also explain why transforming global capitalism implies decolonizing ourselves (as, for instance, in the critique of Latin American phallocentrism).

The use of the term self-colonization calls for a renewed perspective from a real totality (the global state-form and its apparatuses) in order to avoid two risks: first, the mere “celebration of particularisms” (gender, race, subculture) and, second, the appeal to “empty universalism,” which always run the risk of becoming an ideal form of global capitalism.

2

Three consequences follow from this analysis:

Although the insight of postcolonialism points in the right direction (i.e., behind the neutrality of multicultural universalism, where a Eurocentric subject lurks), it must be corrected. Since today's capitalism holds to a cultural heritage that hides not only forms of exclusion according to race, gender, or culture which can be dealt with in inclusionary liberal fashion, but also to the anonymity of capital and the “repressed” biopolitics of epistemic differentiation, the task for a postcolonially enlightened “critical theory” is to account for the ways in which society has been subsumed by the state-form. That is, we must understand how capital has become an anonymous global machine with no particular content, setting each individual to colonize him- or herself, before trying to unveil any particular content hidden behind the universalistic claims of the center. This pinpoints the question concerning translation and identity in the actual conditions of globalization: that is, the seductive character of consumerism and the acquisition of ready-made identities. [End Page 33]
One must also remain attentive to the possibility that via “discursive theory,” “postmodernism,” or “cultural studies,” theory produced in the “centers” and circulated toward the “peripheries” of the world-system might be operating today in favor of the ideological effort to make capitalism and epistemic differentiation invisible. This effort becomes patent in the renewed interest of certain critical discourses in the social sciences in relocating the resistance of antisystemic movements exclusively within the normative space of postmodernity (i.e., the juridical), reinterpreting it as a struggle for recognition in terms of ready-made “rights.”
If the previous consideration is correct, then a better answer to our original question (how to reinvent the political under globalization) takes the form of a Zizekian “suspension of the law” freed from Zizek's “Eurocentric” dismissal of the politics of reparations. This means to take seriously the constitutive character of social antagonism (Malinche/Cortés) and its implications, in terms of an antifoundationalist and antinormative grounding for social and cultural criticism.

3

However, in order to avoid repeating the juridical model (since it reintroduces the cosmopolitanism that Derrida and the participants in the “Knowledges and the Known” workshop seek to criticize in related but different manners [see Guardiola-Rivera, Castro-Gómez, and Millán de Benavides 1999]) we should relocate (Derrida's) “undecidability” (the unlimited character of the claims and the claimants to justice) so that we are able to open up the possibility of constructing a nonnormative critique of the relationship linking capitalism, justice, and the law/literacy pair (planning). This might be achieved if we start from a realization that follows from our (postcolonial) analysis of the uses of law and literacy: that capitalism depends on reterritorializing deterritorialized agency (labor-power) and deterritorialized (or speculative) wealth.

As we have seen, apparatuses such as the law and literacy (as power and as state-of-grace) elaborate locally uncoded agency by coding it (by giving to it a social role, a meaning, and a proper name that refer to a “developmental myth,” i.e., an evolutionary model of spatializing time). While doing so (while subjectifying agents), they determine (or code) the undetermined life-activity (the life-producing or, more clearly, time-producing [End Page 34] activity) of such agents. Through this activity value is produced. Capital grows as a resultant of appropriating such value. What apparatuses like law and literacy do is to actualize capitalism by actually connecting time and wealth in the form of organized life-producing, value-producing activity. To put it otherwise, time and agency are decoded flows; and apparatuses of colonization, such as those I have referred to throughout this essay, code and transfer such flows. In the process “the local” is made to work for “the global.”

However, neither the local nor the global are ever completely finalized and determined. The process I am describing here takes place in time, and thus it is always bifurcating in new, unexpected ways. This movement of continuous colonization and decolonization (the reterritorialization and deterritorialization of bifurcations in time and agency) gives capitalism its critical nature.

The bifurcating, undecidable, nature of capitalism does not preclude an analysis of the forms it takes. As I have argued here, such forms can be thought of as apparatuses of capture, and the central feature of an apparatus is its tendency to function as a recodifier of still decoded flows of time-labor and wealth. In its modern, world-systemic form (that of global law and literacy as state-of-grace) this process is expressed as an operation of massive collective subjectification that occurs at every point of the social field, as in large-scale social planning or “global designing.” Radically, social subjection at a global scale means that there are subjects of capital (capitalists) and there are those subjected to capital (proletarians). Thus, for instance, actual global designing does not seek to export to the South a biopolitical model of “centrality” that would allow the eventual development of the periphery, but, quite the opposite, it seeks to export toward the South a model of “marginality” (that of the “Hispanic” worker in the national frontiers of the United States) that allows Latin Americans to be transformed into the new “Hispanics of the South.” That is, into a collection of working subjects, not so much disciplined (in the Foucauldian sense) as seduced by their fascination with consumerism. We become subjects of and subject to capital, but never at the same time and never at the same point of the social field. Therefore, we can say that world capitalism remains a contested site; it is an agonistic space.

