The Failure of Latin America by John Beverley

Author:John Beverley [Beverley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Latin America
ISBN: 9780822945673
Google: 6y1OvQEACAAJ
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 2019-06-18T03:06:02+00:00

7

CAN CRITICISM BE A MILITANT PRACTICE?

ON TESTIMONIO AND CARTONERA LITERATURE

Political art cannot work in the simple form of a meaningful spectacle that would lead to an ‘awareness’ of the state of the world.

—Jacques Rancière (2008)

THE NOTION that literary and cultural criticism can constitute a militant practice perhaps involves a misunderstanding, typical of the excessively superficial readings of the philosophy of our time by literary critics like myself. But it was—and is—a productive misunderstanding. As Paul de Man observed about the Confessions of Rousseau in Allegories of Reading: “Like any other reader, Rousseau is doomed to misread his own text as the promise of political change. The error is not in the reader but in the language itself. . . . To the extent that it is necessarily performative, language equally necessarily carries the promise of its own truth. This is the reason why textual allegories at this level of rhetorical complexity not only represent but generate history” (de Man 1979, 277). In the idea that texts “not only represent but generate history” de Man alludes to the influence of Rousseau, and of the Confessions in particular, on the American and French revolutions. The notion of a militant Latinamericanist criticism that subtends these essays is, in turn, linked to the radical upsurge in the Americas in the 1960s and 1970s that arose from the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

In a way similar to Rousseau’s eighteenth-century readers (who included Simón Bolívar), those of us who formed the academic arm of the generation of the sixties passed at the end of that decade from traditional literary criticism to the still unknown territory of “theory”. The lure of “theory” was that it represented not only a new way of thinking about politics but also a way of doing politics. What favored this proposal, besides strong doses of Freud, Marx, and hallucinogenic drugs, was, above all, the nominalist radicalism implicit in the structuralist doctrine of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic or semiotic sign. According to Saussure, the founder of structural linguistics, what was arbitrary in the linguistic sign was not only the fact that this or that set of phonemes (the signifier)—different in different languages—represents such and such an object or instance not different but constant in different languages (the signified): horse for caballo or red for rojo, for example (excuse the vulgarization). The linguistic sign also “cut” arbitrarily the semiotically indeterminate plane of the Real, thus producing the concept and the experience of red or horse at the same time. This image of the sign as a “cut”—coupure—is from Saussure himself, and I recall it here for its suggestion of an element of violence in signification: to cut is to act on something materially (I rely here on Culler 2008).

If the structuralists were right, then not only our way of perceiving the “things” of the —the res—but also their identity as things or states depended on the semiotic system or langue in which we were immersed. And that system did not

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.