Things with a History by Héctor Hoyos

Author:Héctor Hoyos
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: LIT004100, Literary Criticism/Caribbean & Latin American, LIT006000, Literary Criticism/Semiotics & Theory
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2019-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

buys it before he pays for it. The seller sells an existing commodity, the buyer buys as the mere representative of money, or rather as the representative of future money. The seller becomes a creditor, the buyer becomes a debtor. Since the metamorphosis of commodities, or the development of their form of value, has undergone a change here, money receives a new function as well. It becomes the means of payment.29

Note how many times the word and notion of “becoming” appears in this short passage. I read here the remnants of Hegelian eschatology and teleology, but also something wholly animistic. The magical properties of coveted things are connected to the magical properties of those rectangular pieces of paper we call money. This Marx must demystify. Vallejo, rather, remystifies. Extrapolating from Silva’s accounting notebook, he flatly brings theology back into the picture: “For Silva, God didn’t exist, Credit did. God is Credit.”30

Vallejo goes on to elaborate how, for the Silvas, owing was “a philosophy,” according to which, in order to truly exist, a person must owe. Some of this is a play on the book’s pre-text, namely, the accounting notebook. After all, it is Vallejo who needs names to show up there in order to tell his story. But the deeper truth is that debt is never just about arithmetic but has always had religious and moral overtones. As David Graeber notes, since the Middle Ages, moral relations have been conceived as debts.31 For the Silvas, according to Vallejo, being in the red was laudable, almost ascetic, rather than reproachable: “Silva didn’t have anything but empty hands that squandered in luxury what came in from loans.”32 Perhaps the Silvas thought themselves beyond good and evil. Whatever the case may be, owing to the fine-goods stores of the metropolis was indeed a way of life, a shortcut to the riches of metropolitan capitalism from the periphery. Brecht’s famous dictum “What is robbing a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” applies, with qualification.33 The Silvas traded in luxury, not in their individual manpower. Still, from a moral standpoint, they are both in the wrong and in the right. They lied and cheated in a system of debt and credit that was already corrupt.

The quip on the Silva God also has to do with the ebbs and flows of convertibility from money to gold, which conservative president Miguel Antonio Caro had restricted, to the chagrin of importers. (A Catholic zealot and also a poet, Caro re-Christianized the country via the 1886 clericalist constitution; everything about him, down to his classicist aesthetics and religious beliefs, reeked contrary to Silva’s modernismo.)34 Certainly, Parisian luxury providers would not take pesos. Importers gave away the country’s gold in exchange for goods, but then limited access to bullion aggravated what was already a vicious circle of debt. Caro rejected modernity; for Silva, to be modern was to owe. Anyone studying nineteenth-century Colombia will encounter thought-provoking alternatives to the Weberian tale of capitalist expansion—some more failed than others.

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