In closely following and relocating Mackenzie's arguments, I have refrained from conceiving undecidability as a moment of judgment in the name of normative justice. Instead, I have located it in the immanent [End Page 35] bifurcations of capitalism. The point is that global law and literacy as state-of-grace, being instruments of self-colonization, are always subjected to criticism from the vantage point of capital as an indeterminate series of flows, and capital (in its global operation) is always under fire from the vantage point of law (power) and literacy (knowledge). The possibility of critique arises in the strategic play of one against the other. Now, if social criticism comes from the creation of new possibilities by the strategic, bifurcating movement between the two (capitalism and demands of justice), then critique operates not at an ontological normative level but at the level of pragmatics (the political).

We may invoke the bifurcating features of capital as a way into creative and critical experimentation in the face of social subjectification. We can also take into account that it is because of the limits global capitalism sets on itself (produce, circulate, accumulate!) that it can never be fully bifurcated (that is, sublated). Thus, within our critical remit are not only the apparatuses of global capitalism but also the whole capitalistic operation, which is also susceptible to critique from the perspective of critical thought. This kind of critical thought is strictly separated from normative judgment, for its source is the (decodified) nature of the social field. The “repressed” conflicting nature of the social field provides us with “real” criteria for criticism.




Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is professor at the Universidad Javeriana's Instituto Pensar in Bogotá. He coauthored Pensar (en) los intersticios: Teoría y práctica de la crítica postcolonial (1999) and coedited La otra guerra: El derecho como continuación del conflicto y lenguaje de la paz (1999), which won first prize at the 2000 International Book Fair in Bogotá. He contributed to La reestructuración de las ciencias sociales en América Latina (reviewed in this issue). Former director of the Instituto Pensar, Guardiola-Rivera is currently doing research on the discursive construction of political subjects in the “Plan Colombia” and the relationship between ideology, global capitalism, and globalcentrism, and the reshaping of the geopolitical and cultural map of the Andean region.

Notes

For their insightful critical observations, I am indebted to Nepantla's internal and external reviewers and, particularly, to Freya Schiwy, Walter Mignolo, Santiago Castro-Gómez, and Alberto Moreiras.

1. At work here is the ideological recognition function; see Althusser 1994 [1970], 129–32.

2. That promise has been repeatedly portrayed in recent years by such films as the Wachowski brothers' The Matrix, Alejandro Amenábar's Abre tus ojos, and David Cronenberg's ExistenZ. In such films mankind, severed at last from its remaining bond to Nature (the Body) finally fulfils its destiny by living its virtual reality life, as it were, in complete “state-of-grace.”

3. Marx saw this space as a new form of territoriality coterminous with the establishment of a civil society of independent individuals, in fact, with the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals, whose relationships depend on the law.

4. By “literacy as adaptation,” Scribner means the (individual) level of proficiency necessary for effective performance in a range of settings and customary activities; by “literacy as power,” she means the point where a community becomes aware of its needs and the impediments to its efforts to satisfy them (important here is the latter concept's accent on group or community advancement).

5. The term was coined by Walter Mignolo. It responds to the problem of (re)introducing the subject into social theory and cultural studies in antiessentialist fashion: although subject identity may well be understood as a construct, this construct is not only cultural but also linguistic, and thus epistemic. I would like to add that it is also political in the final analysis. This becomes clearer if one understands epistemology not as a theory of knowledge but as a practical theory of translation, and translation as involving strategy (pragmatics): a sophisticated form of deception deployed in an antagonistic field.

6. On this I draw from the work of Ilan Stavans. See, for instance, Stavans 1996.

7. “Translation” here is deception and conquista, both in the sense of the historical event (the conquistadores raping and penetrating our women and the motherland) and the erotic event (Malinche seducing Cortés, sleeping with him, deceiving her peers, building linguistic bridges, mothering the “first” mestizo). I do not know whether there is any significant difference between these two meanings.

8. It could just as well be Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui or Beatriz González Stephan against Derrida.

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